Shenzhen Is Set to Deliver Another Satellite IPO Breakout

Hong Kong’s capital market is welcoming another “hard-tech” contender from Shenzhen. Huada Beidou, a satellite navigation specialist, has submitted its prospectus and is preparing to pursue an IPO in Hong Kong.

After nearly a decade of focused development in satellite navigation, Huada Beidou has built a strong foothold in shared mobility. The company has delivered more than 15 million navigation and positioning chips to the bike-sharing sector, enabling high-precision positioning services for roughly 90% of shared bicycles nationwide. Beyond this, its products have expanded into multiple application areas, including consumer electronics and environmental monitoring.

The company’s latest growth narrative is taking shape around the low-altitude economy. According to its prospectus, Huada Beidou’s multi-frequency, multi-constellation SoC chips—such as the HD8145 series—support Beidou, GPS, and other major satellite systems. With capabilities designed for centimeter-level accuracy, low power consumption, and strong performance under signal obstruction, these chips are well-suited to navigation and positioning needs for drones and eVTOL aircraft.

A Founding Mission Driven by Satellite Navigation “Dreamers”

Huada Beidou was born from a clear ambition shared by a group of satellite navigation “dreamers”: to break foreign technological dependence in this critical field.

The prospectus shows the company originated from a navigation chip business within China Electronics Corporation (CEC). It was jointly backed by a mix of strategic and industrial investors, including CEC-related entities and major automotive groups such as SAIC and BAIC, along with listed companies such as BIRD (600130.SH) and Jinjia (002191.SZ). The founder, Sun Zhongliang, has long been engaged in satellite navigation chip development.

Huada Beidou was officially registered in December 2016 in Longgang District, Shenzhen. During his tenure as chairman, Sun led the team through multiple breakthroughs in high-precision positioning algorithms, advanced Beidou chip technology, and helped establish an open platform for Beidou chip development.

Through this platform, the company has provided technical support to upstream and downstream partners, accelerating industrial adoption of Beidou across a wide range of scenarios—such as intelligent driving, shared mobility, and geological disaster monitoring.

From a business trajectory perspective, Huada Beidou started in consumer-grade markets and gradually expanded into automotive-grade applications. In positioning accuracy, it progressed from standard precision to centimeter-level high precision, and further toward millimeter-level capabilities in advanced use cases.

This evolution also shaped a product strategy built around application-specific offerings. For consumer electronics, Huada Beidou developed low-cost, highly integrated navigation chips, gaining stable partnerships with multiple device makers through advantages such as low power usage, compact form factors, and reliable accuracy.

In the intelligent vehicle segment, years of technical work enabled key advances in automotive-grade reliability design and anti-interference algorithms. Huada Beidou has become a core supplier to leading new-energy automakers, with large-scale deployments in advanced driver-assistance systems—including applications in SAIC’s MG7 coupe and the Roewe “Whale” SUV. Its high-precision positioning chips are also widely used across intelligent driving, drones, precision agriculture, surveying and mapping, robotics, port automation, and other demanding high-accuracy scenarios.

With commercialization continuing to expand, revenue has maintained an upward trend. The prospectus reports that Huada Beidou’s revenue grew from RMB 698 million in 2022 to RMB 840 million in 2024. In the first half of 2025, revenue reached RMB 403 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 19.4%.

According to data from CIC Consulting cited in the filing, Huada Beidou ranked as the world’s sixth-largest and China’s second-largest GNSS chip and module provider by shipment volume in 2024, with a global market share of 4.8%. By revenue, it ranked eighth globally and third among mainland China companies, with an estimated market share of about 1.1%.

Five Funding Rounds, with National and Local Capital Joining In

Riding supportive policy momentum and continued progress in both technology and applications, Huada Beidou has attracted backing from industrial capital, local state-owned investors, and leading venture firms since its inception.

The prospectus highlights that industrial investors and local state capital have been among the most resilient pillars of the company’s growth. In 2017—just one year after founding—Huada Beidou completed its first external financing round, with Shenzhen Yuanzhi Investment (now Shenzhen Capital Group) participating by subscribing to newly issued registered capital for RMB 15 million.

Equity tracing suggests Shenzhen Yuanzhi Investment is a representative state-backed industrial capital platform. It is involved in major local stabilization funds and serves as a market-oriented implementer of Shenzhen’s emerging industry support policies, with a focus on strategic sectors such as advanced manufacturing, next-generation information technology, new energy, and new materials.

A local investor has noted that around 2017, Shenzhen identified aerospace and Beidou navigation as key strategic emerging industries, aiming to position them as future economic growth engines. The city emphasized chip R&D, terminal device manufacturing, and location-based service deployment to help fill regional gaps in Beidou navigation chip capabilities. At the same time, cultivating anchor enterprises was seen as a way to accelerate the formation of a complete Beidou industry chain. Backed by industrial heavyweights like SAIC and BAIC, and supported by state-linked shareholders, Huada Beidou was viewed as having the potential to become a “chain leader” within the ecosystem.

From 2019 to 2020, Huada Beidou completed three financing rounds in quick succession—Series A, A+, and A++—raising more than RMB 300 million in total. Investors included China Merchants International Capital, CEC-linked funds, CDH Bofang, Gree Investment, AVIC Investment, and BYD. BYD invested RMB 49.5 million in the A++ round, becoming one of Huada Beidou’s strategic shareholders.

With BYD’s participation, Huada Beidou further strengthened resource synergies across automotive, consumer electronics, and IoT. By the time of the IPO filing, BYD held 4.12% of the company, ranking as its eighth-largest shareholder.

In May 2021, the company closed a RMB 602 million Series B strategic financing round led by CPE Yuanfeng, with participation from Yunfeng Capital, CSSC Capital, TCL Capital, TusPark, and JMC Investment, while existing shareholders such as CDH Bofang, China Merchants International Capital, and AVIC Investment also increased their stakes.

In March 2022, Huada Beidou completed a Series C financing round worth several hundred million yuan, joined by National Development Bank-backed Guokai Kechuang, the Greater Bay Area Fund, and other well-known financial and industrial investors, with some existing shareholders continuing to add.

Public information indicates that following the Series C round, the company’s valuation reached RMB 4.57 billion—more than 11 times the approximately RMB 400 million valuation implied when early shareholders invested in 2017.

Huada Beidou previously submitted an IPO application in June 2025.

A Trillion-RMB Low-Altitude Economy Becomes the Next Growth Engine

As reforms in low-altitude airspace management accelerate, the low-altitude economy is shifting from policy blueprint to scaled implementation.

Under the “15th Five-Year Plan,” the low-altitude economy has been positioned as a strategic emerging pillar industry—alongside aerospace, new energy, and new materials—with an emphasis on accelerating industrial cluster development.

In this context, high-precision, highly reliable, all-weather positioning capability is becoming foundational infrastructure for safe low-altitude flight operations. This is exactly where Beidou and Huada Beidou’s technical strengths intersect.

The prospectus notes that as the low-altitude economy advances, demand is rising for higher-quality spatiotemporal information services. Huada Beidou believes GNSS satellite navigation systems can enable “space-air-ground” integrated applications, delivering precise navigation and positioning services to devices such as drones and embedding GNSS deeper into the low-altitude economy’s full industry chain—creating a meaningful new growth direction.

Huada Beidou estimates that by 2029, GNSS chip and module shipments into China’s low-altitude economy will reach 33.7 million units, representing a compound annual growth rate of 34.5% from 2024 to 2029. The company also disclosed that it is in early-stage discussions with several leading drone manufacturers regarding potential adoption of its GNSS chips in consumer drone products.

On the operational side, the filing shows that sales volume of Huada Beidou’s high-precision products has been climbing steadily—from 1.96 million units in 2022 to 5.12 million units in 2024, reaching 4.253 million units in the first half of 2025—reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 61.7%.

Beyond hardware supply, Huada Beidou is also positioning itself through a “chip + platform + ecosystem” strategy to address the low-altitude economy. On one hand, it anchors its offering with high-precision positioning chips and short-message communication chips. On the other, it provides technical platforms and integrated solutions—partnering with industry players to build a broader ecosystem around low-altitude applications.