Financial Services Association, August 16 (Reporter Wu Xin) In the first half of the year, Wanji Technology (300552.SZ) garnered a lot of attention due to the popular concept “Che Lu Yun,” but this evening released a semi-annual “increase in revenue without increase in profit” report.

In Q1 2024, the company achieved a year-on-year increase in revenue of more than 50%, and net profit losses also narrowed year-on-year, so it is considered by the market that “performance has entered an upward channel.” However, the questionnaire published tonight shows that it is not easy to turn a loss into a profit in the short term.

According to the semi-annual report, the company achieved operating income of 0.378 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.28%; net profit loss to mother of 0.15 billion yuan, an increase of 17.33% year-on-year; net profit loss after deduction was 0.158 billion yuan, an increase of 13.85% year-on-year.

Revenue growth has been lackluster, but operating costs have risen quite a bit. According to the semi-annual report, the company's operating costs increased by 39.34% year on year to 0.272 billion yuan, mainly due to revenue growth and changes in product structure. In addition, sales expenses increased by 9.42% in the first half of the year. According to the company, it increased its market expansion efforts mainly to cope with vehicle-road cloud integration and the development of the expressway business in the second half of the year.

Facing the collaborative construction of a vehicle-road cloud ecosystem, in terms of vehicles, Wanji Technology has launched products such as in-vehicle lidar and vehicle-mounted V2X communication terminals for intelligent connected vehicles. On the roadside side, it has built intelligent connected products such as smart high-speed integrated solutions and vehicle-road cloud integration.

Among them, the dedicated short-range communication products that contributed the most revenue to Wanji Technology continued to grow in the first half of the year, achieving 0.24 billion yuan in revenue, an increase of 38.06% over the previous year. However, Wanji Technology revealed in its semi-annual report that increased competition in this business market has led to a drop in the prices of some of the company's products, which affected the decline in its gross margin and overall gross margin.

Intelligent networking and lidar business H1 are both declining. Lidar achieved revenue of 0.038 billion yuan in the first half of the year, a year-on-year decrease of 4.52%. The intelligent connectivity business achieved revenue of 0.017 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 35.93%. Notably, the gross margin of these two businesses is also declining; the former decreased by 10.48 percentage points, while the latter decreased by 27.2 percentage points.

Lidar is gradually becoming the standard for smart cars, but the market has been around for a long time and competition is fierce. You can imagine how powerful Wanji Technology can be in this field.

According to Geshi Auto, the domestic lidar market showed a significant growth trend from January to May this year. The penetration rate of standard lidar models also rose from 1.5% in the same period in 2023 to 4.7% this year. However, Suteng Juchuang, Hesai Technology, Huawei Technology, etc. have divided up most of the market, leaving an extremely limited market share for manufacturers such as Wanji Technology.

It is worth noting that with the arrival of the vehicle-road cloud integration policy dividend window, more and more manufacturers are eyeing this piece of cake. Manufacturers such as Qianfang Technology, Jinyi Technology, Yihualu, and Gao Xinxing are all speeding up their layout and seizing market space.

After five consecutive years of year-on-year decline in net profit for the year, it will take time to verify whether Wanji Technology can seize the heat of Che Lu Cloud and turn the market against the wind.