51WORLD (06651) has announced the establishment of a joint venture with Shenzhen United Imaging Co., Ltd. (United Imaging), named Shenzhen Wanwu Linchang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (the Joint Venture). The Joint Venture is primarily focused on addressing the core challenge of "real-world data scarcity" in the embodied AI industry, and on August 18, 2026, launched AperData, a "software-hardware integrated" embodied AI data platform designed to provide products and services for collecting, delivering, and training data from the real world.
According to the company, United Imaging is an independent third party with no connection to the Group. As the highest applicable percentage ratio calculated for the establishment of the Joint Venture is below 5%, this transaction does not constitute a notifiable transaction under the Rules Governing the Listing of Securities on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited.
A significant constraint currently facing the embodied AI industry is the lack of large-scale, high-quality real-world interaction data that can be directly used for model training. The capabilities of the Group and United Imaging are highly complementary: the Group brings extensive experience in digital twin and data platform technologies, with its Dataverse platform leading the industry in full-lifecycle data management, yet it lacks professional hardware for real-world data collection; United Imaging, meanwhile, has over a decade of experience in R&D and manufacturing of camera modules and visual algorithms, a mature mass-production supply chain, and expertise in producing wearable capture devices. Together, these strengths complement the Group's offerings.
By combining the "data platform capabilities" of the Group with the "imaging hardware capabilities" of United Imaging, this collaboration is expected to enable the company to seize emerging market opportunities in embodied AI data infrastructure.
The establishment of the Joint Venture represents a key step in the Group's "three-step" development strategy. First, the SimOne platform has been deeply involved in intelligent driving simulation for years and has become the market-leading intelligent driving simulation platform, laying a solid technical and market foundation for data-driven simulation. Second, the Group is extending its digital twin and simulation expertise into the field of embodied AI data infrastructure, building core infrastructure for the embodied AI era through AperData. Looking ahead, the Group plans to further expand into the aerospace domain, exploring related business opportunities, with the goal of becoming a leading provider of data and simulation infrastructure across intelligent driving, embodied AI, and aerospace.