--- title: "Moore Threads' First Profit, and 3.3 Billion Yuan of Cash Out" date: 2026-11-02 category: Capital & Markets site: NeuroAI canonical: https://neuroai.site/a/na-capital-moore-threads-post-ipo-numbers language: en --- # Moore Threads' First Profit, and 3.3 Billion Yuan of Cash Out > China's first listed full-function GPU maker reported a quarterly profit, while its cash-flow statement showed 3.3 billion yuan leaving the business over nine months. A chip designer that had never finished a year in the black filed a quarterly report showing it had finally made money. Three pages deeper in the same document, the cash-flow statement showed the business had consumed more than 3 billion yuan of cash since January. Neither figure is a typo. The distance between them is the most useful thing a reader can take from Moore Threads (摩尔线程), China's first listed full-function GPU company, a year after its STAR Market (科创板) debut. ## Key takeaways - Moore Threads listed on the STAR Market (科创板) in December 2025 at 114.28 yuan per share, raising about 8.0 billion yuan (≈ US$1.1B) — against revenue of 438 million yuan (≈ US$62M) in the last full year before filing. - For 2025, revenue reached 1.51 billion yuan (≈ US$212M), up 243.37%, with a net loss attributable to shareholders of 1.00 billion yuan (≈ US$141M) and R&D equal to 86.68% of revenue. - The third quarter of 2026 delivered 1.55 billion yuan (≈ US$219M) of revenue, up 1,773.92% year on year, and a first-ever single-quarter profit after deducting non-recurring items. - Over the first nine months of 2026, operating cash flow was negative 3.31 billion yuan (≈ US$466M) and inventory rose to 3.36 billion yuan (≈ US$474M). - The prospectus had told investors consolidated profitability would come no earlier than 2027. It arrived in quarterly form ahead of that. ## What 8 billion yuan bought The listing itself was a statement about how Chinese capital prices strategic hardware. Moore Threads sold 70 million shares — 14.89% of post-issue share capital — with CITIC Securities (中信证券) as sole sponsor, taking in roughly 8.0 billion yuan (≈ US$1.1B). At the time of the prospectus, the company's revenue history was short and steep: 46.09 million yuan in 2022, 124 million yuan in 2023, and 438 million yuan in 2024. Cumulative R&D over those three years was 3.81 billion yuan (≈ US$537M), equal to about 626% of cumulative revenue. Losses attributable to shareholders ran at 1.89 billion, 1.70 billion and 1.62 billion yuan across the same three years. In other words, the public market was asked to fund a company whose annual sales could fit inside one month of its research budget. That is not unusual for frontier silicon, but it sets the terms of the trade: investors are buying an option on future volume, not a stream of current earnings. Ownership was equally dispersed. The prospectus listed 86 shareholders with no single holder above 30%; founder, chairman and general manager Zhang Jianzhong (张建中) held 11.06% directly and controlled 36.36% in total through concert-party agreements and employee shareholding platforms. ## The first full year as a listed company The 2025 annual report, published in April 2026, was the first full accounting after listing. - Revenue: 1.506 billion yuan (≈ US$212M), up 243.37% year on year. - Gross profit: 987 million yuan, up 218.43%, implying a gross margin of roughly 65.6%. - Net loss attributable to shareholders: 1.001 billion yuan (≈ US$141M); after deducting non-recurring items, 1.088 billion yuan. - R&D spending: 1.305 billion yuan (≈ US$184M), or 86.68% of revenue. The gross margin carries the most information. A hardware business clearing about 65% gross margin is not selling commodity boards; it is selling differentiated compute. The problem is everything below the gross line — R&D, and the working capital needed to ship clusters. ## 2026: profit arrives, cash keeps leaving The third-quarter report, filed in late October 2026, is where the story turns. - Q3 2026 revenue: 1.552 billion yuan (≈ US$219M), up 1,773.92% year on year and 55.4% quarter on quarter, a single-quarter record. - Q3 net profit attributable to shareholders: 49.26 million yuan; after deducting non-recurring items, 20.07 million yuan — the first positive quarter on that stricter measure. - First nine months of 2026: revenue 3.289 billion yuan (≈ US$463M), up 319.15%; net profit attributable 37.70 million yuan, though the figure after deducting non-recurring items remained a loss of about 131 million yuan. - R&D in the first nine months: 1.34 billion yuan, up 55.72%, already above the full-year 2025 total. Cumulative R&D since 2022 is close to 6.5 billion yuan (≈ US$915M). Then the cash-flow line. Operating activities used net cash of 3.31 billion yuan (≈ US$466M) over the nine months. Inventory at the end of September stood at 3.36 billion yuan (≈ US$474M), up 2.03 billion yuan from the end of 2025; the company attributes the outflow to scaling production and strategic stocking. This is the ordinary shape of a hardware ramp: you buy silicon, boards and memory months before a customer pays you, so profit on the income statement and cash in the bank move in opposite directions. It is why a GPU company with a quarterly profit still needs its IPO proceeds. According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), hardware-heavy AI suppliers tend to reach accounting profitability well before cash self-sufficiency, because working capital and inventory scale with order volume rather than with reported margin. ## What the money is being spent on Proceeds were earmarked for three chip programmes — an AI training-and-inference chip, a graphics chip and an AI SoC — plus working capital. In practice, the spend is architecture iteration. The current workhorse is the MTT S5000, built on the "Pinghu" (平湖) architecture for large-model training and inference; the next generation, "Huagang" (花港), is the stated R&D focus. In September 2026 the company announced a partnership with JD Cloud (京东云) to build a 100,000-card GPU cluster for training, inference and embodied AI (具身智能) workloads. Customer categories in the filings span cloud service providers, token service providers, AI startups, telecom operators, intelligent computing centers (智算中心) and research or government clients. Demand is broad, which makes concentration disclosures matter more than growth rates. ## Honest limitations - This piece relies on the company's prospectus, annual report and quarterly filings, plus Chinese financial media coverage of them. Customer contracts and shipment volumes are not independently verified. - Quarterly figures are unaudited unless stated; full-year audited figures may differ. - Segment revenue, customer concentration, and the hardware-versus-software split are not broken out cleanly in the available summaries — a real gap, since margin quality cannot be judged without them. - No attempt is made here to value the shares. A company turning a quarterly profit while burning 3.3 billion yuan of operating cash cannot be assessed on a price-to-earnings basis. - Comparisons with international GPU competitors are qualitative; Chinese filings offer no like-for-like product benchmark. ## What readers can do now - When a Chinese AI hardware company announces a profit, open the cash-flow statement in the same filing before forming a view. For capital-intensive suppliers, operating cash flow and inventory decide whether the profit is durable. - Track R&D as a share of revenue across consecutive periods, not in absolute terms. Moore Threads moved from 626% over 2022–2024 to 86.68% in 2025 to under 41% in the first nine months of 2026 — that trajectory is the real story of scale. - If you evaluate vendors rather than stocks, ask which architecture generation a quoted product belongs to. Generation determines software compatibility and performance far more than brand does. --- Published by NeuroAI (https://neuroai.site/) — https://neuroai.site/a/na-capital-moore-threads-post-ipo-numbers Free to quote with attribution and a link to the original.