(Source: Silver Persimmon Finance).

In 2024, NOVOSENSE's R&D expenses will be 540 million yuan, accounting for 27.55% of revenue, the number of R&D personnel will increase to 560, and 62 new intellectual property projects will be authorized, with a total of 407.

A few days ago, NOVOSENSE (688052. SH) released its 2024 annual report. According to the financial report, last year, the company achieved operating income of 1.96 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 49.53%. Specifically, NOVOSENSE has increased its single-quarter operating income from 362 million yuan in the first quarter to 594 million yuan in the fourth quarter, and its overall operation is in a rapid growth trend, and the net cash flow generated by operating activities for the whole year is 95.0533 million yuan, achieving a positive return.

After the release of the above results, the share price of NOVOSENSE rose by 20cm on April 11 and rose for many consecutive days, with the latest market value of nearly 29 billion yuan.

According to the data, NOVOSENSE is a high-performance and high-reliability analog and mixed-signal chip company, focusing on organizing product development around downstream application scenarios, focusing on the three major product directions of sensors, signal chain and power management, and is widely used in the fields of automotive, pan-energy and consumer electronics.

The share of automotive electronics continues to increase

For the substantial growth of revenue, NOVOSENSE said in the financial report that with the steady growth of demand in the downstream automotive electronics field, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles continues to increase, and the company's automotive electronics-related products continue to increase, making the company's revenue in 2024 reach a new high.

According to data released by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, the sales of new energy vehicles in China will reach 12.888 million units in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 35.5%, accounting for 40.9% of the total sales of new vehicles, an increase of 9.3 percentage points from 2023.

Compared with fuel vehicles, the three-electric system, charging module, and intelligent cockpit of new energy vehicles require corresponding analog chips for control or transmission, and the amount of chips has increased exponentially. Taking B-class models as an example, the number of analog chips used in traditional fuel vehicles is about 160, while the number of pure electric vehicles needs to be equipped with more than 400.

According to the financial report, the revenue of NOVOSENSE in the field of automotive electronics accounted for 36.88% last year, an increase of 5.93 percentage points year-on-year. During the reporting period, in the face of strong market demand, the company launched new products such as power path protection, small motor drive SoC, angle sensor, etc., and has been able to provide more than 3,300 products and solutions.

Among them, in the direction of the driver chip of the electronic control part of the power motor, the company's multi-channel tail lamp driver chip, magnetic current sensor chip and some interface chips have entered the stage of stable mass production, and achieved large-scale shipments, driving the shipments in the field of automotive electronics to reach 363 million, and the cumulative shipments have exceeded 668 million.

NOVOSENSE further stated that the company will continue to drive product iteration with technological innovation, deepen collaboration with leading customers, and continue to increase its market share and industry influence in the field of automotive electronic chips.

It is reported that the generation of isolation products with integrated isolation power supply launched by NOVOSENSE has excellent performance in EMI performance, reaching the highest EMC level of automotive grade, and in the direction of general interface, the new generation of CAN chips has reached the domestic leading level in EMC performance. In addition, the company's MCU+ products used in the automotive electronic actuator market have shipped more than 2 million pieces, and have been successfully introduced into a number of mainstream car manufacturers, and the market penetration rate continues to increase.

NOVOSENSE has also reached in-depth strategic cooperation with overseas leading Tier1 suppliers to jointly develop chip products suitable for its next-generation global platform, and quickly integrate into the supply chain system of mainstream automobile manufacturers with the help of its global channel network. At the same time, in order to make better use of the international capital market and diversify financing channels, NOVOSENSE also announced in March that it plans to go public in Hong Kong, which is expected to further promote the internationalization strategy and further enhance the company's comprehensive competitiveness.

The second growth curve is promising

The continuous investment in the automotive electronics industry has also laid a solid foundation for NOVOSENSE to make breakthroughs in other fields.

According to the financial report, last year, NOVOSENSE's R&D expenses were 540 million yuan, accounting for 27.55% of revenue, and the R&D expenses increased by 44.57% year-on-year after excluding share payments, the number of R&D personnel increased to 560, and 62 new intellectual property projects were authorized, with a total of 407.

Taking the humanoid robot industry as an example, analog chips play a key role in humanoid robots, and are widely used in many core fields such as power management, signal conversion and processing, communication interfaces, sensor signal processing, and motor drive and control of humanoid robots.

In recent years, the humanoid robot market has entered a rapid development track and is expected to maintain a rapid growth trend in the next few years. From the perspective of market space, humanoid robots are expected to become a blue ocean market of 100 billion US dollars.

According to the forecast of the Advanced Industry Research Institute (GGII), the global humanoid robot market will reach $15.1 billion in 2030, with a CAGR of more than 56% from 2024 to 2030, and the global sales of humanoid robots will increase from 11,900 to 605,700 units. This will undoubtedly drive the demand for analog chips to continue to grow, especially in the fields of high-performance power management, high-speed signal conversion and processing, and high-precision sensor signal processing.

Domestic enterprises such as NOVOSENSE are expected to build differentiated competitive advantages in high-end application scenarios such as closed-loop control of servo motors and flexible tactile perception by virtue of process innovation and algorithm optimization.

According to the analysis of Guohai Securities, considering that NOVOSENSE has technical and customer barriers in the field of analog chips in the field of vehicle specification and pan-industry, it is expected to take the lead in benefiting from the localization trend of related chips, and the company's epitaxial mergers and acquisitions are expected to continue to expand the company's revenue volume in parallel with endogenous growth.