From the laboratory to Vanity Fair: Li Jinyan's Changjin Guang Photonic Accounts Receivable remain high, and mysterious shareholders cash out at high levels before submitting filings

On March 20, 2026, the Shanghai Stock Exchange announced that the Listing Examination Committee is scheduled to meet on March 27 to review the IPO application of Wuhan Changjin Photon Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Changjin Photon”). The listing of this leading domestic specialty optical fiber enterprise is a critical juncture for its actual controller Li Jinyan as he transitions from academic research to the capital market. It also involves three major core controversies: technical ownership, profit stability, and production capacity digestion.

Specialty optical fiber is a core strategic material in information communication, high-power laser processing, and national defense industries. The IPO process of Changjin Photon is a typical reflection of the domestic specialty optical fiber industry transitioning from academic research and development to large-scale industrialization, undergoing scrutiny from both the capital market and regulatory authorities throughout the process.

From laboratory to fame: Patent internal circulation and mysterious high-level cashing out by shareholders

The core technological foundation of Changjin Photon is deeply tied to Huazhong University of Science and Technology, with its key technology directly relying on the active optical fiber-related patent results from the university, which also became the starting point for its subsequent development and capital operation. On November 10, 2017, Huazhong University officially transferred six invention patents under the “Core Patent Technology of Active Optical Fiber,” with a listing price of 1,001,400 yuan. This seemingly routine technology transfer transaction with the university welcomed its acquirer—Changjin Photon, which had only been established for two years—one month later, and the company successfully completed the delisting at the appraised price. However, this seemingly compliant market transfer, under the meticulous scrutiny of the IPO review, was shrouded in hidden complexities, including a “self-selling and self-buying” financial closed loop, a decade-long equity holding issue, and the precise high-level cashing out operations of mysterious shareholders, all of which sketch a complex capital layout as Li Jinyan transitioned from a university scholar to a capital operator.

The primary doubts surrounding this core patent transfer point to the dual identity of the actual controller Li Jinyan and the concealed equity holding arrangements. At the time of the patent delisting, Li held dual identities as a professor at Huazhong University, the first inventor of the involved patents, and the actual controller of Changjin Photon, yet his name did not appear at all in the company’s shareholder register. According to relevant information, Changjin Photon’s predecessor, Changjin Limited, has always been shrouded in the shadow of equity holding since its establishment in 2012. Li, concerned about the adverse effects of his university employee status, entrusted others such as Wang Shanzhen and Liu Changbo to hold company shares on his behalf, even employing multiple layers of nested holding arrangements to deliberately conceal the fact of his actual shareholding. Such concealed arrangements led to the 2017 core technology acquisition transaction presenting a compliant facade of public delisting from a non-related third party, thereby completely avoiding the explicit risks of directly related transactions.

More worthy of scrutiny than the concealment of identity is the complete funding “internal circulation” logic behind this patent transfer, which formed a solid profit closed loop. According to the policies of Huazhong University, 70% of the net income obtained from technology transfer must be awarded to the corresponding R&D team. This means that the 1,001,400 yuan patent transfer fee paid by Changjin Photon, after deducting the university’s management fee, resulted in approximately 700,000 yuan ultimately flowing back to Li in the form of research rewards. By September 2018, this funding chain had completely formed a closed loop: Li Haiqing, entrusted by Li Jinyan, contributed an increased capital of 683,000 yuan to Changjin Photon using this patent reward fund. Through the operation of “receiving patent rewards within the university and entrusting others to inject capital externally,” the controlling team only paid a small difference of about 318,100 yuan, successfully completing the transfer of ownership of the million-level core patent technology and the injection of technology into the company, achieving the goal of low-cost control over core intellectual property. This model of related transformation relying on university patents was once again replayed in August 2025, when Changjin Photon acquired another six invention patents from Huazhong University for 2,100,000 yuan. Although the company publicly emphasized its shift towards independent R&D, the early theories and technical foundations of its core products still heavily rely on these patents obtained from the university.

Amid the tangled layers of equity holding issues in Changjin Photon, the timing of natural person shareholder Li Yaogang’s shareholding, appointment, and exit appears particularly precise, showcasing a targeted capital operation. In January 2019, during the initial development period of Changjin Photon, the company’s pre-investment valuation was only 12.75 million yuan, and Li Yaogang entered at a very low price of 4.75 yuan per registered capital, hitting the key node of the company’s lowest valuation. Subsequently, during the core preparation phase for the company’s entry into the capital market, Li Yaogang briefly appeared in the management: in May 2020, he was added as a director, but this directorship lasted only eight months, as he quickly resigned in January 2021, returning to his role as a purely financial investor. This identity transition clearly paved the way for subsequent high-level reductions and cashing out.

As the valuation of Changjin Photon continued to soar, Li Yaogang initiated precise high-level cashing out operations: in December 2023, he transferred his shares to Nanjing Lianchuang at a price of 22.54 yuan per share, bringing in approximately 15 million yuan; in May 2025, he again transferred shares to Dianheng Venture Capital at a price of 25.62 yuan per share, further locking in profits. As of now, Li Yaogang has cumulatively profited nearly 20 million yuan from share reductions, still holding 1,548,900 shares of the company, accounting for 2.20%, with a corresponding remaining value of nearly 40 million yuan. In just four years, compared to his initial investment cost of about 1.9 million yuan, Li Yaogang’s return on investment has reached as high as 30 times. Such operations of timely shareholding entry, short-term positions, and gradual high-level reductions have raised many questions about the potential existence of hidden shareholding or benefit transfer scenarios.

Accompanying the cashing out doubts surrounding Li Yaogang is the more complex “chain” of equity holding by Changjin Photon, with equity ownership entanglements persisting throughout the company’s development. In September 2020, Li Jinyan had previously held shares of Changhe Xin on behalf of nine partners, with the core aim of centralizing company voting rights to strengthen his control over the company. Additionally, shareholder He Tao had held shares on behalf of twelve colleagues and friends, and shareholder Shenzhen Ruibin also had related equity holding situations. Although Changjin Photon has stated that all equity holdings have been cleared before the IPO application, such as He Tao and Shenzhen Ruibin exiting the company through equity transfer in May 2025 while simultaneously resolving the corresponding holding relationships, the long-term, high-frequency, and multi-layered equity ownership confusion remains a key issue for the IPO regulatory authorities to scrutinize.

Hardcore optical core breakthrough: Domestic wall-breaking in the high-end track

Returning to the essence of the business, Changjin Photon’s operational performance reflects the strategic breakthrough potential of the domestic specialty optical fiber industry. Specialty optical fibers are fundamentally different from ordinary communication optical fibers, which focus on low loss and large-scale transmission. Their core competitiveness lies in the complex waveguide structure design and atomic-level precise doping with rare earth elements to achieve optical signal amplification, suppression of non-linear effects, and stable transmission capabilities under extreme conditions. For a long time, the global high-end specialty optical fiber market has been dominated by international giants such as Nufern (under Coherent) and OFS (under Furukawa Electric), while domestic enterprises have long been in a catch-up position in the mid-to-low-end track.

Changjin Photon focuses on the highly technical barrier of rare-earth-doped optical fiber tracks (such as ytterbium-doped and erbium-yb fiber), which are key components of high-power fiber lasers and fiber laser radars. With the industrial laser market warming up in 2025 and the explosive demand in the low-orbit satellite internet industry, Changjin Photon has achieved rapid growth in performance. Financial data shows that the company achieved an operating income of approximately 250 million yuan in 2025, representing over 70% cumulative growth compared to 150 million yuan in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 30.4%. Among these, the revenue from function-enhanced specialty optical fibers (including radiation-resistant, polarization-maintaining, etc.) has shown particularly prominent growth: the revenue share of this segment jumped from 3.5% (5.083 million yuan) in 2023 to 8.9% in 2024, and further surged to 22.5% (55.296 million yuan) in 2025.

This means that in just two years, the annual revenue scale of this high-value-added segment expanded nearly tenfold. Such a dramatic optimization and upgrade in product structure directly enhanced the company’s overall bargaining power and marked Changjin Photon’s accelerated transition from a single laser supporting supplier to a high-value-added specialty application solution provider.

In the fields of military and aerospace high-end applications, behind the company’s performance growth is a substantive breakthrough in domestic substitution. Taking radiation-resistant optical fibers as an example, in the heavily cosmic ray environment of space orbits, ordinary optical fibers are prone to radiation-induced attenuation (RIA) problems, leading to signal transmission interruptions. Changjin Photon has improved the radiation resistance of its products to an international mainstream level through its independently developed fiber core dehydroxylation process and high-pressure hydrogen loading technology, and has already achieved bulk supply to core units such as China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, breaking the long-standing technological monopoly of the West in this field.

Moreover, it is noteworthy that the company is focusing on key layouts in cutting-edge technology fields. Currently, the global optical communication industry views hollow-core photonic bandgap fibers (HCF) as a core research and development direction. These fibers achieve light signal transmission in air through micro-structure design, reducing signal delay by 30% compared to traditional quartz optical fibers, making them a key technological solution to break through the interconnection bottleneck of AI computing power clusters. Microsoft has publicly planned to deploy 15,000 kilometers of hollow-core fibers to support its AI infrastructure; Changjin Photon has also listed anti-resonance hollow-core fibers as a core project for fundraising and research. Although the products are still in the small-scale trial production stage, the company’s technological accumulation in precise control of micron-level glass microstructures has already equipped it with the foundational capabilities to participate in establishing the next-generation optical communication technology standards. This control strength in underlying physical technology forms a key support for the company to avoid low-end market homogenization competition and build core technological barriers.

Financial report quality examination: Profitability concerns under high growth

Peering through the surface growth of the operational layer, Changjin Photon’s financial data reflects the balancing act between high-value-added product layout and production yield improvement. From the overall financial trend, the company possesses typical characteristics of a technology innovation enterprise: revenue scale grew from 145 million yuan in 2023 to 250 million yuan in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 30.4%. However, fluctuations in profitability quality also reflect deep operational issues during the company’s growth process.

First, the gross profit margin of the main business has shown structural downward fluctuations. The gross profit margin of the company’s main business has remained at a relatively high level of 65.06%, but it has decreased compared to 69.31% in 2023, mainly due to the downward pressure from price reductions in downstream industries. Taking the core product, high-power ytterbium-doped fiber, as an example, the product price fell from 111.37 yuan/meter in 2024 to 73.92 yuan/meter in 2025, a decline of 33.6%. The core challenge on the profitability side lies in the stability bottleneck of production yield. The preparation process of specialty optical fibers is complex, with a high waste rate during production; the proportion of unqualified products in R&D materials was once at a high level. Regulatory authorities have inquired about the company’s “unit cost carried forward being lower than the unit cost at the end of the period,” with the core reason being production yield fluctuations: the cost difference rate of ytterbium-doped fiber reached -23.9% in 2024, and this fluctuation, under the weighted average cost accounting method, has had a certain impact on the accuracy of profit accounting for the current period.

Second, there exists a juxtaposition of rigid R&D investment and lagging returns. Over the past three years, Changjin Photon has accumulated R&D investment of 84.432 million yuan, accounting for 14.5% of the cumulative operating income during the same period. Continuous high-intensity R&D investment has propelled the performance explosion of function-enhanced specialty optical fibers in 2025, with revenue from this segment increasing from 5.083 million yuan in 2023 to 55.296 million yuan in 2025, and the revenue share rising from 3.52% to 22.51%.

However, high R&D investment also comes with corresponding operational risks. The company currently has 46 R&D personnel supporting 14 ongoing projects, leading to a high per-person R&D cost. As the company transitions from technological leadership to cost advantages, it needs to rapidly achieve economies of scale through capacity expansion; otherwise, the annual R&D expenditure of over 34 million yuan will continue to exert dilution pressure on net profit.

Third, cash flow faces turnover pressure from rising accounts receivable. As leading downstream customers such as Chuangxin Laser and Ruike Laser gain stronger bargaining power, the company’s accounts receivable balance rose to 120 million yuan by the end of 2025, a year-on-year increase of 51%, significantly outpacing the revenue growth during the same period. Although the company’s net operating cash flow reached 100.953 million yuan in 2025, slightly higher than the net profit for the same period, this performance was mainly due to improved payment cycles arising from domestic sourcing of raw materials and the impact of bill endorsement transfers. Under the backdrop of intensified competition and pricing negotiations in the downstream laser industry, as a core upstream supplier, Changjin Photon faces ongoing challenges to its gross profit quality. The company’s ability to maintain a high gross margin relies not only on the depth of its core technology barriers but also on whether it can sustain stable bargaining advantages amid a high concentration of customers (in 2025, Chuangxin Laser accounted for 18.59% of sales, and Ruike Laser accounted for 14.99%).

Fivefold capacity expansion gamble: The digestion test of capacity release

In its IPO fundraising plan, Changjin Photon disclosed a clear industrial expansion plan. The company intends to raise approximately 780 million yuan, with 680 million yuan focused on the “high-performance specialty optical fiber production base and R&D center” project. According to the project plan, the total investment for this project is 700 million yuan, aiming to configure 14 high-precision deposition lathes and 12 drawing towers, and upon reaching full production, the company’s annual production capacity for specialty optical fibers will reach 38,500 kilometers. Compared to the actual output of approximately 7,100 kilometers in 2024, this expansion plan means the company aims to achieve a 5.4-fold capacity leap within a 36-month construction period.

From the perspective of the capital market, large-scale capacity expansion by enterprises has always carried dual implications. On one hand, scale expansion is expected to release dividends from economies of scale. The core production equipment for specialty optical fibers, the deposition lathe, has a high unit price, resulting in rigid pressure on profits from annual fixed depreciation costs; during low output phases, the unit depreciation cost directly compresses gross margin space. Through scaled-up production, Changjin Photon is expected to transition specialty optical fibers from customized small-batch production in laboratories to industrialized mass production, further enhancing market competitiveness through cost dilution advantages.

At the same time, the ability to digest new capacity also needs to be carefully considered. Changjin Photon has a high customer concentration, with downstream orders heavily reliant on leading manufacturers such as Ruike Laser and Chuangxin Laser. Although the company’s function-enhanced specialty optical fibers performed brilliantly in 2025, with revenue share quickly rising from 3.5% to 22.5% (approximately 55.296 million yuan), whether the overall market scale of this high-margin niche can support a capacity expansion rate of over fivefold remains highly uncertain.

Especially as the global laser market enters a phase of stock competition and downstream core customers gradually push for vertical integration (self-research of optical fiber preforms), the company faces potential risks of insufficient digestion after capacity is put into production. Furthermore, although technology giants like Microsoft have announced deployment plans for hollow-core fibers (HCF), this technology is still in the standard refinement stage. Undertaking large-scale heavy asset investments without securing definite orders in advance could create substantial operational pressure for the company if subsequent technology iteration directions change.

To further standardize corporate governance and respond to market concerns, Changjin Photon has recently completed adjustments to its governance structure. On November 3, 2025, the company’s second board of directors completed its renewal, with a core adjustment being the complete independence of the audit committee, with all three members being independent directors, and Shi Yong, who has a senior background in accounting, serving as the chairperson. This institutional arrangement aims to hedge governance risks during rapid scale expansion through transparency and professionalism in financial oversight, while also resolving past compliance shadows related to equity holding and patent-related transactions, thus establishing a stringent internal control defense line for subsequent large-scale capital expenditures.

Changjin Photon’s IPO journey is a typical sample of the transformation of hard tech enterprises from academia to industry, capital layout, and industrial expansion. The company holds core technology in high-end specialty optical fibers, riding the wave of domestic substitution, but it also cannot escape common growth issues such as early governance flaws, profitability fluctuations, and doubts over capacity expansion.