Hikrobot's 1,300-Day IPO Queue: Can a "Financial Materials Expired" Filing Explain the Pending Review?

For Hangzhou Hikrobot Co., Ltd.'s ChiNext IPO application, more than 1,300 days had passed by September 28, 2026, counting from its acceptance by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on March 7, 2023. This figure is an extreme value within the entire ChiNext IPO review cycle; most projects usually complete the process from acceptance to the listing review meeting within one to two years. Hikrobot's application had previously been suspended four times because its financial materials exceeded their validity period, each time resuming after updated financial reports were submitted. It is still in the inquiry stage and has not yet entered the listing committee review process.

Note on information cutoff: the prospectus data described in this article are based on the disclosure scope of the filing draft, and the review timeline information is based on materials publicly disclosed by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as of September 27, 2026. New information added on September 28, 2026 is treated only as a lead pending verification and is not accepted as a conclusion.

First, look at the company's foundations. Hikrobot was established on April 20, 2016, with registered capital of RMB 720 million, legal representative Jia Yonghua, and registered address in Binjiang District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province. The company's controlling shareholder is Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd., and the actual controller is China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, which indirectly controls Hikvision through entities such as CETC Hikvision Group, which in turn controls Hikrobot.

This is a clear equity chain disclosed in the original prospectus and is the starting point for understanding the review logic for this company; its machine vision and mobile robot products emerged from the technical accumulation and industrial resources within the Hikvision system.

The company's main business is machine vision and mobile robot products and solutions, focusing on the fields of industrial IoT, smart logistics, and smart manufacturing. Together, these two businesses accounted for a rising share of main business revenue year by year. The figures disclosed in the prospectus are 89.05% in 2019, 92.93% in 2020, 96.36% in 2021, and 98.07% in the first three quarters of 2022. The business structure has continued to concentrate in core tracks, and the room to rely on other marginal businesses to hedge risks has correspondingly narrowed.

However, the growth of these two main businesses themselves is sufficient to support revenue expansion, and the company does not need diversified businesses to hold up its profile.

Financial data show a steep growth curve. Operating revenue rose from RMB 941 million in 2019 to RMB 2.768 billion in 2021, and had already reached RMB 2.810 billion in the first three quarters of 2022, a three-year compound growth rate of 71.48%. Net profit attributable to the parent company rose from RMB 45.4786 million in 2019 to RMB 482 million in 2021, and was RMB 428 million in the first three quarters of 2022.

This growth rate was leading within the industrial robot and machine vision industries during the same period. During the same period, the company's cumulative R&D investment reached RMB 1.154 billion. Behind the scale expansion there is support from real technological investment, rather than revenue growth obtained simply by grabbing orders through low prices.

The trend of gross margins by business deserves a closer look. The gross margin of the machine vision business over the four periods was 49.33%, 41.45%, 46.16%, and 49.37%, respectively, showing a trend of fluctuation followed by recovery. The gross margin of the mobile robot business was 49.45%, 42.89%, 38.61%, and 34.63%, declining year by year, with a cumulative decline of nearly 15 percentage points.

The prospectus attributes this trend to intensifying industry competition and a rising share of solution-type business, which usually means a higher degree of project customization and relatively compressed room for bargaining. This is the prospectus's own explanation, not an external inference. The mobile robot track has attracted more capital and technological forces in recent years, and gross margin pressure is consistent with the overall industry trend. The prospectus itself does not further elaborate on the specific pace of compression and the competitive landscape.

Related-party transactions with Hikvision are a key focus of review inquiries and are also one of the clearest and most verifiable data chains in this prospectus. The proportion of purchases from related parties in total procurement in each period of the reporting period was 82.61%, 66.34%, 12.41%, and 9.55%, respectively, showing a rapidly declining trend, as the company gradually reduces its dependence on the parent company system at the supply chain level.

Sales to related parties were RMB 102.4252 million, RMB 117.6538 million, RMB 141.2471 million, and RMB 110.0895 million, respectively, accounting for a share of operating revenue in each period that fell from 10.88% to 3.92%, with independence strengthening at the same time. Some of the company's information systems still use Hikvision's information systems, and the two parties signed a System Authorization and Use Agreement. This kind of legacy system dependence is relatively common in companies incubated and spun off from within a group and is a fact voluntarily disclosed in the prospectus.

Regarding fundraising projects, six projects together involve total planned raised funds of about RMB 6 billion, including RMB 1.534 billion for the Hikrobot Intelligent Manufacturing Tonglu Base Project, RMB 1.166 billion for the Product Industrialization Base Construction Project, RMB 831 million for the Next-Generation Mobile Robot Platform Technology and Product R&D Project, RMB 777 million for the Next-Generation Machine Vision Perception Technology and Product R&D Project, RMB 762 million for the Artificial Intelligence Technology and Industrial Software Platform R&D Project, and RMB 930 million for supplementing working capital.

In this fundraising structure, R&D-type projects account for nearly 40%. Together with the more than RMB 1 billion in cumulative R&D investment already disclosed, the company still treats technological iteration as an important investment direction while expanding production.

Among the risk factors voluntarily disclosed in the prospectus, the risk of a relatively large scale of related-party transactions ranks at the front. Although the proportion has continued to decline, the historically high level of supply chain dependence remains a focus of review inquiries. The risk of gross margin fluctuations in the mobile robot business follows closely, which the prospectus itself states is affected by industry competition and changes in business structure. The risks of relatively large receivables and negative cash flow from operating activities are also listed. Such issues are relatively common among technology-oriented companies in a period of rapid expansion.

As of September 30, 2022, the company also had cases involving disputes over the ownership of patent rights and patent application rights, and the prospectus did not disclose detailed information on the specific cases. During the reporting period, there were also instances in which social insurance and housing provident funds were not paid in full, which are compliance-defect-type risks. These items were all voluntarily disclosed in the original prospectus, not speculation or exaggeration by external media.

What truly deserves clarification is why the review has taken so long. According to publicly disclosed information from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the official reason given for suspension has always been the same: the financial materials exceeded their validity period, and the review could resume only after the company submitted the latest financial reports. This process was triggered four times, in June 2023, March 2024, September 2024, and March 2025, and each time it resumed after supplemental materials were submitted. In January 2025, a reply to an implementation opinion letter was completed, taking nearly a year.

This is a procedural fact publicly verifiable in the Shenzhen Stock Exchange review system and does not involve subjective interpretation of the reasons for suspension. By contrast, reports and commentary articles in some financial media have linked the phenomenon of the review not advancing for a long time to qualitative statements such as "related-party transaction issues may become a fatal wound" and "regulatory tightening on spin-off listings." Such analysis represents the media's value judgments, while the official suspension reasons disclosed by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange do not provide such qualitative characterizations, and the two should not be presented as if they were the same.

Several specific circulating figures also need to be handled cautiously, including statements such as "expected fundraising of RMB 6 billion" and "issuance of no more than 240 million shares." These figures were not found in the original filing draft reviewed this time, and the timing information in the relevant reports is abnormal. They are temporarily listed as leads pending verification and are not accepted as established facts.

As Hikrobot's review process has reached this point, what the public materials can confirm are continuously growing revenue and net profit, a gradually declining dependence on related-party transactions, a fundraising structure with nearly 40% allocated to R&D, and the official, purely procedural reason for suspension. The fact that it has been in the queue for more than 1,300 days itself constitutes the greatest news value of this report, but equating this length of time directly with some undisclosed substantive obstacle currently lacks support from official documents.

Whether this company, which started with technical resources backed by Hikvision and has continued to prove its independent operating capability, can ultimately complete the registration step still has to be answered by documents subsequently disclosed by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.