2020.12.12 CoStone Capital Views:
On December 9, 2020, Deloitte issued the list of “Stars of Tomorrow: China’s Top 50 High Growth High-Tech Enterprises 2020” in Beijing. With its expertise in privacy computing, industry leading technology and competitiveness, Clustar was selected to be on the list, alongside with other star companies including Genki Forest, ESWIN, and AInnovation.
On December 9, 2020, Deloitte issued the list of “Stars of Tomorrow: China’s Top 50 High Growth High-Tech Enterprises 2020” in Beijing. With its expertise in privacy computing, industry leading technology and competitiveness, Clustar was selected to be on the list, alongside with other star companies including Genki Forest, ESWIN, and AInnovation.
This ranking list started in the Silicon Valley of the U.S in 1995, and was introduced to China in 2005. Every year it is made with due consideration in over 30 countries around the globe, and is renowned as the benchmark of global fast-growing enterprises. Many of today’s world leading technology enterprises such as Amazon, Google, Alibaba Group, ByteDance, DJ-Innovations, Sense Time and Megvii have been candidates on this list, thus many consider it as the cradle of star industries.
China’s Stars of Tomorrow 2020 award sets the theme of “Perseverance, Reform and Revitalization”, focused on examining company’s founding team, technological innovation, industrial prospect and company valuation, it aims to commend outstanding start-up enterprises with immense potential and leading position in respective sectors.
Stars of Tomorrow 2020, China
Clustar is a leading technological service provider of federated learning, providing ultrahigh computing power for AI speed up training with tremendous data input. Meanwhile, premised on maintaining the data local, Clustar also assists clients in data-sensitive sectors such as finance and medical industry in sustainably introducing valuable data into practical business context with legal compliance, so as to strike a balance among “breaking data silos”, “data security and privacy protection” and “business development”. Currently, Clustar has established strategic cooperation with dozens of major clients in finance, insurance, funds, medical treatment and biology industries to facilitate the bridging of data silos and excavation of the data factor market.
Selecting Clustar to be on the “Stars of Tomorrow 2020” short list is a confirmation of Clustar’s overall competence and it shows expectation and encouragement towards the company’s future. In the meantime, as large scale privacy computing being implemented in financial sectors and approved by regulators, Clustar will hold on to its vision of “constructing AI infrastructure with secure data connection by breaking data silos”, and apply the advanced federated learning technology in more fields related to data security to create greater value for the industry.
Rewritten by: Xue Guanda, Edited by: Du Zhixin, Li Yunzhen
Over the past year, the bull market returned, with technology leading the way.
As I said back in October 2024, the rally that began on September 24 was not merely a rebound, but a reversal. Since then, China's capital markets have undergone a broad revaluation, moving from undervaluation toward fair value.
The Shanghai Composite Index reached its highest level in a decade. The "Yi-Zhong-Tian" trio—Eoptolink, Zhongji Innolight and TFC Communication, three prominent Chinese optical communications stocks—saw their share prices multiply severalfold in a single year. Cambricon's market capitalization briefly exceeded RMB 600 billion. Elsewhere in the technology sector, triple-digit price-to-earnings ratios and valuations exceeding RMB 10 billion became commonplace.
Some investors were greedy; others, fearful. Still others asked me: Are technology stocks in a valuation bubble?
My answer is that what we are witnessing is the hunger and anxiety of an era, reflected in the capital markets. Once you understand this, the current fervor for technology investing is no longer difficult to explain.
Investment has nothing to do with macroeconomics, but everything to do with geopolitics.
China-US relations will shape the investment landscape for decades to come. Geopolitics has played a major role in shaping the hunger and anxiety of our times, fundamentally reshaping the way we invest.
What, then, lies at the heart of China's hunger and anxiety?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is already underway, yet China has not fully overcome the technological shortcomings left by the Third. There is no time to lose.
This is why some people wonder: Why do Chinese computing chip companies command such high valuations when their technologies still lag so far behind NVIDIA's? Why does NVIDIA trade at just 50 times earnings, while a company hailed as "China's answer to NVIDIA" commands a multiple of 300?
To me, this gets the logic exactly backward.
It is precisely because these companies cannot catch up with NVIDIA in the near term that they command a higher strategic premium. The wider the technological gap, the greater the strategic value.
The further something lies beyond our reach, the stronger our hunger. The harder it is to catch up, the deeper our anxiety. If China were to achieve a complete breakthrough in computing chips one day, valuations might actually come down.
Where can one find China's most spectacular natural landscapes?
Much of the answer, I believe, lies in and around the Hengduan Mountains: the Meili Snow Mountains, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, Mount Gongga, Mount Siguniang, Jiuzhaigou, and many others. Vast differences in elevation and deep fault lines have given rise to landscapes of extraordinary grandeur.
Hard-tech investing follows a similar logic.
Technological gaps, discontinuities in capabilities, and missing links in industrial systems: a leap in difficulty brings a leap in valuation, and a successful breakthrough can, in turn, bring a leap in returns.
This logic extends well beyond computing chips. It is equally evident in memory semiconductors, commercial spaceflight, and other sectors where China still faces substantial technological gaps with other countries.
It was precisely this conviction that led CoStone Capital, starting in 2016, to decisively focus its investments on three areas: hard tech, emerging industries, and life sciences and healthcare. In this context, "hard tech" refers specifically to important industries in which China faces a technological gap with the United States.
Thanks to this forward-looking strategy, CoStone Capital established an early presence across the full value chains of key sectors, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and robotics.
Looking ahead, the frontiers of technological progress and industrial upgrading are boundless. Nor can the gaps in hard technology be closed overnight. The twin windows of opportunity presented by technological innovation and the development of homegrown alternatives to foreign technologies have only just begun to open.
The road ahead is long, but the future holds immense promise.
As an investment firm, CoStone Capital will continue to invest where the hunger and anxiety of each era run deepest, move forward with the tensions that shape our times, and extend our reach toward the most challenging—and most important—frontiers.
Spring 2026