Following six consecutive years of losses, Cambrian has experienced its seventh year of losses. On the evening of January 30, Cambrian officially released its 2023 annual performance loss announcement. According to the announcement, Cambrian is expected to achieve operating income of 680 million yuan to 720 million yuan in 2023, which will only decrease from 729 million yuan in 2022; the net profit attributable to the owners of the parent company is expected to be a loss of 756 million yuan to 924 million yuan, which is the same as the previous year. Compared with the same period last year, the loss narrowed by 26.47% to 39.84%; the net profit attributable to the owners of the parent company after deducting non-recurring gains and losses is expected to be a loss of 945 million to 1.155 billion yuan, and the loss narrowed by 26.87% to 40.17% compared with the same period last year.
Cambrian's market value has been cut in half, and it has suffered losses of 5 billion for seven consecutive years.
To put it simply, based on the calculation of the upper limit of expected losses in 2023, Cambrian has accumulated losses of more than 5 billion yuan in the past seven years. Although this huge loss was within investor expectations, it was still difficult for the market to recognize it. Therefore, on the day after the announcement of pre-loss results, Cambrian's stock price closed with a 5.90% decline.
Regarding the reasons for the decline in performance, Cambrian attributed it to reduced funds for administrative expenses, research and development expenses and asset impairment losses. Affected by non-operating gains and losses, during the reporting period, the impact of non-recurring gains and losses on net profit is expected to be 189 million yuan to 231 million yuan, mainly due to the impact of government subsidies included in the current profit and loss.
Judging from the performance from 2017 to 2022, Cambrian Company's revenue was 7.8433 million yuan, 117 million yuan, 444 million yuan, 459 million yuan, 721 million yuan, and 729 million yuan respectively. ; The net profit losses attributable to the parent company were 381 million yuan, 41 million yuan, 1.179 billion yuan, 435 million yuan, 825 million yuan, and 1.257 billion yuan respectively, which shows that Cambrian's losses have continued to deepen.
For a high-profile and controversial company, how to turn losses into profits has long been an unavoidable issue.
Venture capital shareholders liquidated their positions, and the founder’s net worth shrank by tens of billions
In fact, Cambrian's stock price has been on a downward trend in the three years before its listing, and the cumulative decline once exceeded 80%. The good news is that Cambrian’s stock price rebounded rapidly under the influence of artificial intelligence in early 2023, once soaring to 271.47 yuan per share. As of the close of trading on February 2, 2024, Cambrian's stock price was 108.49 yuan per share, with a total market value of 45.24 billion yuan.
However, when the stock price rebounded in 2023, many shareholders of Cambrian chose to reduce their holdings and cash out, including Nanjing CMB, Hubei CMB, Ningbo Hangao, Paleozoic Venture Capital and SDIC Venture Fund. As of the end of 2023, Cambrian's five venture capital shareholders have almost all completed liquidation, and the cumulative reduction of holdings has exceeded 4 billion yuan.
From September 2022 to March 2023, Ningbo Hangao completed the liquidation and reduction of its holdings. A few months later, news of share liquidation also came from Nanjing CMB and Hubei CMB. From March to August 2023, Paleozoic Venture Capital’s cumulative shareholding reduction ratio was 1.4343%, and the total reduction amount was approximately 1.072 billion yuan. From March to June of the same year, SDIC Venture Fund reduced its cumulative shareholding ratio by 1.7760%, with a total reduction of approximately 1.482 billion yuan, becoming the largest reduction in Cambrian shareholder holdings in the past year. After reducing its holdings, Paleozoic Venture Capital no longer holds shares in Cambrian, while SDIC Venture Fund only holds 0.0003% of the shares.
The large-scale reduction of Cambrian shareholders has put this once highly anticipated unicorn into unprecedented difficulties. Even the genius founder Chen Tianshi is facing the pressure of continued loss of performance and the large-scale withdrawal of venture capital shareholders, and is experiencing a "troubled period" on the road to entrepreneurship. Although the current Cambrian prospects are not optimistic, Chen Tianshi has not lost confidence.
In August 2023, Cambrian announced a buyback plan in order to restore investor confidence, with a planned amount of 30 million to 50 million yuan, which will be used for subsequent employee stock ownership plans or equity incentives. A month later, Cambrian responded again, announcing that the company had received a "Letter of Commitment" from Chairman Chen Tianshi, in which Chen Tianshi promised not to reduce the company's shares directly held by him in any way.
However, major shareholders cleared their positions and fled when the stock price peaked, which to a certain extent revealed a negative signal about the future. Many people also believe that Cambrian has the reputation of being the “number one AI chip stock” but still cannot make money. Although Cambrian subsequently tried to stabilize the company's stock price by repurchasing shares and issuing a letter of commitment from the actual controller not to reduce its holdings, it still failed to prevent the stock price from falling.
According to Cambrian's 2023 third quarter report, Chen Tianshi currently holds 28.69% of the company's shares, a total of 119 million shares. Based on the closing price on February 2, 2024, his current net worth is 12.979 billion yuan. Compared with Cambrian's net worth of more than 25 billion yuan on its first day of listing, Chen Tianshi's wealth has shrunk by more than 10 billion yuan.
Cambrian's road to building a "Chinese core" is like a bottomless pit of money.
The upstart becomes a leek? How the first AI chip stock can save itself
Regarding the reasons for Cambrian's consecutive losses, some clues can actually be observed from past financial reports. For example, in the cloud intelligent computing market and edge intelligent computing market, the market share is mainly monopolized by large companies such as NVIDIA; in the intelligent computing cluster system market, clusters based on NVIDIA GPU products have also been occupying a dominant position in the market.
Compared with industry giants such as Nvidia, Cambrian has a clear gap in terms of industrial chain ecological structure and industrial implementation capabilities.
First of all, in terms of commercialization, Cambrian's customer structure has obvious risks. On the one hand, there is a lack of support from high-quality large customers, and on the other hand, the concentration of customers is too high. For example, partners such as Nanjing Science and Technology Innovation Investment Co., Ltd. and Jiangsu Kunshan High-tech Industry Investment and Development Co., Ltd. are either affiliated institutions or local governments. Of course, some external reasons, such as sanctions, have also restricted the development of the Cambrian to a certain extent.
Currently, Cambrian’s main product is the artificial intelligence chip Siyuan 370 launched in 2021. As of March 2022, Cambrian officially released the new training accelerator card MLU370-X8. MLU370-X8 is equipped with dual-chip four-core Siyuan 370, which uses a 7nm process technology and is mainly used for training tasks. The Cambrian official website shows that in the widely used YOLOv3, Transformer and other training tasks, the parallel performance of the 8-card computing system reaches an average of 155% of NVIDIA 350WRTX GPU.
For Cambrian, the golden age of AI “entrepreneurship” has passed, and the time left for it to make choices has become increasingly limited. Are you actively planning to become a scenario solution provider in vertical fields? Or actively seek to become ecological partners with large companies? This will become a key issue that needs to be seriously considered in the Cambrian for a long time to come.
Cambrian, which is currently only in its 7th year of establishment, is caught between its vast ideals and the realistic dilemma of elusive profits. “Spring” is far from coming.