Yifan Li
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Thank you, Yuanting. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Let me start with the headline. The second quarter of 2026 marks a major turning point for Hesai. We are opening a truly exciting new chapter in our history. Over the past decade, we have built the technology, manufacturing engine and commercial scale required to lead the lidar industry. Today, we are setting our sights on a much larger opportunity, expanding Hesai into a full stack infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, empowering them to see, understand and act. The simplest way to think about Hesai now is 3 layers. First, see. Our lidar lets intelligent machines see the physical world, what things are, where they are, how fast they are moving and how the scene changes around them. Second, understand. Kosmo turns real environments into reusable AI-ready 3D spatial assets, so intelligent machines learn from the world instead of guessing at it. Third, act. Our robotic actuation modules turn intelligence into precise physical motions. We are already seeing commercial momentum across all these layers. Our core lidar business keeps scaling profitably and generating strong cash flow. Kosmo shipped prototypes in July 2026 secured initial orders and remains on track to contribute revenues in the third quarter of 2026. Actuation modules started generating revenues in the second quarter of 2026 and are ramping fast. Together, these 3 layers form an integrated platform, opening up a significantly larger addressable market than we saw a year ago. Let me start with See. ADAS was our first big commercialization market and is still a phenomenal cash engine. Think about it. A modern intelligent car is arguably the most widely deployed robot on earth. And the industry has moved beyond the question of can the car drive itself? The question now is whether it can do it safely every single time with backup when something fails. That's a completely different bar. Regulation is catching up fast. In China, the first mandatory national safety standards for Level 3 and Level 4 will take effect in 2027. In the U.S., proposed New Jersey legislation would require commercial autonomous vehicles to run 2 independent sensing technologies beyond cameras, typically lidar and radar. So the vehicle still sees when the cameras don't. This is what we have been saying for years, lidar is the invisible airbag. You never think about your airbag on a normal drive. But the one time you need it, it is the difference between a bad day and a catastrophe and nobody removes airbags to save bucks. So the market is shifting from does it have lidar to better lidar and more lidar. Better means longer range, higher resolution, rock-solid reliability where it matters. This quarter, we won a design win with Great Wall Motor for mass production programs using our ultra-long-range high-end ETX lidar with SOP expected in late 2026. ETX extends detection range to more than twice that of ATX, while ATX has already established itself as the benchmark for cost-efficient lidar. More means multi-lidar, full coverage and higher redundancy. Momentum on our FTX blind spot lidar is strong. Changan and other leading OEMs picked Hesai for multi-lidar programs and Li Auto's L8 and L9, each equipped with 4 Hesai lidars are now in mass production. Li Auto's newly launched L6 model priced around RMB 250,000 now offers an optional 4 lidar configuration -- 4 lidars at a mainstream price point. That is the moment an advanced feature goes mass market, and that is how content per vehicle compounds. Globally, we are accelerating too. Following Mercedes-Benz, we won a major design win with Volkswagen covering multiple models from its China joint venture brands and expanded collaboration with GAC Toyota. We are also riding along with Chinese automakers that are going global with meaningful overseas volume expected in 2027. Our leadership is also reflected in third-party market data. Per Gasgoo, we took 44% of China's long-range ADAS lidar market in June 2026 and have been #1 in China for the long-range ADAS lidar market for 17 straight months. Now here is where it gets fun. That same demand for high-performance 3D sensing is expanding rapidly into humanoids and other intelligent machines. Morgan Stanley estimates that robots could deploy roughly 6x as many lidar sensors as automotive by 2050. You can only drive one car at a time, but in the future, you might interact with many different robots in a day. We are already leading this trend. We work with more than 50 embodied AI companies worldwide with recent orders coming from Unitree, Robbyant, Galbot, Galaxea, Dexmal and many others. Our JT128 has become the go-to lidar for humanoid and quadruped robots, and the numbers are frankly remarkable. Robotics lidar shipments in the second quarter almost tripled compared with the same quarter last year, following year-over-year growth of 47% in 2023, 67% in 2024 and 426% in 2025. And we expect another 2 to 3x shipment increase in full year 2026. The next leap is going from geometry to [indiscernible]. Classic LiDAR gives you the skeleton of the world, distance, shape and position. A robot needs to know what a thing is, not just where it is. That is Picasso, our full color ultrasensitive 6D SPAD-SoC. People love to frame the debate as camera versus lidar. That is like asking a human to choose between color and depth. You need both. Picasso fuses them on one chip. We are pleased to share that the Picasso SoC is now SOP ready. Since its launch in April 2026, the full color ETX powered by Picasso has secured initial design wins, including KargoBot. It is now undergoing customer validation and advancing into RFI and RFQ discussions with leading robotaxi operators and global automakers. Because depth and color come off one chip under one time stamp, you get intrinsically time-aligned multimodal information, exactly the fuel world models need. We believe Picasso will be the eyes of the next generation of robots. Then layer 2, understand. Helping robots understand and learn from their environments. This is where Kosmo comes in. Kosmo is a spatial intelligence platform that integrates an AI spatial camera, AI algorithms, 3D spatial assets and cloud services into one unified system for capturing, reconstructing and understanding the physical world. It addresses the sim-to-real gap bottleneck. Robots need enormous digital representations of the physical world that are geometrically accurate and physically grounded. Training on bad inputs is like teaching a kid from a blurry textbook, plenty of pages, but they may learn the wrong things. Kosmo makes the textbook sharp. It turns real environments into high fidelity, editable, interactive 3D assets, reality itself as the training ground. That is exactly the foundation robotic scaling laws need without the model collapse risk from low-quality inputs. Validation came fast. Prototypes went out this July. And within 7 days, we had orders from a lineup of leading humanoid robotics companies, including Galbot. Customer feedback has been extremely encouraging. Kosmo reconstructs a 200 square meter restaurant at roughly 5x the efficiency of a leading alternative with such high fidelity that even 4 millimeters text on a menu remains clearly visible. Scale that across thousands of scenes and you get the generalization robots need to walk into an actual home. Kosmo also goes well beyond robotics, cultural tourism, film and TV, games, advertising and beyond. Imagine standing on stage at a concert or on the field for historic sporting moment. Kosmo turns real places into reusable digital assets. Since the April preview this year, more than 200 prospective partners have come to us and initial revenues are expected to land in the third quarter within SGI. But the part which I am most excited about is the business model of Kosmo. The AI spatial camera is the front door. Behind it is proprietary algorithms, cloud services and a compounding library of 3D spatial assets. Every deployment adds assets. A richer library enables more applications, more applications attract more users, more users create more assets. That is a flywheel, recurring revenues, network effects and real operating leverage. Kosmo doesn't digitize a space once. It compounds the value of that space over time. Layer 3 is act, the muscles. JPMorgan sees 2026 as a milestone year for humanoids. Actuation modules can be more than half a robot's BOM and robot may need more than 100 modules. Run that math and long-term demand could approach 1 trillion units, 1 trillion, it is also brutally hard engineering. You need strength and precision in something compact, efficient, durable and consistent like asking a pro athlete to run a marathon every day for years without losing a step. This is exactly our wheelhouse. For more than a decade, we have built precision electromechanical systems, in-house chips, material science, thermal engineering and automated manufacturing. People think lidar is a sensor, but it is not. It is a precision machine where optics, electronics, software, motors and encoders stay in perfect sync through heat, cold and vibration for years. The physics of a lidar scanner and a robot joint are cousins, both demand precise control of position, speed and force. Going from helping robots see to helping robots move is the most natural extension we have ever made. We rebuilt the entire actuation stack from first principles, materials, structure and system integration. The result is a breakthrough in actuation modules, roughly 3x the torque density and power density of leading products available today in a package 37% smaller with transmission efficiency above 95% and performance validated through 2 million operating cycles. We deliberately started with the hardest system in humanoid robotics, the dexterous hand. Walking gets the robot to the workstation, hands are what make it useful once it arrives. Starting with this demanding hand application allowed us to validate our architecture at the highest level before extending it across the rest of the body. That strategy is already converting into revenues. We are supplying actuation modules to Sharpa, a global frontrunner in AI robotics. In August 2026 in Shanghai at a Dairy Queen store, a Sharpa humanoid is expected to complete what we believe is the world's first zero retrofit commercial deployment of its kind. The robot is set to autonomously work a full DQ shift preparing signature Blizzard ice cream treats, a complex long horizon challenge while demonstrating the potential to generalize across diverse real-world tasks. That is the whole point. Robotics is not about impressive lab demos. It is about useful work done repeatedly and reliably in a real operating environment. And as Sharpa earns market recognition and its backlog grows, our volume grows with it. At the same time, real-world field experience feeds directly back into engineering, creating another powerful flywheel for our product development. Our dedicated production line is fully operational. Cumulative shipments exceeded 10,000 modules by the end of the second quarter. We are ramping toward roughly 10,000 modules per month in the near term and expect 6-digit volumes in 2027. Meanwhile, full body modules SOP is expected in the second half of 2026, expanding into shoulder and wrist joints. Beyond robotics, these modules fit anything needing dense, precise, reliable motion. This is only the beginning. As intelligent machines proliferate across industries, we believe the addressable market for high-performance actuation will expand dramatically. Let me close by returning to the bigger transformation we are witnessing today. If digital AI gave machines a voice and a mind, physical AI is giving them eyes to see, a body to move and the ability to act in the real world. Hesai is becoming a full stack infrastructure platform for robotics and physical AI, empowering them to see, understand and act so as to power the AI-driven Fourth Industrial Revolution. With that, I will turn it over to Andrew for our financials and outlook. Andrew, please go ahead.