Management voluntarily locks up for 12 monthswhat signal is MANYCORE TECH (00068) sending during the lock-up expiry window?

Title context: Management voluntarily locks up for 12 monthswhat signal is MANYCORE TECH (00068) sending during the lock-up expiry window? Text: As a scarce physical AI target in the Hong Kong stock market, MANYCORE TECH (00068) has continued to attract attention from the industry and the market since its listing. Now, as the original lock-up period window for the relevant equity approaches, the company's core management has chosen to inject a dose of "certainty" into this window with a 12-month voluntary lock-up commitment. On October 20, MANYCORE TECH issued an announcement stating that, based on an optimistic judgment of the company's long-term value, core competitiveness and future prospects, co-founder, chairman and executive director Huang Xiaohuang, co-founder, executive director and chief executive officer Chen Hang, co-founder, executive director and chief technology officer Zhu Hao, and executive director and chief financial officer Shen Bei have voluntarily extended or entered into a 12-month lock-up period for the relevant equity held by each of them. The shares subject to the extension commitment total 483 million shares, accounting for approximately 27.99% of the company's total issued shares. In addition, a number of cornerstone and early shareholders of MANYCORE TECH, including Linear Capital, Yunqi Partners, Hesai Technology, GOLDSTREAM INV, Wusong Capital and CR CONSTRUCTION (with Zhejiang Construction Investment Group as controlling shareholder), have explicitly stated that they are optimistic about the long term and will continue to hold their shares. Core management voluntarily extends lock-up, multiple shareholders express long-term optimism According to the announcement, the relevant equity included in the extended lock-up arrangement is as follows: Wintermatch International Limited, wholly owned by Huang Xiaohuang, holds 238 million shares of the company; Ineffable International Limited, wholly owned by Chen Hang, holds 170 million shares of the company; Peekaboo International Limited, wholly owned by Zhu Hao, holds 65 million shares of the company; and Shen Bei has an interest in 10.2 million shares. Among them, Wintermatch, Ineffable and Peekaboo have all committed to extending the original lock-up period for their relevant equity by an additional 12 months until October 16, 2027; Shen Bei has entered into a commitment not to sell his relevant equity during the period ending on October 16, 2027 (inclusive). The announcement clearly states that during the extended lock-up period, the executive directors will not directly or indirectly sell or otherwise reduce their equity in any manner. In other words, at a point when the lock-up expiry window is approaching, the people at MANYCORE TECH who know the company best did not leave the question of "whether to reduce holdings" hanging, but instead locked up nearly 30% of the total issued shares in one go until October 2027. This move itself is the most direct response to "short-term share supply pressure." Coupled with the public statements of multiple cornerstone and early shareholders, it further strengthens market confidence. The announcement shows that a number of cornerstone and early shareholders of MANYCORE TECH have explicitly stated that they are optimistic about the long term and will continue to hold, including Linear Capital, Yunqi Partners, Hesai Technology, GOLDSTREAM INV, Wusong Capital and CR CONSTRUCTION (with Zhejiang Construction Investment Group as controlling shareholder). Hesai Technology stated: "As a strategic partner and cornerstone investor, we are optimistic about MANYCORE TECH's frontier positioning in the next wave, 'physical AI,' and remain firmly confident in the company's long-term development prospects. The spatial intelligence business that we and Manycore are currently betting on completes AI's ability to perceive, understand, imagine and act in the three-dimensional physical world, and is a bridge from the digital world to the physical world. The two parties have reached a deep strategic cooperation. Spatial intelligence is the underlying capability of the embodied intelligence and physical AI era, and Manycore is an irreplaceable partner on this track. We hope to accompany and witness Manycore realize its long-term value." CR CONSTRUCTION stated: "Our controlling shareholder, Zhejiang Construction Investment Group, has established a deep industrial cooperation relationship with MANYCORE TECH. As an industrial investor, with Manycore's spatial intelligence technology as the foundation, we are jointly building a number of typical 'AI+' application scenarios around the full life cycle of the construction sector. The cooperation areas include an 'AI+ good housing' design and marketing service smart chain platform, intelligent construction, construction Siasun Robot&Automation operations and twin supervision, AI+ intelligent inspection and smart construction sites, etc. We are optimistic about MANYCORE TECH's technological advantages and development prospects in the field of spatial intelligence." Industry observers believe that, generally speaking, when the direction expressed by multiple shareholders is consistent with management's lock-up action, this combined signal of "insiders + important shareholders" is more meaningful for reference than a single announcement. After uncertainty over lock-up expiry is eased, valuation repair space draws attention For high-quality technology targets, long-term value is far more important than short-term fluctuations, and the logic for MANYCORE TECH is the same. The reason MANYCORE TECH is regarded as a scarce domestic physical AI target is that it has built a full-stack technology system of "computing powermodelsapplications" and possesses globally scarce interactive 3D data assets. At the model level, the company has built a series of model technology foundations including the world generation model SpatialGen, the 3D generation model Lux3D and the spatial language model SpatialLM, helping AI achieve understanding, reasoning and generation in the physical world. MANYCORE TECH co-founder and chairman Huang Xiaohuang made it clear in an internal letter released on October 20 that MANYCORE TECH will adhere to one thing in the future: using spatial intelligence to bring the digital world and the real world closer and closernot only "looking similar," but also "truly matching"and ultimately becoming the entry point for AI into the physical world. Around this goal, the company will make comprehensive efforts in three directions in the future: computing power, physical data and models. Over the next three years, it plans to expand computing power and data scale to more than several times the current level, and will expand the acquisition of high-quality physical data through methods such as spatial reconstruction systems and world generation models, continuously launching and optimizing spatial models for real production scenarios that can handle complex long-horizon reasoning tasks. Performance data also provides validation for this narrative. Spatial intelligence has become the core capability foundation supporting the company's full line of products. In the first half of 2026, revenue from MANYCORE TECH's new AI applications and new products increased by more than 177% year on year, while adjusted net profit reached 55.42 million yuan, up 211% year on year, close to last year's full-year profit level. The AI business still accounts for a relatively small share of the revenue structure, but the growth trajectory is already clear. From a market perspective, there is an obvious gap between MANYCORE TECH's current share price and the target prices given by a number of brokerages. Well-known brokerage institutions such as CCB International, Guosheng, Guotai Haitong and East Money Information Securities have respectively given "Overweight" and "Outperform" ratings. Against the backdrop of a round of systemic valuation compression in the Hong Kong stock AI technology sector and concerns over share supply overlapping with the lock-up expiry window, MANYCORE TECH's management has voluntarily locked up 483 million shares, significantly narrowing the scale of shares that could become tradable upon lock-up expiry and concentrating the easing of short-term uncertainty. As a scarce domestic physical AI target, MANYCORE TECH has room for valuation upward revision after the uncertainty brought by this lock-up is eliminated. In the short term, the actions of management and important shareholders provide certainty on the share supply side; in the long term, whether the "computing powerdatamodels" closed loop can accelerate the writing of spatial intelligence into the revenue curve remains the key variable determining its long-term allocation value.