Film by film, a wafer is built. The machine that lays those films inside a vacuum chamber is one of the hardest to master — and one of the most expensive lines on a fab's budget. For China's Piotech, 2025 was the year that machine finally paid off at scale.
Key takeaways
- Piotech (拓荆科技, 688072.SH) reported 2025 revenue of ¥6.519 billion (≈ US$905 million), up 58.87% year on year.
- Net profit attributable to shareholders was ¥927 million (≈ US$129 million), up 34.67%, while recurring profit rose 103.05% to ¥723 million.
- Its PECVD film-deposition family alone generated about ¥5.142 billion (≈ US$714 million), roughly 79% of total revenue and up 75.27%.
- The year-end backlog stood near ¥11.0 billion (110亿元), with contract liabilities (customer prepayments) at ¥4.852 billion, up 62.66%.
- Gross margin was 34.95%, down about 6.7 points as volume outran the higher-margin mix of prior years.
The deposition dilemma
Modern chips are stacks of thin films — insulators, conductors, barriers — deposited with atomic precision. The two dominant techniques are CVD (chemical vapor deposition) and its variant PECVD (plasma-enhanced CVD), plus ALD (atomic layer deposition) for the thinnest layers. These tools sit at the heart of every logic and memory fab, and for years the field was dominated by Applied Materials, Lam Research, and Tokyo Electron.
Piotech, founded in 2010 and listed on Shanghai's STAR Market, bet almost entirely on this category. That bet is now visible in the income statement. Its 2025 annual report, filed on the official cninfo disclosure system, shows revenue climbing to ¥6.519 billion (≈ US$905 million) from ¥4.10 billion in 2024 — a 58.87% jump. Net profit attributable to shareholders reached ¥927 million (≈ US$129 million), up 34.67%. Stripping out one-off items, recurring profit more than doubled to ¥723 million.
One family carries the year
The headline number hides a concentration that investors should not ignore. Piotech's PECVD series — built on its PF-300T Plus and PF-300M platforms and newer reaction chambers — sold about ¥5.142 billion (≈ US$714 million) in 2025, up 75.27% and equal to nearly 8 of every 10 yuan of revenue. The growth came from products for advanced memory and advanced logic that passed customer validation and entered mass production.
ALD equipment added roughly ¥301 million, up 191.82%, as PE-ALD SiO₂, SiN, and SiCO tools scaled and a first Thermal-ALD TiN product cleared validation. Hybrid bonding (混合键合) — the technique that directly bonds two wafers face to face and is central to advanced packaging (先进封装) and high-bandwidth memory — contributed about ¥136 million, up 41.92%, with the first wafer-to-wafer fusion-bonding tool also converting to revenue.
In other words, Piotech is not yet a broad-line equipment company. It is a deposition specialist that is deepening its lead in the one category it knows best.
The order book tells the real story
For capital-equipment firms, this year's revenue is last year's orders. Piotech's disclosure is unusually explicit: contract liabilities — mostly advance payments from customers — reached ¥4.852 billion at year-end, up 62.66% from the end of 2024. The company stated its backlog (在手订单) was about ¥11.0 billion (110亿元), a buffer that, if it converts as planned, supports revenue well into 2026.
That backlog is the bull case. The flip side is customer concentration: disclosure shows the top five customers accounted for about 79% of sales. When a handful of domestic foundries and memory makers set their capex, Piotech's quarterly results will move with them.
Why hybrid bonding is the wildcard
The most strategic line item is small but symbolic. Hybrid bonding revenue of ¥136 million is modest today, but the technology is the connective tissue of next-generation advanced packaging — the path that lets chipmakers stitch dies together without traditional bumps. As China's packaging houses and memory suppliers push into high-bandwidth memory and chiplet designs, demand for bonding tools should rise faster than the base business.
Piotech's challenge is to turn a deposition monopoly-in-the-making into a multi-tool franchise before any single customer's cycle turns. The ALD and hybrid-bonding lines are the early evidence that diversification is working — just not yet at scale.
Honest limitations
Figures are taken from Piotech's 2025 annual report filed on the official cninfo system and summarized by financial press; they were not independently audited here. The ¥11.0 billion backlog and the 79% top-five-customer concentration are company-disclosed and should be read as management estimates and reported aggregates, not guarantees of future revenue. Gross margin decline is stated but its drivers (mix vs. pricing vs. ramp costs) are characterized from the filing, not measured line by line. The article covers financial and strategic signals only; it does not assess tool technical performance, export-control exposure on specific components, or the competitive standing of Piotech's tools versus leading global suppliers beyond the company's own descriptions.
What readers can do now
- Watch the backlog-to-revenue ratio each quarter: a shrinking backlog would signal fab capex cooling faster than the bull case assumes.
- Track ALD and hybrid-bonding revenue as a share of the total — rising percentages mean diversification is real, not just promised.
- Compare Piotech's deposition strength against peers like ACM Research (cleaning/plating) to see which equipment niches China is localizing fastest.