Shanghai Xihe Technology: The Silicon Photonics Chip Ramp Curve from 6.22 Million to 460 Million Yuan

The operating revenue of Shanghai Xihe Technology Co., Ltd. grew from 6.2270 million yuan in 2023 to 461 million yuan in 2025, a three-year compound growth rate of 760.34%. Alongside this steep growth curve, another set of figures has changed in tandem: the proportion of revenue contributed by the company's largest customer fell from 60.40% in 2025 to 55.55% in the first half of 2026, with customer concentration slowly shifting down from an extremely high level.

Placed together, these two curves form the two coordinates for understanding the current stage of development of this silicon photonics integrated chip company.

Xihe Technology was founded in May 2021 and converted into a joint-stock company in November 2025. It is registered in Shanghai. The actual controller, Wu Aimin, graduated from the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, majoring in microelectronics and solid-state electronics. From 2008 to January 2026, he successively served as an assistant researcher, associate researcher, and researcher at the institute. From 2013 to 2014, he was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Before the IPO, he controlled a total of 45.3944% of the company's voting rights through multiple shareholding platforms.

This career path from a research institute to the founder of a chip company forms the academic foundation of the company's technical team.

The company is mainly engaged in the research and development, design, and sales of high-performance silicon photonics integrated chips. Its products cover multiple speed grades including 400G, 800G, and 1.6T, and it has exhibited 3.2T and 6.4T NPO/CPO samples. The prospectus cites Frost & Sullivan data stating that the company's global market share in 2025 was approximately 13%. Silicon photonics technology is one of the fastest-growing segments in the optical communications industry in recent years. It uses mature silicon-based semiconductor manufacturing processes to produce optoelectronic devices, which can reduce production costs while ensuring performance. This is also why international chip giants continue to increase their investment in the silicon photonics field.

Xihe Technology's explosive revenue growth is essentially riding the industry rhythm of global data centers upgrading optical communications infrastructure to address AI computing power demand.

In terms of financial data, the company's net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was negative 28.3405 million yuan in 2023, narrowing to negative 22.4625 million yuan in 2024, and turning profitable at 176 million yuan in 2025, further reaching 160 million yuan in the first half of 2026, already exceeding the full-year level of 2025. In terms of gross margin, it was 80.78% in 2023, fell to 50.75% in 2024 due to cost amortization in the early stage of mass production, and rebounded to 62.82% in 2025 as economies of scale and wafer procurement costs declined. This V-shaped gross margin curve reflects that the company is moving from the early mass production ramp-up stage into a stage of large-scale cost reduction.

In terms of product structure, 400G products contributed 92.47% of revenue in 2025, 800G accounted for 5.49%, and 1.6T accounted for 2.04%. The company is upgrading its product structure toward higher speeds. As of June 30, 2026, the company's orders on hand are expected to achieve sales revenue (including tax) of 1.421 billion yuan for the full year of 2026, a further leap from full-year revenue in 2025.

What supports this growth curve is the company's technical accumulation in silicon photonics chip design. The prospectus discloses that the company has seven core technologies, covering ultra-low-loss coupling technology between silicon photonics chips and optical fibers and lasers, low-power high-speed silicon photonics modulation technology, low-loss low-crosstalk broadband on-chip multiplexing and demultiplexing technology, highly reliable silicon photonics chip technology resistant to high-temperature and high-humidity environments, efficient and high-precision wafer-level chip testing methods, multi-channel coherent reception integration technology, and high-tolerance silicon photonics integration technology based on micron-level top silicon.

As of 2025, the company had obtained a cumulative total of 21 patented technologies, covering key links such as optoelectronic sensing, precision optical components, and silicon photonics integrated chips.

Returning to the customer structure. The proportion of Xihe Technology's largest customer was 60.40% in 2025 and fell to 55.55% in the first half of 2026. This customer contributed 278 million yuan in revenue in 2025. During the reporting period, the company's overseas revenue share also rose rapidly from 1.14% in 2023 to 47.51% in 2025, mainly because this major customer is an overseas customer and demand was rapidly released.

The proportion of sales from the top five customers in revenue from 2023 to the first half of 2026 was 100%, 98.41%, 96.40%, and 92.26%, respectively, showing a year-by-year downward trend. The number of customers had increased to 46 by 2025, indicating that the company is gradually expanding its customer base from reliance on a single major customer.

The company's equity structure also reflects long-term optimism among venture capital for this technology route. Before the IPO, the list of major shareholders, in addition to the shareholding platform controlled by Wu Aimin himself, also included dozens of venture capital institutions such as Xinding Shengba, Aocheng Venture Capital, Juyuan Zhenxin, Datai Capital, and Shenzhen Dachen. The concentrated entry of such institutions focused on hard technology tracks generally reflects the investment community's recognition of the company's technology route and team background.

This combination of a technical team emerging from a research institute and diversified venture capital has a certain representativeness among startups in frontier semiconductor niche fields such as silicon photonics chips.

Upstream suppliers are likewise concentrated. The procurement share of the main wafer foundry was 54.54% in 2023 and rose to 90.08% in the first half of 2026. This structure of concentration at both the customer and supply chain ends is a common feature of emerging niche fields such as silicon photonics chips in the early stage of industrialization.

The company's prepayment balance reached 134 million yuan at the end of 2025, mainly used to lock in capacity with core wafer foundries. In fields such as silicon photonics chips that have high requirements for wafer manufacturing processes, locking in capacity in advance is a common practice to ensure delivery capability, and it also indirectly reflects the company's expectations for future order growth.

In this IPO, Xihe Technology plans to use the raised funds for projects including improving the industrialization capability of silicon photonics integrated chips for AI computing power and data centers, the research and development and industrialization of next-generation silicon photonics integrated chips, and the construction of an R&D center. Among them, the next-generation silicon photonics integrated chip R&D and industrialization project has the largest investment scale, focusing on the research and development of single-channel 400G and NPO/CPO multi-channel high-density chips. The direction of the fundraising projects is consistent with the company's technology route of upgrading its existing mainstream 400G products to higher speeds.

The company's STAR Market IPO was accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange on June 30, 2026, and it disclosed its response to the first round of inquiries on August 21. The current review status is "under inquiry," and the sponsor institution is Guotai Haitong Securities. Whether Xihe Technology can gradually expand its revenue structure from high concentration to balance while maintaining cooperation with its existing major customers, the growth rate of the list of 46 customers disclosed in the prospectus will be a specific indicator that can be verified in subsequent inquiry responses.