Starway established a wholly-owned subsidiary, Flyng Micro, and launched three automotive vision processing chip products: M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max. Feilingmicro is expected to form a business collaboration with Stevie's CMOS image sensors to further enrich the products in the Starway automotive business line. Maintain a buy rating.

Key points to support ratings

Starway lays out the field of automotive vision processing chips. In August 2024, according to Stevie's official Weibo report, Starway established its wholly-owned subsidiary Feiling Microelectronics and launched three products: M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max. The M1 is an ISP chip with built-in high-performance dark light noise reduction and image enhancement algorithms. It can support features such as high-resolution RGB-IR image processing, 4-frame HDR synthesis, LED flickering suppression, and dual-channel 3MP @30fps HDR. The M1 Pro is a SoC chip. It integrates 0.8 Tops NPU, Arm Cortex-A7 CPU, 1Gb DDR3L and other chips on the M1. It can be used with Starway's 2MP CMOS image sensor SC232AT to achieve DMS recognition algorithms and result output, thus ensuring smart driving safety. The M1 Max configuration is further upgraded from the M1 Pro. It incorporates chips such as 1.5Tops NPU, Arm Cortex-A7×2 CPU, and 2Gb DDR3L, and has more powerful processing and computing performance.

Flynx is expected to form a business collaboration with Stevie. The M1 series of vehicle-grade vision processing chips launched by Feilingwei, M1 Pro, and M1Max all have excellent image processing performance, low power consumption, small package size, functional safety, information security, etc., and are combined with Stevie vehicle image sensors to form a cost-effective high-performance intelligent driving full-scene vision solution, saving manufacturer system development costs and debugging cycles, and accelerating solution verification and implementation, injecting strong impetus into the leapfrog upgrade of smart driving in-vehicle vision systems.

CIS integrated ISP is moving towards SoC integrated ISP trend. According to semiconductor industry observation data, there are currently two solutions for automotive-grade ISPs: 1) CIS integrated ISP, which can save space and reduce costs; 2) SoC integrated ISP, where ISPs in each camera are directly integrated into the SoC, which can greatly reduce the cost of sensing hardware and solve the heating problems caused by high-pixel cameras. Currently, almost all autonomous driving control SoCs integrate an ISP module. This time, Feilingmicro's automotive vision processing chip products added AI functions to ISP, and also provided car manufacturers with more solution options.

valuations

Steway's 2024/2025/2026 EPS is expected to be 1.15/2.02/3.01 yuan, respectively. As of the close of trading on August 9, 2024, the total market value of Starway was about 20.4 billion yuan, corresponding to 2024/2025/2026 PE was 44.2/25.2/16.9 times, respectively. Maintain a buy rating.

The main risks faced by ratings

Demand for phones fell short of expectations. The progress of the CIS iteration for higher-end phones fell short of expectations. The automobile price war spread to the CIS. Security recovery has fallen short of expectations. The competitive landscape in the market deteriorated.