Lidar sensor maker Hesai rakes in record quarterly revenue as China's EV makers accelerate autonomous-driving adoption

Hesai Group, the world's sixth-largest maker of sensors for smart cars, raked in record revenue in the first quarter of this year, benefiting from Chinese carmakers' stepped up efforts to make their electric vehicles more intelligent capable of autonomous driving.

The Shanghai-based company reported revenue of 429.9 million yuan (US$61 million) for the three months ended March 31, up 73 per cent year on year, according to the earnings report it filed to the Nasdaq after the market close on Tuesday.

Hesai said it shipped 28,195 advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors - key components in vehicles with preliminary autonomous driving technology - between January and March, a 12,600 per cent increase compared to 222 units in the same period last year.

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But Hesai, which counts Li Auto, Jidu and Lotus as clients, posted a net loss of 118.9 million yuan for the quarter due to high research-and-development costs, which jumped 99.2 per cent to 208.5 million yuan.

The company said it had secured orders for its lidar sensors from 11 car assemblers and it expects deliveries for use in smart vehicles to climb 40 per cent in the second quarter, compared with the first quarter.

"Smart vehicles, particularly smart electric cars, with autonomous driving technology and digital cockpits, represent the trend of the automotive industry," said Gao Shen, an independent analyst in Shanghai. "Customers can benefit from lower cost of the sensors when a large volume of the products are made by lidar makers."

Overall deliveries of all types of lidar sensors rose 403 per cent from a year ago to 34,834 units. The company's non-ADAS lidar sensors find use in applications such as robotics and agricultural vehicles.

Louis Hsieh, chief financial officer of Hesai, said in a statement after publishing the first-quarter earnings that the company's sales and a backlog of orders would help it maintain its leading position in the ADAS lidar segment.

China is the world's largest automotive and electric vehicle (EV) market with deliveries of pure electric and plug-in hybrid cars expected to hit 8.8 million units in 2023, up 35 per cent on year, according to UBS analyst Paul Gong.

Up to 15 per cent of all new EVs will have at least partial automation within the next three years, according to Baidu, China's dominant internet search engine operator, which created an open-source autonomous driving platform in 2017.

That translates to about 400 million smart cars that can drive on highways as well as city roads, and park themselves with partial or conditional human intervention.

China supplies about 60 per cent of vehicle lidar sensors globally.

Lidar sensors, widely adopted by Chinese EV builders, are viewed by automotive industry officials as an essential component in developing fully autonomous driving vehicles.

Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk is a lidar sceptic because of its installation cost, uses an array of cameras, a global positioning system and radar in its EVs.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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