LiDAR Valuation Reshaped: Will the Leading Positions Change Under Robot-Driven Innovation?

In 2025, the lidar industry will reach a turning point.

In the face of the new normal of slowing sales growth in domestic new energy vehicles, ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) is no longer the only main battlefield. The key to victory in the industry is no longer “who bets on a certain blockbuster car,” but rather who first completes the valuation switch from “automotive hardware supplier” to “robotic perception platform.”

Recently, the financial reports released by the two leading lidar companies confirmed this shift in logic. Although their paths and milestones vary, both companies achieved significant breakthroughs.

Among them, RoboSense’s revenue, sales, and gross profit indicators hit new highs, achieving operating revenue of 1.941 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.72%. Particularly impressive was the significant improvement in its profitability, with gross profit increasing by 81.3% year-on-year to about 514 million yuan, and successfully achieving an operating profit of 130 million yuan and a net profit of 104 million yuan in the fourth quarter, marking the company’s first quarterly profit. One of the engines of its growth came from the explosion of its robotics business, where the annual shipment of lidar in this field reached approximately 303,000 units, surging more than tenfold year-on-year, topping the industry sales chart.

Hesai Technology’s net income for 2025 was 3.028 billion yuan, an increase of 45.8% from the previous year; the company’s net profit attributable to common shareholders for 2025 was 436 million yuan, compared to a net loss of 102 million yuan the previous year. Hesai Technology became the first lidar company in the world to achieve full-year GAAP profitability.

To match the future demand for business expansion, RoboSense has completed a production capacity layout of 4 million units per year, expecting the lidar shipment volume to grow at least two to three times this year. Hesai’s co-founder and CEO, Li Yifan, stated at the earnings report meeting that the plan is to increase annual production capacity to over 4 million units by 2026.

The simultaneous expansion plans of the two leaders validate that the commercialization race for lidar has entered a new phase where both technology and scale are equally important.

Notably, the shipment volume of robotic lidar is significant — in 2025, RoboSense topped the total sales in the robotics field with an annual shipment of 303,000 robotic products. In the fourth quarter of last year, nearly half of RoboSense’s revenue contribution came from robotics. Hesai’s delivery of lidar in the robotics field 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 past singular metric of “vehicle-mounted pre-installed quantity” is being replaced by a three-dimensional framework of “vehicle-mounted base × robotics growth pole × technological generational barriers.” In this process, the rankings of the leaders may change.

The industry is facing a valuation turning point: 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 has fallen from 30%-40% in the previous two years to 28.2%.

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

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

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

In the automotive manufacturing industry, which generally adopts a sales-driven production model, lidar manufacturers must first become designated suppliers for more automakers to sell more radars. To achieve this goal, lidar manufacturers need to target more automakers.

Hesai’s rapid rise in order and delivery scale in 2025 was primarily due to successfully betting on popular models and adopting a price-for-volume scaling strategy. In the automotive-grade market, Hesai is shifting its focus to medium and low-line products to further expand its market share. One of its main automotive-grade product lines, the ATX series, has reduced the line count from the original 128 lines to 64 lines, significantly lowering the price to several hundred yuan, successfully entering the 100,000 yuan-level vehicle platforms, covering popular models like the Leapmotor B10/C10.

In addition to precisely binding with popular models from Li Auto, Xiaomi, Changan, etc., in 2025, Hesai Technology’s ADAS lidar shipment volume reached 1.3811 million units, a growth of 202.6% compared to 456,400 units in 2024.

However, according to a report from CMBI, Hesai’s shipment unit price for the fourth quarter of 2025 was 1,557 yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 51%, significantly below expectations, primarily due to the increased proportion of lower-priced ATX and JT series. This indicates that the low-price strategy has shown significant effects but also poses “volume increase, price drop” pressures on its foundational ADAS business.

This means that the vehicle-mounted lidar market is undergoing changes, and new technological opportunities have also brought chances for breakthroughs.

The vehicle-mounted market is evolving, with high-line counts becoming the new competition point.

As the market’s demand for perception accuracy continues to rise, lidar has evolved from “whether to use” to “how well to use,” with the focal point of the technological competition shifting to high-line counts. This has become the key to RoboSense’s breakthroughs.

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

In March, WeRide and Geely deepened their strategic cooperation, planning to deliver 2,000 newly upgraded mass-produced Robotaxi GXR vehicles in 2026. This model will use the RoboSense EM4+E1 lidar combination. The EM4 is a thousand-line digital main lidar with a maximum detection range of 600 meters, while the mainstream solutions in the industry range from 200 to 300 meters, making it the only mass-producible automotive-grade high-line digital main lidar in the industry; the E1 is the first digital all-solid-state blind-spot lidar to be mass-produced in the industry.

WeRide’s founder, Han Xu, mentioned that the latest model will be among the first to be equipped with thousand-line lidar for fully autonomous operation. Based on the thousand-line main lidar, the vehicle’s point cloud density increases 17-fold, with the maximum detection distance reaching 600 meters, which is 2-3 times that of mainstream industry solutions. With its ultra-long-range detection advantages, it can gain over 70% of the time margin for safe decision-making, achieving precise predictions of minor obstacles and high-speed dangers, even maintaining stable perception in heavy rain and fog.

Following closely, the next-generation mass-produced Robotaxi model from Amap will also be equipped with thousand-line lidar, similarly using the RoboSense EM4+E1 digital combination, exclusively supplied by RoboSense.

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 plans to deploy ten of this combination of lidar per vehicle.

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

Goldman Sachs predicts that by 2030, there will be 500,000 autonomous taxis in China, with the market size expected to reach $47 billion by 2035. By then, deploying 6-10 lidar units per vehicle may become the mainstream configuration for Robotaxis.

The passenger vehicle market is also accelerating to follow the high-line count trend. On the evening of March 5, BYD held a press conference in Shenzhen for the “Second Generation Blade Battery and Flash Charging Technology,” showcasing 11 new models, including the Song Ultra EV, 2026 Dolphin 06 EV, 2026 Seal 07 EV, Seal 08, Tang, 2026 Denza Z9GT, 2026 Yangwang U7/U8/U8L, and two flash charge versions of the Equation Leopard. All 11 new models are equipped with digital lidar, exclusively supplied by RoboSense. According to the new car announcement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, BYD has expanded the lidar optional configuration to entry-level models like the Seagull, promoting the penetration of intelligent driving functions.

Just the day before, Huawei’s HarmonyOS Intelligent Driving conference unveiled the world’s highest-spec mass-produced 896-line lidar, raising the industry’s technical barriers.

Industry analysis points out that BYD is expected to differentiate lidar configurations based on model positioning, with the high-end flagship models likely to directly adopt RoboSense’s thousand-line solution to maintain its technological competitiveness across various market segments.

New energy vehicle companies represented by BYD, along with technology suppliers like Huawei and RoboSense, are jointly promoting lidar into a new phase of large-scale application and parallel performance iteration. 2026 is expected to become the “year of delivery” for the large-scale adoption and performance stratification of lidar in China’s intelligent vehicles.

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

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

The technological advantages brought by the digital architecture are generational. Traditional analog lidar requires seven key components to complete the construction of the three critical systems of transmission, reception, and processing, while RoboSense’s digital architecture can achieve the same functions with only two core chips, and the performance of the lidar’s line count can exceed that of analog solutions by more than ten times, shrinking the system size by over 50%.

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

The technological advantages ultimately translate into market leadership. Currently, RoboSense has accumulated 167 model designations from 35 automotive companies, helping 69 models achieve SOP, covering leading automotive companies such as BYD and Geely, as well as several phenomenon-level new forces and leading SUV manufacturers. In the international market, it has also accumulated 33 designated partnerships with 14 overseas and joint venture brands, ranking first among lidar suppliers for joint venture automotive brands in 2025 with over 70% market share.

The robotics market is exploding, and technological generational differences are building competitive advantages.

If the evolution of the vehicle-mounted market is shifting from “scale-driven” to “technology-driven,” then the explosion of the robotics market has made the perception capabilities of lidar the core variable determining ecosystem positioning.

The competitive rules of the new robotics track are highly correlated with the logic of the latter half of the vehicle-mounted market — the core is no longer a contest of channel resources but the iterative ability of underlying technological solutions and the ability to reuse across scenarios. This is not only an explosion of the market but also a race of technological solution iterations.

Since its establishment, RoboSense has positioned itself as a “robotics company,” with robotics products once being the backbone of the company’s revenue. According to the company’s prospectus, from 2020 to 2022, revenue from robotics and other industry lidar reached between 124 million to 189 million yuan, accounting for 45% to 73% of total revenue. During this phase, the company mainly used two products, Helios and Bpearl, to meet the demands of most robotics customers, including agricultural robots, inspection robots, and other fields.

With the advent of the smart driving wave, RoboSense shifted its focus to vehicle-mounted business, but the robotics business did not cease. In 2023, the company has selected tracks such as cleaning robots, unmanned forklift robots, and household service robots. The annual report mentioned, “The maturation of lidar in the automotive field can be well transferred to humanoid robots.” In 2024, initial commercial implementation showed results, and the company announced that it had established collaborations with multiple customers in industrial warehousing, unmanned delivery, and commercial cleaning, achieving formal designations.

Hesai Technology initially did not list robotics as a core strategy on par with ADAS, but around 2024, as the industry shifted and competitive pressures increased, it systematically increased its investment in robotics products and customer expansion, showing a clear intent to catch up and respond to competition.

RoboSense’s technological generational differences have also built 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, the quarterly shipment volume reached 221,200 units, far exceeding the total of the first three quarters (81,800 units). The annual sales of lidar in the robotics field exceeded 300,000 units, with a year-on-year growth of over 11 times. According to GGII data, RoboSense’s annual lidar shipment volume in the Chinese robotics sector ranked first in the industry in 2025.

In addition to shipment volume, the revenue share of the robotics business is another important dimension for analyzing the company’s strategic layout and growth potential.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, the sales proportion of RoboSense’s robotics products reached 49%, with total lidar sales reaching 459,600 units, of which sales in the robotics field reached 221,200 units. For the whole year, the proportion of robotics business has surpassed 30%. In contrast, Hesai is still below 15%.

The embodied intelligence track is another opportunity for the lidar industry to seize. Currently, RoboSense has reached collaborations with nearly 50 leading companies in humanoid and quadruped robotics, including Zhiyuan, Yushu, Zhongqing, Galaxy General, and Zhujidian. Hesai Technology has also secured orders from companies like Yushu, Galaxy General, Magic Atom, and Vita Power.

According to the latest ranking published by China Robotics Network, the top three brands in the embodied intelligence lidar sector are RoboSense, Lanwo Technology, and Hesai Technology.

GGII predicts that by 2026, the sales of humanoid robots 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 for cognitive and operational safety across various industries and robots.

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

It is worth noting that for the lidar industry, the complete cycle from obtaining designated orders to SOP (indicating the conditions for mass production), and then to actual mass production delivery and financial reporting, typically takes 10-18 months.

Based on this rhythm, RoboSense’s order reserves in the robotics field have entered a conversion window. In the lawn mower segment, the company has deeply bound itself with leading brands like Ninebot’s Unmanned Land and Kuka Technology, and added a new exclusive designation order from a leading cleaning robot brand; in unmanned delivery, the coverage rate of leading customers has reached 90%, with clients including New Stone Age, White Rhino, JD.com, Meituan, and Coco Robotics among top domestic and foreign enterprises. These early layouts will translate into visible performance increments this year.

Conclusion:

From a technical foundation perspective, smart vehicles and robots share the same source in their perception architecture, and the explosion of the robotics market in 2025 is not coincidental but rather an inevitable extension of technology. For lidar companies, the progress of ecosystem positioning in the robotics field is becoming a core variable in assessing 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 the China Report Hall, the market size for intelligent lawn mowers is expected to exceed $5 billion in 2026, making it one of the fastest-growing segments in the global robotics market; in the embodied intelligence field, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has clarified that it will release guidelines for the construction of standardized systems in 2026, and the industry also expects 2026 to become the “year of delivery”; in unmanned delivery, 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 undergone preliminary verification, and the formal admission process for L3-level autonomous driving is also underway.

For the market, the core framework for evaluating lidar companies has already been upgraded. The singular metric of “vehicle-mounted pre-installed quantity” is shifting to a more three-dimensional and predictive analytical framework: the stability of the vehicle-mounted base, the growth curve and penetration rate of the robotics business, and the durability of the technological generational differences constructed. The evolution of this framework will not only re-anchor the valuation center of leading enterprises but may also become the key winning factor determining the final ranking of the industry in the coming years. Among them, the ecological positioning and commercialization progress in the incremental market of robotics are becoming core variables for evaluating the long-term value of enterprises.