Wang Dongsheng's third IPO

Wang Dongsheng's third IPO, a six-year long march with a group of patient capitals.

Just now, another "first stock" has been born in the semiconductor chip field.

Eswin Computing, known as "the first RISC-V stock", made a strong debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at an opening price of HKD 1.54 per share, with a total market capitalization of HKD 32.6 billion.

Founded 6 years ago, it has completed 4 rounds of financing totaling RMB 92.76 billion, with a post-money valuation of RMB 35 billion -- this is the third IPO of Wang Dongsheng, known as the "Father of China's Semiconductor Display Industry", and also a collective bet from the primary market.

From IDG Capital, Legend Capital, Primitive Core Capital, Tianyi Capital, Zhiyi Investment, to China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, National Social Security Fund, and then to BOE, Tencent and SAIC, behind this IPO, almost all the key forces investing in domestic chips are covered.

The "Strong Chip" Road of a Veteran

Setting out again.

Wang Dongsheng, the veteran who has been engaged in the "display" industry for more than 20 years, has no intention of leaving the industry. From BOE to Xi'an Yicai, and then to Eswin Computing, this is the third IPO he has achieved.

Back in 1993, Wang Dongsheng took over the nearly bankrupt Beijing Electron Tube Factory amid crisis, led employees to raise RMB 6.5 million in seed funds by themselves, and restructured it into Beijing Oriental Electronics Group, which later became BOE -- the global leader in semiconductor display panels. In the following 20 years, the shortage of domestic displays has been greatly alleviated.

In 2019, 62-year-old Wang Dongsheng did not choose to retire after achieving great success. Only three months after stepping down from BOE in June, he stepped into a more brutal, higher-investment and longer-cycle track -- semiconductor chips. In September of the same year, Eswin Computing was established, with Wang Dongsheng taking the lead personally, and quickly formed a "star team": Wang Bo, former product director of Intel, served as vice chairman, and He Ning, former senior staff engineer of Qualcomm, served as CTO.

This time, he bet on RISC-V.

RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture, regarded as the "third pole" of the global computing architecture following x86 and ARM. For a long time, x86 dominates the PC and server market, and ARM rules the mobile terminal market. Chinese chip enterprises are facing the risk of "strangulation" under the authorization system of the two major architectures. The openness of RISC-V provides a strategic opportunity for China's chip industry to strive for the right of independent definition.

Eswin Computing is exactly one of the few chip product providers in China that takes the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture as the foundation and has realized large-scale commercial implementation. As of the end of March 2026, the company has launched more than 150 software and hardware co-design products to the market, serving 220 customers around the world. This industry status is inseparable from the accelerating maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem in China.

In March this year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences released the "Xiangshan" open-source high-performance RISC-V processor system and the "Ruyi" RISC-V native operating system at the Zhongguancun Forum, marking that China has obtained important discourse power in the construction of the RISC-V open-source community.

The ecosystem is maturing, but what is really scarce has never been the technical route itself, but the people who can make this route work. Zhiyi Investment, which entered the market in the Series C round in 2021, came to a very simple conclusion after repeatedly reviewing Wang Dongsheng during the due diligence: "We are highly consistent in values."

In the view of Zhao Fu, founder and CEO of Zhiyi Investment, three things about Wang Dongsheng are the hardest to replicate: the pattern and sense of mission of Chinese entrepreneurs -- "the trend of the times and the needs of the country are the direction of industrial practitioners"; the long-termism that is willing to endure the long suffering of the industry -- starting over in his 60s with huge investment and extremely long return cycle, but he "is not a utopian idealist, and repeatedly emphasizes that hard technology should not only look at the general direction of the industry, but also respect the commercial reality, and find a balance between long-term value and short-term survival"; and the strategic vision of making overall arrangements from the perspective of the whole industrial chain -- building Eswin is not just about making a single chip, but also laying out large silicon wafers and RISC-V computing chips synchronously, connecting the upstream manufacturing base and the upper computing power platform.

"When evaluating a company, we never look at whether it is cheap at present, but at how large it can grow when the industry explodes." Zhao Fu said that this long-term perspective is consistent with Wang Dongsheng's.

Apart from the long-term perspective, competition is also unavoidable. Competitors such as T-head and StarFive continue to make efforts, but in the view of Zhiyi Investment, Eswin's foothold is not on the paper parameters of IP or single-core performance, but on the profound understanding of scenarios and the ability to polish products with leading customers in long-term collaboration -- "Many competitors focus on the IP core itself, while Eswin starts from the real end-user application demands and provides integrated platform solutions of software and hardware". Especially in the edge-side AI scenario, RISC-V is not a simple substitute for ARM, but a completely different cost structure and efficiency curve.

However, under the grand narrative of technical positioning, the fundamental performance of Eswin Computing is still under pressure. According to the data from the prospectus, from 2023 to 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, the company's revenue was RMB 17.52 billion, RMB 20.25 billion, RMB 24.31 billion and RMB 494 million respectively; the losses during the period were RMB 18.37 billion, RMB 15.47 billion, RMB 15.16 billion and RMB 375 million respectively. In the first three years alone, the accumulated loss has reached nearly RMB 49 billion. More notably, customer concentration is high: the revenue from the top five customers has remained close to 90% all year round, the single largest customer contributed 82.1% of the revenue in 2023, and the proportion still reached 64.6% in 2025.

Facing the loss statement, Zhiyi Investment believes that it is necessary to distinguish between "burning money" and "investment". "The core driver of the loss is strategic R&D investment, not operational stall." The internal consensus of Zhiyi Investment is that as long as the industry logic does not change, technical capabilities continue to iterate, and customer onboarding proceeds steadily, the upfront investment will continue to accumulate long-term value. This is the same logic as their investment in Green Control Transmission in 2018 -- they do not simply look at the absolute values of P/S and P/E in the current year, but at the potential when the industry explodes. Green Control Transmission has been listed on the ChiNext board on August 20, 2026.

The funds raised from this IPO also follow the same logic -- the company will mainly use the funds for five major directions: chip product development and iteration, RISAA software and hardware technology platform construction, potential strategic mergers and acquisitions, marketing network and RISC-V ecosystem construction, and supplementary working capital.

Who is Betting on RISC-V?

As the first RISC-V stock lands on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it is a milestone of Wang Dongsheng's second venture, and also a collective harvest for the primary market.

Since its establishment in 2019, the company has completed 4 rounds of financing in total, with the financing amount as high as RMB 92.76 billion. After completing the last round of financing in April 2025, the company's post-money valuation reached RMB 350 billion.

Behind it are also a group of "veterans". By disassembling the shareholder list, it can be found that not only are market-oriented VC/PE institutions such as IDG Capital, Legend Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Bohua Capital, Ceyuan Capital, Primitive Core Capital, Tianyi Capital, Zhiyi Investment, and Guoke Private Equity participating, but also state-owned institutions such as Guangzhou Industrial Investment Capital, Guoxin Investment, Yizhuang State Investment, Zhongxin Fund, Western High-tech Investment, Greater Bay Area Fund, and China Internet Investment Fund are gathered. Industrial institutions cover Core Dynamic Capital, Shangqi Capital, Cloudwalk, etc. In addition, capital from financial institutions such as GF Qianhe and CITIC Goldstone are all on the list.

Counting the LPs behind it, the lineup is even stronger.

National team institutions have made heavy bets. National Council for Social Security Fund, China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Innovative Development of Trade in Services Guiding Fund, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund, CICC Qiyuan National Emerging Industry Venture Capital Guiding Fund, China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II and other national team institutions have entered the market one after another.

In addition, there are bets from provincial and municipal funds such as Guangtou Capital, Xiamen C&D Emerging Investment, GLP C&D, Shenzhen Government Guiding Fund, Jiangcheng Industrial Investment Fund, Zhejiang Provincial Industrial Fund Co., Ltd., Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Beijing Science and Technology Innovation Fund, Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center Phase I Equity Investment Fund, Chongqing Yufu Holding Group, Chongqing Development Investment, Guangzhou Scientific and Technological Achievement Industrialization Guiding Fund, as well as support from district and county-level funds such as Beijing Yizhuang International Emerging Industry Investment Fund, Wuxi High-tech Zone New Kinetic Energy Development Fund, Xi'an High-tech Investment Cornerstone Investment Fund.

Among industrial capitals, Qingdao SAIC, Tencent Industrial Investment Fund, Shangqi Capital and Cloudwalk are particularly prominent. Among them, Wang Dongsheng's former employer BOE Technology Group and BOE's affiliated institution Core Dynamic Investment have been deeply involved from the very beginning, appearing in the angel round capital contribution list.

In addition, insurance capital and financial institution funds are also key forces in the LP team. Among them, insurance capitals including Sunshine Life, Guohua Life, China Insurance Investment, Taiping Life, Junlong Life and others made bets before the Series A round. Subsequently, Taikang Life, CITIC Prudential Life, CPIC Life and other institutions entered the market one after another. Brokerage-affiliated capitals include CITIC Securities, Haitong Securities, CITIC Goldstone, etc.

Beyond the list, what is more interesting is the time point when the funds entered. On this financing curve, the Series C round in 2021 is a watershed. At that time, the RISC-V track was far less popular than it is today, "the market heat has not risen, and there are not many entrepreneurial projects with real commercialization capabilities". As one of the investors that entered the market in the Series C round, Zhiyi Investment recalled that the core reason for choosing to bet at that time was two key factors: a mature team polished through long-term industrial practice, who understands the supply chain and mass production, and the mass production and implementation gap that Eswin has already crossed when other players were still doing IP R&D and sample verification.

Looking back now, this company has grown into a completely different form: according to the statistics of Frost & Sullivan, calculated by the revenue in 2025, Eswin Computing has become the largest domestic human-computer interaction chip product provider for smart terminals in China; in the direction of "RISC-V+AI", it is the enterprise with the most comprehensive coverage of global patents, IPs and products. The "One Body Two Wings" industrial layout established in the early stage -- taking RISC-V as the technical base, smart terminal chips as the basic cash flow support, and interconnection and computing chips as the growth engine -- is now accelerating the launch of embodied intelligent chips, and interconnection chips and computing chips have been implemented in automotive, robot and industrial scenarios.

Conclusion

Looking back from the node of the first day of listing, Eswin Computing carries as much expectation as it bears pressure. Problems such as high customer concentration and gross margin pressure still exist, but what the semiconductor field needs has always been "patient capital".

The 69-year-old entrepreneur has spanned two eras with two ventures. This time, whether he can replicate the legend of BOE on the RISC-V track, the answer may still need time to write -- but the direction itself is firm enough.

This article is from the WeChat official account "FOFWEEKLY", author: Ling Xiu, published with authorization from 36Kr.