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Cambrian (688256. SH) stock price is still fluctuating, and the mood of shareholders is "roller coaster".

In early trading on January 17, Cambrian fell 3.87% to 571 yuan per share, hitting the lowest point since December 17, 2024. On the same day, Cambrian closed at 592 yuan per share, down 0.34%. Compared with the nearly 17% intraday dive in the previous trading day, Cambrian's share price volatility narrowed.

Cambrian disclosed the 2024 annual performance forecast on the evening of January 14, and it is expected to achieve revenue of 1.07 billion yuan to 1.2 billion yuan in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 50.83%-69.16%; The net profit attributable to the owners of the parent company is expected to lose 396 million yuan to 484 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 42.95%-53.33%.

Financial data show that in the first three quarters of 2024, Cambrian's revenue was 185 million yuan, and the net profit attributable to the parent company was -724 million yuan. Combined with the performance forecast data, it can be calculated that in the fourth quarter of 2024, Cambrian will achieve revenue of 885 million yuan to 1.015 billion yuan, and net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company will be 240 million yuan to 328 million yuan, which is expected to achieve a single-quarter turnaround. In the same period of 2023, Cambrian's revenue will be 564 million yuan, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company will be -40.71 million yuan.

Regarding the change in performance, Cambrian announced that during the reporting period, the company continued to expand the market and actively helped the application of artificial intelligence, resulting in a significant increase in revenue compared with the same period of the previous year (2023). A reporter from the Times Weekly called the Cambrian Securities Department on the company's performance and recent stock market performance, but the call was not answered as of press time.

Founded in 2016, Cambrian focuses on the R&D and technological innovation of artificial intelligence chip products, and landed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in July 2020, known as "the first AI chip stock on the Science and Technology Innovation Board" and "China's version of NVIDIA".

Since its establishment, Cambrian's performance in the capital market seems to have deviated somewhat from the basic financial logic - while the stock price and market value are high, the company has been in the red for a long time.

As of the close of trading on December 31, 2024, Cambrian won the title of "stock king" of A-shares with an annual increase of 387%, with a total market value of nearly 280 billion yuan. On January 10 this year, Cambrian's share price rushed to 777.77 yuan per share intraday, a record high, and its market value once touched 320 billion yuan. At the close of the day, Cambrian reported 729.97 yuan per share, with a total market value of about 304.7 billion yuan.

Cambrian's performance was lackluster. From 2017 to the first half of 2024, Cambrian has accumulated losses of about 5.5 billion yuan. According to the financial report, the net loss in the first three quarters of 2024 will be 724 million yuan, and the net loss after deducting non-profits will be 862 million yuan. Among them, the net loss in the third quarter was 194 million yuan, and the net loss after deducting non-profits was 254 million yuan.

In response to the divergence between Cambrian's performance and stock price, Zhang Chengyu, partner of Analysys and head of Analysys Enterprise Digitalization Center, told the Times reporter that the current market has ultra-high expectations for domestic chips, but domestic chip companies have not yet ushered in a large-scale period. Therefore, the contradiction between "high expectations" and "low reality" breeds industry bubbles.

Zhang Chengyu believes that the procurement demand for domestic chips by major Internet manufacturers represented by bytes and Alibaba, as well as operators and governments, is in a blowout state, but domestic AI chip manufacturers will generally be in the development stage from 0 to 1 in 2024. He predicts that 2025 will be a big year for the localization of AI chips. Ascend, Haiguang, and Cambrian will all usher in a large number of shipments, and NVIDIA's market share may drop sharply to about 50%. "The current bubble actually reflects the market's expectation of accelerating the domestic substitution of AI chips in the next 1 to 2 years." He said.

Although not yet profitable, Cambrian's R&D spending has exceeded revenue. According to the third quarter report of 2024, Cambrian's R&D expenditure in the first three quarters of 2024 was 659 million yuan, accounting for 355.65% of revenue. However, Cambrian has been reducing its R&D investment. From 2022 to the first three quarters of 2024, the company's R&D investment was 1.523 billion yuan, 1.118 billion yuan and 659 million yuan respectively, a year-on-year decrease of 26.63% and 8.13% respectively.

At the same time, the number of Cambrian R&D personnel continues to decrease, and from 2022 to the first half of 2024, the number of R&D personnel in the company will be 1,205, 725, and 727 respectively.

In the eyes of industry insiders, there is a gap of at least two generations in the performance of a single GPU between domestic manufacturers and Nvidia products. But it does not mean that domestic chip manufacturers have no chance of breaking through.

An investor who has been paying attention to the field of AI chips for a long time told the Times reporter that the opportunity for domestic chip manufacturers is to find specific application scenarios, rather than blindly benchmarking against NVIDIA.

"For domestic chip manufacturers, if capital and hardware investment are difficult to match, it is a very difficult task to catch up with Nvidia on the same technical route. Assuming that the technology development is linear or divergent, it may be possible to pile up resources or take a detour to catch up, but at present, the technology curve of Nvidia's GPUs is steeply rising, leaving little chance for the chasers. The above-mentioned person said.

Building a computing power cluster is also a way to break through. Zhang Chengyu said that although the single-card computing power gap of computing power products is still obvious, it can make up for the single-card performance gap through multi-card clusters, and at the same time, there is still a lot of room for optimization in domestic computing power cluster management, parallel computing and collaborative scheduling, so it is not meaningful to simply compare single-card computing power, and it will not affect domestic chip manufacturers to squeeze into the table.

According to the financial report, at the end of the third quarter of 2024, Chairman Chen Tianshi held 28.63% of Cambrian's shares and was the largest shareholder. On January 15, Cambrian's market value was 297.7 billion yuan, and the corresponding market value of Chen Tianshi's shares was about 85.2 billion yuan; Cambrian's latest market value is 247.1 billion yuan, and the corresponding market value of Chen Tianshi's shares is about 70.744 billion yuan. This means that in just two trading days, the book wealth of Chen Tianshi's shares has shrunk by nearly 14.5 billion yuan.