A company known for outdoor gear has seen its chip business grow over 200% quarterly, an anomaly in the textile and apparel sector. Toread's Q1 2026 report shows chip revenue reached 179 million yuan, up 206.92% year-on-year, accounting for 36.09% of total revenue. Outdoor business grew only 8.02%, solidifying a 'chip high-growth, outdoor steady-growth' pattern.
Technology Positioning: Large Model Compression Targets Key Edge AI Bottleneck
Deploying large models on edge devices like phones, cars, and robots has long been constrained by bandwidth and memory. During inference, massive parameter and intermediate data movement consumes bandwidth, limiting computing power. Toread's subsidiary Shanghai Tongtu has signed a strategic agreement with Horizon Robotics to address this pain point.
Tongtu has built a full-stack compression system covering three layers: input data, intermediate states, and model parameters. For high-volume input like video, it compresses data to one-fifth of its original size. For intermediate states, it achieves 50% further compression beyond Google's results. For billion-parameter models, it compresses parameters by 30% without retraining. These metrics suggest a potential order-of-magnitude improvement in edge chip inference efficiency.
Horizon Robotics, a domestic leader in automotive AI chips, reported 2025 revenue of 3.758 billion yuan, up 57.7% year-on-year. Its 2026 'Starry 6P' cockpit-integrated chip and operating system have taken a leading position in the pre-installed mass-production market. The deep integration of Tongtu's compression technology with Horizon's computing platform will directly optimize inference bandwidth and memory usage on automotive-grade chips, clearing obstacles for large-scale edge deployment of intelligent driving.
Industrial Deployment: The Leap from R&D to Mass Application
Tongtu's full-stack compression technology has completed pre-research and testing. According to public data, it has achieved breakthroughs in inference performance, bandwidth usage, and business effectiveness. Wang Hongjian, VP of Toread and CEO of Shanghai Tongtu, noted at the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum that Tongtu's technical path aligns closely with Google's TurboQuant algorithm, confirming that 'using compression to free computing power' is an industry certainty.
This partnership signifies more than a technical breakthrough. It marks the transition of large model compression from the lab to industrial-scale application. Tongtu can leverage Horizon's automotive pre-installation channels to quickly enter the high-barrier intelligent driving scenario, while Horizon enhances its chip platform's compatibility with ultra-large models through Tongtu's compression solution.
From a broader industry perspective, edge AI is forming a massive incremental market. Wang predicted China's edge AI market will grow from 600 billion yuan in 2026 to 2.1 trillion yuan by 2030. Tongtu's compression technology can cover eight major scenarios including personal devices, smart spaces, in-vehicle, industrial internet, embodied robots, and AR/VR wearables. This suggests Toread's chip business growth ceiling remains far from reached.
Dual-Business Synergy: The Intelligent Leap of Outdoor Gear
Since establishing its 'outdoor + chip' dual-main business strategy in 2021, Toread has acquired five chip-related companies, building a chip product matrix covering 'perception-interaction-display'. Tongtu's full-stack compression technology is both an independent chip business growth driver and core technical support for Toread's second-generation intelligent exoskeletons and smart hiking shoes.
During the 618 shopping festival, the self-developed Crest C3 intelligent exoskeleton opened for pre-sale, selling over 100 units in one day on Tmall. Weighing only 1.8 kg with a 10:1 thrust-to-weight ratio, the product achieves full-chain self-sufficiency from underlying chips to end products. The implication for the textile industry: outdoor brand competition has shifted from fabric functionality to intelligent integration, and chip capability will become a key differentiator in the next round of brand evolution.