Beijing ESWIN Computing Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "ESWIN Computing") updated its Hong Kong IPO prospectus on January 30, 2026, marking its second attempt following the lapse of its initial application on May 30, 2025. As the core venture of BOE founder Wang Dongsheng's second entrepreneurship, ESWIN Computing carries expectations of becoming the "first RISC-V architecture stock" while also bearing the heavy burden of continuous losses and high customer concentration. Against the backdrop of its sibling company, Xi'an ESWIN Materials, already listed on the STAR Market with a market capitalization exceeding 100 billion yuan, can this RISC-V chip developer break through in the Hong Kong market and replicate BOE's legend? Can the open-source architecture it is betting on support the valuation imagination of the capital market?
The IPO journey of ESWIN Computing has always carried the distinct labels of "Wang Dongsheng" and the "ESWIN Group." In 2019, after many years at the helm of BOE and被誉为 "the father of China's semiconductor display industry," Wang Dongsheng stepped down and turned to the chip sector, restructuring and establishing the ESWIN Group, which was split into two core entities: Xi'an ESWIN Materials (wafer business) and ESWIN Computing (chip business). In October 2025, Xi'an ESWIN Materials successfully listed on the STAR Market, raising over 4.5 billion yuan, with its market capitalization surpassing 100 billion yuan by February 2026.
This second application by ESWIN Computing is jointly sponsored by CITIC Securities and China Securities, sharing a core sponsorship team with Xi'an ESWIN Materials. It is further supported by renowned institutions such as IDG Capital, Legend Capital, and the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II. As of the prospectus disclosure, ESWIN Computing has completed four rounds of financing totaling 9 billion yuan, with a shareholder lineup encompassing both industrial and financial capital, demonstrating cautious optimism from the capital market towards the RISC-V sector.
In terms of equity structure, Wang Dongsheng indirectly controls the ESWIN Group through ESWIN Technology (holding 52.4% of ESWIN Group shares) and, through the ESWIN Group and employee持股 platforms ESWIN Logic Technology and ESWIN Idea Technology, collectively holds 31.55% of ESWIN Computing shares, making him the actual controller. Notably, nearly half of the employees participate in the shareholding plan, with 704 employees holding approximately 14% of the company's shares through 24持股 institutions, averaging 400,000 shares per person. Additionally, CITIC Securities, as a joint sponsor, has its wholly-owned subsidiary, CITIC Securities Investment, holding shares in both ESWIN Computing and Xi'an ESWIN Materials, making it one of the biggest winners in the ESWIN Group's listings through this "dual role" of sponsorship and investment.
ESWIN Computing's core positioning is as a leading Chinese provider of chip products based on the RISC-V architecture. Adopting a fabless model, it focuses on the R&D, design, and sales of smart terminal chips and embodied AI chips. Differing from the two mainstream architectures, X86 and ARM Holdings, it has chosen a more open but also more challenging path.
As an open-source architecture, RISC-V has rapidly penetrated fields like the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, and embedded hardware due to advantages such as no licensing fees, flexibility, scalability, and low power consumption. However, the global market is still in an exploratory phase. According to Frost & Sullivan data, the global market size for RISC-V main control chips reached 56.5 billion yuan in 2024 and is expected to exceed 440 billion yuan by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39%.
The market size for embodied AI chips was 292.2 billion yuan in 2024 and is projected to reach 804.3 billion yuan by 2029, indicating significant growth potential for the sector. However, RISC-V also faces shortcomings such as a weak ecosystem and insufficient instruction set compatibility, particularly in complex scenarios like automotive electronics, where its competitiveness still lags behind mature X86 and ARM Holdings architectures.
ESWIN Computing's business布局 revolves around two core scenarios: smart terminal chips and embodied AI chips. Among these, smart terminal chips are the current revenue pillar, contributing over 85% of revenue. The core product is human-computer interaction (HCI) chips. In 2024, this product generated 1.7 billion yuan in revenue with a 5.7% market share, ranking first among domestic manufacturers, but the lead is narrow, with only 100 million yuan more revenue than the second-place player.
To capture market share, ESWIN Computing has adopted a "volume-for-price" strategy. The sales volume of HCI chips increased from 69.44 million units in 2022 to 111 million units in 2024, but the average selling price dropped from 23.8 yuan per unit to 15.3 yuan per unit, directly impacting overall profitability. Embodied AI chips are regarded as the future growth engine, primarily applied in automotive, robotics, and industrial fields, divided into interconnect chips and computing chips. However, this business is still in a nurturing phase, with a gross margin of only 1.5% in 2024, operating almost at a loss. Although sales of embodied AI chips increased significantly year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2025, with computing chip sales growing by 430%, their revenue contribution remained below 14%.
As of September 30, 2025, ESWIN Computing had commercialized over 130 system-level solutions, serving more than 110 customers globally. It was the provider with the highest number of mass-produced RISC-V main control solutions and the highest revenue from fully customized solutions in China in 2024, establishing a certain technological barrier in its niche segment. Additionally, the company launched the RISAA (RISC-V + AI) ecosystem technology platform, integrating self-developed IP modules with an open software platform, attempting to compensate for RISC-V's inherent weaknesses through ecosystem development.
Like many chip startups, ESWIN Computing is caught in a dilemma of "high R&D, high losses, and high dependency." The prospectus shows that from 2022 to 2024, the company's revenue was 2.0 billion yuan, 1.752 billion yuan, and 2.025 billion yuan respectively, with relatively small fluctuations. However, net losses for the same periods reached 1.570 billion yuan, 1.837 billion yuan, and 1.547 billion yuan respectively, accumulating nearly 5.0 billion yuan in losses over three years. In the first three quarters of 2025, losses further expanded to 1.101 billion yuan, bringing cumulative losses to over 6.0 billion yuan.
The core reasons for the losses lie in high-intensity R&D investment and low gross margins. From 2022 to 2024, ESWIN Computing's R&D expenses remained around 1.4 billion yuan annually, with R&D spending as a percentage of revenue consistently exceeding 60%, reaching as high as 82.5% in 2023. Total R&D expenses over three years exceeded 4.2 billion yuan.
Concurrently, the company's gross margin has persistently been at the low end of the industry, plummeting from 25.9% in 2022 to 15.4% in 2023. Although it slightly recovered to 17.7% in 2024, it still shows a significant gap compared to leading industry players.
Behind the low gross margins, besides the "volume-for-price" strategy, are issues related to inventory buildup and failed product iterations. ESWIN Computing had to write down inventory for an earlier generation of embodied AI solutions, further depressing profitability. By product, the gross margin for the main revenue-driving HCI chips has continuously declined, from 24.1% in 2022 to 16.7% in the first three quarters of 2025. Interconnect chips have long been in a state of negative gross margin. Although the gross margin for computing chips has improved, their low revenue contribution makes it difficult to boost overall profitability. Only multimedia processing chips saw gross margins soar above 50% in 2025 due to undertaking custom services, but such profitability levels are difficult to sustain.
Funding pressure has become an urgent issue for ESWIN Computing. From 2022 to 2024, the company's operating cash flow was consistently negative: -1.431 billion yuan, -1.251 billion yuan, and -781 million yuan respectively. As of the end of September 2025, cash and cash equivalents on the books were only 870 million yuan, a significant decrease from 1.587 billion yuan at the end of 2024. More critically, after completing its last round of 3.0 billion yuan financing in June 2023, ESWIN Computing only received a 250 million yuan capital injection in April 2025, with no other equity financing since. The funds raised from this IPO will be predominantly used for chip R&D and ecosystem platform construction.
Beyond financial losses, high customer concentration is another core risk facing ESWIN Computing, and this risk is deeply intertwined with Wang Dongsheng's past experience. The prospectus shows that from 2022 to 2024, revenue from ESWIN Computing's largest customer, BOE, accounted for 78.9%, 82.1%, and 76.8% of total revenue respectively. Over three years, BOE contributed a total of 4.57 billion yuan in revenue, accounting for 79% of total revenue during that period. In the first three quarters of 2025, this proportion decreased to 67%, but remains at an extremely high level.
On the surface, there is no direct equity link between BOE and ESWIN Computing—BOE holds an indirect stake through its investment in Beijing Core Power (holding 5.78% of ESWIN Computing shares), and Wang Dongsheng holds less than 0.2% of BOE's shares. However, personnel connections between the two are extremely close. Key executives of ESWIN Computing, including Chairman and CEO Mi Peng, President and COO Hu Weihao, and Board Secretary Bu Tian, are all former subordinates of Wang Dongsheng from BOE. This team connection creates strong粘性 in their cooperation.
ESWIN Computing emphasizes externally that BOE is an independent third-party customer and that it is one of the few partners capable of supporting BOE's full range of products at scale, with strong product compatibility and high switching costs, making the risk of losing orders controllable. However, it cannot be ignored that ESWIN Computing did not rank among BOE's top five suppliers in terms of total procurement volume in 2024. This indicates that in the supply chain dynamic, BOE holds absolute dominance, and ESWIN Computing lacks bargaining power in areas like pricing and payment terms.
More critically, this "single-customer dependency" drastically reduces the company's risk resilience. Any adjustment in BOE's supply chain strategy, reduction in procurement volume, or operational fluctuations at BOE would directly impact ESWIN Computing's revenue and cash flow. Although a second major customer emerged in the first three quarters of 2025, contributing over 10% of revenue, the combined revenue from the top five customers still accounted for a high 91.8%, indicating that customer concentration risk has not been fundamentally alleviated.
More alarmingly, the company also has a special situation where a customer overlaps with a supplier. During the reporting period, ESWIN Computing's second-largest customer, Customer B, was also its largest supplier, Supplier A—a technology company headquartered in Taiwan Province, China, focused on new materials. Since 2019, this company has supplied hardware to ESWIN Computing. Starting in 2021, ESWIN Computing began selling solutions to it. From 2022 to 2024, sales revenue from this customer decreased from 76 million yuan to 23 million yuan, a significant reduction of 68.49% year-on-year. During the same period, procurement spending with this supplier also decreased from 360 million yuan to 209 million yuan, showing a逐年下降 trend. Regarding this supply-demand overlap phenomenon, the company merely stated that transactions are based on fair principles with pricing consistent with other customers and suppliers, without providing further detailed explanation.
On the supply chain side, ESWIN Computing is also in a passive position. As a fabless company, it relies on foundries and packaging and testing service providers, with procurement from the top five suppliers accounting for about 50% of total procurement. Among them, SMIC, as the core foundry, saw procurement volume increase by nearly 60% year-on-year in the first three quarters of 2025. However, ESWIN Computing's payment terms with SMIC have shifted from 30% prepayment to full prepayment, highlighting its weak bargaining power within the core supply chain. Meanwhile, the packaging and testing supplier,疑似颀中科技, offers relatively lenient payment terms, but ESWIN Computing's procurement volume already accounts for over 20% of that supplier's revenue.
ESWIN Computing's IPO is essentially a gamble on the "sector"—betting that the RISC-V architecture can break the monopoly of X86 and ARM Holdings in the future, and betting that it can establish a firm foothold before the industry takes off. From an industry trend perspective, RISC-V's penetration rate is steadily increasing. Its penetration in the smart terminal market was 1.3% in 2024 and is projected to increase to 11.8% by 2029. In the embodied AI market, penetration was 6.4% in 2024 and is expected to reach 19.1% by 2029. If the industry explodes as expected, ESWIN Computing, as an early mover, could seize first-mover advantages.
Furthermore, ESWIN Computing's technological accumulation and ecosystem布局 provide it with a certain level of competitiveness. The company has self-developed a series of RISC-V core matrices covering 32-bit and 64-bit computing platforms, possesses over 130 commercialized solutions, and holds a leading domestic position in the HCI chip field. The construction of the RISAA ecosystem platform also helps attract partners, improve the RISC-V ecosystem, and compensate for architectural weaknesses. Simultaneously, the successful listing of its sibling company, Xi'an ESWIN Materials, provides ESWIN Computing with supply chain synergy and capital market endorsement. If synergy between the wafer and chip businesses can be achieved, it could potentially reduce costs and enhance competitiveness.
However, challenges cannot be overlooked. On one hand, building the RISC-V ecosystem still requires long-term investment, and it is difficult to shake the dominance of X86 and ARM Holdings in the short term, especially in areas like high-performance computing and high-end automotive electronics, where ESWIN Computing still faces technical bottlenecks. On the other hand, the situation of continuous losses is unlikely to change in the short term. If IPO fundraising falls short of expectations or the industry's take-off is later than anticipated, the risk of a broken funding chain will intensify. Additionally, issues like customer concentration and weak supply chain bargaining power will require a long time to gradually resolve.
For investors, ESWIN Computing represents a "high-risk, high-reward" investment choice. It is backed by Wang Dongsheng's industry influence, the vast potential of the RISC-V sector, and the support of the hundred-billion-yuan ESWIN Group. But at the same time, risks such as continuous losses, customer concentration, and uncertainty in the technology roadmap test investors' patience and judgment.
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