New Stock Preview | Farewell Haier's "Greenhouse", how far is Kaos from becoming a true industrial Internet giant?

After a year of preparation for A-share listing and multiple rounds of coaching, Kaios IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a unicorn in the industrial Internet under Haier Group, officially "abandoned A for Hong Kong" at the end of January 2026, and submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. With 40 years of manufacturing experience and large-scale customization model from Haier, Kaios has built the well-known COSMOPlat industrial Internet platform. In today's accelerated digitization of the global manufacturing industry, can this technology giant with deep manufacturing genes establish its leading position in the industrial AI era through the empowerment of the capital market? The digital transformation driven by the BaaS engine It is understood that Kaios' underlying competitive strength is not derived from pure algorithms in the laboratory, but rooted in Haier Group's 40-year intelligent manufacturing practices and experience in large-scale customization. Kaios' independently developed COSMOPlat industrial Internet platform is defined by the company as an end-to-end digital solution integrating edge and cloud, which models and softwareizes industrial knowledge and experience through the BaaS (Best Practice as a Service) engine. From a technical architecture perspective, Kaios has built a complete full-stack capability from the bottom layer of IoT sensing and edge computing, to the middle layer of industrial operating systems and industrial brain, and to the top layer of industrial intelligent software. This architecture positions it at the top of the industry with a 1.2% market share capturing platform-based industrial data intelligence solution market in China in 2024. At the same time, this leading position is accompanied by the extreme fragmentation of the market. The combined market share of the top three players is only 3.3%, meaning that no giant has yet formed an absolute monopoly premium, and the focus of competition still lies in the deep penetration of vertical industries and cross-system integration capabilities. Kaios' revenue pillars consist of data intelligence solutions and IoT solutions. The data intelligence business focuses on smart manufacturing and green manufacturing, providing enterprises with a closed loop from research and development, production, to carbon management through software products like COSMO-Sphere. The IoT business focuses on the combination of smart controllers' hardware and software. It is worth noting that, although the company emphasizes the "smart" and "platform" attributes in its narrative, its revenue structure still shows a clear "heavy hardware, light software" characteristic. In terms of revenue composition, during the first nine months of 2023 to 2025, IoT solutions contributed more than seventy percent of revenue. However, the gross profit margin of this business has remained around 12.7% for a long time, dragging down the company's overall gross profit level. In contrast, the proportion of data intelligence solutions with a gross margin of over 30% has been increasing year by year, from 18.3% in 2023 to 29.0% in the first nine months of 2025. However, the company's overall gross profit margin is still below 20%, indicating a certain gap compared to pure software or platform-based tech companies. It is worth mentioning that, with the support of AI technology, the company's Tianzhi large model has already implemented multiple intelligent applications in high-value industries such as petrochemicals and automobiles, such as aldehyde separation tower process optimization and indicator diagram intelligent assistant. This vertical modeling capability based on industry know-how (process knowledge) is the key to maintaining its 1.2% market share. However, the extreme fragmentation of industrial scenarios poses a huge challenge to the generalization capability of large models, and each cross-industry replication signifies high customization costs. To address this, Kaios has strengthened its green manufacturing territory by acquiring Shanghai Carbon Index, and divesting inefficient non-core assets by selling Kaios molds. This series of "trimming and bulking up" actions reflect the management's urgency to optimize asset quality and direct capital expenditures towards the development of industrial smart bodies with more imagination space. Endogenous blood-making capability and dependence on the parent company remain to be resolved Looking at the company's overall performance, Kaios' revenue was 4.994 billion yuan in 2023, 5.069 billion yuan in 2024, and 4.421 billion yuan in the first nine months of 2025. In terms of profits and losses, the company experienced a rapid growth from a loss of 82.72 million yuan in 2023 to a profit of 65.14 million yuan in 2024, and further to a profit of 176 million yuan in the first nine months of 2025. This explosive profit growth is partly due to the increasing weight of high-margin software business and also from the company's financial optimization measures. By divesting the Kaios mold business, not only did it remove the loss burden, but it also contributed substantial disposal earnings in 2025. In addition, government subsidies have a strong presence in the composition of profits. According to the prospectus, confirmed government subsidies in 2023 and 2024 were 97.6 million yuan and 79.7 million yuan, respectively, both exceeding the total net profit for the year. This means that if non-recurring gains and policy subsidies are excluded, Kaios' core business's endogenous blood-making capability is still at the stage of making a small profit gamble. Currently, the biggest concern for Kaios' IPO in the market is the company's relationship with its parent company, Haier Group. As a result of being internally incubated by Haier, Haier Group is not only Kaios' controlling shareholder but also its largest customer and supplier. It is known that the proportion of income from Haier Group decreased from 72.2% in 2023 to 57.7% in the first nine months of 2025. Although the downward trend is evident, it still dominates the company's performance. This characteristic of being "born in Haier, rooted in Haier" certainly provided Kaios with a unique "lighthouse factory" experimental field and a stable revenue base in its early stages, but it also leads to a discount in valuation in the face of market competition. Although Kaios is trying to prove the generalization capability of its BaaS engine through benchmark examples established with third-party clients like CHERY AUTO and Tsingtao Brewery, and the proportion of revenue from third-party clients has increased to 41.1%, the fairness of pricing in related party transactions and the sustainability of transactions remain red lines that the capital market strictly scrutinizes. In addition, the potential credit risk cannot be ignored among the risks. The prospectus shows that the company's net loss from impairment of financial and contract assets increased from 4.66 million yuan in 2023 to 25.59 million yuan in the first three quarters of 2025. The change in net impairment loss also reflects the increasing complexity of credit risk management of diversified customer groups during the expansion process. Looking ahead, Kaios' strategic blueprint clearly points to "full data application" and globalization expansion. The company plans to focus the funds raised from this IPO on the continuous upgrading of industrial large models and the development of high-value industrial smart bodies, aiming to drive the business flywheel through AI technology system to achieve the leap from equipment connection to value creation. Furthermore, the expansion into overseas markets has become a new growth driver for Kaios, with its overseas revenue reaching 709 million yuan in 2024, and the proportion of total revenue continues to increase. Leveraging Haier's global industrial layout, the company is accelerating the increase in the proportion of overseas revenue and striving to occupy a key node in the global industrial digitization landscape. With the dual resonance of policy support and industrial transformation, Kaios is evolving from an industry pioneer to a builder of the industrial Internet ecosystem with its full-stack capability of "platform + software + hardware." Standing at the turning point of value release in the manufacturing industry restructuring wave, can Kaios deliver a convincing "de-association" answer that satisfies the secondary market?