The legendary 69-year-old Zhejiang business tycoon is about to launch an IPO.

The AI boom continues to surge, with a large number of semiconductor companies lining up for IPOs.

Back in the day, Wang Dongsheng, a leading entrepreneur from Zhejiang, led BOE to "persist relentlessly" and defeated Japanese and South Korean giants, rewriting China's history of "screen shortage", which earned him the title of "Father of China's Semiconductor Display Industry". Most people thought that after stepping down as chairman at the age of 62 with well-deserved achievements, he would fade out of the industry. However, he unexpectedly stepped into the semiconductor chip track with fiercer competition, higher investment and longer cycle, and started his second entrepreneurial journey in life.

Seven years later, Wang Dongsheng is ushering in his own IPO moment again. Recently, according to the disclosure of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Beijing ESWIN Computing Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "ESWIN Computing") has once again sprinted for the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Previously, the company obtained the overseas listing filing from the China Securities Regulatory Commission on June 18, 2026, and is only one step away from landing on the Hong Kong stock market.

Since its establishment in 2019, ESWIN Computing has successively completed 4 rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of up to 90 billion yuan. Not only top VCs such as IDG Capital, Legend Capital, Gaorong Capital have gathered, but also the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II (the Big Fund Phase II) has made a heavy investment. Its sister company ESWIN Materials successfully landed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market) in October 2025, with a total fundraising amount of up to 46.36 billion yuan.

I

Returning to the battlefield at the age of 69: from the "Godfather of Panel Industry" to the "Chip Maniac".

Wang Dongsheng, born in Zhejiang in 1957, took over the loss-making Beijing Electronic Tube Factory at the age of 36, and led employees to raise funds to revitalize the asset, which later became BOE. After that, China's industrial sector staged a 20-year-long counterattack from the brink of defeat. Against overwhelming doubts, Wang Dongsheng led BOE to invest hundreds of billions of yuan in the semiconductor display field, made aggressive counter-cyclical investments during the industry trough, and pulled mainland China out of the desperate situation of "chip shortage and screen shortage", forcing Japanese and South Korean giants to withdraw from the market.

In 2019, 62-year-old Wang Dongsheng retired from BOE with well-deserved achievements. Logically, enjoying life with the aura of "Father of China's Semiconductor Display Industry" would be the choice of most people. But he immediately saw a more harsh reality: it is not enough for China to only produce displays. For the driver chips and computing chips behind the displays, if we are still constrained by overseas giants, we are essentially working for others.

In September 2019, ESWIN Computing was officially established through division, with Wang Dongsheng taking the lead personally. The timing is very subtle. That year, ZTE was sanctioned, Huawei, DJI and Hikvision were added to the Entity List, and the entire technology industry was in a state of anxiety. The phrase "chip shortage" is like a huge stone weighing on the hearts of every Chinese. Having grown up in the panel industry, he understands the importance of independent industrial chain far better than many chip entrepreneurs. Wang Dongsheng chose a very unique entry point: instead of competing with Intel and ARM in the old track, he bet on the new generation of open source architecture RISC-V. Facts have proved that a legend is a legend. From 2020 to 2023, ESWIN Computing almost completed one round of financing per year, with top VCs and state-owned capital entering the market one after another, raising a total of 90 billion yuan.

In essence, the institutions' investment is for a very practical industrial access permit. In the chip track that burns huge amounts of capital, R&D without landing scenarios is nothing but empty talk. This is exactly the most fatal flaw of chip design companies. Even if the chip is designed, why would customers risk equipment downtime to use your new product? Without large customers placing large orders first to conduct real-environment tests, chips cannot be iterated, and will eventually die in the laboratory. And Wang Dongsheng's biggest ace is the BOE ecosystem he spent 20 years building. From display driver chips as the basic cash flow, to automotive computing and AI edge-side chips that require long-term efforts, the company adopts the resource allocation strategy of "mature businesses supporting cutting-edge businesses", pulling the originally high-risk open source chip entrepreneurship back to a controllable commercial operation track.

It is this overall strategy that combines technical foresight and industrial implementation capabilities that allows 69-year-old Wang Dongsheng, after crossing into the chip design industry, to still lead ESWIN Computing to grow rapidly into a chip unicorn valued at hundreds of billions of yuan, and successfully obtain the access permit to sprint for the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

II

Catching the boom of AI and embodied intelligence.

When the global AI large model enters a period of rapid development, the outside world is frantically hyping computing power cards, but few people realize that no matter how powerful the AI computing power is, it cannot be implemented in the physical world without fine human-computer interaction chips as the bridge. Whether it is the AI mobile phone and AI PC that accompany you every day, or the embodied intelligent robots that have become popular all over the world in the past two years, to understand the world and realize interactive display, they all rely on human-computer interaction and display control chips. What ESWIN Computing has seized is exactly the core node of this supply chain.

Data does not lie. Calculated based on the revenue scale in 2025, ESWIN Computing has leapt to become the largest domestic domestic human-computer interaction chip provider for smart terminals. The financial trend disclosed in the prospectus intuitively shows its rapid growth speed in recent years. In 2023, the company's revenue reached 17.52 billion yuan, in 2024 the revenue directly rose to 20.25 billion yuan, and in 2025, this figure even reached 24.31 billion yuan.

Behind this huge annual revenue of nearly 25 billion yuan, there is actually a very practical survival logic of ESWIN Computing.

Many people think that chip companies compete on technology. But for a chip enterprise that is still in a period of high-speed investment, surviving first is more important than anything else. Although mature terminal markets such as TVs, mobile phones and displays have long been a red ocean, their profit margin is not amazing, but they have the biggest advantage — the shipment volume is large enough. For chip design companies, scale means life. As long as the sales volume is high enough, fixed costs such as R&D, tape-out and supply chain can be quickly diluted. Relying on this part of mature business, ESWIN Computing achieved an annual revenue of 24.31 billion yuan, winning the most precious time and cash flow for the subsequent higher-investment AI chip R&D.

However, what is really worth paying attention to is not how many chips it has sold, but why it insists on betting on RISC-V. For a very long time in the past, the global chip industry was almost built on two major architectures: ARM and x86. Behind the mature performance, there are also high licensing costs and greater ecological dependence. For a chip company that hopes to participate in global competition for a long time, this is not the most ideal choice. Therefore, ESWIN Computing has chosen a more difficult but more active path: self-developing the RISC-V architecture.

On the surface, this is a dispute over technical routes; in essence, it is to restructure the cost structure. There is no need to pay high IP licensing fees for a long time, and the architecture can be flexibly customized according to different terminal scenarios. When terminal manufacturers continue to compress costs and industry price competition becomes increasingly fierce, this independent capability also means greater cost reduction space and stronger product competitiveness.

More importantly, Wang Dongsheng did not pin the future on the already mature consumer electronics market. Mature businesses are responsible for making money, and AI is responsible for the future. With the rapid development of AI mobile phones, AI PCs, robots and smart cars, human-computer interaction chips have ushered in a new round of demand explosion. Institutions predict that by 2030, the penetration rate of RISC-V architecture in the domestic embodied intelligence field will rise to 28.2%, and a new industrial window is opening.

This is also the real strategy of ESWIN Computing: use mature businesses to support R&D, use independent architecture to reduce costs, and use today's cash flow to exchange for the right to speak in the future AI era.

III

Semiconductor enterprises are welcoming the most intensive round of IPO waves in recent years.

At present, the global AI industry remains extremely hot, major cloud manufacturers continue to increase capital expenditure on computing power, and the full-chain demand of large models, embodied intelligence and vehicle-mounted terminals has exploded, directly boosting the upstream chip track. The capital market's demand for underlying chips has been pushed to the highest point in history.

In 2026, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's 18C channel has become a fast track for science and innovation enterprises, and many companies engaged in cutting-edge chips have successfully listed this year. In the first half of the year, Cerebras, Axera, Fourier were successfully listed; in the second half of the year, domestic storage leader ChangXin Memory Technologies landed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, setting a new semiconductor fundraising record within the year, which completely ignited the capital confidence of the entire storage industry chain. In addition, many leading enterprises bound to the upstream and downstream of the storage industry have also accelerated their pace of listing in Hong Kong. GigaDevice, Montage Technology, Nationalchip completed the A+H layout this year. China Semiconductor Equipment, JHICC also successfully landed on the Hong Kong stock market; a large number of manufacturers such as VeriSilicon, XMC all submitted Hong Kong stock listing applications this year. From chip design and wafer foundry to semiconductor materials and equipment, the entire industrial chain is actively embracing the capital market this year.

The chip industry itself is a big "capital burner". Tape-out, self-developed technology, and retaining high-end engineers all require huge investment. Listing and financing has become a key step for enterprises to continue to carry out R&D. All semiconductor enterprises listed this year have attracted national teams and top venture capital institutions to compete for layout, which fully shows that the capital market is very optimistic about the long-term opportunity of domestic chip substitution.

Combined with this wave of listing in 2026, it is easy to understand ESWIN's third sprint to the Hong Kong stock market. With the support of listing funds, the company can deeply develop RISC-V vehicle-mounted and edge-side AI chips, and consolidate its position as the leader of human-computer interaction chips. The 69-year-old Wang Dongsheng's second sprint to the capital market is also perfectly in line with the current general trend of the whole industry relying on capital to break through technical barriers.

The semiconductor industry has always been a field where the strong get stronger. Whoever can get abundant funds from the secondary market first will occupy absolute dominance in R&D investment, top talent competition, and upstream wafer foundry capacity reservation. 27 years ago, Wang Dongsheng solved China's "screen shortage". Today, at the age of 69, he has bet his whole life on solving the "chip shortage". He won the battle for screens. What about chips this time? This is also the biggest suspense left to the capital market.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investor", Author: Bi Feng, published with authorization from 36Kr.