China's leading AI accelerator designer Cambricon filed H1 results at about 20:00 Beijing time on 7 August showing revenue up 108.13% to 5.996bn yuan and net profit up 122.61% to 2.311bn yuan. Profit excluding non-recurring items rose 137.30%, and basic earnings per share reached 3.68 yuan.
The line under the headline
Net operating cash flow fell 65.83% to 311m yuan. Inventory rose 66.83% to 8.248bn yuan — roughly 45% of total assets — and prepayments rose 291.37% to 2.914bn yuan. Doubled earnings alongside collapsed cash conversion means the profit is being funded into stockpiled wafers and advances to suppliers.
Buying ahead of demand
That is a defensible position for a company whose supply is politically constrained: securing capacity before it becomes unavailable is rational. It is also the balance sheet of a firm paying for inventory it has not yet been paid for. Which reading is right depends on second-half shipments, and the filing does not forecast them.
One product line
The cloud line contributed over 99.9% of revenue. The edge line produced 877,000 yuan — a rounding error. R&D spending rose 29.63% to 702m yuan but fell as a share of revenue to 11.72%, down 7.09 percentage points.
A note on the numbers
Chinese filings use 亿, meaning one hundred million, so these are 5.996 billion and 2.311 billion yuan — roughly US$890m and US$343m. Machine-translated reports rendering them as "59.96 billion" are off by a factor of ten, which turns a strong mid-cap result into a fictional one. The filing landed at about 20:00 Beijing time; the first English write-up followed inside an hour.