Cambricon Nets 9.5 Billion Yuan Revenue in First Three Quarters: What Share of Its 11.6 Billion Yuan Inventory Ties to Confirmed Actual Orders?

Multiple undisclosed pieces of information were released at Cambricon's Q3 earnings briefing, and its market capitalization exceeds 600 billion yuan.

On the afternoon of October 26, Cambricon held its Q3 earnings briefing, and the SSE Roadshow Center showed that the company responded to a total of 40 questions.

One of the responses supplemented information not disclosed in the Q3 report: the revenue in the first three quarters mainly came from the cloud product line, excluding the intelligent computing cluster system business.

The shipment volume, customer base and revenue contribution of Siyuan 690 were not disclosed. The company also did not specify how much of the 11.665 billion yuan inventory corresponds to existing orders.

Revenue Mainly Comes From the Cloud

In the first three quarters, Cambricon achieved an operating revenue of 9.526 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 106.76%; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 3.715 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 131.49%; the non-recurring profit and loss deducted net profit was 3.523 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 148.30%.

The gross profit margin for the first three quarters was 56.53%. The company stated at the briefing that the rapid revenue growth did not dilute profitability.

The revenue in the third quarter alone was 3.531 billion yuan, and the net profit attributable to shareholders was 1.404 billion yuan. Revenue and profits continued to grow, and the gross profit margin also remained at a relatively high level. Cambricon has achieved profitability for three consecutive quarters.

The briefing supplemented a piece of information not directly given in the financial report: the revenue in the first three quarters mainly came from the cloud product line, and did not include the intelligent computing cluster system business.

Cambricon has undertaken intelligent computing cluster projects in the past. This type of business usually includes servers, networks, storage and system integration, with large project amounts, and revenue may fluctuate with the acceptance rhythm.

This growth is mainly driven by the cloud product line, which means that Cambricon's revenue source has changed. Chips, acceleration cards and related software and hardware platforms have begun to directly contribute the main revenue, and the cluster system is no longer the source of performance growth in the first three quarters.

The company said that its related products have been continuously deployed in large-scale commercial scenarios in industries such as finance and the Internet.

Specific customers are still not disclosed.

Five Models and One Programming Tool

Cambricon devoted a lot of space to introducing software adaptation.

The company said that its products have been adapted to mainstream domestic open-source models such as GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, and MiniMax, while continuing to optimize the training efficiency of models including DeepSeek, Qwen, and Hunyuan.

In terms of development tools, Triton-MLU has connected the Triton programming model with the MLU hardware backend. Developers can follow the Triton programming method to develop and optimize custom operators on Cambricon hardware.

This part of the work does not directly correspond to revenue figures, but determines how much code customers need to modify when migrating to the Cambricon platform.

Delivering AI chips to customers only completes the hardware deployment. Whether large models can be trained and inferred stably, whether common operators are complete, and whether problems can be located quickly after they occur will all affect the final utilization rate of the chips.

The adaptation list listed by Cambricon has covered major domestic models. The briefing did not announce the training efficiency of these models on the MLU platform, cluster stability, and performance comparison with other chips.

After "adaptation is completed", how many customers have actually migrated their training tasks still cannot be judged from this Q&A session.

Switch Chips Are Still in the Planning Stage

Cambricon also revealed that the company is planning multi-machine multi-card interconnection protocols and switch chips for large models.

This is one of the few replies involving new product directions in this briefing.

Large model training requires a large number of chips to work at the same time. The computing power of a single chip is only part of it, and the data transmission speed between chips, network topology and communication software will directly affect the training efficiency of the entire cluster.

NVIDIA provides GPUs, NVLink interconnection and switch chips in this system at the same time. To enter larger-scale training clusters, domestic AI chip companies also need to supplement the chip interconnection and network sections.

Cambricon currently uses the expression of "planning and R&D". The company has not announced the tape-out time, verification progress, mass production plan of the switch chips, nor has it explained whether related products have entered customer tests.

No new figures about the progress of super nodes were added in this briefing.

11.6 Billion Yuan of Inventory, 500 Million Yuan of Depreciation

As of the end of September, Cambricon's inventory stood at 11.665 billion yuan. At the end of 2025, this figure was 4.944 billion yuan.

In the same period, prepayments increased from 745 million yuan to 3.044 billion yuan. The total of inventory and prepayments reached 14.709 billion yuan, an increase of 9.021 billion yuan in nine months.

The company confirmed at the briefing that it accrued 501.6 million yuan of inventory depreciation reserves in the first three quarters, due to the increase in the inventory age of some raw materials previously reserved for strategic purposes.

This provides one more layer of information than the "asset impairment loss" in the quarterly report. Cambricon purchased a batch of raw materials in advance before demand expanded, and the storage time of some of them has triggered the depreciation reserve.

Stockpiling is still ongoing.

Cambricon's notes payable increased from 351 million yuan at the end of 2025 to 4.966 billion yuan, and accounts payable increased from 765 million yuan to 1.827 billion yuan. Part of the new inventory is supported by supplier credit periods and notes.

The goods have been included in the financial statements, and part of the payment will be made later.

In the first three quarters, Cambricon received 10.671 billion yuan in cash from selling goods and providing services, and paid 8.994 billion yuan for purchasing goods and receiving services. The net cash flow from operating activities was 228 million yuan, which remained positive.

The net cash flow from operating activities in the third quarter alone was negative 83.778 million yuan. The net profit attributable to shareholders in the quarter was 1.404 billion yuan, and procurement and tax payments absorbed most of the cash.

The briefing did not disclose the composition of the 11.665 billion yuan inventory. The management did not answer the respective proportions of wafers, HBM, consigned processing materials, work-in-progress and finished products.

The company also did not specify how much of this batch of inventory corresponds to customer orders.

4 Billion Yuan Has Not Been Confirmed

The equity incentive revenue target set by Cambricon for 2026 is 13.5 billion yuan.

After completing 9.526 billion yuan in the first three quarters, the company still needs to achieve about 3.974 billion yuan in revenue in the fourth quarter. This figure is 443 million yuan higher than that of the third quarter, requiring a quarter-on-quarter increase of about 12.5%.

At the briefing, some investors asked about the full-year target and subsequent growth. The company continued to emphasize the strong demand for AI computing power, product competitiveness and market expansion, and did not give quantitative confirmation of the nearly 4 billion yuan revenue in the fourth quarter.

Siyuan 690 is another product that has been repeatedly mentioned.

The public is concerned about whether it has been delivered on a large scale, which industries the main customers come from, and how much of the revenue in the first three quarters is contributed by Siyuan 690. Cambricon did not disclose the shipment volume and revenue at the product model level.

The capacity issue was not elaborated either. The company did not separately explain whether wafer foundry, advanced packaging, HBM supply and customer acceptance would restrict the fourth-quarter delivery.

The "1 Million Units" Statement Did Not Come From Cambricon

In response to the market rumor that "chip shipments will exceed 1 million units in 2027", Cambricon replied that the company "has never had relevant communications".

The company did not give its own 2027 shipment target at the same time, nor did it disclose the existing sales volume by product model.

On October 26, driven by the sentiment of the earnings briefing and the Q3 report, Cambricon's share price surged sharply again during intraday trading, closing at 968 yuan.

Calculated based on the total share capital of about 629 million shares at the end of the third quarter, the market value is about 608.7 billion yuan.