As digitization evolves from localized upgrades to large-scale transformation, China's ICT infrastructure sector stands at the forefront of the global computing power revolution. Recently, Unisplendour Corporation, a seasoned player with over two decades of experience in the domestic market, is seeking to redefine its growth trajectory through a Hong Kong listing.

Boasting annual revenues exceeding 70 billion yuan, Unisplendour ranks among China's top three digital infrastructure providers and is one of the few domestic firms with comprehensive capabilities spanning computing, storage, networking, security, and cloud integration.

Yet the reality is challenging: steady revenue growth but mounting profit pressure, with gross margins in a continuous decline. Unisplendour must "unlock new capabilities" to secure its next growth phase.

When Scale Advantages Reach Their Limits, Unisplendour Faces an Invisible Battlefield

According to its prospectus, Unisplendour is a global leader in digital solutions, including ICT infrastructure products, software, and cloud services tailored for AI training, inference, and big data processing.

Frost & Sullivan data reveals that by revenue, Unisplendour ranked as China's third-largest digital infrastructure supplier in 2024, holding an 8.6% market share within China's broader digital solutions market. It also ranked among the top ten in China's digital solutions market by revenue that year.

Behind this achievement lies a highly capital-intensive, high-barrier systems engineering endeavor. From ICT products to underlying software platforms, from enterprise cloud services to system integration delivery, and extending to cross-industry solution customization, building such capabilities requires years of expertise.

Unisplendour has long been a cornerstone of China's digitalization journey, serving critical sectors such as government, finance, telecommunications, energy, and manufacturing. Its offerings function as both digital infrastructure and essential gateways for AI training, inference, and data processing.

However, scale advantages alone do not guarantee sustainable growth. Over the past three years, Unisplendour's revenue climbed from 73.7 billion yuan in 2022 to 79 billion yuan in 2024—a seemingly stable rise, but with decelerating growth rates. Profit trends are more concerning: net profit dropped from 3.74 billion yuan in 2022 to 1.98 billion yuan in 2024, and further to 1.285 billion yuan in the first half of 2025.

The primary driver of this trend is the asset-heavy business model. Over 90% of revenue comes from the domestic market, where distribution businesses operate with relatively low margins. Consequently, gross margins fell from 19.8% in 2022 to 14.4% in the first half of 2025, tightening profit margins.

This structural pressure is not unique to Unisplendour but reflects a broader industry shift. After the large-scale market penetration phase, China's digital infrastructure sector is transitioning from scale expansion to structural optimization. However, the larger Unisplendour's scale and ecosystem become, the more challenging its transformation proves.

With a clear domestic market ceiling, the solution business's growth rate cannot match the distribution business's scale inertia. To unlock new profit margins, Unisplendour must break free from its existing cost structure—making AI a critical inflection point.

From an industry perspective, AI's emergence has redefined infrastructure value. Computing power, storage, and networking are no longer mere IT costs but foundational to AI productivity. As model training scales and costs rise, demand for data centers, cloud platforms, and intelligent computing surges across industries.

Meanwhile, industry clients increasingly rely on full-stack services and system-level integration. Unisplendour occupies a pivotal position: it combines hardware scale, a complete software and service ecosystem, and cross-industry AI computing delivery experience.

As large models enter industrial deployment cycles, capacity supply is no longer dominated solely by cloud providers or GPU suppliers but requires holistic systems engineering. Here, Unisplendour's integrated capabilities become a competitive edge.

Yet translating these advantages into sustained growth depends on whether the company can pivot from traditional domestic distribution and large project delivery to higher-margin, wider-moat comprehensive solutions. This is the true challenge Unisplendour must overcome.

Growth Trajectories Behind the IPO: Technological Reconstruction, Capital Allocation, and Global Rebirth

Unisplendour's challenges extend beyond cyclical slowdowns and structural pressures. The deeper issue is that as China's digital infrastructure market matures, its traditional growth model can no longer sustain profit expansion.

This makes the intent behind its Hong Kong IPO particularly strategic. While fundraising uses appear diverse—R&D investment, strategic acquisitions, overseas expansion, and working capital—they collectively point to a core objective: re-evolving integrated capabilities.

Specifically, R&D investments focus on high-performance computing, cloud, and digital platforms—foundational technologies for the AI era. Infrastructure competition in the AI age ultimately hinges on computing organization, architectural optimization, and software-hardware synergy.

China's market has long lagged in chips, operating systems, and critical software. However, the AI-driven new cycle is closing or even redefining these gaps.

Unisplendour's decision to ramp up R&D at this juncture is essentially a bet on autonomous capabilities for next-gen AI infrastructure. Breakthroughs in computing scheduling, heterogeneous computing, and domestic software-hardware synergy will directly determine whether its solutions business can improve gross margins and escape the profit ceiling imposed by distribution.

In strategic investments, the company explicitly targets acquisitions along the "computing power × connectivity" axis, focusing on chip-related technologies, software-related technologies, and AI-native tech firms.

This investment route is not mere scale expansion but chain supplementation—accelerating technology stack completion through external collaboration and acquisitions to build a complete AI solutions ecosystem.

For an industry giant nearing 100 billion yuan in annual revenue, internal R&D alone cannot rapidly establish a full ecosystem. Thus, external investments carry greater strategic significance. If the investment portfolio truly synergizes with core businesses, Unisplendour will shift from selling products to selling systems, with gross margins recovering accordingly.

A more certain growth curve lies in global expansion. As of June 30, 2025, Unisplendour operates in over 100 countries and regions, with 32 subsidiaries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America—laying a preliminary foundation for globalization.

AI infrastructure is becoming a necessity in emerging markets, where many regions have low digitalization starting points and are at a window to leapfrog from traditional IT to the AI era.

For Unisplendour, overseas markets represent not just incremental growth but structural opportunities. Overseas orders generally carry higher margins than domestic ones and offer greater output space. If the company can replicate its China-honed engineering and delivery capabilities abroad, it could carve out a differentiated position in the global AI infrastructure race.

Epilogue

At the critical juncture where AI enters practical application, the infrastructure battleground is shifting from domestic to global. In this sense, Unisplendour's future depends not only on its ability to enhance technological and systemic capabilities but also on securing a foothold in the next round of global infrastructure reconstruction.