Hesai Technology Series ③
October 8, 2026

Cover image: Hesai official website illustration of lawn mower robot application.

Dreame and MOVA's robot lawn mowers have brought Hesai a lidar order on the scale of tens of millions of units. That number is far larger than Hesai's total robot lidar shipments of roughly 240,000 units in 2025.

The order is eye-catching enough, and the questions become concrete as a result. Can lawn mowers push Hesai's robot lidar to annual sales of one million units and leave behind meaningful profit?

The first two articles broke down profitability and customers respectively. This one looks only at the business on the lawn. Materials verified as of October 8, 2026; the latest quarterly financial report remains the unaudited second-quarter results disclosed on August 18.

First, put the ten-million-unit order back into its original framing

The full-year results announcement on March 24 disclosed that Hesai signed robot lawn mower lidar orders with customers including Dreame and MOVA, with a backlog exceeding 10 million units. On March 26, the official website further stated that Hesai is the exclusive lidar supplier for Dreame-system robot lawn mowers.

Excerpt from Hesai's March 24 results announcement. What is disclosed here is an order, with no annual delivery plan listed.

But these two announcements did not give the total order value, unit price, the year delivery is to be completed, or disclose minimum purchase commitments and cancellation terms. Using 10 million units to directly calculate this year's revenue lacks the most critical time and price information.

Being the exclusive lidar supplier also does not mean every lawn mower the customer sells is equipped with lidar. Which navigation solution the customer chooses determines how fast this order can ultimately move.

What lidar sells is the elimination of installation hassle

MOVA's LiDAX Ultra product materials combine a 360-degree 3D lidar with a camera for mapping, obstacle recognition, and navigation. The manufacturer emphasizes that users do not need to lay boundary wires or install an RTK base station. RTK is a high-precision satellite positioning solution.

For people buying a lawn mower, having one less device to install and being able to move it to a different yard easily is easier to understand than how many lines the lidar has. This is why I am bullish on this application. The machine only needs to do one thing well over the long term—mow the lawn—and consumers can directly judge whether it saves them effort.

However, saving effort can be achieved through different technologies. MOVA's January new product announcement states clearly that the ViAX 250 and 300 use binocular vision, and only the ViAX 500 adds a 360-degree lidar. eufy's E15 and E18 also market pure vision navigation as a selling point.

MOVA official website announcement from January 8, captured on October 8. The original text distinguishes the ViAX 250/300's binocular vision from the 500's lidar combination.

This also limits Hesai's official website claim that "all lawn mowers within the system come standard with lidar." At least judging from the customer's public product line, it cannot be extended to mean every model uses lidar. Growth in lawn mower sales, an increase in the share of lidar solutions, and Hesai actually winning orders are things that need to be verified separately.

Where deliveries currently stand

Hesai shipped 260,653 robot lidar units in the first half of 2026, already exceeding the full year of 2025. Second-quarter shipments were 142,371 units, up 193.4% year-over-year and about 20.4% quarter-over-quarter. The quarterly curve shows demand is continuing to expand.

Figure 1 is calculated based on company disclosures and cumulative values. The category includes lawn mowers, unmanned delivery, Robotaxi, and other applications; it is not a lawn-mower-specific statistic.

In the public transcript of the August 18 earnings call, the CFO said that most of this year's robot lidar shipments come from lawn mowers, and the relevant customers are mainly Chinese manufacturers targeting Europe; full-year robot lidar is still expected to exceed 500,000 units. This is management's business judgment and expectation; full-year deliveries are not yet complete.

In other words, lawn mowers are already contributing in the current period, but annual sales of one million units remain to be verified. Half-year data cannot simply be doubled, and a cumulative order of ten million units cannot be treated as annual demand. End sales to European customers, channel inventory, and the next round of stocking will all affect the pace of lidar procurement.

How much is one million units actually worth

For investors, unit numbers must be connected to revenue. Let's do a purely arithmetic example: assuming 1 million units delivered at 200 yuan per lidar, revenue would be 200 million yuan, equivalent to about 6.6% of Hesai's 2025 group revenue of 3.028 billion yuan. The 200 yuan figure is only an example; public materials have not disclosed JT's actual average selling price.

Figure 2 is an author's calculation example, not an order value forecast. All unit prices are assumptions, and no profit estimate is made based on them.

This example shows that one million units can significantly change the sales mix, but the revenue weight depends on unit price. Costs have not yet been factored in, and profit certainly cannot be directly inferred. The retail price of the complete lawn mower also cannot be used to back-calculate the lidar price.

The 2025 results announcement stated that robot lidar generally has a higher gross margin than ADAS lidar. But the robot category also includes products with different price and performance requirements, and this statement is not enough to prove that low-priced lawn mower lidar can also maintain the same gross margin level.

Next, I will prioritize looking at whether the company discloses actual lawn mower lidar deliveries, robot lidar revenue and gross margin, and the annual fulfillment schedule for the ten-million-unit order. If shipments continue to rise but revenue growth clearly cannot keep up, the product mix and prices still need to be broken down—we cannot just celebrate unit numbers.

Lawn mowers have already provided Hesai's robot business with