IPO outlook | More than 1,000 new cars have been delivered, and the actual operating mileage has exceeded 100 million. How far is 01 Auto from making a profit?

Recently, Jiangsu 01 Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. (“01 Auto” for short) officially submitted a listing application to the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Goldman Sachs and Haitong International acted as co-sponsors.

Prior to this IPO, the company had already received multiple rounds of capital support. The most recent financing of 925 million yuan was completed in May 2026, and the post-investment valuation reached 7 billion yuan. According to the prospectus, the company has introduced top industry players and long-term capital partners such as Ningde Times, Temasek, Momenta, NIO Capital, Zijin Mining, Shandong Energy Group, Maotai Investment, Lenovo, and Sanhua Holdings. The shareholder lineup is luxurious.

Unlike traditional car manufacturers, which often superimpose intelligent solutions on mature fuel vehicle platforms or oil-to-electric chassis, 01 Auto aims to deeply integrate the vehicle with AI from the design process. It positions itself as the first company in the world that also has the ability to positively design vehicles and has an end-to-end multi-modal large language model for autonomous driving of heavy trucks. This “complete vehicle+big model” dual capability is quite rare among heavy truck companies that have already gone public or are planning to go public.

Against the backdrop of the continuous rise in the penetration rate of new energy heavy trucks and the overall acceleration of the capitalization process of the industry, whether 01 Auto can use this unique position to truly gain a foothold in an increasingly crowded racetrack will be the focus of the market's continuous attention.

More than 1,000 NEV heavy trucks have lost money for three consecutive years

According to public information, 01 Auto is a technology company focusing on the field of new energy intelligent heavy trucks. Its business model also covers vehicle sales and unmanned heavy truck solutions.

Judging from the performance data, the company's revenue grew rapidly during the reporting period, but losses also increased at the same time. From 2023 to 2025, the company's revenue was 1,163 million yuan, 124 million yuan, and 522 million yuan (RMB, same below); annual losses were 114 million yuan, 241 million yuan, and 281 million yuan, respectively, with a loss of 636 million yuan over three years.

The Zhitong Finance App learned that the company is mainly engaged in two major businesses: sales of new energy intelligent heavy trucks and unmanned heavy truck solutions. In 2024, 01 Auto officially launched and began delivering two new energy intelligent heavy truck models, the “Jingzhu” and “Xiaoman”.

Among them, the main application scenario of “Jingzhu” is the transportation of large resources such as coal, concrete, steel, etc., and its standard version has a retail price range of 53-680,000 yuan, and this model accounts for 38.5% of revenue in 2025; “Xiaoman” is specially tailored for short-distance transportation and regional logistics scenarios. The retail price range for the standard version is 43-600,000 yuan, and this model accounts for 58.7% of revenue in 2025.

Delivery data shows that the company's new energy smart heavy truck business has entered the large-scale delivery stage. In 2023, 2024 and 2025, the company delivered 2, 272 and 1,176 new energy smart heavy trucks respectively, setting the fastest record in the industry to achieve batch delivery of new energy smart heavy trucks using a positive definition method. In the first four months of 2026, the company delivered 778 new energy smart heavy trucks, an increase of 334.6% over the previous year.

It is worth mentioning that the company's unmanned heavy truck solution also successfully delivered 15 heavy trucks adapted to the driverless solution in 2025, and another 41 vehicles were delivered in the first four months of 2026. In 2025, this part of the business achieved a positive gross profit margin of 4.3%, mainly because the company's vehicles are equipped with wire-controlled chassis, which have higher technical content and higher sales prices. In the future, the company plans to expand the business revenue model of driverless solutions, plan to gradually begin charging technical service fees from customers, and expand unmanned heavy truck solutions to more application scenarios.

During the reporting period, the company's R&D investment continued to be high, with R&D expenses of 71.42 million yuan, 116 million yuan and 126 million yuan respectively from 2023 to 2025, of which R&D expenses accounted for 24.1% of revenue in 2025; by the end of 2025, the company's net debt reached 629 million yuan, net current liabilities amounted to 690 million yuan, and cash and cash equivalents at the end of the year were 155 million yuan.

Can a “complete vehicle+big model” create a competitive moat?

Driven by the goal of “dual carbon”, the replacement of traditional fuel heavy trucks by new energy smart heavy trucks has become an irreversible industrial wave.

In June 2026, 11 departments including the Ministry of Transport, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology jointly issued the “Implementation Plan to Promote Large-scale Application of New Energy Heavy Trucks”, which first clarified quantitative targets at the national level: by 2030, the penetration rate of new energy heavy trucks will reach 40%, and the number of NEVs owned will exceed 1.6 million vehicles, accounting for about 20%.

The Zhitong Finance App learned that previously, heavy trucks, as the market segment with the highest share of carbon emissions in the commercial vehicle sector and the largest amount of electricity for bicycles, lacked clear penetration rate guidelines for a long time. The introduction of this policy has filled the gap in macroeconomic planning. Judging from actual implementation data, from January 2025 to May 2026, the cumulative sales of new energy heavy trucks nationwide reached 337,000 units, with a market penetration rate of over 29.5%. Demand for new energy heavy trucks is rapidly penetrating from closed and short-run scenarios to medium- and long-haul trunk lines, and sales continue to rise.

The race track where the 01 car is located is a golden area where the electrification and intelligence of commercial vehicles are deeply integrated. Unlike the rear installation path of traditional car manufacturers that superimpose intelligent solutions on existing fuel vehicle platforms, 01 Auto chose the technical route of forward research and development to achieve vertical integration and self-research in core aspects such as chassis and electric drive systems.

Its self-developed “Rectangular Stone” four-in-one electric drive axle integrates a motor, gearbox, drive axle and power take-off into a lightweight unit, integrates a power take-off on the drive axle for the first time in the industry, uses an oil-cooled flat wire motor for the first time, and eliminated the drive shaft weight by more than 200 kg through mass production of a segmented axle structure, increasing the maximum efficiency of the system to 94%. At the same time, the company is the first and only company in the industry to achieve integrated mass production of multi-source heat pump vehicle-grade heat management systems. Compared with traditional PTC heating, the energy saving range can reach more than 70% under -20℃ operating conditions.

Under the collaborative optimization of the vehicle's electronic control system, these technological breakthroughs have been transformed into quantifiable energy efficiency advantages at the vehicle level — according to Frost & Sullivan data, the 4-in-1 electric drive axle of 01 has the highest transmission efficiency among mass-produced products, and the vehicle's overall energy consumption under rated load conditions can be reduced by up to 15% compared to some competitors.

Autonomous driving capability is the second differentiating point of the Zero One car. Although the technical path of autonomous driving for heavy trucks is the same as that of passenger cars, the application scenarios are more complex — tens of tons of load, longer braking distances, and diverse operating environments covering high speeds and closed parks place far more demands on model generalization capabilities and safety than passenger cars.

The 01 autonomous driving system developed by 01 Automobile is the industry's first heavy truck autonomous driving system based on an end-to-end multi-modal large language model. It automates the entire process of inputting sensors into driving trajectory generation. Compared with traditional modular architectures, its critical system complexity is reduced by about 95%, and data labeling costs are reduced by about 95% compared to the industry average.

At the 2024 CVPR End-to-End Autonomous Driving Challenge, 01 Auto stood out from 143 teams around the world with its pure vision solution and won the runner-up, confirming its technical strength.

At the perception level, the company only relies on cameras to achieve environmental recognition, effectively reducing hardware costs; while the triple safety redundancy design (traceability of algorithm logic, full coverage of simulation verification, and redundant hardware vehicle design) provides safety guarantees for large-scale commercial use. At the data level, the actual operating mileage of the 01 Electric Bridge New Energy Heavy Truck has exceeded 100 million kilometers. This actual road condition data will continue to feed back algorithm iterations, forming a closed loop of “delivery-operation-optimization”.

However, at present, the driverless heavy truck business is still in the early stages of commercialization. In 2025, unmanned heavy truck solutions contributed 8.102 million yuan in revenue, accounting for only 1.5% of total revenue; as of April 30, 2026, the cumulative delivery volume for driverless solutions was 56 vehicles. This means it will take time for the autonomous driving business to become the company's second growth curve.

Judging from the competitive landscape, the current capitalization process in the NEV industry is accelerating significantly. Since 2026 alone, many new energy commercial vehicle-related companies, such as Langao Technology and Tage Zhixing, have successively applied for IPOs. Among them, Tage Zhixing has focused on the mining scene. It has delivered a total of 557 unmanned mining cards and launched 31 smart mining projects. Of these, 14 have passed national certification, establishing a deep first-mover advantage in vertical scenarios. In the future, it may potentially squeeze 01 Motor's market share.

Summarize

Overall, the 01 automobile has distinct differentiation characteristics in technology route selection, and its unique path of “complete vehicle+big model” has built competitive barriers from hardware energy efficiency to software algorithms. Although the company's performance is still at a loss, as subsequent commercialization and actual operating data continue to feed back the autonomous driving system, the company's technical advantages are expected to be transformed into sustainable performance growth, and the break-even point may not be far off.