Original source：风口研报First published on Unhidea：Original source date：
Key takeaway
Guotai Haitong’s growth outlook for Empyrean Technology rests on broader tool coverage increasing the number of licenses and purchase value per customer, while heavy R&D spending and a relatively high valuation raise the bar for delivering profits.
Why does filling gaps in digital EDA affect revenue per customer?
Empyrean Technology has deployed full-flow toolchains for analog, memory, radio frequency and flat-panel displays, while its digital EDA product range covers 80% of the major tools. Guotai Haitong believes that as the digital full flow is gradually completed, customers will be able to purchase more tools, potentially increasing purchase value per customer.
The company recently signed strategic cooperation agreements with Xin Xing Ji, Qijie Technology, Zhongke Jianxin and Shanghai Manguang to expand its presence in placement and routing, ECO, DFT and optoelectronic simulation, respectively. Whether the agreements lead to a complete, usable toolchain is a key condition for this revenue growth thesis.
Product coordination also has practical uses: the digital signoff insight solution moves signoff verification forward to the early design stage, allowing performance, power and area to be optimized together earlier to shorten R&D cycles. The value of expanding the full flow therefore lies both in the number of tools and in how they work together.
What specific changes has AI brought to the company?
Synopsys and OpenAI signed a multiyear partnership to jointly develop models specifically for chip design. This provides industry context for the report’s positive view of AI+EDA moving from assistance with individual tasks toward intelligent agents spanning the full flow. Synopsys is the direct party to this partnership; Empyrean Technology’s opportunity comes from upgrading its own products.
The company’s PyAether platform offers more than 12 thousand Python APIs, and Aether Coder, launched in April 2026, supports script generation from natural language. Andes FPD, meanwhile, reduces display-panel layout cycles from 4 weeks to 1 week. The former lowers the barriers to invoking tools and writing scripts; the latter provides a concrete example of improved design efficiency.
Why does 3D IC need new EDA tools?
When multiple chips are stacked, verification must extend across chip boundaries. The company’s end-to-end 3D physical verification solution can verify multiple chips simultaneously and target cross-chip defects that traditional separate verification may miss. Cross-die simulation addresses timing and signal integrity issues across different chips and process technologies.
The report says the Argus 3D IC platform delivers a 5-fold performance improvement over the industry benchmark and improves verification efficiency by more than 50%. It has been deployed in several advanced packaging projects. These projects provide a foundation for the company’s efforts; future incremental growth depends on how much design and verification demand advanced packaging expansion generates.
How high is the bar for a recovery in profitability?
Growth continues to be accompanied by substantial investment: the R&D expense ratio rose to 72.6% in the first half of 2026, and the report attributes short-term pressure on profits mainly to R&D and share-based payments. An encouraging sign is that net profit attributable to the parent excluding non-recurring items returned to profit in the second quarter of 2026, both year on year and quarter on quarter.
As a baseline, revenue in 2025 was 1.325 billion yuan, up 8.4% year on year, while net profit attributable to the parent was approximately 61 million yuan, down 44.3%. Guotai Haitong expects revenue to rise to 1.673 billion yuan in 2026, up 26.3%, and net profit attributable to the parent to rise to 144 million yuan, up 136.4%. The strong profit growth also reflects a low base.
The institution further forecasts net profit attributable to the parent of 224 million yuan and 343 million yuan for 2027 and 2028, respectively. Based on the share price in the report and the latest diluted share count, the corresponding price-to-earnings ratios for 2026 through 2028 remain approximately 411 times, 264 times and 173 times. Absorbing that valuation will require continued revenue acceleration alongside a recovery in profitability.
