Will Semiconductor Co Ltd

Howell Group announced plans to change the use of 8.7502 million A-shares held in its repurchase special securities account to cancellation and reduction of registered capital. The company's previous repurchase program had a total funding amount of no less than 800 million yuan and no more than 1 billion yuan, with a repurchase price not exceeding 100 yuan per share. The shares were originally intended for employee stock ownership plans or equity incentives. As of July 1, the repurchase was completed, with a cumulative total of 8.7502 million shares repurchased, accounting for 0.69 percent of the total share capital at that time, and a total payment of 813 million yuan. Based on actual operating conditions and development strategy, and to enhance shareholder value, the company decided to change the use and cancel the shares. After the cancellation, the total number of shares will decrease from 1.258 billion to 1.249 billion.

Pathfinder's Shanghai Tongtu Semiconductor has officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Horizon Robotics to jointly optimize inference bandwidth and memory usage for large models on automotive-grade chips. Tongtu will leverage its full-stack data compression technology as the core, deeply integrating with Horizon Robotics' intelligent driving computing platform. This technology can compress video and other input data to one-fifth of its original size, further compress intermediate data by 50% on top of Google's TurboQuant, and achieve 30% parameter compression for large models with hundreds of billions or even trillions of parameters without retraining. The partnership is seen as a key move for China's on-device AI industry to break through the memory wall bottleneck. Tongtu's compression IP has been adopted in volume by leading supply chain players such as HiSilicon and Will Semiconductor, and its self-developed on-device dedicated compression chip has entered the tape-out and mass production stage. Since establishing its dual-core strategy in 2021, Pathfinder has successively acquired five chip companies—Beijing Core Energy, G2 Touch, Jiangsu Dingmao, Shenzhen Betterlife, and Shanghai Tongtu—building a chip product matrix covering the full chain of sensing, interaction, display, and compression, with Tongtu playing the role of a technological adhesive. In addition, Tongtu has signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with the global ecosystem platform GNS to integrate its compression technology into the GNS technology ecosystem, accelerating global commercialization.