Horizon Robotics

What the company does

Horizon Robotics is a Chinese company that supplies advanced driver assistance (ADAS) and automated driving solutions for passenger cars. It was founded in 2015.^[1] Its customers are carmakers rather than consumers: Horizon provides the sensing and computing systems a production car needs in order to assist the driver, and manufacturers build them into their own models. That puts the company one step back from the showroom, selling into vehicle programmes rather than to shoppers.

Founders

The founders include Yu Kai, who is chief executive, Huang Chang, chief technology officer, and Tao Feiwen, chief operating officer.^[2] The three most senior roles at the company are therefore held by people who started it: one running the business, one leading the technology, one running operations.

Three product lines and the Journey platforms

Horizon offers three product lines: Horizon Mono, Horizon Pilot and Horizon SuperDrive.^[1] Underneath them sits a family of automotive-grade computing solutions. Since 2019 the company has released the Journey 2, Journey 3, Journey 5 and Journey 6.^[3] Automotive-grade is a term of art for components specified to keep working over years of use in a vehicle — through temperature swings, vibration and long service life — rather than only under laboratory conditions. A supplier that wins a place in a production car generally keeps it for the life of that model, so each generation of computing platform is aimed at a multi-year programme rather than a single sale.

How widely it is used

By the company's account, its solutions had been adopted by 27 OEMs across 42 brands for 290 car models, and all of China's top ten OEMs had chosen Horizon solutions for mass production.^[1] Horizon cites China Insights Consultancy data saying it is the first, and consistently the largest, Chinese provider of integrated ADAS and AD solutions by installation volume since mass deployment began in 2021.^[1] Installation volume — the number of vehicles actually shipped carrying the system — is the measure the company puts first, rather than the score on any single performance benchmark.

The market it sells into

The relevant gauge is the smart-driving penetration rate: the share of new passenger cars sold with such features. Horizon says the global rate was 65.6 percent in 2023 and is projected to reach 80.3 percent by 2026 and 96.7 percent by 2030.^[1] For China the same data put the rate at 57.1 percent in 2023, rising to 81.2 percent and 99.7 percent in the coming years.^[1] Read together, the two sets of projections describe a feature that goes from most new cars to nearly all of them within a decade, with China starting from a lower base in 2023.

The 2024 listing

On 24 October 2024 Horizon listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the code 9660.HK.^[1] The offering was priced at 3.99 Hong Kong dollars per share for 1.36 billion shares, raising 5.407 billion Hong Kong dollars.^[3] The Hong Kong public offer was 33.8 times oversubscribed and the international placing 13.8 times.^[3] Alibaba, Baidu, CMA CGM and a Ningbo municipal fund were cornerstone investors, subscribing about 220 million US dollars in total.^[3] Cornerstone investors commit to buying a set portion of an offering before it is priced, which gives a listing a visible base of demand; here they included large Chinese technology companies and a shipping group, alongside a municipal fund.

Where it sits

Horizon belongs to the layer of the car industry that turns sensing and computation into driver assistance, and its public case rests on how many vehicles actually carry its systems rather than on a single headline result. Being chosen by all ten of China's largest carmakers for mass production is the clearest evidence it offers of that reach.^[1] The listing turned a privately held supplier into a public company, with the capital raised and a share price that outside observers can follow, and it put the scale of Chinese smart-driving supply in front of international investors for the first time in a Hong Kong main-board listing.