Even if he got a pre-tax salary of nearly 3 million yuan higher than the company's chairman Chen Tianshi in 2020, for Liang Jun, who jumped from Huawei HiSilicon and worked in Cambrian for 5 years, he still decided to leave.
On the evening of March 14, the announcement released by Cambrian, the "first share of AI chips", showed that Liang Jun, the company's core technical personnel and former chief technology officer, had left his job. The day after the announcement, Cambrian's stock price fell by 18.38%, and the closing price of 66.02 yuan on the same day was a record low since the listing. As of the close of trading on March 16, Cambrian shares continued to fall 1.53% to $65.01.
In addition to how to stabilize the core technical personnel team, Cambrian's stock price performance and operating conditions also show that controlling losses is still an important issue for many AI chip companies.
The CTO ran away due to disagreement
According to the announcement, the reason for Liang Jun's departure was due to "differences with the company". He notified the company to terminate the labor contract on February 10 this year, and has recently gone through the resignation procedures. After leaving the company, Liang Jun will no longer hold any position in the company. This means that he has left the company completely.
It should be mentioned that Cambrian did not announce the new CTO candidate. In January this year, Liang Jun applied to the company's board of directors to resign as deputy general manager and CTO. But at that time, he did not leave the company, but was appointed as the chief expert of the Forward-looking Chip Technology Innovation Center, still engaged in technological innovation. At that time, Cambrian announced that the two leaders of the company's edge product line and cloud training product line were the company's new deputy general managers.
Although Cambrian stressed in the announcement, "Liang Jun's departure will have a certain impact on the company's R&D management, but it will not affect the company's technological innovation and will not have a significant adverse impact on the company's overall R&D strength." "But for the AI chip industry, which attaches great importance to research and development strength, the importance of core technical personnel is self-evident.
According to the "China Times" reporter, Cambrian was established in 2016, mainly engaged in the design and sales of artificial intelligence chip products. In the second year of cambrian establishment, Liang Jun jumped from Huawei HiSilicon to Cambrian and became one of the four core technical personnel of the company. During this period, he was responsible for the overall technology and product development of Cambrian AI chips, and the management of the R&D team.
As the former CTO, Liang Jun has the highest salary among the executives. According to the financial report, in 2020, Liang Jun's total pre-tax remuneration in Cambrian was 3.997 million yuan, which was nearly 3 million yuan more than Chen Tianshi, chairman and general manager of Cambrian, while Liu Shaoli and Liu Daofu, who were also core technicians, did not exceed 1.3 million yuan.
In addition, he also holds a 37.6% stake in Aixi Technology, Cambrian's third largest shareholder. According to the announcement, this part of the shares will be transferred in the future. In addition, the 80,000 shares of restricted shares that he has been granted in 2020 will also be invalidated.
Xu Ke, chief analyst of InSemi Research, a research institute in the semiconductor industry, told the China Times that Liang Jun's departure may have a greater impact on cambrian technical routes, and it is not easy for the company to find personnel who can replace Liang Jun in a short period of time. But from another point of view, the founder of the company itself is also a technical background, with a scientific research background of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which may be somewhat lacking in engineering, but may be stronger in terms of algorithms.
On March 16, a reporter from The China Times contacted Cambrian through various channels on R&D management work and how to maintain the stability of the R&D team, but as of press time, he had not received a reply.
Loss quagmire
In addition to the departure of core technical personnel, Cambrian's stock price and performance are not optimistic.
On the day of listing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in July 2020, Cambrian's stock price rose more than three times at one point, and its market value exceeded the 100 billion mark. But since then, its stock price has fluctuated and fallen. On March 16, its closing price of 65.01 yuan fell nearly 80% from the all-time high of 297.77 yuan on the fourth trading day after listing in July 2020.
From the performance point of view, as one of the representative players of domestic AI chip companies, Cambrian has not come out of the predicament of continuous losses.
Cambrian's 2021 performance report shows that its revenue of 721 million yuan increased by nearly 60% year-on-year last year, but its net loss expanded by more than 90% to nearly 850 million yuan. It should be mentioned that in the four years from 2017 to 2020, it has accumulated losses of more than 2 billion yuan.
It said in the announcement that the main reason for the loss was the increase in the company's research and development expenses, share payments in management expenses, and sales expenses. This is also a common problem faced by many AI chip companies - before AI chip products generate sales revenue, companies need to invest a lot of resources in product research and development, promotion and sales.
Among them, research and development expenses are the largest investment in Cambrian. In the first three quarters of last year, Cambrian invested 704 million yuan in research and development, more than three times the current revenue. In the past four years, its R&D expense ratio has exceeded 100%. Among them, professional and technical personnel, as a scarce resource, have always been the focus of enterprise competition. In the first half of last year, 60% of Cambrian's R&D investment was used for R&D personnel salaries, and the total salary of R&D personnel alone was 258 million yuan, which was more than 100 million yuan higher than the current revenue.
From the perspective of the entire industry where Cambrian is located, the competitors it faces, in addition to Intel, Huawei HiSilicon and other players with strong competitiveness in this field, there are also domestic Internet companies such as Ali and Tencent that are laying out in the field of AI chips.
Xu Ke analyzed the "China Times" reporter that Internet companies are more efficient in making chips, and chips can be quickly applied and feedback after making, which is an internal virtuous circle. Cambrian and Internet companies do not have a strong binding, may choose some relatively small manufacturers, which makes it more difficult to land and scale.
Xu Ke said that AI chips are not easy in industrialization, and they are not expected to go smoothly in the end of customer landing. "From the current situation, it is difficult for Cambrian to achieve profitability in a short period of time, which is a big test for its market value in the short term." In the long run, cambrian in addition to the need to do a good job in cash flow management, the most important thing is to really expand the business, while doing a good job in the balance of research and development and market development. ”
Responsible Editor: Huang Xingli Editor-in-Chief: Han Feng
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