Recently, Sunny Optical, leveraging its role as industrial capital, joined other prominent institutions—including Moore Threads, a leading domestic GPU firm; Winsing Group, a fund affiliated with Zhejiang University; SenseTime Industrial Fund, a frontrunner in industrial AI; and Cowin Capital—in participating in Zeno Robotics' seed funding round, which was worth hundreds of millions of yuan.

This move by Sunny Optical is not a standalone financial investment but a strategic step to deeply integrate into the embodied intelligence industry chain within its 'Optics + AI' framework. As early as 2015, the company established Sunny Intelligent Optics to make an early strategic entry (Note: 'Layout' was originally in pinyin, but its intended meaning is strategic entry) into the robotic vision sector.

At that time, the evolution of smartphone cameras was in full swing, with the industry still reaping benefits from the transition to multi-camera setups and high-pixel counts. Yet, during the peak of the mobile phone optics sector, Sunny Optical had already begun extending its core competencies in opto-mechatronics integration to robotic perception—a forward-thinking move that has been validated over a decade later.

Sunny Intelligent Optics categorizes the commercialization of humanoid robots into three stages: manufacturing, commercial, and household, each corresponding to escalating visual requirements—from high-precision object recognition to unstructured information processing. It positions itself distinctly as the 'eyes' of Physical AI, crafting tailored vision solutions around the four key areas of humanoid robots: head, torso, hands, and feet.

This 11-year strategic entry is now bearing fruit, as evidenced by the financial statements. In the first half of 2026, Sunny Optical reported revenue of 21.906 billion yuan, marking an 11.5% year-on-year increase; profit attributable to shareholders reached 1.808 billion yuan, up 9.9% year-on-year.

Revenue from 'other products,' encompassing robots, intelligent imaging, and pan-IoT (Internet of Things) products, surged to 4.039 billion yuan, an 88.5% year-on-year jump, with a gross margin climbing to 34.4%. In contrast, revenue from mobile phone products was 13.149 billion yuan, a slight 0.8% decline year-on-year. Despite an overall gross margin of approximately 19.5%, with revenue growth slightly outpacing profit growth, it suggests that the robust growth of new ventures has not yet fully compensated for the declining gross margins in the mobile phone segment on the group's overall profitability.

Furthermore, the company has yet to disclose separate revenue figures for its robotics business, leaving the market unable to accurately dissect the contributions from robotics, intelligent imaging, and pan-IoT. The clarity of its scalable profitability and business boundaries still awaits more explicit validation from subsequent financial reports.

From a product system standpoint, Sunny Intelligent Optics has developed a comprehensive matrix that includes TOF cameras, stereo cameras, structured light cameras, RGB cameras, and AI cameras, extending its capabilities to environmental perception, 3D obstacle avoidance, positioning and grasping, and on-device intelligence.

The company has honed key capabilities in multi-sensor fusion, including high-precision iTOF, dTOF, stereo vision, and structured light, along with supporting capabilities such as on-device AI vision development and flexible supply chains. These effectively address industry challenges like ranging failures, interference effects, depth distortion, and complex calibration.

In terms of commercialization, in September 2025, the AMR navigation and obstacle avoidance module co-developed by Sunny Intelligent Optics and Sony achieved its first batch of mass production and shipment. The HYT001-EX module boasts a multi-modal fusion design, integrating three dToF sensors and one RGB module, providing robots with an ultra-wide 202° field of view.

In household applications, Sunny's visual system solution for lawn mowing robots has achieved mass production and deployment with multiple leading manufacturers both domestically and internationally, covering over ten top robot brands globally.

In the realm of humanoid robots, the company has supplied core hardware such as TOF cameras and stereo vision to leading manufacturers like Unitree. Media reports have also revealed that it has entered the supply chain verification stage for Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus.

Overall, Sunny Optical is gaining access to the foundational model layer by investing in Zeno Robotics while simultaneously building in-depth capabilities with perception hardware and system solutions as its core strengths.

For Sunny Optical, the window of opportunity in embodied intelligence has just opened, and the true test lies in whether it can convert its 11-year early strategic entry into sustainable system-level competitive advantages.