BLACK SESAME (02533) delivered a clear positive signal to the market with its 2025 performance announcement released on March 31. According to the financial report, BLACK SESAME's revenue for 2025 reached RMB 822 million, a significant increase of 73.4% year-on-year, setting a new historical record and highlighting its strong growth momentum. Simultaneously, the company's adjusted net loss narrowed by 17.5% during the reporting period, indicating a clear improvement in profitability. The rapid revenue growth and enhanced profitability confirm BLACK SESAME's sound operational condition. However, more indicative of the company's long-term value than the financial figures is the fact that its strategic layout for all-scenario intelligent computing has entered a harvest period. Focusing on intelligent driving as its main path, BLACK SESAME has proactively laid out plans in two emerging fields, embodied AI and device-side AI, successfully establishing a diversified growth engine where intelligent driving, embodied AI, and device-side AI advance synergistically. During the reporting period, while continuously consolidating its leading position in the smart automotive computing chip sector, BLACK SESAME achieved strategic breakthroughs in innovative businesses such as embodied AI and device-side AI. This not only opens up future growth space for the company but also, through technology reuse and ecosystem synergy, drives its intrinsic value into a new phase of accelerated appreciation.
Multiple highlights underscore the "quality" of this earnings report. A closer look at the financials reveals several key points for investor focus. Firstly, the synergistic effort of three major businesses propelled the company's revenue to historic highs. The core driver behind the significant revenue increase was the assisted driving products and solutions segment. Benefiting from the combined strength of the "Huashan" and "Wudang" dual product lines, the intelligent driving business reached a new level. The report shows that the Huashan A1000 series chips, as a mature product with a lifecycle of over five years, continued to see volume expansion in the passenger vehicle sector. They were successfully adopted in multiple models from Geely, Dongfeng, BYD, and FAW, and began shipping globally. Concurrently, their application scenarios successfully expanded to commercial vehicles and specific L4 domains, providing active safety solutions for Chery and Shaanqi commercial vehicles, and offering high-security computing power support for Desay SV's "Chuanxing Zhiyuan" S6 series of unmanned vehicles. The Wudang C1200 series chips, as an industry-leading central computing chip platform, achieved the critical leap from design-win to mass production in 2025. This series has entered mass production on new models from leading automakers and is undergoing verification and delivery for several others, covering diverse needs such as integrated cockpit-driving-parking and entry-level intelligent driving. Its secure intelligent base architecture has also gained recognition from multiple OEMs. During the period, revenue from assisted driving products and solutions surged 56.8% to RMB 687 million, driven by the launch of new passenger vehicle models standardly equipped with Huashan chips and their strong sales, significant growth in both customer numbers and average order value in the L2-L3 commercial vehicle sector, and bulk shipments in specific L4 scenarios like unmanned logistics. This substantial revenue growth indicates that BLACK SESAME's leading position in the smart automotive computing chip field has been continuously strengthened.
The rapid commercialization of the embodied AI solutions business was a key force driving BLACK SESAME's high revenue growth. In 2025, BLACK SESAME launched the SesameX platform, which pioneers a new paradigm for embodied AI with its "Whole-Brain Intelligence" system. Through three core modules—Kalos, Aura, and Liora—it provides robots with full-stack computing power from basic control to high-level cognition. During the reporting period, BLACK SESAME collaborated with leading robotics industry chain companies such as Yun Shen Chu, Fourier Intelligence, Lenovo, Zhi Ping Fang, Geek+, Yunji Robotics, Tianwen Humanoid Robot, and Joyson Electronics to jointly promote the commercialization of embodied AI. It has already achieved scaled deliveries in scenarios like quadruped robots and smart shipping inspections, leading the embodied AI solutions business to generate revenue of RMB 96.3 million in its first year. This fully demonstrates the strong competitiveness and commercial potential of the SesameX platform in the market. Additionally, the intelligent imaging solutions business contributed to the growth in total revenue. Revenue from this segment grew 7.9% to RMB 36.3 million, primarily benefiting from the broad market base established by the cumulative deployment of the company's technology in over 500 million devices and its successful expansion into emerging areas like AI glasses, which jointly drove steady revenue growth.
Alongside the record-high revenue, the continuous optimization of the revenue structure was another major highlight of BLACK SESAME's 2025 report. With the embodied AI solutions business achieving nearly RMB 100 million in revenue, the proportion of revenue from assisted driving products and solutions decreased from 92.41% in 2024 to 83.53% in 2025, while the share of embodied AI solutions revenue broke through 10% to reach 11.71%. This structural change clearly confirms that BLACK SESAME's strategy of diversified growth engines is taking sustained effect, with embodied AI and intelligent driving now forming a dual-core growth pattern.
Meanwhile, BLACK SESAME's adherence to a long-term philosophy, driving high growth through strong R&D, and making strategic investments to build long-term competitive barriers is another highlight. R&D expenditure for the period was RMB 1.417 billion, remaining largely flat compared to 2024. While reducing R&D spending could quickly lead to significant profit improvement, facing the epochal trend brought by the AI industry on the verge of explosion, BLACK SESAME firmly chose to maintain high R&D investment. This is aimed at building a core technology foundation of "chip + algorithm + toolchain" that can be reused across scenarios. This not only significantly enhances R&D efficiency and product iteration speed but also provides a solid technical starting point and cost advantage for new businesses in embodied AI and device-side AI, beyond the main path of intelligent driving. This diversified layout based on a unified technical architecture is driving the company's evolution from a participant in a single track to an underlying computing power platform enabling the era of intelligent connectivity of everything, building profound strategic depth and an ecosystem moat for its long-term growth.
Furthermore, the significant narrowing of losses is a key signal that BLACK SESAME's business layout is entering a virtuous commercial cycle, another highlight not to be overlooked in this report. The company's adjusted net loss narrowed by 17.5% year-on-year, primarily driven by two factors: first, rapid revenue growth led to the release of economies of scale, pushing gross profit up by 73.1%; second, while maintaining high-intensity R&D investment, operational costs were effectively controlled—selling expenses and general and administrative expenses decreased by 27.2% and 19.1%, respectively. This not only reflects that the company's long-term technological investments are gradually translating into commercial results but also demonstrates its improved capabilities in refined management and focused resource allocation, indicating a continuous optimization of overall growth quality.
Successful Transformation into a "Universal Computing Platform" Highlights Long-Term Commercial Value. Financial performance merely reflects the阶段性 operating results of a company. To fundamentally understand BLACK SESAME's long-term intrinsic value, one must analyze its core competitive structure. BLACK SESAME's true moat lies not in superficial business diversification, but in its strategic elevation from "specialized chips" to a "universal computing platform," achieved through the architectural generalization capability of its self-developed Jiushao NPU, hardware innovation in cross-domain fusion chips, and bandwidth and energy efficiency breakthroughs brought by Hyperband packaging. This leap is not only a fundamental iteration of the technical path but also the foundation for defining and supporting future all-scenario intelligent computing demands. The fundamental restructuring of the underlying technical architecture enables BLACK SESAME to efficiently support all-scenario businesses—such as intelligent driving, embodied AI, and device-side AI, which seem different but share underlying computational needs—with a unified computing foundation. This represents a systematic, low-dimensional strike starting from the technological base, manifesting across multiple dimensions including technical synergy, business logic, and ecosystem value.
At the technical synergy level, the Jiushao NPU provides portable computing power, cross-domain fusion chips provide scalable carriers, and Hyperband technology ensures sustainable performance. These three interlocking elements form a difficult-to-replicate technical moat. At the business logic level, BLACK SESAME can leverage the high standards of automotive-grade chip capabilities with extremely high R&D efficiency and economy, rapidly replicating them into new scenarios like robotics, device-side AI, intelligent transportation, and smart logistics, forming an advantage spillover from "high potential to low potential." This is the fundamental reason why BLACK SESAME's embodied AI solutions revenue quickly soared to nearly RMB 100 million in 2025. At the ecosystem value level, for customers, BLACK SESAME provides not an isolated chip, but an open, secure, and iterable computing platform. Customers can quickly build their differentiated products based on this platform without worrying about the fragmentation and compatibility issues of underlying computing power, which significantly enhances customer appeal and stickiness.
The universal computing platform built by BLACK SESAME possesses the underlying capability to cover all-scenario intelligent computing demands. The currently focused areas of intelligent driving, embodied AI, and device-side AI are merely the directions where the company has first achieved commercialization based on this platform. In the future, leveraging the same technical architecture, the company can continuously expand into more scenarios requiring high-performance, high-reliability intelligent computing power, constantly raising its growth ceiling. Crucially, due to the deep reuse of the underlying chip architecture, software toolchain, and development ecosystem, the marginal R&D cost for entering each new scenario is significantly reduced, while profit release efficiency will be greatly enhanced. Therefore, the profit boost from accelerated commercialization of new scenarios is not simply additive but exhibits exponential growth potential. As BLACK SESAME accelerates the commercialization of its three major businesses, this growth logic is expected to be more clearly evidenced in 2026.
Clear Roadmap Drives Comprehensive Commercialization Acceleration in 2026. In its 2025 report, BLACK SESAME has already laid out a clear and effective roadmap for achieving accelerated commercialization in 2026. For the intelligent driving business, 2026 will be a key stage characterized by simultaneous scaled volume expansion and forward-looking layout. Centering on the new-generation flagship Huashan A2000 chip, the company will fully advance solution adaptation and mass production work, aiming to help partners achieve the scaled implementation of L3 high-level intelligent driving, while simultaneously laying out frontier scenarios like L4 Robotaxi and promoting cooperative mass production with leading enterprises such as "Luobo Kuaipao." Notably, BLACK SESAME, in collaboration with a leading Tier-1 supplier, has secured design-wins for the A2000 series products and solutions with a leading automaker, which is a top player in China's new energy vehicle sector. As the mass production scale of the A2000 series chips continues to expand, BLACK SESAME will accelerate its entry into the high-end market, which will significantly enhance the company's profitability. While pushing for accelerated mass production of the A2000 series, BLACK SESAME is committed to achieving market coverage across the full L2-L4 scenario spectrum and multiple vehicle types. On one hand, it will continue to deepen the penetration of high-level intelligent driving in passenger vehicles; on the other, it will accelerate bulk shipments in commercial vehicle sectors like engineering machinery, sweepers, unmanned logistics, and light trucks, achieving scaled commercial penetration from L2-L3 commercial assisted driving to L4 unmanned logistics scenarios. Additionally, leveraging the certification advantage of the Huashan A2000 chip having passed relevant US reviews and gained global market access, BLACK SESAME will accelerate the mass production application process for overseas vehicle projects, advancing its internationalization strategy.
For the embodied AI business, BLACK SESAME has established it as a strategic new business, forming the "twin engines" for future development alongside high-level intelligent driving. In 2026, the company will focus on promoting the scaled deployment of the SesameX platform in scenarios like logistics, manufacturing, and services. Relying on the three product series—Kalos, Aura, and Liora—it will cover the computing power needs of robots with varying complexities and forms, systematically building a "Whole-Brain System for Robots." Simultaneously, the company will create benchmark projects in areas like embodied AI terminals, deepen cooperation with leading robotics companies, and focus on implementing diversified application solutions such as industrial robots, inspection robots, dexterous hands, and waste-sorting robotic arms, further promoting ecosystem synergy and industrial闭环 in the embodied AI field.
Regarding device-side AI, BLACK SESAME will complete the acquisition of Yizhi Electronics in 2026. With a core strategy of "chip + algorithm + scenario," it will integrate the R&D resources of both parties, share core IP, algorithms, and toolchains, to quickly penetrate the entry-level computing power market. Yizhi Electronics' accumulation in consumer-grade AI SoC chips and algorithm optimization will strongly complement BLACK SESAME's mature automotive-grade product lines. Together, they will define and develop vehicle-grade products with 2T-10T computing power, covering segments like integrated front-view modules, dash cams, and driver monitoring systems. Meanwhile, Yizhi Electronics' technology is expected to expand horizontally from existing applications like smart PTZ cameras and AI glasses to broader consumer and smart hardware fields such as AI companion toys, robotic vacuum cleaners, and robotic lawn mowers. Post-acquisition, BLACK SESAME will establish a complete product matrix covering high, mid, and low computing power series, possessing the capability to provide full-stack solutions for smart cars, robots, and various AIoT terminals. This will not only significantly enhance the company's competitiveness and coverage breadth in the pan-device-side AI market, but the cross-scenario reuse of underlying technologies will also generate powerful synergistic effects, laying a solid foundation for growth in 2026 and beyond.
Looking ahead, following the impressive achievements of high revenue growth and significantly narrowed losses in 2025, as the company drives comprehensive acceleration in the commercialization of its three major businesses in 2026, BLACK SESAME is poised to further release its growth momentum and accelerate the realization of the huge potential value inherent in its successful transformation from a "specialized chip" company to a "universal computing platform." Based on the high certainty of BLACK SESAME's future growth, following the earnings announcement, several brokerages issued reports expressing unanimous optimism about the company's prospects. Everbright Securities pointed out that BLACK SESAME is expected to continue benefiting from the increasing penetration rate of intelligent driving, with shipments of its assisted driving products maintaining growth, and the proportion of mid-to-high-end products like C1200/A2000 expected to rise further. Simultaneously, the company's continuous expansion into new business scenarios like robot brains/cerebellums and L4 opens up long-term earnings growth space. Based on this, Everbright Securities forecasts BLACK SESAME's revenue for 2026-2028 to reach RMB 1.461 billion, RMB 2.217 billion, and RMB 3.114 billion, respectively, maintaining a "Buy" rating. Furthermore, Sinolink Securities stated that BLACK SESAME's assisted driving products are growing rapidly, and its leading embodied AI layout forms a second growth curve, projecting revenues of RMB 1.56 billion, RMB 2.66 billion, and RMB 4.12 billion for 2026-2028, representing a three-year compound annual growth rate of 62.48%. From a capital market perspective, BLACK SESAME's current stock price is at a relatively low level, which shows some divergence from the thriving state of its business operations. However, given the strong certainty of BLACK SESAME's future high growth, this divergence may present a good opportunity for investors to achieve excess returns.
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