Foreword:

After years of dormancy, the AR sector, buoyed by the AI wave, has finally transitioned from the first half of product competition to the second half of capital acceleration.

The battle for the '[First Stock]' is not just a game between two leading manufacturers but also reflects the anxiety and ambition of the entire smart glasses industry on the eve of explosion.

The IPO Surge of Smart Glasses Led by Two Giants

XREAL's early move is an inevitable choice after its commercialization path matured. According to its prospectus, XREAL achieved revenues of RMB 390 million, RMB 394 million, and RMB 516 million from 2023 to 2025, with a 30.8% YoY revenue growth in 2025.

Corresponding net losses were RMB 882 million, RMB 709 million, and RMB 456 million, respectively, with the loss margin narrowing for two consecutive years.

In the consumer AR sector, still in its early investment stage, XREAL has developed a relatively clear commercialization model.

By 2025, its comprehensive gross margin surged from 18.8% in 2023 to 35.2%, a nearly 90% increase over two years, with core AR glasses product sales accounting for 78.1% of revenue.

In terms of market share, according to iResearch data, XREAL ranked first in global AR glasses market sales revenue for four consecutive years from 2022 to 2025.

In 2025, its global market share reached 24.8% by volume and 27.0% by revenue.

More notably, its global layout yielded results, with overseas market revenue accounting for 71% in 2025.

The U.S., Japan, and Europe became the top three core markets, contributing nearly 40%, 14%, and 15% of revenue, respectively.

Rokid, close on its heels, has not slowed down either.

Since 2026, this 12-year-old AR manufacturer has completed a series of lightning-fast capital operations, securing four rounds of capital increases in just a few days.

Its registered capital soared from RMB 2.87 million to RMB 13.96 million, with 39 new shareholders, including industry giants like Lens Technology and SenseTime.

It then completed shareholding system reform, obtained CSRC overseas listing filing (filing), and was approved to issue up to 3.124 billion ordinary shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange main board.

From a market performance perspective, Rokid has taken a differentiated path from XREAL.

According to Omdia data, global AI glasses shipments surged 322% YoY to 8.7 million units in 2025, with Rokid ranking second globally and first among Chinese brands with a 3.9% market share.

In the AI glasses segment with display functionality, Rokid topped the global rankings.

Unlike XREAL's focus on C-end audio-visual entertainment, Rokid has formed a '[B+C Dual-Wheel Drive]' business structure.

It has stable orders in B-end scenarios like industry, education, and healthcare, while main AI interaction and real-time translation in the C-end market, with order volume surging 200% YoY in 2025.

This race is not just between two giants. Thunderbird Innovation completed over RMB 1 billion in financing from industrial capital such as China Mobile and China Unicom in early 2026;

it also posted a job opening for an Investor Relations Director, explicitly requiring experience in leading a company to a successful IPO.

VITURE was also reported to be preparing for an IPO, targeting the U.S. capital market.

The once highly sought-after 'AR Four Little Dragons' in the primary market now collectively stand at the gates of the secondary market.

The Route Dispute Between Two Endgame Judgments

While XREAL and Rokid appear to be in the same smart glasses sector, they have taken two entirely different development paths.

XREAL has chosen a core route of '[Spatial Display],' cut into (cutting into) high-frequency, rigid-demand scenarios like audio-visual entertainment.

From its product lineup, the entry-level Air series focuses on immersive viewing, console gaming, and mobile office scenarios, offering plug-and-play functionality as its core early-market product.

The mid-to-high-end One series further upgrades display performance and interaction capabilities, with sales reaching 111,300 units in 2025, becoming its highest revenue-contributing product line.

The Light-Ultra-Aura product line represents its technological evolution toward spatial computing.

The core advantage of this route lies in precisely addressing consumer users' core pain points, delivering usable and user-friendly product experiences with mature technology, and rapidly completing commercialization validation.

XREAL's self-developed X-Prism optical engine achieves thinner modules and wider fields of view compared to the industry's mainstream Birdbath solution.

Its X1 edge-side co-processor, designed specifically for AR glasses, controls motion-to-photon latency within 3 milliseconds, significantly enhancing user experience.

More importantly, this route has earned XREAL widespread recognition in overseas markets.

Users in markets like Europe, the U.S., and Japan have strong demand for on-the-go viewing and mobile office scenarios, enabling XREAL to establish stable revenue and cash flow.

Rokid, on the other hand, has chosen a '[Spatial Computing + Full-Scene AI]' route, aiming from the outset for the '[Next-Generation Terminal to Replace Smartphones]' endgame.

Unlike XREAL's focus on indoor audio-visual scenarios, Rokid's products are designed for outdoor wear, with AI photography, real-time translation, and multimodal interaction as core selling points, operating independently without external devices.

Technologically, Rokid adopts a multi-sensor fusion solution of '[TOF Camera + IMU],' combined with its self-developed optical flow SLAM algorithm, reducing positioning errors from the industry average of 0.3 meters to 0.15 meters while cutting power consumption by 20%.

A more fundamental difference lies in its open ecosystem strategy. Unlike the closed ecosystems of manufacturers like Meta and Apple, Rokid's products can simultaneously access mainstream large models domestically and internationally, such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen, becoming an open AI gateway.

Meanwhile, its years of deep cultivation in the B-end market have yielded mature solutions across multiple scenarios like industrial inspection, security, education, and healthcare, with stable B-end business revenue supporting its C-end market expansion.

The Industry Logic Behind the IPO Surge

According to the latest data released by IDC, global smart glasses market shipments reached 14.773 million units in 2025, up 44.2% YoY.

The Chinese market performed particularly well, with full-year shipments of 2.46 million units, up 87.1% YoY.

For the AR/ER category, Chinese market shipments surged 142.3% YoY in 2025, with a market share of 89.8% in Q4, becoming the absolute growth driver.

IDC predicts that global smart glasses shipments will reach 22.671 million units in 2026, up 56.3% YoY.

Chinese market shipments will reach 4.508 million units, up 77.7% YoY.

As the industry approaches the critical threshold of 10 million unit shipments, leading manufacturers must preemptively enter the capital market to stockpile sufficient ammunition for the impending large-scale explosion.

Meanwhile, the financing window in the primary market is rapidly narrowing, leaving the secondary market as the only option for leading manufacturers.

From a financing history perspective, XREAL has completed 12 rounds of financing since its establishment in 2017, raising approximately RMB 2.3 billion in total.

Rokid has raised over RMB 3.5 billion in cumulative financing over its 12-year history.

Early-stage investment institutions' exit demands are becoming increasingly urgent, while valuation negotiations in new financing rounds are growing fiercer, making it difficult for the primary market to provide large-scale funding support for leading manufacturers.

For hardware manufacturers requiring continuous investment in core technology R&D like optics, chips, and AI algorithms, while also building brands and channels in the global market, primary market financing alone can no longer sustain long-term development.

Moreover, with the competition cycle tightening and pressure from giant entrants, the industry's window of opportunity is rapidly closing.

IDC data shows that Meta dominated the global market with a 72.2% share in 2025, thanks to its Ray-Ban Meta series.

To consolidate its advantage, Meta further ramped up in 2026, planning to increase annual production capacity to over 20 million units while accelerating scenario deployments in education and healthcare.

As Apple's '[Highest Strategic Priority]' product, its first consumer-grade smart glasses are expected to debut by the end of 2026, targeting the next core terminal beyond the iPhone.

Additionally, smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi and OPPO, along with internet giants like Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance, have also entered the fray, with over 30 players now in the domestic smart glasses sector, hinting at looming price wars.

For vertical players like XREAL and Rokid, only by securing funding and brand endorsement from the secondary market before giants fully roll out and the industry landscape solidifies can they defend their market shares.

Unresolved Industry Reefs

While XREAL holds the data advantage, it remains in a typical '[Intermediate State]' from an industrial perspective.

Despite narrowing losses for two consecutive years, XREAL's cumulative losses over three years still exceed RMB 2 billion, and it has yet to achieve profitability, with Rokid also in a sustained loss position.

Across the industry, except for Meta, which has achieved single-product profitability in smart glasses through massive scale effects, most manufacturers are still in the stage of burning money to gain market share.

This creates a typical structure: larger scale → greater investment → further from profitability, highly similar to early-stage smartphone manufacturers.

The core contradiction (contradiction) of current smart glasses remains unresolved: the physical dilemma of wanting lightness → limited functionality, or wanting power → increased size and power consumption.

Until these issues are resolved, products will remain in the '[Usable but Not Essential]' stage.

The true value of smart glasses lies not in hardware but in operating systems, application ecosystems, and AI capabilities.

Without an ecosystem, hardware remains a '[High-End Accessory].'

Ending:

XREAL founder Xu Chi believes truly competitive high-end AI glasses will only emerge by 2027.

Thunderbird Innovation founder Li Hongwei also makes a similar judgment, predicting the '[iPhone Moment]' for AR glasses will arrive between 2027 and 2028.

This means all current industry layouts are preparations for the category explosion in two to three years.

Capitalization is precisely the key step to stockpile ammunition for this final battle.

Partial References: Qu Jie Shang Ye (Fun Business Insights): '[XREAL vs Rokid, Who Will Capture the 'First Smart Glasses Stock'?]', EO Intelligence: '[Global Smart Glasses First Stock XREAL impact (Targets) Hong Kong Stock Exchange! Annual Revenue Exceeds RMB 500 Million, Losses Exceed RMB 400 Million, Backed by Sequoia, Hillhouse, and Alibaba]', Caitong She (Financial News): '[Smart Glasses First Stock] Sprints for Hong Kong Listing! The 41-Year-Old Founder Previously Worked at NVIDIA, with All Executives Graduating from Zhejiang University]