An outdoor equipment company now derives over half of its growth from chips. Toread Group (300005.SZ) announced that its H1 2026 net profit attributable to shareholders is expected to reach RMB 46-56 million, up 128.92%-178.69% year-on-year, with non-recurring profit growth surging to 166.58%-211.01%. This doubling signals that the 'outdoor + chip' dual-mainstay strategy has entered a profit release phase.
Chip Business: From M&A Puzzle to Systematic Monetization
The chip segment has become Toread's primary growth engine. In Q1 2026, chip revenue hit RMB 179 million, a 206.92% YoY surge, accounting for 36.09% of total revenue. A single quarter's chip income nearly matched full-year 2025 chip revenue, far outpacing the outdoor business. This explosive growth stems from systematic M&A and integration of five chip firms since 2021. The acquisitions of Shanghai Tongtu and Shenzhen Betterlife, consolidated from January 2026, directly boosted profitability. Betterlife leads in fingerprint recognition chips, with touch chips in major notebook supply chains; Tongtu focuses on image/video processing, with core IP licensed to over 20 mid-to-large chip companies.
Crucially, the integration has formed a complete chain from underlying tech to end products. Toread's self-developed smart exoskeleton Crest C3, equipped with proprietary low-power touch and motion-sensing chips and weighing just 1.8 kg, sold over 100 units in a single day during Tmall's 618 promotion. This validates the 'perception-interaction-display-full-stack compression' technology matrix built by the five chip firms. The 'chips driving outdoor innovation, outdoor scenarios feeding chip R&D' path is breaking the traditional outdoor brand model of relying solely on OEM or brand premium.
Edge AI Inflection Point: Compression Tech Opens Trillion-Yuan Market
Tongtu's full-stack large-model compression technology, optimizing input data, intermediate states, and trillion-parameter weights, significantly reduces edge AI device computing and storage thresholds without retraining. This aligns with a global AI shift: inference capital expenditure by hyperscale cloud vendors has historically surpassed training CapEx, with the industry focus moving from 'training large models' to 'using large models'. The core bottleneck has shifted from computing scale to memory bandwidth and communication latency.
In June, Tongtu signed strategic cooperation with a domestic automotive AI chip leader and a memorandum with global semiconductor ecosystem platform GNS, moving its compression solutions from lab to edge applications like autonomous driving, robotics, and data centers. Industry estimates peg the domestic edge AI market at RMB 600 billion in 2026, expanding to RMB 2.1 trillion by 2030. Tongtu's capabilities can penetrate personal devices, smart spaces, in-vehicle systems, industrial IoT, embodied robots, and AR/VR wearables. For Toread, this reshapes valuation from an outdoor consumer goods company to an edge AI infrastructure player.
Policy Resonance: Dual Mainstay Aligns with 15th Five-Year Plan
On July 13, the State Council issued the '15th Five-Year Plan for Expanding Consumption,' prioritizing sports, AI-integrated consumption, smart wearables, and health/silver economy consumption. Toread's layout precisely matches these four directions: its outdoor business posted Q1 revenue of RMB 315 million, up 8.02% YoY, building a product ecosystem covering mountaineering, hiking, skiing, trail running, and camping; its chip business directly targets AI smart terminals and wearables. The company has also paid cash dividends for three consecutive years, signaling stable management confidence during transformation.
This cross-industry synergy is rooted in Toread's 27-year technology and brand heritage. Since 2009, it has provided equipment for China's Antarctic and Arctic expeditions for 17 consecutive years, and supplied gear for Shenzhou 12 to 23 manned space missions, participating in space suit standard setting. In January, it partnered with Beijing Transporter Manned Space Technology Co., further integrating aerospace tech with outdoor and chip industries.