Every advanced chip begins not with the chip itself, but with the machines that carve and coat the wafer. Those machines are among the hardest to build and the easiest to block from crossing a border. A Beijing-based equipment maker just closed a year that shows how far that local effort has come — and what it costs.
NAURA (北方华创) is China's largest supplier of the tools that sit inside a chip fab: etchers that sculpt tiny patterns, deposition systems that lay down films, furnaces, cleaners, and, increasingly, the ion implanters and plating tools that complete a process flow. Its 2025 annual report, filed with the Shenzhen exchange, lays out a year of strong growth paired with a deliberate hit to profit.
The headline numbers
Revenue for 2025 came in at about ¥39.35 billion (about US$5.54 billion / HK$43.3 billion), up roughly 31% year on year. Profit attributable to shareholders was about ¥5.52 billion (about US$778 million / HK$6.07 billion), down about 2% — a rare combination of faster sales but flatter earnings.
The reason is spelled out in the filing: the company poured money into the future. Research and development expense for the year was about ¥5.44 billion (about US$766 million / HK$5.98 billion), up roughly ¥1.77 billion, or close to 47%, as it raced to develop higher-end tools and validate new products with customers. It also grew its team by nearly 4,750 people and took on higher equity-incentive costs.
- Revenue: about ¥39.35 billion, up ~31%.
- Net profit: about ¥5.52 billion, down ~2%.
- R&D expense: about ¥5.44 billion, up ~47%.
- Gross margin: 40.1%, down from 42.9% a year earlier.
Where the growth comes from
The company's integrated-circuit equipment revenue grew more than 50% during the year, and management says its two largest product families — etching (刻蚀) and thin-film deposition (薄膜沉积) — each crossed the ¥10 billion revenue mark, together accounting for roughly half of total sales. It also delivered its 1,000th thin-film deposition unit, a symbolic milestone for a homegrown tool line.
NAURA points to an installed base of more than 8,000 ICP etching chambers in the field and claims stable monthly production of over five million 12-inch wafers on its equipment at customer sites. Those field figures are cited by the company and its research coverage rather than audited per-tool, but they indicate breadth of deployment across Chinese fabs.
Broadening the toolbox
A telling detail in the report is how many new product categories NAURA entered. It launched ion implanters and plating tools with what it describes as fully independent intellectual property, and it completed the acquisition of Kingsemi (芯源微) to fill gaps in track-and-cleaning equipment. The strategy is explicitly "platform" — cover as many steps of the fab as possible so a customer can buy a large share of its toolset from one domestic supplier.
This matters because a fab is a chain of dozens of process steps, and a missing link forces a foreign purchase. Each new category NAURA ships reduces that dependency. The trade-off is exactly the profit slide seen in 2025: new tools cost money to develop and to qualify, and qualification at a customer can take many months before revenue follows.
The demand backdrop
The company frames its opportunity around two forces. One is the large model (大模型) and AI compute (算力) build-out, which it argues is reshaping demand toward advanced logic and advanced packaging equipment. The other is 3D NAND marching to higher layer counts, which needs ever-more precise etching and deposition. Public industry forecasts cited by Chinese financial media put global semiconductor-equipment sales above US$145 billion in 2026, growing about 9% — a tailwind for any supplier with qualified tools.
Trend reading
According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), equipment is the longest pole in semiconductor self-reliance, because tool maturity, not design cleverness, sets the ceiling on what a domestic supply chain can actually build.
Honest limitations
This is a supplier's own annual report, so the growth narrative is presented by the company; segment revenue splits such as the "over ¥10 billion each" for etching and deposition come from the firm's disclosures and analyst notes, not a separate audit of each product line. The profit dip is real but partly a choice — heavy R&D and hiring — and could widen if the company keeps investing aggressively. NAURA still depends on foreign sources for some critical components and subsystems, a vulnerability that export controls can expose at any time, and it remains behind the global leaders in the most advanced deposition and etch modules. A 31% revenue gain also rests on continued domestic fab expansion, which is sensitive to policy and to the cyclicality of memory and logic demand.
What readers can do now
- Investors: read the R&D and new-product qualification signals, not just the revenue line; a dip in near-term profit can be a healthy sign of platform-building if new tools are shipping to fabs.
- Engineers: if you qualify equipment, track which process steps NAURA can now cover end-to-end at your node, since that determines how much of a line can be sourced domestically.
- Buyers: for capacity planning, treat domestic equipment as qualified-for-many-steps but still hybrid — assume some leading modules will remain imported, and plan qualification cycles accordingly.