Cambricon distributes profits to its employees.

This is a scene widely welcomed by all working professionals.

Recently, Cambricon released its 2026 restricted stock incentive plan, proposing to grant 5 million restricted shares to incentive recipients, with a value of about 5.7 billion yuan calculated at the latest stock price. The total number of initial grantees is 945, accounting for about 85% of the total number of employees.

At this moment, Cambricon has gone through a full 10 years. It once fell into a trough during this period, until the demand for computing power exploded, and the legend of "Han King" was born as a result, with the latest market value exceeding 700 billion yuan.

The R&D cycle is inherently long, and it takes great courage to devote to the hard technology wave. At this moment, the real money investment from the enterprise is undoubtedly the biggest motivation for employees.

5.7 Billion Yuan Distributed to 85% of Employees

This time, Cambricon has made a very generous move.

According to the announcement, Cambricon plans to grant 5 million restricted shares to incentive recipients at a grant price of 750 yuan per share, corresponding to a total market value of about 5.7 billion yuan. This price is about 34% lower than the latest stock price, with a calculated floating profit of nearly 2 billion yuan.

The incentive is almost available to everyone — the total number of initial incentive recipients is 945, accounting for about 85.37% of the total number of employees, covering directors, senior management personnel, core technical personnel, and other personnel that the board of directors deems need to be incentivized.

Specifically, the initial grantees are divided into three categories: the first category includes 245 people who did not participate in the 2023 incentive plan; the second category includes 692 people who participated in the 2023 incentive plan (excluding the third category); the third category includes 6 senior executives and 2 personnel that the board of directors deems need to be incentivized.

In terms of timeline, the incentives will be vested in batches over the next four years roughly: grantees in the first category will vest in batches at the ratio of 30%, 30% and 40% 12 months after the grant date, while grantees in the second and third categories will vest in batches at the ratio of 50% and 50% 24 months after the grant date.

In accordance with the arrangement in the announcement, this incentive is directly linked to the company's performance targets from 2026 to 2028 and individual performance assessments.

To achieve 100% vesting, the company-level performance assessment targets are: the operating revenue in 2026 shall not be less than 13.5 billion yuan, the cumulative operating revenue from 2026 to 2027 shall not be less than 40.5 billion yuan, and the cumulative operating revenue from 2026 to 2028 shall not be less than 100 billion yuan. For grantees in the third category, the net profit indicator will also be added for comprehensive calculation.

Finally, at the individual level, the results will be divided into six grades: 5, 4, 3, 2.2, 2.1 and 1, corresponding to the actual vesting ratios of 100%, 100%, 80%, 50%, 30% and 0% respectively for incentive recipients.

In addition, 1 million shares are reserved in the incentive plan, with the assessment year ranging from 2027 to 2028. The reserved incentive recipients will be determined within 12 months after being reviewed and approved by the shareholders' meeting. If not determined within the time limit, the reserved rights and interests will become invalid.

With a target of 100 billion yuan in revenue within three years, Cambricon has tied almost all its employees to the same chariot.

The Most Remarkable Brothers in China

The story of Cambricon can be regarded as a model of defying fate and achieving success.

Behind it are two post-80s brothers from Jiangxi province — Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi. The two have almost identical growth paths: they both attended the University of Science and Technology of China's junior class for gifted youth, worked as researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences after graduating with doctorate degrees, and launched research in the chip field very early.

At that time, NVIDIA was still selling gaming graphics cards, and artificial intelligence and chip design were unpopular interdisciplinary fields that no one paid attention to. Chen Yunji once described that period as "groping in total darkness", and the difficulty is self-evident.

No one expected that this team of only 20 people developed the world's first prototype chip dedicated to deep learning processors. Later in 2016, members of Cambricon's founding team and Zhongke Suanyuan, the investment management platform of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly established Cambricon, with Chen Tianshi serving as chairman and general manager.

It rose to fame in 2017, when Huawei released the artificial intelligence mobile chip "Kirin 970", which was equipped with the Cambricon 1A processor. After that, Cambricon further shifted to the full-scenario layout of "Cloud-Edge-Device". Until it landed on the STAR Market in 2020, its market value exceeded 100 billion yuan on the first trading day.

But as chip R&D is well known for burning huge capital, coupled with the impact of supply chain and other factors, Cambricon was in a loss state for a long time after listing. As a result, Cambricon's stock price went down for nearly two years. In April 2022, it even fell to about 46 yuan per share, down more than 80% from the high point of 297.77 yuan per share.

The outside world once questioned: Is Cambricon going to collapse? Can the path of domestic AI chips still be paved?

The turning point came in 2024, when Cambricon's Siyuan 590 chip was launched, whose energy efficiency in inference scenarios is comparable to that of overseas giants. Immediately after that, the new generation of large models represented by DeepSeek exploded in an all-round way, and while the demand for computing power increased sharply, the value of domestic chip substitution was greatly amplified.

According to IDC data cited in Goldman Sachs' research report, the shipment volume of AI chips in China reached 4 million pieces in 2025, among which the proportion of domestic chips rose from 30% in 2024 to 41%. Cambricon is exactly the largest third-party AI chip supplier in China after Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and other self-owned cloud platform chip vendors.

What followed immediately was performance realization — according to the 2025 annual report released by the company, Cambricon's operating revenue reached 6.497 billion yuan last year, a year-on-year increase of 453.21%, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 2.059 billion yuan, realizing profitability for the first time.

From mid-2024 to now, Cambricon has experienced an unprecedented surge. By the end of June this year, its stock price once broke through 1600 yuan, becoming the first trillion-yuan stock on the STAR Market. Although it has experienced a wave of pullback, its latest market value still exceeds 700 billion yuan.

Retaining Talents

This scene is not unexpected.

This week, Changxin Technology officially landed on the STAR Market, topping the A-share market with a market value of over 3 trillion yuan. A detail hidden in its prospectus — the founder and chairman Zhu Yiming voluntarily promised to distribute half of his 1.536 billion shares to employees, corresponding to a market value of over 34 billion yuan.

Generous treatment is also reflected in the employees of GigaDevice. A few days ago, GigaDevice announced the exercise results of the second exercise period of its 2024 equity incentive plan. A total of 37 people exercised 1.25 million shares this time. Calculated at the exercise price of 58.09 yuan per share and the stock price of 629 yuan at that time, the per capita profit reached 19.28 million yuan.

Earlier, the vesting conditions of multiple phases of Innolight's equity incentive plan were met. If there is no overlap among incentive recipients during this period, 803 Innolight employees will be able to vest 1.63 million shares, with a value of over 1.7 billion yuan calculated at the stock price at that time.

At present, industry competition is intensifying, and equity incentive has become an important means for hard technology enterprises to retain talents.

For example, Naura Technology clearly stated in its 2025-2027 shareholding plan that employees can hold up to 10% of the company's total share capital in total; Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment launched an equity incentive plan in 2024, covering 99.72% of its employees; a recent announcement released by Accelink Technologies shows that 702 employees can unlock equity incentives, with a floating profit of about 1.1 billion yuan after deducting the grant cost.

Different from the fast-paced model in the internet era, these industries usually have extremely high technical barriers, and the training cycle that often lasts for several years and strict professional requirements make every senior core talent extremely precious.

"No one can afford the consequences of technical fault." The logic behind the move from paying salaries to distributing equity is self-evident: when the wave of the era hits and the industry enters a critical stage of shifting growth gears, everyone wants to keep the most elite team in their hands.

For technical personnel who have been silently rooted in the front line of hard technology R&D and production, holding the company's equity undoubtedly injects motivation into their persistent work. With the explosive growth of product sales, they will also share the dividends brought by the growth of the industry and the enterprise.

As billionaire investor Mark Cuban said, the employee stock ownership model should become the norm rather than the exception. "I hope every CEO, founder and entrepreneur can follow what I did in the past, distribute equity to all employees, which can give unknown ordinary employees the chance to get huge returns."

In a sense, this is also a re-pricing of talents — at this moment, enterprises firmly bind their core employees to their future development with equity. A few years later, the growth income of the enterprise will also be shared with employees. They are no longer just workers who work overtime late at night, but "partners" who share weal and woe.

In this way, a number of counterattack legends of ordinary people in the hard technology era are created.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Daily IPO", written by Yu Mengying, and published with authorization from 36Kr.