JiHao Tech IPO Analysis: Pros and Cons of Being No. 2 in Smartphone Fingerprint Sensors [Analysis]

Just finished analyzing Jihao Technology's prospectus, and a few numbers made me stop and take a second look.

First, a three-year revenue compound growth rate of 50.1%. In a smartphone fingerprint recognition market that has matured, where leader Goodix holds a 49.3% share, this growth rate is indeed striking. Second, gross margins climbed from 26.3% to 37.6%, driven by an increased proportion of high-margin optical fingerprint sensors, while low-margin capacitive fingerprint sensors (with only 15% gross margin) remained stagnant. This structural change is clear: Jihao is migrating from mid-low end to mid-high end.

What concerns me more is customer concentration. The single largest customer accounts for 41.4% of revenue, and the top five customers combined account for 89.6%. Moreover, Jihao doesn't deal directly with terminal brands but goes through module manufacturers and distributors, creating two layers of intermediaries. This means bargaining power is constrained by intermediate links, and order visibility is low. Compared to Goodix Technology, which supplies phone brands directly, their channel control is stronger.

Another debatable point is valuation. The post-money valuation was 1.89 billion in the Pre-A round in 2022 and 1.95 billion in the Series A in 2024—almost no increase in two years. Meanwhile, the HKEX listing threshold requires a market cap of at least 4 billion HKD. This suggests primary markets still have doubts about this story, and any valuation uplift is entirely bet on the IPO.

Founder Chen Keqing is 35, with a bachelor's and master's from Tsinghua and a background from Megvii; the team also includes former Megvii executives. This background is persuasive in the AI perception field, but the real variable lies in smart glasses and embodied intelligence—technical service NRE revenue surged to 39.96 million with a 62.3% gross margin, but the volume is too small. The "data flywheel + unified multimodal model" sounds nice, but currently, only smart glasses solutions from Xiaomi, Honor, and two others have been validated, and embodied intelligence sensor modules won't be completed until Q2 2026.

I think Jihao's core problem is: How long can the ceiling for fingerprint sensors hold? Can smart glasses and embodied intelligence take the baton as a second curve? Or will it become a short-lived "selling shovels" story, trapped in the middle before giants strike back?

What do you guys think about this trajectory?

https://36kr.com/p/3887659913083392?f=rss