Hesai and the falling price of Lidar

For most of the past decade, lidar was the reason autonomy looked unaffordable. The laser scanner that lets a car build a three-dimensional picture of the road was a low-volume, hand-built instrument, mounted on the roofs of research vehicles and priced like a small car. It has since moved behind the windscreens of mass-market models, and the cost of a single unit has fallen to a few hundred dollars. Behind much of that decline sits one supplier, and the numbers it now reports say something about where the whole business is heading.

The company began in Shanghai in 2014, founded by David Li, an engineer who had just finished a doctorate in the United States, building high-performance laser sensors before it turned to lidar for driverless cars around 2016. Its early units were the tall, spinning drums that robotaxi developers bolted to the roofs of test vehicles. In February 2023 Hesai listed on the Nasdaq, the first Chinese lidar maker to go public in the United States, raising more than US$190 million; [1] in September 2025 it added a dual-primary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a raise of more than US$533 million that stands as the largest to date in the global lidar industry. [6] Today, by the research firm Yole Group's tally, it is the largest automotive lidar supplier in the world. [2] The credential that matters more is one the company does not print: what a single one of its sensors actually sells for.

01The price of seeing

It can be worked out. Take the net revenue Hesai reports for a year and divide it by the number of lidar units it says it shipped, and the result is a rough average price per sensor. Using a constant conversion rate of RMB6.9931 to the dollar across all four years — chosen to strip out currency swings between reporting periods rather than let them distort the trend — the implied price was about US$2,137 (RMB14,950) a unit in 2022. A year later it was US$1,208, and by 2024 it had reached US$592. For 2025 it came to US$267, on net revenue of US$432.9 million (RMB3.03 billion) spread across 1,620,406 units. [3] That is a fall of roughly 88 per cent in three years in this blended, revenue-per-unit sense, while unit volume rose about twentyfold. (Hesai's own year-by-year dollar translations, which each use that period's own reporting-date exchange rate rather than a constant one, tell much the same story: roughly US$2,168 a unit in 2022 against US$267 in 2025, a fall of similar size. The conclusion doesn't hinge on which conversion method is used.)

That fall is a blended average, and it should not be read as one sensor getting 88 per cent cheaper. Net revenue includes a small amount of non-hardware income — engineering-service fees paid by early customers, which have run at roughly 5 per cent of the total in recent years — so hardware-only pricing sits a little below the figures above throughout. More significantly, what Hesai ships has itself changed. Its shipments were already mostly ADAS units in 2022, but ADAS lidar then meant a pricier, earlier-generation sensor; the low-cost ATX line that now accounts for a large share of volume only reached mass production in 2025, priced from around US$200, built specifically to hit a mass-market price point rather than to replace an existing sensor at a discount. Hesai does not publish revenue by product line, so a given sensor's cost-down and the shift toward selling cheaper sensors cannot be cleanly separated from public filings. Both are almost certainly real; the 88 per cent figure is their combined effect, not evidence that any single lidar design fell in price by that much.

Volume explains part of that, but not all of it. Hesai designs its own application-specific chips, the signal-processing silicon at the core of a lidar, rather than buying them in, and builds the optics, lasers and moving parts into a single unit it manufactures itself. On the company's first-quarter call in May 2026, its chief executive, David Li, said Hesai had by then shipped more than a million of its own automotive-grade motors and encoders inside its sensors. Its chief financial officer was blunter about what that vertical integration is for.

Yes, the price of a single lidar has come down over the years, but that's really the result of strong in-house ASIC capability and system integration, which helped bring lidar from a luxury technology into mass adoption without sacrificing performance.

Andrew Fan, chief financial officer, Hesai first-quarter 2026 earnings call, 19 May 2026

02How the volume got there

Falling prices do not by themselves ship 1.6 million units; orders do. Hesai's 2025 volume arrived from two directions. One is factory-fit driver assistance at Chinese OEMs — design wins across BYD, Geely, Great Wall Motor, Changan and Chery carried the bulk of the 1.62 million units shipped that year. The other is a robotics business that barely existed for the company a few years ago: lawn-mowers, delivery machines, industrial platforms. A single agreement to supply Dreame's robotic lawn-mower ecosystem runs to ten million lidar units; Hesai has also joined Nvidia's Halos AI safety-inspection lab and put sensors on outdoor autonomous robots built by firms such as Germany's Innok Robotics. In the first quarter of 2026, roughly a quarter of the units it shipped went into robotics rather than cars. [4] The order book has since reached further west: in May 2026, alongside its first-quarter results, Hesai was named a confirmed lidar supplier for Mercedes-Benz models built to enable Level 3 automation, and it booked a further one-million-unit order from another European carmaker — the clearest sign yet that Chinese-made lidar is moving from Chinese nameplates onto European ones. [4]

03The competition, and the outlier

Hesai does not have the field to itself, and its closest rivals are mostly neighbours. RoboSense, Huawei and Seyond are all Chinese; Yole's 2024 ranking put Hesai first in automotive lidar overall with about a third of the market, though on some cuts of the passenger-car segment RoboSense led on revenue. [2] The order matters less than the shape of the board: Chinese suppliers now account for the large majority of ADAS lidar shipped worldwide, and Hesai's particular stronghold is the long-range sensors that see furthest, where it held 43 per cent in 2025. Increasingly this is a contest among Chinese firms over who scales fastest.

Beyond China, the earlier front-runners have spent two years retrenching. Luminar, the American maker that supplies Volvo Cars, ran an operating loss of about US$435 million in 2024 and has since cut hard; Innoviz has warned over its cash runway; Ouster reached its first GAAP-profitable quarter only at the very end of 2025. [5] Hesai's real separation from the pack shows up further down the income statement. For most of lidar's history, scale and profit did not travel together: makers won design wins, shipped more, and still lost money doing it. Hesai reported net income of US$62.3 million (RMB435.9 million) for 2025, against a loss the year before, and held a gross margin of 41.8 per cent even as the average sensor price kept falling. [3] Its chief executive called it the first full-year GAAP profit any lidar company had posted.