Assisted driving brings equal rights and drives high growth in performance, BLACK SESAME (02533) has achieved significant results in the layout of full-scenario intelligent computing.

Since April, the Hong Kong stock market has been consistently strong, with the Hang Seng Index (HSI) gaining over 30% in less than four months, reaching a peak of 25735 points on July 24, the highest in nearly four years. Behind the continued strength of the Hong Kong stock market is the result of the resonance of the three major drivers: "valuation repair + policy dividends + southbound funds", especially the southbound funds, which have become a major force in buying Hong Kong stocks. Data shows that as of July 25, 2025, southbound funds have accumulated a net inflow of 82 billion Hong Kong dollars year-to-date, exceeding the total for the entire year of 2024. It is expected that the net inflow for the entire year of 2025 will exceed 1 trillion Hong Kong dollars. In terms of market performance, while funds are allocating to high dividend assets, they are also favoring the internet NETDRAGON, pharmaceutical, and hard technology sectors, especially high-quality companies with business coverage in the AI field, keeping the market heat high. As the Hong Kong stock market continues to strengthen, a trend is gradually forming where funds are seeking undervalued quality assets to achieve excess returns. BLACK SESAME (02533) has thus entered the sight of investors. As a leader in the field of intelligent automotive computing chips, BLACK SESAME's autonomous driving products and solutions business has high growth certainty, and relying on its multidimensional synergistic advantages in the field of intelligent automotive computing chips, BLACK SESAME has accelerated its expansion into the full-scenario intelligent computing field, including AI and Siasun Robot & Automation, and its valuation logic has quietly changed. Assisted driving enters the parity era, L2+ technology commercialization sees a major outbreak Having deepened its presence in the autonomous driving chip field for six years, and already possessing the self-developed Hua series focused on assisted driving and the Wudang series focused on cross-domain computing, BLACK SESAME has achieved sustained high-speed growth in recent years, as reflected in its performance. Data shows that thanks to the breakthrough in the continuous mass production of advanced assisted driving chips and solutions, BLACK SESAME's revenue in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 was 60.54 million, 165 million, 312 million, and 474 million yuan respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of nearly 100%, showing strong growth momentum. During the same period, gross profit increased from 21.87 million to 195 million yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of up to 107%. BLACK SESAME's high growth is directly related to the rapid development of China's autonomous driving industry, and in 2025, China's commercialization of autonomous driving technology has made a significant breakthrough, accelerating industry development once again, displaying a significant feature of "hierarchical coexistence and scene optimization". L2-level technology popularization is accelerating, with at least one vehicle equipped with L2-level assisted driving out of every two new vehicles sold, achieving a penetration rate of over 50% in new vehicles; while L2+ (advanced assisted driving) is experiencing a rapid penetration in high-speed NOA (automatic navigation assisted driving) and urban NOA, with NOA reaching down to the 100,000 level vehicle model driving the acceleration of the assisted driving parity era. In addition, L3-level technology has seen a policy breakthrough, with limited scene implementation, allowing L3 vehicles to be on the road in cities like Beijing and Shenzhen, initially limited to highways and urban expressways with a maximum speed of 95 km/h. At the same time, the demonstration and operation scope of L4-levels has been further expanded, with Shanghai Pudong fully open and Beijing's demonstration area 4.0 expanding to 600 square kilometers, marking China's shift from regional testing to large-scale operations in autonomous driving, laying the foundation for the commercialization of L4-levels. Therefore, in 2025, China's commercialization of L3 and L4 autonomous driving technology has significantly improved in terms of scene optimization, and the explosion of L2+ technology has accelerated the arrival of the assisted driving parity era, marking a milestone event in the industry, driving the accelerated mass production of L2+ autonomous driving chips. Earlier, CITIC Securities released a research report stating that the penetration rate of L2+ technology is expected to experience a steep increase by 2025, reaching 30% from the 14% in 2024, doubling the number of vehicles equipped. The growth of high-speed NOA is particularly significant, expected to increase from 6% in 2024 to 15% in 2025, with sales expected to grow by 160%; and urban NOA penetration rate is expected to increase from 8% to 15%. It is projected that by 2030, the penetration rate of L2+ could reach 80%. Autonomous driving products and solutions business expected to maintain high growth in 2025 As one of the earliest domestic autonomous driving chip companies dedicated to promoting "assisted driving parity," BLACK SESAME is set to benefit from the explosion of L2+ technology commercialization and breakthroughs in L3 and L4 level technology scenes. Back in June 2020, BLACK SESAME released the HuaShanA1000, the first domestic chip capable of supporting L2+ assisted driving. Data shows that BLACK SESAME's A1000 series chips have been mass-produced in multiple models of top domestic car manufacturers, and in 2024, among the new cars delivered by traditional independent brands for fast NOA parking, BLACK SESAME ranked third in the market with its A1000 series chips, making the A1000 series chips the most mature, domestically-produced chip solution with the highest number of mass-produced car models for parking. In addition to the A1000 series chips, BLACK SESAME has closely followed the industry's trend of advanced assisted driving systems (ADAS) and integration of intelligent cockpits, releasing the first intelligent automotive cross-domain computing chip platform, Wudang C1200 family, in April 2023. It is the first product to integrate assisted driving, intelligent cabins, vehicle control, and other computing domains in the industry, providing customers with cost-effective cross-domain integration capabilities. BLACK SESAME stated that the C1200 series products have already cooperated with multiple ecosystem partners and obtained 2 OEM appointments. In particular, several models from Dongfeng will adopt the cockpit integrated solution based on the C1296 chip and are expected to achieve mass production by 2025, potentially becoming the first mass-produced cockpit integrated chip platform in the industry. Similarly, in 2024, BLACK SESAME launched the HuaShan A2000 family of chips, a platform that provides higher performance and efficiency for next-generation AI models, including the A2000 Lite, A2000, and A2000 Pro versions, each catering to different levels of assisted driving requirements. The A2000 Lite focuses on urban assisted driving, A2000 supports full-scenario assistive driving, while the A2000 Pro is designed for advanced full-scenario assistive driving. The A2000 family of chips achieves high integration and single-chip multitasking capabilities, manufactured with a 7nm process, and incorporates the industry's largest NPU coreBLACK SESAME's Jiushao. BLACK SESAME also introduced a new generation of general AI toolchain, BaRT, based on the A2000 series chips, supporting mainstream frameworks and model transformations to lower development barriers and fully unleash the computing power of Jiushao, thereby making the A2000 series chips more competitive in the ecosystem. Currently, BLACK SESAME is cooperating with top-tier first-tier suppliers to advance the A2000 series products and solutions to top-tier car manufacturers. If successful, this cooperation could accelerate the penetration of A1000 series chips with the L2+ technology explosion this year and the performance of the C1200 series chips with the beginning of mass production this year, thereby enabling BLACK SESAME's autonomous driving products and solutions business to continue to maintain high-speed growth in 2025. If the A2000 series chips are successfully targeted, it will help BLACK SESAME accelerate its entry into the high-end market and consolidate its leading position in the L3-L4 level, ensuring the high certainty of continuous growth in the autonomous driving products and solutions business in the long term. Leveraging synergies to create a second growth curve, the layout of full-scenario intelligent computing shows effectiveness In fact, BLACK SESAME's business scope is no longer limited to assisted driving chips for passenger cars. Thanks to the generalization capability of the self-developed Jiushao NPU architecture, the underlying innovation of cross-domain integration chips, and the efficiency optimization capability using Hyperband packaging technology to optimize bandwidth and energy consumption, BLACK SESAME has transitioned from a "specialized chip" provider to a "generalized computing platform" provider, meaning that with just one architecture, it can serve multiple scenario computing power needs. This has laid a solid foundation for BLACK SESAME's expansion into full-scenario intelligent computing businesses, including Siasun Robot & Automation, intelligent transportation, intelligent logistics, vehicle-road coordination, and beyond. BLACK SESAME's current layout has already shown significant results. BLACK SESAME indicated that the current Siasun Robot & Automation industry is akin to the state of the intelligent car industry in 2018, but due to the maturity of AI computing chips and rapid model development capabilities, the Siasun Robot & Automation market's growth rate will exceed that of the intelligent car market, with a stronger explosion. Based on this judgment, BLACK SESAME is actively laying out the Siasun Robot & Automation market and has successively cooperated with several Siasun Robot & Automation OEMs. The related chip products and solutions are expected to achieve mass production in the Siasun Robot & Automation field in 2025. In addition, due to the breakthrough in the A2000 chip Jiushao AI accelerator architecture, capable of supporting multimodal and large-model AI algorithms, BLACK SESAME plans to cooperate with leading intelligent enterprises to develop intelligent algorithms and hardware solutions based on A2000 chips. Moreover, due to the advanced capability of the Wudang C1200 series chip in hardware isolation, supporting AI computation and actuator control in parallel, efficient processing of multimodal sensor data fusion, BLACK SESAME has partnered with Fourier to provide computing support for its dexterous hands. In the future, BLACK SESAME will expand its applications in the industrial, medical, service, and other fields for Siasun Robot & Automation, providing strong support for the large-scale implementation of intelligent Siasun Robot & Automation technology with the high-performance computing capability of C1200 series chips and A2000 series chips. In the field of intelligent transportation and smart logistics, BLACK SESAME has worked with top brands like Sany Special Vehicles to complete the large-scale applications in trunk logistics, mine smart driving, and factory unmanned logistics. By upgrading the Patronus 2.0 active safety system, BLACK SESAME has realized functions such as automatic emergency braking (AEB), blind-spot detection, and panoramic view coverage. BLACK SESAME noted that with the increasing number of customers, its commercial volume in the commercial vehicle sector is also increasing continuously, expecting to achieve large-scale revenue in intelligent transportation, smart industry, and in other scenarios by 2025. In the field of vehicle-road coordination, BLACK SESAME has secured multiple city car-road cloud integration pilot projects in cities like Chengdu, Xiangyang, Ningbo, Tianjin, among others. BLACK SESAME is responsible for participating in the delivery of support bracket chips and algorithm solutions, covering smart network traffic, L4 and below unmanned driving car-road coordination, and multiple functional applications. In its 2024 financial report, BLACK SESAME announced plans to launch AI low-latency products for car-road cloud integration, which can significantly improve perception accuracy and real-time performance in complex traffic scenes by optimizing image capture and processing capabilities. The company will also introduce new edge computing unit products based on next-generation high-computing chips to further enhance the computing power and response speed of roadside devices, further enhancing the core competitiveness of the company's products in the car-road coordination field. Moreover, leveraging its technical expertise in ISP cores and intelligent image algorithms, BLACK SESAME has provided a full set of visual artificial intelligence algorithm products and technologies to top customers in the industry, gradually extending from original design manufacturers (ODMs) to frontline end manufacturers, further consolidating the company's market position in the intelligent imaging field. Thus, relying on the cross-scene adaptability of the company's chips, BLACK SESAME has leveraged synergies and achieved commercial breakthroughs in Siasun Robot & Automation, intelligent transportation, smart industry, car-road cloud coordination, intelligent imaging, and various other scenarios. This signifies that full-scene intelligent computing will become BLACK SESAME's second growth curve, opening up future growth space for the company while significantly enhancing the commercial capabilities of BLACK SESAME's computing platform. It is worth noting that BLACK SESAME previously announced plans to acquire an AI chip company through equity acquisition and capital injection. The target company focuses on the development and sales of high-cost-effective and low-power AI system chips (SoCs), with core IP (including ISPs/NPUs) that are self-developed and mainly serve the automotive intelligence and end-side AI application fields. If the acquisition is successful, it is expected to expand BLACK SESAME's high, medium, and low product lines, strengthen its capabilities in providing integrated intelligent automotive solutions, accelerate the expansion of its products into a wider range of applications, including Siasun Robot & Automation and end-side AI, thereby enhancing the company's competitive advantage in the AI SoC chip field. For BLACK SESAME, a successful acquisition would be an opportune moment to accelerate the company's growth through resource integration. Conclusion: Based on its current business layout and ecological expansion achievements, BLACK SESAME's valuation logic has transitioned from a single vehicle rule chip provider to a full-scene intelligent computing platform provider, indicating that its breadth of technological reuse, depth of business ecosystem, and profitability model will be restructured, driving a reassessment of the company's intrinsic value. As a rare AI computing platform provider covering automotive, Siasun Robot & Automation, and edge computing domains, BLACK SESAME is likely to enjoy a higher valuation premium. While BLACK SESAME's stock price has been consolidating at the bottom for four months, the stock market is a short-term "voting machine" and a long-term "weighing machine". With a sufficient turnover of chips and the continuous accumulation of buying volume, BLACK SESAME's high-growth and high-certainty logic of valuation switching is expected to be reflected in the stock price, potentially bringing excess return opportunities. The announcement of the company's repurchase plan has injected a "confidence booster" into the market. Earlier, BLACK SESAME announced its intention to repurchase shares of up to 100 million yuan on the secondary market, indicating that the management is confident in the company's future development.