On the evening of March 14, Zhongke Cambrian Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Cambrian), a chip listed company (stock code 688256), announced that its core technical personnel Liang Jun notified the company to terminate its labor contract on February 10, 2022 due to differences with the company.
According to the "Labor Contract" signed by Liang Jun and the company and the relevant provisions of the "Labor Contract Law", the company has recently handled the relevant resignation procedures for him; after leaving, Liang Jun will no longer hold any position in the company.
Liang Jun joined Cambrian in 2017 as CTO, and during his tenure as one of the company's core technical personnel, he participated in research and applied for 138 invention patents and 10 PCT projects, all of which are not single inventors.
Cambrian's announcement said that Liang Jun's departure will have a certain impact on the company's research and development management, but it will not affect the company's technological innovation and will not have a significant adverse impact on the company's overall research and development strength.
Despite this, after the announcement, the company's stock price fell 14% and has fallen to near the issue price, closing at 66.02 yuan on March 15, and the company's market value fell to 26.462 billion yuan.
The company has been losing money for consecutive years, and the gross profit margin has continued to decline
Cambrian was founded in 2016, and the founder Chen Tianshi was admitted to the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China at the age of 16.
On July 20, 2020, Cambrian landed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, becoming the second fastest company to SMIC since the establishment of the Science and Technology Innovation Board, but the company's profitability has been criticized by the outside world.
According to Cambrian's financial reports over the years, the company has continued to lose money since its inception. The loss in 2021 was 847 million, an increase of 94.98% over the same period of the previous year; the loss for the whole year of 2020 was 434.5 million, compared with a loss of 1.179 billion in 2019.
In addition, Cambrian's gross profit margin has also shown a downward trend year by year, and the gross profit margin level in the first three quarters of 2021 has fallen below 50%.
According to the financial report, the overall operating income level is slowly growing, with Cambrian achieving total revenue of 721 million yuan in 2021, 458.9 million yuan in 2020, and 443.9 million yuan in 2019.
Normalization of income structure
In February this year, Cambrian released its latest financial report mentioning that cambrian operating income in 2021 mainly comes from cloud product lines, edge product lines and intelligent computing cluster businesses.
Among them, the edge product line MLU220 chip and acceleration card landed in a number of head enterprises, achieving large-scale sales of nearly one million pieces in the reporting period, and the revenue of the edge product line achieved breakthrough growth compared with the same period last year.
Changes in income structure suggest that cambrianism may be gradually "normalizing."
According to Cambrian financial reports, the core source of revenue in 2019 and 2020, the intelligent computing cluster system business, shrank significantly in 2021, accounting for only 1.15% of the total revenue in the first six months of 2021.
In contrast, the intelligent computing cluster system business was 70.96% of the total revenue in 2020 and 66.72% of the total revenue in 2019.
Dou Yumei, founder of in AI Capital, believes that cambrian's main revenue in 2019-2020 will come from the intelligent computer group system business, which is the data center hardware server business, and the large proportion of revenue does not come from the chip products mainly developed by the company.
"Judging from the disclosure of the 2021 annual performance express report disclosed by the company, the proportion of revenue of edge chip products has risen to the first largest proportion, and there are millions of sales of the scale, which is the main research and development of edge chip products began to increase and constitute the main revenue, but it is the performance of the company's operation normalization." Dou Yumei analyzed, "But at present, there is no comprehensive disclosure of the company's 2021 annual financial report, and it is still impossible to understand the first few major customers and main scenarios of the company's million-chip mass production of edge chips, as well as the business progress of the company's key layout of cloud chips." ”
Public data shows that in the first six months of 2021, Cambrian edge smart chips and acceleration cards (60.74%) and training machine (18.88%) products contributed a total of 79.62% of the company's revenue, constituting the company's core pillar revenue.
"Cambrian is finally selling its own chip products, but it's still far from making money." An industry insider said that "the core or Cambrian core competitiveness is not enough."