On the evening of February 28, Haiguang Information (688041. SH) released its 2024 annual report, which not only opened the curtain of the annual report of the semiconductor sector, but also brought clearer information to investors: how much business increment can the development of domestic computing power bring to listed companies in the industrial chain?

Driven by the demand for AI and the recovery of the semiconductor cycle, Haiguang Information recorded the best performance level since its listing three years ago, and the net profit of operating income increased by more than 50% year-on-year, and the revenue in the fourth quarter hit a record high, but the net profit fell by nearly 40 percentage points quarter-on-quarter.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Lu Xiangtong carried out the largest single-quarter increase in Haiguang Information, with a net purchase of 14.815 million shares, which has made a lot of money. Since the "9.24" market, Haiguang Information's share price has doubled, with a cumulative increase of 111%, and a cumulative increase of 6.82% since the beginning of this year. On February 28, the technology sector was fully "dumb fire", which was the first collective sharp retreat since the current round of market, and Haiguang Information closed down 5.88% at 160 yuan, with a total market value of 371.9 billion yuan.

The annual performance reached a new high, and the profit in the fourth quarter fell sequentially

Haiguang Information's main business is engaged in high-end processor design, the main products include Haiguang general-purpose processor (CPU) and Haiguang co-processor (DCU), and the main customers are server manufacturers. Among them, CPU products are used in data centers in telecommunications, finance, Internet and other industries, and DCU series products are used in big data processing, artificial intelligence, business computing and other fields.

According to the financial report, Haiguang Information will achieve operating income of 9.162 billion yuan in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 52.4%, a net profit attributable to the parent of 1.931 billion yuan, and a net profit of 1.816 billion yuan after deducting non-profits, a year-on-year increase of 52.87% and 59.79% respectively. In terms of dividends, Haiguang Information plans to distribute cash dividends of 1.70 yuan (tax included) for every 10 shares, with a total dividend of 394 million yuan and a dividend payment rate of 20.42%.

Looking at the fourth quarter of last year alone, although Haiguang Information hit a new high in revenue scale, the net profit that declined quarter-on-quarter was a hidden worry. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the company's operating income reached 3.025 billion yuan, an increase of 46.22% and 27.47% year-on-year respectively, and the net profit attributable to the parent company was 405 million yuan, down 39.72% from the previous quarter, and the net profit attributable to the parent company after deducting non-profits fell by more than 48.14% from the previous quarter.

As for the reasons for the annual performance growth, Haiguang Information said that the company continued to maintain high-intensity R&D investment around the general computing market, continuously achieved technological innovation and product performance improvement, won more widespread recognition from users, further expanded the application field of products, and further increased the proportion of the domestic market, which promoted the significant growth of the company's performance.

In terms of R&D investment, Haiguang Information's R&D investment in 2024 will total 3.446 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.63%, and due to the substantial growth of the company's revenue, the proportion of R&D investment in revenue will decrease by 9.13 percentage points year-on-year to 37.61%. According to the financial report, among the research projects of Haiguang Information, the capitalization projects such as the engineering technology of the new generation of Haiguang coprocessor products have been accepted and completed; The R&D progress of expense-based projects such as the research and development of key technologies of Haiguang processors and the design of new generation Haiguang general-purpose processor chips has been accelerated, and the investment has increased a lot.

Data is the basis for various large-scale AI use cases, and the global server CPU market is currently monopolized by Intel and AMD, with domestic CPUs having a global market share of less than 2%, and the GPU market being mainly monopolized by NVIDIA.

Haiguang Coprocessor (DCU) products are the most concerned by investors, mainly deployed in server clusters or data centers, providing high-performance and energy-efficient computing power for applications, and supporting high-complexity and high-throughput data processing tasks. Shanghai Securities Research Report believes that Haiguang DCU coprocessor can better adapt and adapt to international mainstream commercial computing software and artificial intelligence software, and has a rich software and hardware ecology. On this basis, Haiguang has also created an independent and open complete software stack, including "DTK (DCUToolkit)", development tool chain, model warehouse, etc., which is fully compatible with "CUDA" and "ROCm" ecosystems.

There is a divergence between the cross-border and public shareholdings

As of the end of the fourth quarter of last year, the company's inventory was 5.425 billion yuan, an increase of 39.224% from 3.896 billion yuan in the third quarter, and an increase of 4.351 billion yuan from 1.074 billion yuan in the same period last year, an increase of 405.09% year-on-year.

Haiguang Information said that the company's strategic inventory increase was due to the initiative to increase inventory in response to the growth of market demand and ensure the stability of the supply chain, and as of the end of the period, the inventory accounted for 19% of total assets.

The actions of institutional investors provided in the annual report are the focus of the market. In the second quarter of 2024, Lu Hongtong bought the top ten shareholders of Haiguang Information for the first time, and continued to increase its holdings in the third and fourth quarters, increasing its holdings by 14,814,900 shares in the fourth quarter, the highest purchase rate since entering the top ten shareholders. As of the end of 2024, Lu Xiangtong held 68,201,500 shares of Haiguang Information, accounting for 2.83% of the total share capital.

The

number of shares held by the fund decreased from the third quarter, while the number of funds held increased from the third quarter. According to Oriental Choice data, as of the end of the fourth quarter, 469 funds held 302 million shares of Haiguang Information, compared with 330 and 343 million shares at the end of the third quarter, of which broad-based index funds were the main fund investors.

ChinaAMC SSE STAR Market 50 Constituent ETF is still the fund with the highest number of shares, with 60.8906 million shares, reducing its holdings by 11.2066 million shares in the fourth quarter, and E Fund SSE STAR Market ETF, which holds the second largest shares, also reduced its holdings by 4.8233 million shares, down to 38.9081 million shares, ranking the tenth largest shareholder. ChinaAMC CNI Semiconductor Chip ETF also reduced its holdings by about 4.466 million shares in the fourth quarter, while ChinaAMC SSE 50 ETF reduced its holdings by nearly 1.3 million shares.

(This article is from Yicai).