The opening bell rang in Hong Kong, the stock jumped 28%, then gave most of it back by close. Behind the volatile first day was a company that sells the "brains" of self-driving cars but has never turned a profit.
Horizon Robotics (地平线), a Beijing-based supplier of advanced driver-assistance (ADAS) and autonomous-driving compute, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on October 24, 2024. It was, by multiple accounts, the exchange's largest technology IPO of the year.
The numbers that got attention
- Listing: HKEX main board, stock code 9660.HK, pricing at HK$3.99 per share.
- Raised: about HK$5.4 billion (roughly US$690 million), described by China Financial Information and CE.cn as the biggest Hong Kong tech IPO of 2024 and the largest Chinese tech offshore IPO in three years.
- Valuation at open: above HK$660 billion market capitalization at the intraday peak, settling near HK$534 billion at close (per CNR and Beijing science-and-technology authorities).
- Cornerstone backers: Alibaba, Baidu, CMA CGM (达飞集团) and a Ningbo government fund committed about US$220 million (roughly HK$1.7 billion) as cornerstone investors (CE.cn).
A company built for the software-defined car
Founded in 2015 by Yu Kai (余凯), a former head of Baidu's deep-learning institute, Horizon positions itself as a full-stack provider: chips plus the software stack that runs on them. Its Journey (征程) series of automotive compute has, the company says, shipped more than 6 million sets cumulatively. A next-generation Journey 6, built on its BPU Nash architecture, was unveiled in April 2024.
The commercial footprint is the part investors paid for:
- Solutions adopted by 27 OEMs across 42 brands, deployed on 290 vehicle models.
- All of China's top-10 OEMs are reported to use Horizon's driving-compute solutions.
- By total installed solutions in 2023 and the first half of 2024, Horizon ranked fourth globally (9.3% and 15.4% share), and first in China's home-brand passenger-car full-range ADAS and front-view one-box compute markets at 28.65% and 33.73% (first half of 2024).
Growth that is real — and unprofitable
Revenue has grown fast, reported in the IPO documents and echoed by Chinese financial media:
- 2021: about RMB 467 million (≈ US$65 million)
- 2022: about RMB 906 million (≈ US$126 million)
- 2023: about RMB 1.552 billion (≈ US$216 million), a compound annual growth rate near 82% over 2021–2023
- First half of 2024: about RMB 935 million (≈ US$130 million), up 151.6% year on year
Gross margin is high and stable — 70.5% in 2023 and 79.0% in the first half of 2024 — reflecting the software-and-IP nature of the business.
But the bottom line is deeply red. Net losses reported by CNR:
- 2021: RMB 2.064 billion
- 2022: RMB 8.72 billion
- 2023: RMB 6.739 billion
- First half of 2024: RMB 5.098 billion
On an adjusted (non-IFRS) basis, losses were smaller — about RMB 1.10 billion, 1.89 billion, 1.64 billion and 0.80 billion across the same periods — but still negative every year.
Why the market paid anyway
The bull case is simple: China's passenger cars are racing to add driver-assistance as standard, and Horizon is already designed into the volume models. The bear case is also simple: the company is spending heavily to stay ahead of both foreign chip rivals and domestic competitors, and profitability is a plan, not a result.
What the listing said about the market, not just the company
Horizon's debut did something quieter than raise money: it re-priced the category. Before the listing, "automotive chip" in Chinese capital markets usually meant either an imported incumbent or a consumer-electronics chipmaker pivoting to cars. A loss-making ADAS-compute specialist raising the year's largest tech IPO — with Alibaba and Baidu buying cornerstone stakes in a company that competes with their own silicon ambitions — told every auto supplier that the capital markets would fund design wins over profits, at least for a while. That window mattered: it let Horizon, and rivals watching it, keep spending on next-generation compute while the software-defined-vehicle transition was still unsettled.
Honest limitations
- Revenue, margin, and loss figures are taken from the IPO prospectus as reported by CNR, China Financial Information and the Beijing science body; we did not access the filings directly.
- Market-share percentages come from third-party consultancies (CIC, cited in filings) and industry research houses; methodologies vary.
- First-day trading ranges differ slightly across outlets (close reported at HK$4.10 by CNR; intraday peak near HK$5.50 by CE.cn). We used the widely repeated HK$3.99 pricing and HK$5.4 billion raise.
- This is a capital-markets event write-up, not investment advice; loss-making hardware-software firms carry execution and dilution risk.
What readers can do now
- If you track China's auto-tech supply chain, watch Horizon's "activated" OEM count and Journey 6 design wins — those are the leading indicators, more than the IPO pop.
- Compare the open-loss profile here with profitable incumbent chip names before drawing conclusions about the sector's health.
- Read the post-listing interim reports for adjusted-loss trend and free-cash-flow, since the IPO snapshot alone hides the burn rate.