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12 Nov 2025
Chinese firm posts near-50% increase in sales and has already shipped more than 1 million units this year.
Hesai Technology, the Shanghai-headquartered maker of lidar units primarily used on cars built in China, has posted sales revenues of RMB795 million ($112 million) for its latest financial quarter.
Covering the three months ending September 30, that sales total is up nearly 50 per cent on the same period last year, further cementing the company’s position as the market leader in automotive lidar.
The revenue figures mask an even more rapid increase in unit shipments, with Hesai delivering just over 440,000 lidar units in the latest accounting period - more than three times the figure it posted for the equivalent quarter last year.
The vast majority of those shipments are bound for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) on Chinese-built cars, where the sensors help drivers rather than replace them.
But Hesai also reported a much sharper increase in lidar unit shipments for robotics applications, up from just 4000 a year ago to more than 60,000 in the latest quarter.
Multi-lidar systems
During an investor call to discuss the latest results, Hesai CEO David Li’s initial commentary was delivered by an AI-generated voice - used to highlight the company’s wider adoption of AI processes to save money on operating costs.
Li’s voice hailed the firm’s latest achievements, which included passing the milestone of 1 million total unit shipments in 2025 by early October, as evidence that, for ADAS applications in China, lidar was “no longer optional” and rapidly becoming a standard feature.
“As regulations [in China] take shape, one thing is clear: a higher-level autonomous driving system cannot tolerate a single point of failure, making safety redundancy not just important, but essential.
“At the same time, lidar sensors must be factory integrated rather than retrofitted, pushing automakers to future-proof their platforms for tomorrow's Level 2 and Level 3 capabilities. The trend is accelerating.”
Li added that some OEM customers were already launching multi-lidar vehicles this year, typically featuring between two and five sensor units, with strong sales results.
“These developments reaffirm a principle we've always stood by: the cost of lidar is nothing compared with the priceless value of human life,” noted the CEO’s AI-generated voice.
“As the auto industry moves toward higher-level autonomy, lidar content in new vehicles is ramping up fast. We now expect three to six lidars per Level 3 vehicle, representing a system value of roughly $500 to $1000 per car in the long run.”
That would represent a significant uptick to Hesai’s addressable market, and the company is looking to exploit that with its new “Infinity IB” system, which combines a long-range “ETX” sensor with blind spot “FTX” units, to provide broad-angle coverage around the car.
Paired with multiple FTX units to provide full 360-degree blind spot coverage, mass production of the "Infinity IB” is slated for late 2026 or early 2027, suggested Li’s voice.
Li Auto ADAS design win
Helping to support that ramp in production will be the firm’s latest public offering of stock, which raised more than $600 million via a new listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange in September, and which, according to Hesai, was massively oversubscribed.
The company’s already healthy balance sheet is also benefiting from profitable operations, with Hesai delivering a pre-tax income of $40 million in the latest quarter - thanks in part to a $24 million gain realized on the sale of an investment in an early-stage tech company.
The current momentum looks set to continue, with Hesai also revealing that it had renewed an exclusive contract with key customer Li Auto to supply lidar sensors for every model in the car firm’s next-generation ADAS platform.
For the closing quarter of the year, Li and his executive team are expecting to post sales revenues of between RMB1 billion and RMB1.2 billion ($140 million-$169 million), which would raise the firm’s annual sales figure to around $440 million - more than 50 per cent higher than the full-year total in 2024.
Answering investor questions in the latest conference call, Li (in his own voice) also hinted that Hesai would soon be looking beyond lidar units to offer a wider range of sensing technologies as it continues to expand.
Quoting Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, he remarked: “In the future, anything that moves will be autonomous. And anything that is moving autonomously is likely to need the best sensing capabilities from us.”
• Despite that management positivity, Hesai’s Nasdaq-listed stock price dropped in value by around 10 per cent following the latest update. That figure equates to a market capitalization of just under $4 billion.
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