Recently, Jiangsu 01 Auto Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "01 Auto") formally submitted a listing application to the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with Goldman Sachs and Haitong International acting as joint sponsors.
Prior to this IPO, the company has already secured multiple rounds of capital investment. The most recent financing round, completed in May 2026, raised 925 million yuan, resulting in a post-investment valuation of 7 billion yuan.
According to the prospectus, the company has introduced top-tier industrial partners and long-term capital investors including CATL, Temasek, Momenta, NIO Capital, Zijin Mining Group, Shandong Energy Group, Moutai Investment, Lenovo, and Sanhua Holding, forming an impressive roster of shareholders.
Unlike traditional automakers that often add intelligent solutions onto mature internal combustion engine platforms or modified electric chassis, 01 Auto aims to deeply integrate the entire vehicle with AI starting from the design phase. It positions itself as the world's first enterprise possessing both forward-design vehicle development capabilities and a heavy-duty truck autonomous driving end-to-end multimodal large language model.
This dual capability of "vehicle + large model" is quite rare among listed or IPO-aspiring heavy-duty truck companies.
Against the backdrop of continuously rising penetration of new energy heavy-duty trucks and the accelerating pace of industry capitalization, whether 01 Auto can firmly establish itself in the increasingly crowded market with this unique positioning will be a key focus for ongoing market attention.
Three Consecutive Years of Losses; New Energy Heavy-Duty Truck Deliveries Exceed One Thousand
Public information shows that 01 Auto is a technology company focused on the new energy intelligent heavy-duty truck sector, with a business model covering both vehicle sales and unmanned heavy-duty truck solutions.
Looking at performance data, the company's revenue has grown rapidly during the reporting period, but losses have also increased concurrently.
From 2023 to 2025, the company's revenue was 1.163 million yuan, 124 million yuan, and 522 million yuan (RMB, same below), respectively. Annual losses were 114 million yuan, 241 million yuan, and 281 million yuan, respectively, accumulating to a total loss of 636 million yuan over the three years.
The company's main businesses are the sale of new energy intelligent heavy-duty trucks and unmanned heavy-duty truck solutions.
In 2024, 01 Auto officially launched and began deliveries of two new energy intelligent heavy-duty truck models: the "Jingzhe" and the "Xiaoman".
The "Jingzhe" is primarily designed for bulk resource transportation such as coal, concrete, and steel. Its standard-load version has a retail price range of 530,000 to 680,000 RMB, accounting for 38.5% of revenue in 2025.
The "Xiaoman" is tailored for short-distance transportation and regional logistics scenarios. Its standard-load version has a retail price range of 430,000 to 600,000 RMB, accounting for 58.7% of revenue in 2025.
Delivery data indicates that the company's new energy intelligent heavy-duty truck business has entered a phase of scaled delivery.
In 2023, 2024, and 2025, the company delivered 2, 272, and 1,176 new energy intelligent heavy-duty trucks, respectively, setting the industry's fastest record for achieving batch deliveries of such vehicles through a forward-defined approach.
In the first four months of 2026, the company delivered 778 new energy intelligent heavy-duty trucks, a year-on-year increase of 334.6%.
It is worth noting that the company's unmanned heavy-duty truck solutions successfully delivered 15 trucks adapted for autonomous driving solutions in 2025, with an additional 41 delivered in the first four months of 2026.
This segment achieved a positive gross margin of 4.3% in 2025, primarily due to the vehicles being equipped with steer-by-wire chassis, which offer higher technological content and command higher selling prices.
In the future, the company plans to expand the business revenue model for its autonomous driving solutions, intending to gradually start charging customers technical service fees and extend unmanned heavy-duty truck solutions to more application scenarios.
During the reporting period, the company's R&D investment remained high. R&D expenses from 2023 to 2025 were 71.42 million yuan, 116 million yuan, and 126 million yuan, respectively, with the 2025 R&D expense accounting for a high 24.1% of revenue.
As of the end of 2025, the company's net liabilities amounted to 629 million yuan, net current liabilities were 690 million yuan, and year-end cash and cash equivalents stood at 155 million yuan.
Can "Vehicle + Large Model" Build a Competitive Moat?
Driven by the "dual carbon" goals, the replacement of traditional fuel heavy-duty trucks by new energy intelligent heavy-duty trucks has become an irreversible industry trend.
In June 2026, 11 departments including the Ministry of Transport, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the "Implementation Plan for Promoting the Large-Scale Application of New Energy Heavy-Duty Trucks", which for the first time set quantitative targets at the national level: by 2030, the penetration rate of new energy heavy-duty trucks should reach 40%, with a stock exceeding 1.6 million vehicles, accounting for approximately 20% of the total.
Previously, as the segment with the highest carbon emissions in the commercial vehicle sector and the largest single-vehicle battery capacity, the heavy-duty truck market long lacked clear penetration rate guidance. This policy fills that macro-planning gap.
From actual implementation data, from January 2025 to May 2026, cumulative national sales of new energy heavy-duty trucks reached 337,000 units, with a market penetration rate exceeding 29.5%. Demand for new energy heavy-duty trucks is rapidly expanding from closed, short-distance scenarios to medium- and long-haul trunk lines, with sales continuing to climb.
01 Auto operates precisely in the sweet spot where the electrification and intelligentization of commercial vehicles deeply converge.
Unlike the retrofit path of traditional automakers adding intelligent solutions onto existing fuel vehicle platforms, 01 Auto has chosen a forward R&D technological route, achieving vertical integration and self-research in core areas such as chassis and electric drive systems.
Its self-developed "Jushi" four-in-one electric drive axle integrates the motor, transmission, drive axle, and power take-off into a lightweight unit. It is an industry first to integrate a power take-off on the drive axle and to apply oil-cooled flat-wire motors. Through the mass production of a segmented axle housing architecture, it eliminates the need for a driveshaft, reducing weight by over 200 kg, and increases the system's maximum efficiency to 94%.
Simultaneously, the company is the first and only enterprise in the industry to achieve integrated mass production of a multi-source heat pump vehicle-level thermal management system, achieving energy savings of over 70% compared to traditional PTC heating in -20°C conditions.
Through synergistic optimization of the vehicle's electronic control system, these technological breakthroughs translate into quantifiable energy efficiency advantages at the vehicle level. According to Frost & Sullivan data, 01 Auto's four-in-one electric drive axle has the highest transmission efficiency among mass-produced products, and its vehicles' comprehensive energy consumption under rated load conditions can be up to 15% lower than some competitors.
Autonomous driving capability is 01 Auto's second differentiating pillar. While the technological path for heavy-duty truck autonomous driving aligns with that of passenger vehicles, the complexity of application scenarios is higher. Tens of tons of load, longer braking distances, and diverse operating environments covering highways and enclosed areas impose far greater demands on model generalization capability and safety than for passenger vehicles.
01 Auto's self-developed 01 Autonomous Driving System is the industry's first heavy-duty truck autonomous driving system based on an end-to-end multimodal large language model, automating the entire process from sensor input to driving trajectory generation.
Compared to traditional modular architectures, its key system complexity is reduced by approximately 95%, and data annotation costs are about 95% lower than the industry average.
At the 2024 CVPR End-to-End Autonomous Driving Challenge, 01 Auto stood out from 143 global teams with its pure vision solution, winning second place, which validates its technical strength.
At the perception level, the company relies solely on cameras for environmental recognition, effectively reducing hardware costs. A triple safety redundancy design (traceable algorithm logic, full-coverage simulation verification, hardware vehicle redundancy design) provides safety assurance for large-scale commercial deployment.
In terms of data, the actual operational mileage of 01 Auto's electric drive axle new energy heavy-duty trucks has exceeded 100 million kilometers. These real-road data will continuously feed back into algorithm iterations, forming a closed loop of "delivery-operation-optimization".
However, the unmanned heavy-duty truck business is still in the early stages of commercialization. In 2025, unmanned heavy-duty truck solutions contributed revenue of 8.102 million yuan, accounting for only 1.5% of total revenue. As of April 30, 2026, the cumulative deliveries of vehicles adapted for autonomous driving solutions totaled 56 units.
This means the autonomous driving business will still require time to become the company's second growth curve.
Looking at the competitive landscape, the capitalization process in the new energy commercial vehicle industry is currently accelerating significantly. Since just the beginning of 2026, several new energy commercial vehicle-related companies, including Langgao Technology and Tage Zhixing, have successively filed for IPOs.
Among them, Tage Zhixing focuses on mining scenarios, having cumulatively delivered 557 unmanned mining trucks and implemented 31 intelligent mining projects, 14 of which are nationally certified. It has established a strong first-mover advantage in this vertical scenario, potentially posing a future threat to 01 Auto's market share.
Overall Assessment
Overall, 01 Auto possesses distinct differentiating characteristics in its choice of technological path. Its unique "vehicle + large model" approach has already built competitive barriers ranging from hardware energy efficiency to software algorithms.
Although the company's performance currently remains in a loss-making state, with subsequent commercial scaling and the continuous feedback from real operational data to its autonomous driving system, the company's technological advantages are expected to translate into sustainable performance growth. The arrival of the breakeven point may not be far off.
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