Chinese supercomputer manufacturer Dawning Information Industry, also known as Sugon, has reported first-quarter revenue at CNY2.3 billion (US$332 million), an year-on-year growth of 5.39%. Net income was CNY131 million, an year-on-on year growth of 19.92%. On its investor platform, the company indicated that it has supported multiple domestically-developed large language models, including those developed by Chinese Academy of Sciences, from which Sugon span off.
As reported by Chinese media Finet, Sugon operates approximately 50 datacenters in China, and has brought online a "computing power trading platform" in 2023. The company is said to have been involved in the entire supply chain of China's supercomputing industry, including CPU, and has become an ecosystem partner of Baidu's "ERNIE Bot". The gaining momentum of large language model development in China has also boosted the company's stock performance since February.
Sugon was listed on Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2014, and has continued to maintain revenue and net income growth. In 2019 Sugon was added to the Entity List by the US Department of Commerce, and in October 2022, the US Department of Defense included Sugon in a list of "Chinese military companies" operating directly or indirectly in the United States.
Despite the development, Sugon saw an annual revenue at CNY13 billion in 2022, marking a 15.44% annual increase. Net income was CNY1.54 billion, seeing a 31.27% annual growth. Net margin, which reached 12.43% in 2022, has also seen improvement in the recent two years. Before 2020, it chronically remained under 10%. Sugon also spent CNY2.47 billion on R&D, accounting for 19.01% of revenue. For the past three years, the company has already spent a total of CNY4.9 billion on R&D.
