MINIEYE (02431) joins hands with Zhongtong to embed "True No Map" into the national logistics network, creating a new sample of technology and scene fusion.

The latest released "Robovan Industry White Paper for the Chinese Urban Delivery Vehicle Industry by 2025" shows that the Robovan industry in China will achieve a breakthrough in 2025, entering a new stage of scaled commercial operation. It is estimated that by 2026, the annual sales volume of unmanned urban delivery vehicles in China will approach 89,000 units. At this moment, the outline of the Robovan track is clearer than ever before. Express delivery, supermarket retail, and wholesale freight transportation have become the largest application scenarios, and a group of pioneers are seizing their positions in this blue ocean in their own ways. For GMTEight, MINIEYE (02431) can be considered as the one with the most stable rhythm and deepest penetration among them. On the 29th of this month, MINIEYE announced the acquisition of 50% equity of Xi'an Tongtu, a subsidiary of ZTO Express, for a total consideration of RMB 25 million. Subsequently, the two parties will achieve a deep integration of autonomous driving technology and top logistics scenarios through capital cooperation, promote the deep binding of express logistics and autonomous driving business. Looking back on the journey, MINIEYE's layout today had long been in the making. In 2020, MINIEYE started the research and development of L4 technology, and in February 2025, the unmanned minibus was first delivered in Suzhou. In the same year, in September, the "Xiao Zhu unmanned vehicle" brand was launched, and the T5 and T8 models quickly secured over 7,000 cooperative orders, landing in 18 cities nationwide, and simultaneously entering the Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Australia markets. It is understood that this acquisition is a complementary advantage in the industrial upstream and downstream. ZTO, as a leading company in the domestic comprehensive logistics field, has a wide range of national logistics networks, operational resources, and application scenarios. Through the combination of MINIEYE's leading autonomous driving technology, car-end perception algorithm, and cloud intelligent system, with the characteristics of large fluctuations in the logistics industry orders, complex routes, and harsh timeliness, the two parties will gradually promote the large-scale deployment of unmanned vehicle operations and the co-construction of the industry ecosystem. In terms of impact, this acquisition will be a key step for MINIEYE to accelerate the commercialization of L4 technology, conducive to its further focusing on the smart logistics track, and accelerating the large-scale landing of the overall unmanned vehicle solution. And from the perspective of the entire industry, with Yujia and ZTO starting strategic collaboration, the integrated smart logistics ecological closed loop of the two parties of "technology + scene + operation" will become a new benchmark for the commercial landing of the Robovan track. "Precise Matching of Smart Logistics Needs with True No-Map" For the commercialization of any new technology, two questions ultimately need to be answered: where are the customers? Can the cost be justified? Although the news of MINIEYE's collaboration with ZTO has just been announced, the answers to these questions are already self-evident. First, let's look at the customers. ZTO, as a leader in the express delivery industry, has a nationwide logistics network and a massive number of end-use scenarios. They have been vigorously promoting the transformation of end-to-end delivery to unmanned vehicles. By the end of 2025, over 3,400 unmanned delivery vehicles were operating in 268 cities, delivering an average of 8.2 million packages per day. MINIEYE's "True No-Map" technology can be said to be the preferred choice for the express delivery industry to explore efficiency gains through technological innovation, and this is also the key foundation for the success of the bilateral cooperation. By embedding unmanned vehicle technology into ZTO's business system through equity cooperation, MINIEYE has a deep binding of interests with ZTO, which will bring long-term synergy. For MINIEYE, the future order volume and deployment scale have a high degree of certainty. Leveraging ZTO's real capacity demand, unmanned vehicles are no longer created first and then seeking scenarios, but scenarios are waiting for the vehicles to operate. This model eliminates the uncertainties of the early market, laying a solid foundation for the long-term growth of Yujia's performance. Next, let's talk about costs. Most of the traditional unmanned delivery vehicle solutions in the industry currently rely on high-definition maps. The constraints of this technological route are clear: high mapping costs, long update cycles, inability to reuse across regions, and poor adaptability to complex scenarios. It takes months to cover a city with a map, not to mention hundreds of counties and tens of thousands of townships nationwide, which is the deep-rooted reason why Robovan has been difficult to commercialize on a large scale in the past few years. MINIEYE's breakthrough lies in its self-developed "True No-Map" L4-level unmanned vehicle Xiao Zhu T5 Pro. This model completely eliminates the dependence on high-definition maps and achieves "ready-to-use upon purchase, can be driven anywhere", without the need for advance mapping and modeling, and can be deployed and operated within hours. By fundamentally eliminating the costs of map collection, production, and iterative maintenance, it significantly reduces the deployment and maintenance costs of vehicles, thereby optimizing the fulfillment cost of logistics orders. It is worth mentioning that with the no-map technology solution, MINIEYE has also broken away from the traditional "selling cars" paradigm. The RaaS (Robovan-as-a-Service) unmanned operational service model allows Yujia to not sell vehicles, but sell operational capacity. This innovative model will bring stable income and cost reduction to the company. Of course, the large-scale landing of the RaaS model has two prerequisites: the technology is reliable enough, and the vehicles can operate steadily; the scenarios are abundant enough to ensure high fleet utilization rates. By leveraging ZTO's mature operational experience and ecosystem resources, MINIEYE can quickly build a replicable operational service system, forming a competitive barrier with a differentiated and closed-loop business model. It can be foreseen that, based on the favorable condition of deep equity binding, true no-map unmanned vehicles will soon be rapidly deployed in ZTO's national network points. Next, it can not only replace the costly human resources in existing trunk and end routes, achieving cost reduction and quality improvement; it can also easily adapt to complex scenarios that traditional unmanned vehicles find difficult to handle, such as townships, remote mountain areas, construction sites, and mixed traffic of people and vehicles. By paving the way with technology, locking in scenes, advancing modes, and opening up increments, MINIEYE has secured multiple certainties, while also taking a position in the Robovan track that is difficult to surpass. "Deep Integration of Technology + Scenes" Opens Up Long-term Imagination Space MINIEYE's dual foray with ZTO this time has extremely profound significance for the entire Chinese urban delivery vehicle industry. The successful "handshake" between the two parties signifies the formal operation of the commercial flywheel of MINIEYE's technology, products, scenes, operations, and data, and also marks the Chinese Robovan track welcoming another benchmark in the deep integration of "technology + scenes". The dilemma for smart driving companies has always been that even with advanced technology, if there is a lack of continued real scenarios for operation, algorithm iteration can become stuck in the bottleneck of "lab data"; conversely, if the scenarios are rich but there is no stable order and cash flow, companies will find it difficult to support long-term research and development. Undoubtedly, the deep binding between MINIEYE and ZTO has precisely broken this stalemate. On one hand, relying on the continuously landing fleet scale and real operational scenarios of ZTO, Yujia has obtained a stable source of orders and predictable cash flow; on the other hand, the massive real logistics scenario data will feed back on the iteration of the no-map algorithm, continuously optimizing the adaptability and stability of vehicles, thereby allowing Yujia to further strengthen its technological barriers, and the dual positive cycle of technology and business is also strengthened as a result. From an investment market perspective, the coordinates of MINIEYE's long-term value are becoming clearer than ever before. Before this acquisition, the capital market mostly viewed MINIEYE as a smart driving technology supplier, with differences among investors in the visibility and sustainability of the company's growth. With the completion of the acquisition, MINIEYE has evolved into a hardcore technology company with stable landing scenarios, mature profit models, sustainable cash flow, and outstanding technological barriers. In my opinion, based on the core technology of True No-Map, the top logistics scenarios and operational resources of the national ZTO, MINIEYE has built a deep moat through the multiple dimensions of technology, capital, scene, and operation. As MINIEYE transitions from a smart driving technology provider to a core collaborator in smart logistics infrastructure, the company's market share, industry discourse power, and business value will continue to be enhanced in this process, and the growth space and valuation potential will inevitably be fully opened.