The robotics sector has experienced a typical cycle in the capital markets over the past two years: from a sentiment peak driven by concepts to a cooling-off period as focus gradually returned to commercial realities. Particularly in the Hong Kong stock market, investors have become notably more selective—they no longer pay for "technological imagination" alone, instead repeatedly asking more fundamental questions: Where does the revenue come from? Is the order flow sustainable? Can gross margins improve? Is the path to profitability clear?

Recently, LDROBOT (01236), which commenced its IPO on the Hong Kong Exchange, finds itself at a微妙 juncture. It is neither a company purely telling an AI story, nor has it fully entered a mature, profitable phase. Instead, it is in an intermediate state that warrants market re-rating: its technology has been validated, losses are narrowing, and commercialization is scaling up. This status also implies that the market's logic for pricing it is shifting from intangible "expectation games" towards empirical scrutiny of "commercial certainty."

LDROBOT is now attempting to provide answers to the market on how robots can be truly deployed, how barriers are built, and how technology translates into business, through a two-pronged strategy combining its visual perception foundation and the scalability of whole-unit exports.

**Embedding into Mainstream Supply Chains: Building a Solid Foundation as a "Perception Infrastructure" Provider** The robotics industry has never been short on narratives. Whether humanoid robots, service robots, or AI-powered smart devices, the capital market has previously granted immense potential for imagination. However, over time, a reality has emerged: most companies struggle to convert technological advantages into stable revenue and profit models. The Hong Kong market is particularly sensitive to this. Compared to the US market's preference for long-term narratives, Hong Kong's capital structure places greater emphasis on short-to-medium-term operational certainty. Consequently, the valuation anchor for robotics companies in Hong Kong is shifting from "technological leadership" to "commercialization capability."

In this regard, LDROBOT presents a relatively uncommon case study. Firstly, in terms of revenue scale, the company has achieved rapid growth over the past three years. According to its prospectus, revenue grew from approximately RMB 277 million in 2023 to RMB 748 million in 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of about 64.4%. This growth is not driven by a single product but stems from two dimensions: the continuous scaling of visual perception products, and the growth of its robotic lawn mower business from virtually zero revenue to a significant scale.

Secondly, regarding customer structure, LDROBOT's visual perception products have entered the supply chains of mainstream robotics manufacturers. Its clientele covers seven of the world's top ten home service robot companies, and all of the top five commercial service robot companies. More crucially, customer retention and revenue retention metrics indicate a degree of stickiness: from 2023 to 2025, the company's customer retention rate increased from 84% to 100%, and its net revenue retention rate consistently exceeded 100%. Such metrics are not common among hardware-plus-technology companies, suggesting that customers are not only staying but also increasing their purchases.

In terms of gross margin and profitability, although the company remains loss-making, the trend is improving. The overall gross margin recovered to 25.7% in 2025, while the adjusted net loss margin narrowed from -20.2% in 2023 to -3.5% in 2025. This reflects the gradual emergence of scale effects and optimization of the product mix.

In other words, LDROBOT's core value lies in having crossed one of the toughest thresholds in the robotics industry: moving from "capable of production" to "capable of selling." The most critical investment thesis for LDROBOT is that it is not merely a hardware OEM. Through intensive R&D on core components like LiDAR and algorithm modules, it has become a provider of "perception infrastructure" for intelligent robots. This "selling shovels" business model endows LDROBOT with strong risk resistance and market penetration—even if brand landscapes in the downstream whole-unit market reshuffle, as long as the trend towards intelligence persists, LDROBOT, as an infrastructure supplier, can continue to profit from technology reuse.

**Prying Open the Global Lawn Care Market: Building a "B2B Support + B2C Breakout" Profitability Loop** If visual perception is LDROBOT's "shield," then the whole-unit export business, represented by robotic lawn mowers, is its most potent "spear." In secondary market valuation systems, pure component companies are often constrained by the prosperity of their downstream customers, whereas companies with whole-unit definition capabilities can leverage higher gross margins and brand premiums by directly reaching end consumers.

Currently, the global robotic lawn mower market is in a technological transition window, shifting from traditional "boundary wire" systems to "vision-guided, wire-free" navigation. Traditional mowers are not only inefficient but also involve high installation and maintenance costs. Leveraging its accumulation in visual perception, LDROBOT selected robotic lawn mowers as its second growth curve, directly launching intelligent mowers based on full-stack visual algorithms.

At CES 2026, LDROBOT's new N-series and M-series products won multiple international awards. Their proposed "full-cycle lawn care" concept integrates mowing, collection, and cleaning into one system. This generational advantage in product capability allowed it to quickly gain traction in the Western lawn and garden economy. In 2024, the company's robotic lawn mower sales surpassed the ten-thousand-unit mark, and revenue from this business saw explosive growth in the first half of 2025.

As the whole-unit business scales, the company's overall profit structure has optimized. In terms of gross margin performance, LDROBOT's robotic lawn mowers achieved a high gross margin of 42.3% in 2025, significantly above the average for its visual perception products. This directly drove the company's overall gross margin to increase markedly from 19.5% in 2024 to 25.7% in 2025.

It is worth noting that the export business signifies not only a broader market but also higher willingness to pay and a more favorable profit environment. By adopting a "technology foundation + vertical scenario" model, LDROBOT successfully avoided the intensely competitive "red ocean" of the domestic robotic vacuum cleaner market, instead carving out a second front in the more consumption-elastic overseas lawn care market. This transition not only demonstrates the transferability of its technology platform but also showcases its strong commercial acumen and engineering execution capabilities.

The core pricing consideration post-IPO essentially revolves around the market's expectation of whether LDROBOT can replicate the lawn mower model into more vertical categories while maintaining the stability of its visual perception foundation. Based on current trends, the adjusted net loss margin plummeted from 20.2% in 2023 to 3.5% in 2025, leaving it just a step away from absolute profitability in financial terms.

For the Hong Kong market, a robotics company on the verge of crossing the breakeven point, with a clear overseas growth logic, will see its valuation rationale shift from a pure Price-to-Sales (PS) model towards a Price-to-Earnings (PE) model that incorporates both growth and profit certainty.

Standing at the threshold of its Hong Kong IPO, the logic for assessing LDROBOT's value is clear. The company is undergoing a valuation paradigm shift. As the platform effects of its visual perception foundation materialize and its robotic lawn mower business booms overseas, its commercial profile is poised to evolve into an embodied AI pioneer characterized by "high margins, high growth, and high barriers."

In the robotics sector, through the reuse of underlying technology, LDROBOT has established a profitability loop spanning from components to whole units, and from B2B installation volume to C2C brand premium. In the future, whether the company can achieve the remarkable leap from losses to scaled profitability through continuous empowerment by AI large models and global production capacity layout will determine its long-term premium level in the secondary market.