Hong Kong IPOs have seemingly turned into the most ruthless retail investor harvesting machines, with 84 new listings in the first half of the year posting a mere 15% break-issue rate, yet the second half has seen a sharp deterioration, particularly in September when 7 of 12 new stocks broke issue, a rate of 58%.

More alarming still, Medcaptain plunged 43% on its debut day, while most new listings continued to slide in the days that followed, such as Shein which has tumbled 36% since listing, and CAMSENSE (HKEX: 06802) which nosedived 48% the day after its debut.

CAMSENSE exemplified retail harvesting to the fullest, surging 266% on its first trading day before crashing 48% the very next session, leaving countless retail investors deeply wounded, with Wednesday's buyers who had celebrated and called for 300 or 500 dollar targets now wailing and crying for the police.

CAMSENSE, jointly sponsored by CICC and Guosen Securities Hong Kong, has been dubbed by the market as the leading high-precision AI spatial positioning stock, focusing on high-precision spatial perception products for smart terminals such as robot vacuum cleaners, offering triangulation LiDAR, dTOF LiDAR, 3D TOF LiDAR, line laser sensors, proprietary spatial perception algorithms and ASIC chips that serve as the eyes for robots in positioning, mapping, navigation and obstacle avoidance.

Additionally, the company is expanding into new areas including robotic lawn mowers, pool cleaning robots and humanoid robots.

Retail investors had plenty to say, with some joking about whether this was the next Unitree, given the lawn mower connection.

According to financial reports, CAMSENSE turned profitable in 2025, with profits of negative 883,000, negative 31.375 million and positive 2.2 million across 2023 to 2025.

On its debut day of September 30, the company released explosive interim results showing revenue of 413 million, up 41.4% year-on-year, with LiDAR and line laser sensors both achieving explosive growth, gross margin rising from 13.2% to 18.6%, and period profit of 11.97 million, soaring 387.7% year-on-year.

It was these results that fueled the speculative frenzy in the secondary market, driving a 266% surge on the first day.

Behind the stock's explosive rally was another factor: the public offering subscription was incredibly hot, oversubscribed 3,546 times, with retail investors struggling to secure even one lot, and even large investors in the B group who applied for 34.44 million could not guarantee a single lot, underscoring the extreme difficulty of getting an allocation.

Given the explosive earnings and red-hot subscription, why did CAMSENSE, hailed as a hard-tech company, ruthlessly harvest retail investors the very next day with a 48% single-day crash?

First, CAMSENSE's underlying quality is not particularly high, with gross margin long remaining below 20%, prolonged losses and only just turning profitable, with a net margin of merely 2.89%, leaving future profitability still uncertain.

Second, although the company's earnings grew explosively by 388%, net profit was only 11.92 million, and even Unitree's valuation is less than 300 times earnings, so what justifies CAMSENSE trading at 1,000 times, and even after halving, still over 500 times, which is severely overvalued.

Third, the company's pre-IPO shareholders and cornerstone investors did not include top-tier capital such as Sequoia, Hillhouse, Tencent or Xiaomi, so market recognition is not particularly high, consisting mostly of lesser-known private equity firms, venture capital funds, individual investors, industrial capital and some local state-owned capital, with more notable names including Yicun Capital, Chenhui Venture Partners and Hefei High-Tech under Hefei state assets.

Among state-owned capital, there are Nanshan Shanghua Hongtu held by Shenzhen state assets, Changzhou Xiyang Puxin backed by Shandong and Wenzhou state assets, Hefei High-Tech under Hefei state assets, Jiaxing Zhongdian Aijia controlled by central state capital and Qingdao Guotou.

Private equity investors include Oriental Fortune Capital, Qianhai, Lingrui Cornerstone, Hangzhou Puhua Yuchen, Shanghai Xuanjian, the well-known Yicun Capital and the renowned venture firm Chenhui Venture Partners.

Industrial capital includes Qingdao Tongge, with Goertek as a limited partner, Guosen Capital under Guosen Securities, and Baoxin Energy as a limited partner of Oriental Fortune Capital.

The good news is that even after the stock crash, it still trades at more than double the IPO price, leaving pre-IPO shareholders with substantial gains, with even D-round investors sitting on nearly 2x paper profits.

Only two cornerstone investors were introduced, both industrial capital: Golden Link under BYD and a subsidiary of Zhongrun Optics, which is listed on the STAR Market.

The fourth and most critical point is that CAMSENSE's offering had three bizarre aspects: first, subscription was extremely hot, with even the largest B-group applicants having at most half receiving one lot, creating extremely difficult allocation conditions that fueled secondary market speculation.

Second, CAMSENSE introduced only two cornerstone investors with a subscription ratio of just 16.13%, meaning of the 10.43 million international placement shares, 8.56 million had no lock-up period, so of the 11.59 million shares issued, 73.8% could be sold immediately upon listing.

International placement investors gained 2.6 times on the first day and faced severe selling pressure on the second day, yet this portion still remains nearly 1x profitable.

Third, the company released explosive interim results on its debut day, which appeared designed to support secondary market speculation while also enabling a pump-and-dump to harvest retail investors, with the P/E ratio pushed to 1,000 times on the first day under the cover of stellar earnings and now still over 500 times, far exceeding Unitree's valuation.

Regardless of how fanciful the concept, CAMSENSE fundamentally belongs to the robotics theme, and whether it is A-share Unitree or Hong Kong-listed Mech-Mind, the experience for investors has been very poor, with Mech-Mind and Galaxy General's quarterly earnings fiasco further intimidating retail investors.

This creates a situation where, as robotics concept companies list, a large pool of capital is waiting to cash out, because what you hold in your hand is truly yours.