IPO outlook | Greenlink Technology: The first and second curves of global accessories increased by 420%, but the scale went wild but fell into a cash mismatch

Recently, Shenzhen Greenlink Technology (301606.SZ) submitted an IPO application to the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the second time, and Huatai International acted as the sole sponsor.

This consumer electronics brand, which started in Huaqiangbei, once again knocked on the international capital market after landing on the GEM in 2024. Previously, the company first submitted a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in February of this year, but now it has once again updated financial data and broken through customs with the intention of establishing an “A+H” dual listing structure.

Many people's impression of Greenlink is still limited to 3C accessories such as data cables and chargers. According to Frost & Sullivan data, according to 2025 shipment statistics, it ranked first in the global expansion consumer electronics parts industry, and ranked second in the world in terms of annual revenue, making it a veritable industry leader. But today's Greenlink is more than just accessories: the private cloud NAS business has exploded in the past two years and is reshaping its growth curve and market label.

However, questions in the capital market also followed: in the Red Sea circuit of consumer electronics accessories, where internal volume and gross profit pressure has been felt for a long time, can a company that relies on channel and supply chain efficiency to win through the original valuation ceiling with new products?

Net revenue and profit increased, and cash flow led to “loss of blood”

Judging from the operating data, Greenlink Technology's growth curve in recent years is impressive.

According to the prospectus, from 2023 to 2025, the company's revenue was 4.801 billion yuan, 6.166 billion yuan, and 9.486 billion yuan, with a three-year compound growth rate of 40.6%; net profit to mother was 394 million yuan, 460 million yuan, and 703 million yuan, which also increased year by year. By the first half of 2026, the company achieved revenue of 5.814 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 50.8%, and net profit of 432 million yuan, an increase of 58.0% year-on-year.

At a stage where most consumer electronics companies are still struggling in the inventory game, such continuous and resilient revenue growth and profit growth is not common among alternative targets for Hong Kong stocks.

However, the motivation behind this report card mainly comes from the resonance of Greenlink's two growth engines.

The first set is a basic plate with traditional accessories. In other words, mature categories such as charging ideas, smart office, and smart video still contribute the vast majority of revenue; among them, charging single products account for nearly 50%, making them a veritable “ballast stone.” After more than ten years of accumulation, Greenlink has established its own brand channel network covering more than 180 countries and regions around the world. The share of overseas revenue rose from 50.4% in 2023 to 66.9% in the first half of 2026. The growth rate in Europe and other regions is particularly prominent. As of the first half of 2026, the company recorded revenue of 2,667 billion yuan for charging and accessories, an increase of about 50% over the previous year.

The second set is the second curve of NAS private cloud, which is full of color. Revenue in the smart storage category increased 213.2% year on year in 2025, with NAS products increasing by nearly 420% year on year; in the first half of 2026, the storage sector continued to maintain a high growth rate of 85.6%, with NAS revenue of 640 million yuan, which has become the most important variable driving structural optimization. It is worth noting that NAS not only brings incremental revenue, but its own gross margin is significantly higher than that of traditional accessories; it is the share of high-margin new products that continues to rise, and the combined scale effect is being released, driving the company's overall gross margin back up from 36% in 2023-2025 to 38.4% in the first half of 2026.

But the other side of high growth is often accompanied by structural costs.

On the one hand, there is a conflict between category structure and pricing power. Traditional charging and transmission accessories have a low threshold, many competitors, and have been in an internal price environment for a long time; although the company has migrated to the middle and high-end through product upgrades, fast gallium nitride charging, and functional innovation, etc., the overall bargaining power of the stock category is still limited. Gross margin has been in a narrow fluctuation range for the past few years, making it difficult to independently drive upward profits. In other words, spare parts in stock can provide a steady cash flow, but it is difficult to support higher valuation premiums alone.

On the other hand, there is a mismatch between the speed of expansion and cash flow. According to the prospectus, the company's net profit reached 700 million yuan in 2025, but the net cash flow from operating activities was -35.33 million yuan. There was a serious divergence between profit and cash flow. Greenlink Technology attributed this phenomenon to the expansion of inventory preparation, lengthening overseas account periods, and delays in the settlement of export tax rebates. However, it should be noted that even if the company's balance ratio is below 5% for a long time, and the book assets are of high quality, every time revenue reaches the next level, it is necessary to invest more capital in inventory and advance capital through overseas channels. This “growth consumes cash” model is a risk point that consumer hardware companies generally need to be wary of.

From the above various performances, it is easy to see that Greenlink has already gone through a replicable path of “channel volume+new product breakthrough”: mature categories stabilize the chassis, new categories open up upward space, and provide incremental depth to overseas markets. However, we also need to clearly see that high growth is supported by continuous category expansion and capital expenditure. Improvement in gross profit is highly dependent on product structural dividends, and fluctuations in cash flow are a key indicator that needs to be continuously tracked during the expansion period.

The internal volume of traditional accessories reaches its peak, and the NAS blue ocean opens up new space for growth

From the perspective of a single company, from an industry perspective, Greenlink is on two major tracks — one is a mature global 3C accessories circuit, and the other is a rapidly rising consumer-grade intelligent storage circuit. The two have different cycles and different logic, and together form the beta undertone of this company.

Let's take a look at the traditional consumer electronics parts circuit first.

From 2021 to 2025, the scale of global technology consumer electronics increased from US$965.3 billion to US$1075.3 billion, a CAGR of 2.7%; traditional terminals such as mobile phones and computers accounted for 94.1%, and the CAGR was only 2.3%, with clear stock characteristics. The CAGR for general expansion accessories reached 12.1% during the same period, outperforming significantly. The global scale will break 1.2 trillion US dollars in 2030. Driven by AI iterations and equipment upgrades, the general expansion category is still expected to maintain a high growth rate of 11.7%, making it one of the most certain growth tracks.

At the same time, the industry has undergone an important change in the past few years — that is, the competitive logic has changed from simply competing for low prices and traffic to fighting for quick definition of products, global quality control, brand trust, and full-link efficiency. This is the reason why brands such as Greenlink can continue to seize shares from white cards and traditional overseas brands. However, it is also important to acknowledge that the accessories circuit naturally has a ceiling: the life cycle of individual products is short, homogenization is easy to reproduce, and the threshold for new entrants is not high; it is difficult to break out of the “larger the scale, the thinner the profit” trap by simply relying on accessories.

Let's take another look at the consumer-grade private cloud circuit represented by NAS.

With the spread of AI terminals, the expansion of the creator community, and the increase in users' attention to local data privacy, the global home and small office NAS market has entered an expansion cycle. According to Frost & Sullivan data, the global NAS market grew from US$4 billion in 2021 to US$5.8 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 9.9%, and is expected to reach US$12.56 billion by 2030. Among them, the consumer-grade NAS market increased from US$240 million in 2021 to US$770 million in 2025, and is expected to reach 3.6 billion US dollars by 2030. The enterprise NAS market grew from $3.76 billion to $5.07 billion and is expected to reach $8.92 billion by 2030.

In the past, the pattern dominated by professional manufacturers such as Qunhui and QNAP is being rapidly broken by domestic brands, and “easy to use, popular, and cost-effective” has become a new competitive dimension. However, NAS is essentially a “hardware+operating system+continuous service” business: hardware can be launched quickly, but firmware iteration, application ecology, and long-term user operation and maintenance require continuous investment; as the popularity of the racetrack rises, leading domestic hardware manufacturers, traditional storage manufacturers, and Internet brands are all increasing their layout, and industry competition is likely to increase significantly in the next two to three years.

In the larger industrial context, the entire consumer electronics hardware industry is undergoing a round of paradigm shift — from “flow-driven and rapid delivery” in the past to “value verification and in-depth self-research.” As the title says: Large-scale competes for incremental growth, technology competes for premium. The track is wide enough, but the dividends will not automatically flow to every participant; whether category dividends can be turned into a continuous barrier is the watershed that distinguishes short-term prosperity from long-term value.

In such a market environment, Greenlink has established a set of highly recognizable competitive advantages, and also has inherent shortcomings in the business model.

In terms of advantages, Greenlink Technology has built a core operating barrier adapted to global competition, based on years of deep cultivation. The company has scarce global independent brand operation capabilities. Relying on large-scale supply chain advantages, flexible response systems and mature overseas channels, the company continues to dilute operating costs and has an efficiency advantage in industry competition. At the same time, the company has strong multi-category incubation capabilities, and can rely on the user and channel base to quickly enter high-quality tracks and successfully incubate high growth curves such as NAS. Combined with a high-quality financial chassis that continues to be stable and profitable, the company's ability to resist cycles is outstanding, laying a solid foundation for continuous expansion and category iteration.

In terms of disadvantages, the company mainly focuses on solution integration and product iterative optimization. The core underlying technology does not have sufficient depth of self-development, and lacks irreplicable technical barriers for a long time, making it difficult to support continued high premiums. The traditional parts business is mired in industry prices. Profit improvement is highly dependent on new product iterations, and the growth fault tolerance rate is low. Furthermore, the company's revenue is highly dependent on overseas markets, continues to face the risk of fluctuations in exchange rates and trade policies, and there is uncertainty about the expansion of multiple categories. If the growth of new products falls short of expectations, the growth curve may be interrupted, limiting long-term development space.

In summary, Greenlink's strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin: it has developed the ultimate supply chain, channel, and rapid iteration capabilities in the Red Sea of accessories; this set of capabilities allows it to seize the outlet of NAS, but if it wants to truly cross the “smart hardware self-developed manufacturer,” it also needs to cross the thresholds of technology, ecology, and long-term service capabilities.

epilogue

From starting with a data line in Huaqiang North to today, it has grown into a global accessories leader and achieved a breakthrough on the NAS circuit. The story of Greenlink itself is a typical example of China's consumer electronics industry: relying on complete supply chain dividends, seizing the cross-border e-commerce window, and relying on quality and efficiency to break through a path in the Red Sea.

Today, it stands at a critical inflection point: it holds a thick bottom card woven by scale, channel, and brand, and in front of it is a window that opens up new tracks such as intelligent storage; yet it is still connected to the red sea of enduring accessories under its feet.

The chassis of the accessory is stable enough to hold it through a short-term cycle; but if you want to actually break the old valuation ceiling, it will ultimately depend on whether it can sink category dividends into long-term barriers that are difficult to replicate — this is probably the most worthy proposition of this leading global accessories company, which is most worthy of continuous market observation in the smart hardware era.