(Yicai) Sept. 7 -- Moore Threads, which went public late last year and is often called “China’s Nvidia,” plunged by its 20 percent daily trading limit after the first tranche of lockup shares became tradable.

Moore Threads [SHA: 688795] finished at CNY415.48 (USD61.90) per share in Shanghai today, taking its market capitalization to below CNY200 billion (USD29.8 billion) for the first time.

Some 25.8 million shares, allocated to institutional investors in the initial public offering’s offline placement and making up 5.5 percent of Moore Threads' shares outstanding, became tradable today, the Beijing-based company announced last month. They had been subject to a nine-month lockup period.

A sudden increase in share float means more shares become available for trading. If investors sell when their shares are unlocked and buyer demand does not increase in equal measure, the stock price can fall.

Moore Threads went public on Dec. 5 at an offering price of CNY114.28, ending 425 percent higher at CNY600.50 on its debut and peaking at CNY941.08 on its fifth trading day. Investors who bought at CNY114.28 and still hold the stock have made a paper gain of about 263 percent.

Under the rules for Chinese mainland-listed firms, another 185.9 million shares of Moore Threads will be unlocked on Dec. 7, making up almost 40 percent of its shares outstanding.

Established in 2020, Moore Threads was the first of China’s "four little GPU dragons” to go public. The other three -- Metax Integrated Circuits, Biren Technology, and Iluvatar Corex Semiconductor -- have followed it.

The share price decline comes despite a major improvement in Moore Threads' financial performance. Benefiting from increasing demand for domestic artificial intelligence chips to replace imports, the firm shrank its first-half net loss by 96 percent to CNY11.6 million (USD1.7 million) from a year ago on a 147 percent surge in revenue to CNY1.7 billion (USD253.4 million).

Editors: Dou Shicong, Martin Kadiev