Value investment banking is the direction, new-quality investment banking is the bigger picture, and digital-intelligent investment banking is the engine. The company will accelerate the establishment of a customer-driven new development model and strive to raise its level of internationalization.
In the first half of 2026, CSC (ASX: 06066) delivered a standout report card: operating revenue of 16.23 billion yuan, up 51.1% year on year; net profit attributable to shareholders of 7.64 billion yuan, up 69.4% year on year; and total assets of 860.5 billion yuan, an increase of 183.6 billion yuan from the start of the year.
This leading securities firm, in the opening year of the 15th Five-Year Plan, has used the "Three ZHI, One New, One Globalization" strategy as its guiding framework to roll out a roadmap for firmly advancing toward a "first-class investment bank." Recently, a reporter visited this blue-chip securities firm listed in Shanghai. From its practice, a clear main line can be seen: driving systemic change through strategic resolve.
Strategic Leadership: Anchoring the Direction of a First-Class Investment Bank with "Three ZHI, One New, One Globalization"
The "Three ZHI, One New, One Globalization" strategy is both CSC's understanding of "what a first-class investment bank is" and its strategic path for "how to build one." Value investment banking answers the question of "what kind of first-class investment bank the company wants to become." As a state-owned financial institution, CSC breaks its own value into three levels: contributing to the cause of the Party and the country to become an enterprise with political value; realizing investment value for shareholders to become an enterprise with commercial value; and creating incremental value for the national economy and providing a platform for employees to become an enterprise with social value.
New-quality investment banking answers the question of "what the company's business orientation and development orientation are." Under a major historical opportunity, the company must serve the overall development of the Party and the country, especially the major strategic deployments of building a modern industrial system and accelerating high-level technological self-reliance and self-strengthening. The building of a first-class investment bank must actively integrate into this bigger picture and take serving new-quality productive forces as the concentrated expression of professional value. The key lies in comprehensive innovation: first, innovating to serve new-quality productive forces and integrating its own functionality into the qualitative transformation of new-quality productive forces; second, innovating to serve national strategy and investing professionalism into building a financial powerhouse; third, innovating its own development model and cultivating new momentum in institutions, organization, products, services and other aspects.
Digital-intelligent investment banking answers the question of "how the building of a first-class investment bank can be achieved." Facing the technological revolution led by artificial intelligence, CSC proposes to build a digital-intelligent investment bank, fully using artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, blockchain and other technologies, activating the potential of data elements, and deepening and expanding "AI+." "One New, One Globalization" is the other wing of the strategy. "One New" means establishing a customer-driven new development model, using management change, technological change and system support to make customer demand drive business development, management model transformation and organizational structure reform, turning customers from trading counterparties into value co-creation partners. "One Globalization" means internationalization. CSC has chosen a differentiated path different from large-scale overseas branch expansion, using Hong Kong as a fulcrum to explore a uniquely distinctive international development path.
This strategic system does not remain at the conceptual level. In the first half of 2026, the synergy among CSC's business segments began to emerge: the trading and institutional client services segment achieved operating revenue of 9.072 billion yuan, up 94.12% year on year, accounting for 56% of revenue and becoming the core driver of revenue growth in the period; the wealth management segment achieved operating revenue of 4.666 billion yuan, up 26.83% year on year; the asset management segment achieved operating revenue of 905 million yuan, up 41.14% year on year; and the investment banking segment maintained a stable operating base amid fierce market competition, achieving operating revenue of 1.113 billion yuan. Currently, the competitive landscape of the securities industry has shifted from homogeneous "competition in quantity" to "competition in quality," and regulatory guidance has placed greater emphasis on the exercise of functionality, CSC management said during the exchange, adding that the extensive development model of the past, which focused on expanding scale and casting a wide net, will no longer work. Differentiation and distinctive characteristics are reflected in focusing on national strategy, capturing customer needs, and forming irreplaceable professional value. Under the policy guideline of "focusing on the main business, improving governance, and pursuing differentiated development," the company proposes that all businesses should draw on each other's strengths around the strategic layout, focus on tapping the value of business synergy, and form a value creation cycle featuring headquarters-branch coordination, parent-subsidiary connectivity, internal-external linkage, and domestic-overseas integration.
Investment Banking Upgrade: From "Channel Service" to "Industrial Integration"
Investment banking has always been CSC's first core competitiveness, and its business indicators have long remained at the forefront of the industry. In the first half of 2026, CSC completed 16 A-share equity financing projects, with a total scale of nearly 28 billion yuan; at the end of July, it sponsored the listing of ChangXin Memory Technologies on the STAR Market, setting a record for the largest IPO in the history of the STAR Market. In addition, the Yangtze Memory Technologies project was recently accepted, and the abundant project pipeline provides solid support for the continued development of the investment banking business. But more noteworthy than the data is the profound change in the meaning of investment banking. At present, industrial mergers and acquisitions focused on the main business and strengthening and supplementing chains have become the main theme of the market, CSC management said during the exchange, adding that what companies seek from investment banks is no longer simply completing a transaction through a channel, but achieving industrial upgrading through mergers and acquisitions. This requires investment banks to upgrade from intermediaries in financing and transaction execution to organizers of industrial integration and long-term companions.
This is precisely the starting point for CSC's proposal to build an "industrial integration-oriented" investment bank. CSC develops business from multiple dimensions including industry, region and central state-owned enterprises: closely tracking leading enterprises in industrial chains, cultivating clients around local advantageous industries in regions with active mergers and acquisitions, and tracking opportunities for professional integration and asset injection by central state-owned enterprises. In capacity building, it strives to achieve three major transformations: first, value discovery capability, shifting from executing transactions to discovering transactions; second, transaction matching capability, shifting from standardized services to providing full sets of solutions for complex transactions; third, sustained empowerment capability, shifting from single-license services to full-lifecycle comprehensive services.
Supporting this transformation is the deep implementation of the "four-investment linkage" mechanism. The so-called "four-investment linkage" service chain integrates the capabilities of investment research, investment, investment banking and investment advisory, providing companion-style services around an enterprise's entire process from the start-up stage to the growth stage and then to the mature stage, adapting to the financial needs of enterprises at different stages. Investment research goes first, relying on industrial investment maps to identify frontier tracks; investment serves as the link, making patient long-term capital investments in the early stage; investment banking provides traction, offering enterprises full-cycle services from IPO to refinancing and merger and reorganization; investment advisory extends the service, accompanying listed companies over the long term as they grow and expand. This service model follows the principle of "one CSC, one client." The client faces a unified entry point, while behind it a securities company provides a new-quality productive force enterprise with comprehensive services across the primary and secondary markets. In the final analysis, it uses the complete capabilities of a securities company's various licenses to match the financial needs of an enterprise's full lifecycle, continuously guiding long-term capital toward emerging industries and future industries, and helping the virtuous cycle of "technology-industry-finance."
In serving science and technology innovation enterprises, CSC is likewise reshaping its value judgment system. For technology companies that are not yet profitable, short-term book losses are not the biggest risk. What truly warrants vigilance are structural risks such as failure of the technology route, commercialization falling short of expectations, changes in industry policy, and gaps in R&D compliance, the company's management said. Investment banks' criteria for judging enterprise value must not only hold the bottom line of authenticity and compliance, but also comprehensively judge the true value of science and technology innovation enterprises by considering technical barriers, industrial space, commercialization potential and other comprehensive dimensions.
Digital-Intelligent Empowerment: AI Deepens into the Fabric of Business and Reconstructs Core Processes
In CSC's digital-intelligent practice, AI is not a concept display, but goes deep into the fabric of business. The Dragonfly Gold AI Q&A "AI Dragonfly Wing Answer" covers 39 categories of customer investment needs, including checking announcements, checking research reports, selecting stocks, diagnosing funds and interpreting news, and has cumulatively served more than 360,000 customers. The "Xin Di Ting" AI intelligent data platform is another calling card of CSC's digital-intelligent transformation. The platform achieves three major breakthroughs: users can complete strategy backtesting with natural language and zero code, and the system automatically troubleshoots code issues, lowering the threshold for quantitative work; it opens more than 7,000 desensitized research reports and over 20TB of institutional-grade financial data, outputs traceable investment research conclusions, and responds within 20 seconds to break AI "hallucinations"; and it validates multi-dimensional investment research strategies, relying on backtesting tools to help investors learn through trial and error and correct speculative mindsets. The investment banking "gatekeeper" platform takes "preventing risk and promoting development" as its main line and uses AI technology to enhance the intelligence level of various investment banking business lines. The platform covers the three core links of investment banking business, namely "pre-access admission, in-process due diligence, and post-event information disclosure," and is deeply integrated into more than 10 key work scenarios such as financial fraud verification, potential related-party relationship investigation and capital flow verification.
In the division of labor between AI and humans, CSC shows an attitude that combines prudence and foresight. At present, our reconstruction targets are mainly links with "many repetitive tasks, large information processing volume, clear rules, and the ability to still be manually reviewed," the company's management said frankly, adding that out of a clear understanding of the limitations of current AI technology, such as hallucinations and insufficient interpretability, almost all processes involving AI have embedded manual review links. Due diligence, review and risk identification concern major decisions and legal responsibilities. At a stage when the technology is not yet fully mature, final human control is our adherence to professionalism and responsibility. Based on this, CSC is exploring the establishment of a layered and tiered human-machine collaboration mechanism: for links with a high degree of standardization, clear rules and traceable results, as AI performance is continuously verified and accumulated, they will gradually be handed over to AI for independent execution, and humans will shift from "item-by-item review" to "sample review" and even "post-event supervision"; for links with high risk, complex judgment and substantive trade-offs and responsibility-bearing, deep human involvement and final decision-making will always be retained.
To better serve the "four-investment linkage" strategy, CSC has built a unified digital-intelligent foundation including computing power, models, data platforms, enterprise knowledge bases, agent platforms and large-model security guardrails, opening up various business lines at the data level and providing a unified data foundation for business collaboration. At the same time, it is comprehensively advancing the construction of a unified enterprise knowledge base, realizing centralized management and cross-line sharing of knowledge assets across business lines, and on this basis accelerating the construction of an agent and digital-intelligent employee system, fully leveraging the compounding effect of data assets and knowledge accumulation to form differentiated competitiveness.
Ecosystem Synergy: Multiple Businesses Advance Together and Deepen the Foundation of Long-Term Value
The wealth management business is the "ballast stone" for CSC's steady development. In the first half of this year, CSC newly developed more than 2 million customers, up more than 140% year on year; online customer acquisition and newly added high-net-worth customers increased by 231% and 157%, respectively. The balance of margin financing and securities lending rose to 108.6 billion yuan, a record high. Behind these figures is a deep transformation from "selling products" to "doing allocation." CSC promotes the transformation of investment advisors from product sales to asset allocation and full-cycle companion services, building a one-stop service system of "investment + advisory + companionship." Relying on digital tools such as the Lingxi platform and Polaris account diagnosis, it completes dynamic customer profiling and achieves "thousands of people, thousands of faces" service reach. During periods of market volatility, it strengthens customer companionship through various online and offline methods and guides long-term value investment.
The transformation has driven continued diversification of revenue sources and gradually reduced dependence on market trading volume. Revenue in the wealth segment has shifted from being dominated by trading commissions to a diversified and balanced structure of "trading commissions + product distribution + investment advisory service fees + asset management fees," the company's management said, adding that in the wealth management segment, the proportion of buy-side business revenue continues to rise, profit stability has significantly strengthened, and the impact of market fluctuations has weakened. In terms of international layout, CSC insists on placing equal emphasis on "going global" and "bringing in," exploring a uniquely distinctive path of international development, deeply participating in capital market connectivity along the Belt and Road with Hong Kong as a fulcrum, and becoming a strategic bridge connecting China and the world. In its bridge role, on the one hand, it follows customer demand to "go global," helping Chinese enterprises list in Hong Kong, issue offshore bonds and conduct cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and serving customers' overseas expansion needs; on the other hand, it actively serves international capital "investing in China," providing services for global capital allocation to Chinese assets through northbound business and connectivity mechanisms, and serving well as a bridge for two-way opening.
In terms of shareholder returns, CSC also shows the responsibility of a leading securities firm. The company takes sustained, stable and predictable cash dividends as its core measure for rewarding shareholders. Since its H-share listing in 2016, including the 2026 interim dividend still pending approval by the shareholders' meeting, the cumulative total dividend is expected to reach 22.725 billion yuan. In implementing the special action of "improving quality, increasing efficiency and emphasizing returns," CSC has formed a systematic mechanism in six aspects: serving national strategy, strengthening strategic leadership, improving corporate governance, strengthening the responsibility of "key minorities," optimizing the dividend mechanism and enhancing investor communication. In science and technology finance, in the first half of the year it completed 13 equity financing deals for science and technology enterprises, with an underwriting amount of 21.164 billion yuan; in green finance, it ranked second in the industry by lead underwriting amount of green bonds; in inclusive finance, it ranked third in the industry by lead underwriting amount of bonds for small, medium and micro enterprises, and its wealth management business cumulatively served 6.962 million inclusive small and micro customer groups; in pension finance, it distributed more than 37.18 million yuan of personal pension products; in digital finance, its digital-intelligent platform has been well applied, empowering customers, employees and management.
Non-bank blue chips are gradually evolving from a single growth premium toward a valuation system driven by both value and returns, the company's management said. The fundamental path for non-bank finance to attract long-term capital and achieve valuation re-rating lies in relying on an institutionalized and sustainable shareholder return mechanism and refined capital management as safeguards, promoting its own transformation from growth-driven to value-driven and return-driven, and ultimately forming a virtuous cycle of stable operations, stable returns and reasonable valuation. CSC is benchmarking itself against this path and continuously improving its own development quality.
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