Cambrian Technology Co., Ltd. issued an announcement today, announcing that the company’s core technology backbone, Cambrian CTO Liang Jun, has resigned from Cambrian due to “disagreement with the company”. Affected by this, since the announcement, Cambrian’s stock price has plummeted by 18%, and its market value has evaporated by 3.6 billion.
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Cambrian revealed in the announcement that Liang Jun’s departure will have a certain impact on the company’s R&D management. But at the same time, it is emphasized that Cambrian has a complete R&D system, R&D team, and rich patented technologies. Liang Jun’s departure will not affect the company’s technological innovation.
It is reported that Liang Jun graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a master’s degree in communication and information systems.
Before joining the Cambrian, Liang Jun worked at Huawei for nearly 20 years, serving as an engineer and technical expert. Has a wealth of work experience.
In 2017, Liang Jun moved from Huawei to Cambrian as deputy general manager and CTO. Liang Jun is responsible for the technical research and development of major AI chips in the Cambrian. During his tenure, Cambrian launched its teaching 7nm AI chip Siyuan 290.
The announcement shows that Liang Jun participated in research and applied for 138 invention patents and 10 PCT patents during his tenure, of which 14 inventions have been authorized. In the announcement, Cambrian stated that these intellectual property rights are owned by the company, and Liang Jun’s departure will not affect the integrity of the company’s property rights.
In recent years, the development of the Cambrian itself has fallen into a bottleneck period. There have been rumors before that the Cambrian high-level discord.
In 2020, Cambrian was officially listed on the Science and Technology Edition, becoming the first listed AI chip company. At the time of listing, Cambrian’s stock rose by 290% on the first day, and its market value once broke through the 100 billion mark. But at that time, the Cambrian was already facing the problem of continuous losses.
After the listing, this trend of losses has continued. From 2017 to 2020, Cambrian losses were 381 million yuan, 41 million yuan, 1.179 billion yuan, and 435 million yuan respectively. Cambrian said that the loss was mainly due to the increase in research and development expenses, management expenses, and sales expenses.
While the company has been losing money year after year, the Cambrian is also facing huge challenges in terms of products. Since the end of the cooperation between Cambrian and Huawei HiSilicon in 2020, its IP licensing business has experienced a huge decline, and it is difficult to find customers of the same magnitude in a short period of time.
At present, the sales of edge smart chips, which are the main business of Cambrian, are also blocked. Its self-developed Siyuan 290 chip fell behind in the competition with Huawei HiSilicon and Nvidia.
In this context, the Cambrian lost another tiger general. However, Cambrian believes that Liang Jun’s departure will not bring great losses to the company’s core technology.
In the announcement, Cambrian mentioned that as of December 31, 2021, the company has applied for a total of 2,526 patents. As of the disclosure date of the announcement, the number of R&D personnel has reached 1,228, accounting for 80.37% of the total number of employees. The core technicians Chen Tianshi, Liu Shaoli, and Liu Daofu are the core members of the Cambrian start-up team. All have rich work experience and have long been engaged in the technical work of artificial intelligence and processor chips. Therefore, Cambrian believes that Liang Jun’s departure will have a certain impact on the company’s R&D management work, but will not have a significant adverse impact on the company’s technological innovation and overall R&D strength.