On April 25, Jingjiawei, an A-share listed company, released its 2023 annual performance report, with unsatisfactory financial data and a new low since its listing.
In 2023, Jingjiawei will achieve a total operating income of 713 million yuan this year, a year-on-year decrease of 38.19%. The non-net profit was 23 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 91.16%, Jingjiawei's operating income shrank, and the profitability of its main business was insufficient.
In 2023, Jingjiawei's non-operating income will be 36.67 million yuan, a slight increase year-on-year, and the net profit will be 59.6811 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 79.35%.
Picture: Jingjiawei's 2023 annual report
Overall, Jingjiawei's poor performance in 2023 is mainly due to the decline in gross profit margin and high R&D investment.
The revenue of products in the chip field has shrunk year by year
Jingjiawei products are mainly divided into graphics and image processing systems, small radar systems, and GPU chips, which are widely used in the military industry and are currently entering the civilian market.
In the era of AI, visual computing has become the mainstream, and graphics processing has once again pushed GPUs to the peak. GPU is the main computing power carrier of 2T (to Things), and GPU occupies the core position in the independent and controllable design of computing power. Jingjia micro graphics and radar products are mainly used in military equipment, accounting for most of the market share in the domestic airborne graphics field, and GPU chip products are expanding from military to information innovation and civilian markets.
Jingjiawei's main business is products in the field of graphic display and control, which is the main source of the company's revenue, of which products in the field of graphic display and control account for 65%, and revenue fell by 28.62% year-on-year. The specific products include graphics display and control modules and reinforcement products developed based on self-developed GPUs, which are specially supplied to the military market and occupy the vast majority of the market share of domestic military aircraft graphics modules.
Products in the field of small specialized radar accounted for 18.3%, and revenue fell 42.66% year-on-year. The sharp decline of 61.13% in product revenue in the chip field was the largest decline.
Civilian products are mainly GPU (graphics processing unit) chips, oriented to the information and innovation market, and the revenue of products in the chip field has shrunk in recent years. From 2021 to 2023, the proportion of Jingjiawei's chip business revenue will continue to decline from 40.84% to 14.2%, and the chip revenue in the first half of 2021 and 2022 will exceed 200 million, but it will barely exceed 100 million yuan in 2023. Jingjiawei is struggling in the process of opening up the civilian market, and there is a long way to go.
Picture: Jingjiawei's 2023 annual report
From the perspective of gross profit margin, products in the field of small specialized radar fell by 11.87%, the largest decline. The consolidated gross profit margin fell by 4.69%, and the profitability of Jingjiawei will be seriously challenged in 2023.
R&D investment accounted for 46.44%
In addition to the pressure on terminal performance, R&D investment has remained high, which is also one of the reasons for the decline in Jingjiawei's performance. In the context of fluctuating industrial demand, the company still invests heavily in research and development.
In 2023, under the background of facing a complex external environment, Jingjiawei will invest 331 million yuan in research and development, a year-on-year increase of 6.03%, accounting for 46.44% of operating income.
Picture: Jingjiawei's 2023 annual report
In 2023, Jingjiawei will apply for a total of 231 patents (188 national invention patents, 29 utility model patents, 10 international patents, and 4 appearance patents), of which 107 invention patents, 29 utility model patents, and 4 appearance patents have been authorized, 137 software copyrights have been registered, and 4 integrated circuit layouts have been registered. A sound intellectual property system not only ensures the company's technological upgrading, but also is conducive to the company's industrial layout in other fields.
Jingjiawei has a total of 1,140 employees, including 734 R&D personnel, accounting for more than 64.39% of the total number of employees. The company has a total of 397 employees with graduate degree or above, accounting for 34.82% of the total number of employees.
Overall, although Jingjiawei is a domestic GPU leader, it is mainly concentrated in the military market, and its competitiveness in the civilian market is weak, and it has not yet been deployed in the field of high-computing power GPU, lagging behind other companies at home and abroad.
Bucking the trend in the AI wave
Entering 2023, artificial intelligence technology represented by AIGC will show a blowout development, and the resulting technological achievements will continue to empower various industries, bringing more possibilities and development momentum to more and more industries. As the underlying support of artificial intelligence technology, computing power has gradually become a new form of core productivity and a new strategic resource.
The industry generally believes that 2023~2024 will be a year of rapid growth in the scale of computing power and intelligent computing, and the domestic computing industry is expected to usher in a high prosperity. From now on, the domestic computing infrastructure sector will continue to receive attention.
Jingjiawei, as the first stock of computing chips, does not seem to enjoy the dividends of the times, and will hand over a failing report card in 2023.
Looking at the A-share market, Haiguang Information can compete with Jingjiawei on the same stage, on the other hand, Haiguang Information's performance in 2023 will usher in a big explosion, with an annual operating income of 6.012 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 17.30%, and a net profit of 1.263 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 57.17%.
Haiguang Information and Jingjiawei, which also do GPUs, have a big difference in performance, what is the difference between them in the direction of chip layout?
First, there are two main branches of GPUs that need to be understood. The first is the traditional graphics card GPU, which focuses on image processing functions and aims to improve the rendering effect and quality of the picture, representing companies including Jingjiawei and Moore Threads. This GPU is mainly used on the computer side and is responsible for the display and processing of images, but it is relatively weak in computing power.
The other is the computational GPU, also known as GPGPU, which plays a central role in the inference and training of large models, especially in the concept of AI computing chips. The downstream applications of these GPUs are mainly in the data center.
Therefore, although Jingjiawei is a domestic GPU scarcity company, its performance has not risen due to the development of AI, mainly because of the different technical routes it focuses on.
Haiguang DCU is a kind of GPGPU, which adopts a "CUDA-like" general parallel computing architecture, which can better adapt and adapt to international mainstream commercial computing software and artificial intelligence software, and its product performance has reached the leading position in China.
Benefit from the localization of GPU chips
According to statistics from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the global semiconductor industry sales have rebounded significantly since the end of 2023 due to strong demand for artificial intelligence chips. SIA's fourth-quarter 2023 sales were approximately $146 billion, up 11.6% year-over-year and 8.4% quarter-over-quarter. According to the semiconductor industry outlook data released by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Organization (WSTS), the global semiconductor market size is expected to be US$588.364 billion in 2024, a significant increase of 13.10% compared with 2023.
GPU chip is the core of graphics display and control, and the global GPU competition pattern presents Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, Intel occupies more than 60% of the PC GPU market share by virtue of CPU advantages, and Nvidia occupies 80% of the market share in the PC independent GPU market.
Jingjiawei is a major player in the domestic GPU market, and it is also the only company in China that independently develops GPUs and uses them for commercial use. At present, the company has completed the mass production and application of JM5400 and JM7200/7201 two series and three chips, the first generation product JM5400 was successfully taped out in April 2014, mainly supporting military equipment, and the second generation product JM7200 was successfully taped out in August 2018, cutting into the civilian information innovation market while completing the product substitution in the military field. At present, the company's next-generation JM9 series GPU research and development has been in the back-end design stage, and the performance is expected to be greatly improved, aiming to enter the domestic information innovation, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other high-end application fields.
Jingjiawei's new generation of JM7200 chip has achieved the performance effect of AMDM9/M72/M96 adaptation with domestic CPUs, and is expected to be successfully used in office computers of party, government, military and other departments. On the basis of the research and development of the previous chip, the research and development of the next generation of graphics processing chips has been started.
In 2024, Jingjiawei successfully developed Jinghong series of high-performance intelligent computing modules and complete machine products, filling the company's product gaps in AI training, AI inference and scientific computing and other application fields, laying the foundation for the company's continuous efforts in the field of artificial intelligence in the future.