Citic Securities, a major brokerage firm, revealed recently that Hikrobot (海康机器人), a robot-making arm of Hangzhou-headquartered AI giant Hikvision (海康威视, 002415.SH), has completed the pre-IPO tutoring, ready for a share sale.
Citic Securities signed the pre-IPO tutoring agreement with Hikrobot on September 9, 2022 and provided two sessions of consultation between September 30, 2022 and the time of issuing its tutoring report.
In China, it’s mandatory for companies seeking IPOs to receive pre-listing tutoring ahead of filing their prospectus with the stock exchange.
Following the consultation, Hikrobot and its executives have met the requirements expected of a public company, including in corporate governance, internal control, accounting rules, compliance and ethical conduct per securities laws and regulations, among others, according to a filing by Citic Securities.
In December 2022, Hikvision announced a stock split in which it divested Hikrobot and sought a listing for its affiliate on the ChiNext Board of Shenzhen Stock Exchange, one of China’s three bourses.
Hikrobot, founded in 2016, focuses on the design, development, production and sale of computer vision and autonomous mobile robot (AMR) for application in industrial, warehousing and logistics sectors.
The announcement by Hikvision stated that it plans to build Hikrobot into an independent listed platform for computer vision and AMR. What’s more, Hikrobot will increase its R&D investment in the two areas via funding from the capital market to bolster its profitability and comprehensive competitiveness.
Hikrobot now is a market leader in computer vision and AMR. Its AMRs are mainly used in carmaking, lithium battery, photovoltaic, 3C (computer, communication and consumer electronics), pharmaceutical, consumer retail industries, with deliveries totaling over 30,000 units to date.
Its computer vision technologies are mainly deployed to industrial and logistics spaces, counting more than 7,000 clients across the globe.
The firm posted a net profit of 45 million yuan (US$6.6 million), 65 million yuan and 482 million yuan on revenue of 852 million yuan, 1.55 billion yuan and 2.74 billion yuan from 2019 to 2021. In the first half of 2022, for which financial figures were last available, Hikrobot recorded 1.766 billion yuan in revenue, up 44.75% year on year.
