BEIJING, June 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chip maker Cambricon has got the approval for its application for initial public offering (IPO) on the sci-tech innovation board, better known as STAR market Tuesday, reported China Securities Journal Wednesday.
The approval, announced by sector regulator China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) on late Tuesday, foretold an IPO of the first pure AI chip designing firm on the country's A-share market, with its valuation predicted to be 19.2 billion to 34.2 billion yuan based on an expected 600 million to 900 million yuan revenue this year and 32-38 price-to-sales ratio.
Cambricon planned to raise 2.8 billion yuan via its IPO on the STAR market, of which 1.9 billion yuan are mulled to fund its new generation of chips and systems for cloud training, inference and edge-end AI and the remaining 900 million yuan will go to boost its working capital.
The AI chip startup, founded in 2016, focuses on R&D and technological innovation of AI chip products. It has rolled out terminal smart processor IP products such as its 1A, 1H and 1M series, MLU100 and MLU270 accelerator cards for cloud computing and edge computing module MLU220.
By far, Cambricon-1A and Cambricon-1H have been applied in flagship smart phones of Huawei and its MLU series are used in products of server producers such as Inspur and Lenovo.
In the following three years, however, the company said it would invest about 3-3.6 billion yuan in R&D of five to six chip products.
During 2017 and 2019, the company suffered consecutive losses and had poured 813 million yuan into R&D, which was equivalent to 142.93 percent of its accumulative revenues in the past three years. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
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