XIZHI TECH-P (01879) "Share Swap Window" Faces Capital Test, Awaiting Inflection Point in Optoelectronic Computing Power Realization Curve

Title context: XIZHI TECH-P (01879) "Share Swap Window" Faces Capital Test, Awaiting Inflection Point in Optoelectronic Computing Power Realization Curve Text: Across the technology sector, the heat of the 2026 Hong Kong stock market is self-evident, with representative names emerging successively in sub-tracks such as AI large models, computing power chips, intelligent driving, and AI pharmaceuticals. In this wave of hard-tech listings, XIZHI TECH-P (01879), by virtue of its scarce positioning as the "world's first AI silicon photonics chip stock," has become one of the most recognizable names. The eyeball effect arrived fiercely, but what truly determines how far a frontier tech stock can go has never been the gains in the early post-listing period, but whether its technological positioning can be gradually validated over subsequent operating cycles. For Xizhi Technology, the price elasticity in the early post-listing period has given way to cooler scrutiny amid valuation digestion: the market's focus is shifting from "story pricing" to "delivery-capability pricing." After a Stunning Start: Valuation Digestion and Rebalancing of Shareholding Structure Xizhi Technology's listing debut can be called the most extreme sample among 2026 Hong Kong IPOs. On April 28, its first trading day, the stock rose as much as 445% intraday and still closed with a gain of about 383.62%. On the sixth trading day after listing, the share price hit a historical high of HK$1,050, up more than 473% from the offer price, with total market capitalization exceeding HK$90 billion. However, the company's share price then entered a sustained digestion channel, with the lowest price probing HK$228.40, a drawdown of nearly 80% from the peak. This trajectory is not hard to understand: the public offering at listing was oversubscribed by more than 5,785 times, and combined with cornerstone and international placing allocations locking up the vast majority of tradable shares, the actual free float was extremely small, and the "thin float" characteristic naturally amplified price elasticity. Moreover, when multiple narrativesAI optical interconnect, domestic computing power, optical computingwere simultaneously loaded onto a single scarce name, capital quickly delivered "story pricing." But on the underlying fundamentals, Xizhi Technology is still in the early stage of scaled commercialization, and its revenue scale cannot fully support a high valuation, so the share price has also consolidated from its high down to around HK$300 per share. This is not the result of any single negative factor, but the valuation digestion process common to highly volatile new listings. On October 28, XIZHI TECH-P (01879) will usher in the lock-up expiry of cornerstone investors following its Hong Kong listing. In terms of total volume, 20 cornerstone investors collectively hold approximately 8.9746 million shares of Xizhi Technology (accounting for 9.54% of total share capital after exercise of the over-allotment option), constituting a major test for the company's short-term share price performance. Before the lock-up expiry, the company's share price, affected by the market, had already undergone further decline. In fact, for listed companies, share price volatility before lock-up expiry is a normal phenomenon, reflecting that market capital has already begun positioning in advance. In addition, the scale of the lock-up expiry does not equal actual selling pressure; the real impact still depends on shareholder attributes and exit methods. Looking at the structure of Xizhi Technology's cornerstone investors, they are mainly divided into four categories: sovereign funds, long-only asset managers, industrial capital, and top-tier PE. Among them, top-tier PE mainly makes investment decisions based on a combination of overall holding cost, the company's commercialization progress, and track value. The remaining three categories of cornerstone investors tend to have longer-term investment intentions. For example, sovereign funds and global long-only asset managers such as GIC, Temasek, BlackRock, Fidelity, and Baillie Gifford typically have assessment cycles measured in years and focus more on track space, technological position, and medium- to long-term delivery rather than short-term price spreads after lock-up expiry. Likewise, computing power supply chain capital such as Alibaba, ZTE, and Lenovo derives its investment logic more from technological synergy, ecosystem positioning, and supply chain security, with investment cycles significantly longer than those of purely financial arbitrage capital. Short Term Look at Chips, Medium and Long Term Look at Three Certain Main Lines The capital that has already engaged in full positioning earlier and the cornerstone group with stronger long-term holding intentions also mean that Xizhi Technology's lock-up expiry this time is more like a "stress test" at the level of shareholding structure and liquidity, rather than an "inflection point" in the company's long-term value curve. In fact, at the fundamental level, a reverse contrast has already formed with short-term share price volatility. In the first half of 2026, Xizhi Technology's revenue grew 284% year-on-year to RMB79.78 million, with optical interconnect revenue up 275% and optical computing revenue up 313%, while adjusted net loss of RMB147 million was basically flat versus the same period last yearrevenue growing rapidly without losses expanding in tandem shows that the company is crossing the early-to-mid-stage technology validation phase, and the improvement in operating leverage from scaled commercial delivery has begun to emerge. For instance, CICC, before the lock-up expiry, gave Xizhi Technology a target price of HK$362 and further raised it to HK$426 in August, maintaining an "Outperform Industry"/"Overweight" rating. Such a judgment by the institution would certainly not factor in short-term market disturbances around the lock-up expiry, but is anchored to the company's medium- to long-term revenue scale and track positioning. Specifically at the business level, Xizhi Technology has also left three major logics: The first is optical interconnect, which is the line with the highest certainty and the closest to a revenue breakout. Currently, AI clusters continue to scale up, and the bottleneck is shifting from single-card computing power to the power consumption and latency of moving data between chips and between racks. Electrical interconnect's physical ceiling under higher speeds, shorter distances, and larger expansion domains is becoming increasingly clear, and "replacing copper with optics" is no longer one of several optional technology routes, but a direction forced by the system's own constraints. In this direction, Xizhi Technology possesses a complete technology route layout from EPS and distributed OCS to NPO and CPO, and its commercialization progress in segmented areas is also at the industry's forefront. In terms of commercialization rhythm, the company adopts a layered layout of "current volume ramp + long-term positioning": NPO takes on the industrial demand that can be scaled up currently, while CPO positions for a more distant optical interconnect form. Currently, although NVIDIA has proven the CPO route works through mass production and delivery, NPO, by virtue of faster commercialization progress and minimal disruption to the industry chain ecosystem, has become the form with higher engineering adaptation maturity and scalable volume ramp in current domestic GPU super-node scenarios. In this regard, the company's 3.2T NPO product has passed testing in end-customer scenarios and completed tape-out, and the 6.4T NPO is being jointly developed with customers. As for more distant technology options, the company's CPO has also completed prototype engineering validation. CPO requires deep collaboration with main chip manufacturers and is regarded by the market as a longer-term, more future-oriented option; the independence of NPO today comes from its realistic adaptability under current industry constraints, rather than an expedient of "never needing CPO." The second main line is optical computing. It still needs time before large-scale commercialization, but the certainty of its long-term market space is precisely the thickest of the three main lines. What optical computing aims to solve is not the cost of data movement, but the energy efficiency and latency of matrix operations themselves; if inference workloads continue to grow, low-latency, low-energy-consumption scenarios will form long-term demand. Therefore, in addition to optical interconnect, optical computing is also a high-certainty technology route for computing power in the post-Moore era. Optical interconnect addresses the cost of data "movement," while optical computing addresses the energy efficiency and latency of matrix operations themselves. The continuous expansion of large-model inference workloads is turning low latency and low power consumption from "optimization items" into "constraint items." After traditional silicon-based electrical chips enter the 1nm node, they are constrained by quantum tunneling effects, performance improvement encounters a physical bottleneck, and Moore's Law tends toward failure. Photons inherently possess the physical advantages of high parallelism, low latency, and low power consumption; using photons instead of electrons to complete AI core operations such as matrix multiplication is one of the few paths in the post-Moore era that can bypass this constraint at the physical level. According to Frost & Sullivan data, China's optical computing product market is expected to grow from RMB63.7 million in 2025 to RMB1.462 billion in 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 87.2%; and from 2031 to 2036, the market is expected to further expand from RMB2.546 billion to RMB34.759 billion, with a CAGR still reaching 68.7%. Xizhi Technology has currently launched the PACE series of optoelectronic hybrid computing chips, being one of the few photonic computing hardware players that has applied silicon photonics to computing, completed productization, and generated sales revenue; its 256256 matrix has now advanced to the tape-out stage. In the first half of the year, this business's revenue was less than RMB20 million, with the absolute scale still small, but its strategic significance lies in synergy and positioning: the two complete narratives of optical interconnect and optical computing mean that if optical computing chips are to coordinate with cluster interconnect in the future, Xizhi Technology has the innate conditions for system-level synergy. Once low-latency inference forms a reusable software stack and interfaces, first movers will have the opportunity to upgrade from "selling chips" to "selling reference architectures," with positioning value far higher than single-device sales. It should be noted that the option value of optical computing is not an indefinitely deferred narrative: both the PIC and EIC of PACE 3 (256256 matrix) have completed tape-out, and the industry is expected to enter a true market penetration period in 2027this constitutes the first time anchor for optical computing to move from a "long-term narrative" to a "verifiable variable," and what it takes on will be a market with greater long-term space than optical interconnect. The third main line is OCS, which Xizhi Technology places within the optical interconnect segment and is a direction relatively easy to underestimate. OCS does little or no optical-electrical conversion, scheduling paths directly in the optical domain, naturally suited to super-node scenarios with large traffic and relatively stable paths. Earlier, Xizhi Technology built the "LightSphere X" distributed optical circuit switching super-node and completed the deployment of a several-thousand-card GPU cluster, adapting to mainstream domestic large models and domestic GPU platforms, and jointly advancing domestic super-node solutions with partners such as ZTE and Biren. This likewise means that what Xizhi sells is no longer a single optical switching device, but a "super-node optical switching solution." Once the networking topology is deployed, migration costs are high and customer stickiness is strong, forming system-level binding with domestic GPUs and cloud vendors rather than single-point procurement. From selling devices to selling architectures, the corresponding valuation coordinate system is inherently different. Returning to the lock-up expiry itself. Short-term sentiment disturbances do exist, and the release of 9.54% of shares needs to be digested by the market through trading. But the lock-up expiry also raises the free float ratio, gradually returning pricing power from the "thin-float game" of the early post-listing period to a broader set of market participants.