Direct Drive Tech and Camsense raise HK$1.76 billion in back-to-back Hong Kong listings, putting the parts inside cheap robots on the market

Retail investors in Hong Kong asked for 3,546.91 times the shares on offer in Shenzhen Camsense Technologies, a company that made a net profit of RMB2.2 million last year on RMB613.5 million of sales of laser sensors for robot vacuums. A day earlier Direct Drive Tech, which reported a net loss of RMB881.0 million for 2025 on revenue of RMB281.7 million, raised HK$1,080.0 million in its own debut. Between them the two suppliers took HK$1.76 billion in gross proceeds on 29 and 30 September 2026, according to their allotment results announcements on HKEXnews.

Neither company sells a robot most consumers would recognise. Direct Drive Tech makes the motor modules that turn wheels and joints, and Camsense makes the lidar and line-laser sensors that let a cleaning robot map a room and avoid a sock. The pair is a rare public test of what investors will pay for the component layer of the consumer robot industry, and their filings answer two questions: how fast these businesses are growing, and how much of that growth rests on a handful of buyers.

HK$1.08 billion for motors, HK$682 million for eyes

Direct Drive Tech sold 50,000,000 H shares at HK$21.60 each for net proceeds of about HK$982.5 million and made no over-allocation, the company said in its allotment announcement dated 28 September. The public tranche was 208.56 times subscribed by 43,933 valid applications, which lifted the retail portion to 10,000,000 shares, or 20% of the deal, from 2,500,000 in the prospectus. The international tranche was 2.72 times covered by 84 placees. Two cornerstone investors, named in the filing as HK Technology Innovation and JSC International acting for Shenghai SP, took 27.69% and 15.86% of the offer shares. With 369,588,080 shares in issue, the offer price values the company at HK$7,983.1 million.

Camsense priced 11,588,800 H shares at HK$58.85 for gross proceeds of HK$682.0 million and net proceeds of HK$615.4 million, according to its announcement of 29 September. Only 10% of the deal went to the public, and 157,315 valid applications competed for 1,158,900 shares; 11,589 applicants received stock. The international book was 5.53 times covered by 130 placees, and the underwriters over-allocated 1,738,300 shares, a position CICC as stabilising manager can close by exercising the over-allotment option. On ROBOTNESS arithmetic, full exercise would add about HK$102.3 million of gross proceeds, and the 96,573,639 shares in issue at listing are worth HK$5,683.4 million at the offer price. The gap between those two order books is wide, and the income statements explain much of it.

One company sells growth, the other sells a profit

Direct Drive Tech was set up on 17 March 2020 and converted into a joint stock company in December 2025, and it listed under Chapter 18C, the exchange's route for specialist technology companies. Its core product is a direct-drive actuator module, sized from 20 to 120 millimetres with up to 120 newton metres of torque, alongside wheel-legged robots sold as Diablo, TITA, TITATIT and D1, according to the prospectus and a company statement on listing day. It shipped 8,497,883 actuator module sets in 2025 and about 0.5 million modules plus 41 robots in July 2026 alone. Frost and Sullivan, cited in the prospectus, ranks it first in China's consumer robotic direct-drive actuator module segment with a 61.1% share, but eighth with 2.4% in the wider consumer robotic actuator module market.

Revenue rose from RMB17.5 million in 2023 to RMB79.8 million in 2024 and RMB281.7 million in 2025, and reached RMB200.3 million in the first half of 2026, up 39.7% on the year, the company said. Gross margin climbed from 13.5% to 21.5% over the three years and stood at 20.7% in the latest half. The 2025 net loss of RMB881.0 million was driven largely by changes in redemption liabilities owed to pre-IPO investors and by share-based payments; stripping those out, the adjusted net loss was RMB43.2 million in 2025 and RMB27.5 million in the first half of 2026. Research spending of RMB55.4 million equalled 19.7% of 2025 revenue on our calculation, rising to 26.8% in the first half of 2026.

Camsense sells triangulation lidar, direct time-of-flight lidar and line-laser sensors used for navigation and obstacle avoidance in robot vacuums, and has shipped more than 39 million units since inception, including more than 10 million lidar units and more than 5 million line-laser sensors in 2025, its prospectus said. Revenue grew from RMB332.1 million in 2023 to RMB433.3 million in 2024 and RMB613.5 million in 2025, a 41.6% rise last year by our arithmetic. Gross margin fell from 21.5% to 16.3% and then 16.5%, before recovering to 19.2% in the first quarter of 2026, when the company earned RMB7.8 million. Research spending dropped from 17.7% of revenue in 2024 to 9.7% in 2025. The company describes itself as a key supplier to the five largest robot-vacuum makers in 2025, and that customer list is both its selling point and its weak spot.

Five customers buy more than 80% of what both companies make

Direct Drive Tech's five largest customers accounted for 85.7% of 2025 revenue and 81.3% in the first half of 2026, and the single largest took 62.1% in 2024, 42.8% in 2025 and 53.6% in the latest half, the prospectus shows. None is named. Overseas revenue was 0.6% of the total in 2025 and 1.7% in the first half of 2026. The company says it works with four of the world's ten largest consumer robot providers and with one of China's five largest embodied intelligence robot companies. At Camsense, the top five customers took 93.6% of revenue in 2023, 80.4% in 2025 and 85.6% in the first quarter of 2026.

The two listings sit next to Amicro, the Zhuhai designer of robot chips for cleaning robots that published its post-hearing information pack on 30 September. Amicro booked RMB406.7 million of revenue in 2025 at a 27.7% gross margin and a RMB155.1 million net loss, as ROBOTNESS reported from that filing. All three sell into the same household machines. Private money this year has gone further up the stack, to robot brains and complete humanoids: D-Robotics raised US$400 million for robot chips on 17 September, LimX Dynamics raised US$200 million twice and EngineAI US$200 million.

The technology explains why both companies have scale but thin margins. A direct-drive module couples the motor straight to the wheel or joint with no gearbox, which removes parts, cuts noise and lets the joint be pushed back by hand, but it needs a large, carefully controlled motor to deliver torque. Triangulation lidar measures the angle at which a reflected laser spot returns to a sensor, which is cheap and accurate at room scale; direct time-of-flight lidar times the round trip of light pulses, which costs more but reaches further. Both are high-volume parts whose specifications buyers can compare line by line, which keeps prices tight.

The main external risk sits in Washington. On 28 July 2026 the US Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List, so new models of mobile ground robots, including service robots, humanoids and quadrupeds, can no longer obtain the equipment authorisation needed for import and sale in the United States, according to a summary by the International Federation of Robotics. The rule is not retroactive and excludes industrial arms. Neither supplier sells much abroad directly, but their customers include consumer robot brands that sell worldwide. Camsense's new markets in yard, pool and humanoid robots produced less than 1% of revenue in the track record period.