Định giá cảm biến lidar bằng laser: Dưới sự thúc đẩy của robot, vị trí dẫn đầu có thể sẽ thay đổi?

2025年，激光雷达行业迎来分水岭。

Facing the new normal of slowing sales growth in domestic new energy vehicles, ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) is no longer the only main battleground. The key to winning in the industry is no longer “who has bet on a certain popular model,” but rather who has first completed the valuation switch from “automotive hardware supplier” to “robot perception platform.”

Recent financial reports released by the two major leaders in the lidar industry confirm this shift in logic. Although their paths and milestones differ, both companies have achieved significant breakthroughs.

Among them, Suoteng Juchuang’s revenue, sales, and gross profit indicators have reached new highs, achieving operating income of 1.941 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.72%. Particularly striking is the significant improvement in its profitability, with gross profit increasing by 81.3% year-on-year to approximately 514 million yuan, and successfully achieving operating profit of 130 million yuan and net profit of 104 million yuan in the fourth quarter, setting a record for the company’s first single-quarter profit. One of its growth engines comes from the explosive growth of its robotics business, where the annual shipment of lidar in this field reached approximately 303,000 units, an increase of more than tenfold year-on-year, topping the industry sales charts.

Hesai Technology’s net income for 2025 is projected to be 3.028 billion yuan, up 45.8% from the previous year; the company’s net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders in 2025 is expected to be 436 million yuan, compared to a net loss of 102 million yuan the previous year. Hesai Technology has become the world’s first lidar company to achieve GAAP profitability for the entire year.

To match future business growth demands, Suoteng Juchuang has completed a production capacity layout of 4 million units annually, expecting this year’s lidar shipment to grow at least two to three times. Hesai co-founder and CEO Li Yifan stated at the performance report that they plan to increase annual production capacity to over 4 million units by 2026.

The simultaneous expansion plans of the two leaders validate that the commercialization competition of lidar has entered a new phase that emphasizes both technology and scale.

It is noteworthy that the shipment of robotic lidar—over the entire year of 2025, Suoteng Juchuang topped the total sales in the robotics sector with an annual shipment of 303,000 units of robotic products. In the fourth quarter of last year, the revenue contribution from Suoteng Juchuang’s robots accounted for nearly half. The delivery volume of lidar in the robotics field for Hesai reached 239,300 units, with a year-on-year growth rate of 425.8%.

In this context, the dimensions for measuring the value of lidar companies are also undergoing fundamental changes. The previous single measure of “vehicle-mounted pre-installation quantity” is being replaced by a three-dimensional framework of “vehicle-mounted basic market × robotics growth pole × technological generational barriers.” In this process, the ranking of the leaders may change.

The industry is facing a valuation watershed: the old growth logic has peaked.

The fundamentals of the vehicle-mounted market are changing. Over the past few years, China’s new energy vehicles have experienced explosive growth, with market penetration reaching 54% in 2025, but the year-on-year sales growth rate has fallen from 30%-40% in the previous two years to 28.2%.

According to predictions from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the sales growth rate of new energy vehicles is expected to further drop to 15.2% in 2026.

In terms of shipment scale, Hesai Technology and Suoteng Juchuang have remained in a state of stalemate during this phase. From 2021 to 2025, Suoteng’s total lidar sales were 16,300 units, 57,000 units, 259,600 units, 544,000 units, and 912,000 units, while Hesai’s were 14,200 units, 80,500 units, 222,100 units, 501,900 units, and 1,620,400 units.

The change in rankings largely comes from the scale of the vehicle-mounted business. In 2025, Hesai’s ADAS product shipment reached 1.3811 million units, significantly driving the overall shipment growth; in 2022, its ADAS product shipment (61,900 units) also surpassed Suoteng’s (36,900 units).

In the automotive manufacturing industry, which generally produces based on sales, the premise for lidar manufacturers to sell more radars is that car manufacturers can sell more cars. To achieve this goal, lidar manufacturers first need to become designated suppliers for more car companies.

Betting on popular models and adopting a scale strategy of exchanging price for volume are the core strategies for Hesai’s rapid increase in orders and deliveries in 2025. In the automotive-grade market, Hesai aims to further expand its market share by shifting its focus to mid-to-low line products. One of its main automotive-grade product lines, the ATX series, has reduced the number of lines from the original 128 lines in the AT128 to 64 lines, significantly lowering the price to the hundreds of yuan range, successfully entering the 100,000 yuan-level vehicle platform, covering several mass-production models such as Leapmotor B10/C10.

Additionally, by precisely binding with popular models from companies like Li Auto, Xiaomi, and Changan, Hesai’s ADAS lidar shipment is expected to reach 1.3811 million units in 2025, an increase of 202.6% compared to 456,400 units in 2024.

However, according to research from CMB International, Hesai’s average shipment price in the fourth quarter of 2025 is expected to be 1,557 yuan, a decrease of 51% year-on-year, significantly lower than expected, primarily due to the increased proportion of lower-priced ATX and JT series. This indicates that the low-price strategy is effective but also puts pressure on the ADAS business that supports its basic market, facing “volume increase with price decrease.”

This means that the vehicle-mounted lidar market is changing, and new technological opportunities also bring about breakthrough opportunities.

The evolution of the vehicle-mounted market, with high line counts becoming the new competitive point.

As the market’s demand for perception accuracy continues to rise, lidar has evolved from “whether to use” to “how good it is,” with the focus of the technology competition shifting to high line counts. This has become the key to Suoteng Juchuang’s breakthrough.

Its thousand-line digital main lidar EM4, as the industry’s only mass-producible automotive-grade high-line count solution, has gained wide recognition in the Robotaxi and high-end passenger vehicle markets.

In March, WeRide and Geely deepened their strategic cooperation, planning to deliver 2,000 new upgraded pre-installed mass-production Robotaxi GXR by 2026. This model uses the combination of Suoteng Juchuang’s EM4 + E1 lidar. The EM4 is a thousand-line digital main lidar with a maximum detection distance of 600 meters, while the mainstream industry solution is 200-300 meters, making it the only mass-producible automotive-grade high-line count digital main lidar in the industry; the E1 is the first digital all-solid-state lidar for blind spot detection to be mass-produced in the industry.

WeRide founder Han Xu mentioned that the latest model will become one of the first pure unmanned operation autonomous vehicles equipped with thousand-line lidar. Based on the thousand-line main lidar, the vehicle’s point cloud detail is improved by 17 times, with a maximum detection distance of 600 meters, which is 2-3 times that of the mainstream industry solution. With the advantage of ultra-long-distance detection, it can win over 70% of time margin for safety decision-making, achieving precise prediction of small obstacles and high-speed dangers, even maintaining stable perception in heavy rain and fog.

Following closely, the next-generation pre-installed mass-production Robotaxi model from RoboTaxi will also be the first to use thousand-line lidar, also employing the Suoteng Juchuang EM4 + E1 digital combination, and will be solely supplied by Suoteng Juchuang.

According to a report by Gaishi Auto in 2025, as the Robotaxi market enters commercial operation, eight leading global companies have collectively chosen the EM4 + E1 solution. For example, Didi deploys 10 of this combination of lidar on each vehicle.

Even more noteworthy is that Suoteng Juchuang’s technical capabilities have been deeply embedded in the ecosystem of global AI computing leader NVIDIA. The company has fully joined the three core ecosystems of NVIDIA Jetson, DRIVE, and Omniverse, while NVIDIA’s Robotaxi Ready platform has aggregated multiple partners of Suoteng Juchuang, including BYD, Geely, Nissan, Toyota, Lucid, Uber, Pony.ai, WeRide, Momenta, etc. This further strengthens Suoteng Juchuang’s first-mover advantage in the L4 autonomous driving field.

Goldman Sachs expects that China’s unmanned taxi fleet will reach 500,000 by 2030, with the market size expected to reach $47 billion by 2035. By then, deploying 6-10 lidar on each vehicle may become the mainstream configuration for Robotaxi.

The passenger vehicle market is also accelerating to follow the high line count trend. On the evening of March 5, BYD held a “Second Generation Blade Battery and Flash Charging Technology Launch Conference” in Shenzhen, showcasing 11 new models, including Song UltraEV, 2026 Haiyan 06 EV, 2026 Seal 07 EV, Seal 08, Datang, 2026 Tengshi Z9GT, 2026 Yangwang U7/U8/U8L, Equation Leopard Titanium 7 Flash Charging Version, and Equation Leopard Titanium 3 Flash Charging Version. All 11 new models are equipped with digital lidar, solely supplied by Suoteng Juchuang. According to the new vehicle announcement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, BYD has expanded its lidar optional configuration to entry-level models like Seagull, promoting the penetration of smart driving functions.

Just the day before, Huawei’s HarmonyOS Intelligent Driving Conference unveiled the world’s highest-spec 896-line lidar, and industry technical barriers are continuously rising.

Industry analysis points out that BYD is expected to configure lidar differently based on model positioning, potentially directly equipping the high-end flagship with Suoteng Juchuang’s thousand-line solution to maintain its technical competitiveness across various market segments.

New energy vehicle companies represented by BYD, along with technology suppliers like Huawei and Suoteng Juchuang, are jointly推动激光雷达进入规模化应用与性能迭代并行的新阶段。2026年有望成为中国智能汽车激光雷达规模化上车与性能分层的元年。

Supporting this trend is Suoteng Juchuang’s underlying breakthrough in digital architecture. The already mass-produced EM4 digital lidar supports customizable solutions ranging from 520 lines to 2160 lines, backed by Suoteng Juchuang’s self-developed digital chip architecture.

As the world’s first mass-producible “thousand-line” ultra-long-distance digital lidar, the EM4 is equipped with Suoteng Juchuang’s self-developed SPAD-SoC chip and two-dimensional addressable 2D VCSEL chip, integrating advanced technologies such as crosstalk elimination, all-condition optoelectronic signal processing, and lossless data compression. In the 1080-line version, it achieves a maximum angle resolution of 0.050°×0.025° and ultra-long-range measurement of 600 meters, increasing the system response time by up to 70% compared to traditional analog lidar.

The technical advantages brought by digital architecture are generational. Traditional analog lidar requires seven key components to complete the construction of the three major systems of transmission, reception, and processing, while Suoteng Juchuang’s digital architecture only needs two core chips to achieve the same functionality, while the performance of lidar lines can reach more than ten times that of analog solutions, with the system volume reduced by over 50%.

In October 2025, Suoteng Juchuang announced that its SPAD-SoC chip and two-dimensional addressable 2D VCSEL chip have passed the AEC-Q102 automotive-grade reliability certification, making it the world’s only technology company to achieve automotive-grade standards for all links of self-developed chips for digital lidar transmission, reception, and processing.

The technical advantage ultimately translates into market leadership. Currently, Suoteng Juchuang has accumulated designated partnerships with 35 automakers for 167 models, helping 69 models achieve SOP, covering leading automakers like BYD and Geely, as well as several phenomenally successful new forces and leading SUV manufacturers. In the international market, it has also accumulated 33 designated cooperation agreements with 14 overseas and Sino-foreign joint venture brands, ranking first among lidar suppliers for joint venture automotive brands in 2025 with over 70% market share.

Robot market explosion, technological generational difference builds leading advantage.

If the evolution of the vehicle-mounted market moves from “scale-driven” to “technology-driven,” then the explosion of the robot market makes lidar’s perception ability the core variable determining ecological positioning.

The competitive rules of the new robot track and the logic of the second half of the vehicle-mounted market are highly similar—the core is no longer the competition of channel resources, but the iteration ability of underlying technical solutions and the ability to reuse across scenes. This is not only a market explosion but also a race of technical solution iterations.

Since its establishment, Suoteng Juchuang has positioned itself as a “robot company,” with robotic products once being the backbone of its revenue. According to the company’s prospectus, from 2020 to 2022, revenue from robotics and other industry lidar reached the range of 124 million to 189 million yuan, accounting for 45% to 73% of total revenue. During this period, the company primarily satisfied the majority of robotic customer needs with two products, Helios and Bpearl, covering areas such as agricultural robots and inspection robots.

With the wave of intelligent driving arriving, Suoteng Juchuang shifted its focus to the vehicle-mounted business, but the robotics business did not cease. In 2023, the company selected tracks such as cleaning, unmanned forklift robots, and home service robots, mentioning in that year’s annual report that “the maturity of lidar in the automotive field can be well migrated to humanoid robots.” In 2024, as commercialization began to show initial results, the company announced establishing partnerships with multiple customers in industrial warehousing, unmanned delivery, and commercial cleaning, achieving formal designations.

Hesai Technology initially did not position robotics as a core strategy alongside ADAS until around 2024 when industry shifts and competitive pressures increased, leading to a systematic increase in investment and customer expansion in robotic products, clearly showing a补位与应对竞争色彩.

Suoteng’s technological generational difference also builds a leading advantage. In 2025, the company experienced an explosion in its robotics business, with the proportion of robotics business exceeding 17% in the first half of the year. In the fourth quarter, single-quarter shipment reached as high as 221,200 units, far exceeding the total of the first three quarters (81,800 units). Annual sales of lidar in the robotics field exceeded 300,000 units, with a year-on-year growth rate of over 11 times. According to GGII data, in 2025, Suoteng Juchuang’s annual lidar shipment in the Chinese robotics field ranked first in the industry.

In addition to shipment volume, the revenue proportion from the robotics business is another important dimension to analyze the company’s strategic layout and growth potential.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, the sales proportion of Suoteng Juchuang’s robotic products reached 49%, with total lidar sales reaching 459,600 units, among which sales in the robotics field reached 221,200 units. For the whole year, the proportion of the robotics business exceeded 30%. In contrast, Hesai’s proportion is still less than 15%.

The embodied intelligence track is another windfall for the lidar industry to seize. Currently, Suoteng Juchuang has partnered with nearly 50 leading companies in humanoid and quadruped robotics, including Zhiyuan, Yushu, Zhongqing, Galaxy General, and Zhujidongli. Hesai Technology has secured orders from companies like Yushu, Galaxy General, Magic Atom, and Weita Power.

The latest release from China Robotics Network, “2026 China Embodied Intelligent Lidar Brand Ranking,” shows that the top three are Suoteng Juchuang, Lanwo Technology, and Hesai Technology.

GGII predicts that in 2026, sales of humanoid and quadruped robots in China will reach 62,500 units and 100,000 units, respectively. Industry data shows that with the evolution of embodied intelligence, the demand for understanding complex environments is becoming increasingly urgent, and the main application scenarios for lidar are extending from high-end vehicle-mounted applications to the core foundation of cognitive and operational safety for robots across various industries.

In this trend, Suoteng Juchuang, with its shipment surpassing 300,000 units and a year-on-year growth of over 11 times, is expected to further expand its leading position in the industry explosion.

It is noteworthy that for the lidar industry, the cycle from obtaining designated orders to SOP (indicating reaching mass production conditions), and then to actual mass production delivery and performance included in financial reports, typically takes 10 to 18 months.

Based on this rhythm, Suoteng Juchuang’s order reserves in the robotics field have entered a conversion window. In the lawn mower robot sector, the company has closely partnered with top brands such as Ninebot’s Weilan Continent and Kuka Technology, and has added a new exclusive designated order from a leading cleaning robot brand; in the unmanned delivery sector, the coverage rate of leading customers has reached 90%, with clients spanning top domestic and international companies like New Stone Tools, White Rhino, JD.com, Meituan, and Coco Robotics. These early layouts will translate into visible performance increments this year.

Conclusion:

From a technical standpoint, smart cars and robots share a common perception architecture; the explosion of the robotics market in 2025 is not accidental but an inevitable extension of technology. For lidar companies, the progress of ecological positioning in the robotics field is becoming the core variable for evaluating their long-term growth potential.

In 2026, multiple key tracks in the robotics industry will simultaneously press the fast-forward button: in the lawn mower robot sector, according to data from China Report Hall, the market size of smart lawn mower robots is expected to exceed $5 billion in 2026, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of the global robotics market; in the embodied intelligence sector, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has clarified that it will release guidelines for standardized system construction in 2026, and the industry expects 2026 to become the “delivery year”; in the unmanned delivery sector, a national-level policy document promoting the application of unmanned delivery technology will also be issued in 2026; in the Robotaxi field, the industry’s profit model has completed preliminary verification, and the formal admission process for L3 autonomous driving is also underway.

For the market, the core framework for evaluating lidar companies has been upgraded. The single measure of “vehicle-mounted pre-installation quantity” is shifting to a more three-dimensional and foresighted analytical framework: the stability of the vehicle-mounted basic market, the growth curve and penetration rate of the robotics business, and the durability of the technological generational difference constructed. The evolution of this framework will not only re-anchor the valuation center of leading companies but may also become a key deciding factor in the final ranking of the industry in the coming years. Among these, ecological positioning and commercialization progress in the growing market of robotics are becoming the core variables for assessing the long-term value of companies.