Longyang Electronics: Company's HVLP5 Copper Foil is Delivering Sample Orders to Clients
Stop focusing solely on NVIDIA's GPU chips and OpenAI's model parameters. As news headlines discuss 1.6 billion Windows users entering the Agent era, another battlefield in China's semiconductor industry is quietly but vitally fighting a crucial war—the domestic substitution of high-end foundational materials. The smoke of this battle drifts through the laboratories of a company called Longyang Electronics and fills the production lines of Guoji Jingong.
Analysis
Longyang Electronics has reported that its HVLP5 copper foil is currently配合客户交付样品订单 (collaborating with clients to deliver sample orders), but no bulk orders have been secured yet. In plain terms, this means: "We have a good product and are letting clients test it, but there's still a long way to go before it's used at scale and generates stable revenue." This is almost the standard script for all Chinese companies catching up in high-end materials. Copper foil sounds basic, but HVLP (Very Low Profile) 5-grade copper foil is a core material for high-frequency, high-speed circuit boards—such as those used in AI servers and 5G base stations. For a long time, this domain has been firmly controlled by Japanese companies. Longyang's progress to the stage of "cooperating with clients to deliver samples" suggests they may have technically gained a foothold. However, the six words "no bulk orders yet" provide the coldest footnote to reality. This indicates that product stability, yield rates, cost control, supply chain systems, and even long-term customer certification barriers have not yet been fully resolved. This cannot simply be summarized as "breaking a monopoly"; it involves countless rounds of testing, adaptation, and possibly repeated rejections by clients. Our narratives often love to focus on the "0 to 1" breakthrough moment but easily overlook the long, tedious, and costly "valley of death" in the "1 to 100" journey.
Turning to Guoji Jingong, its story sounds even more inspiring. Relying on a national key laboratory, it has achieved batch supply of products like dicing blades and packaging blades, thereby "breaking the monopoly of Japanese manufacturers." From "samples" to "batch supply," Guoji Jingong has clearly advanced further. The grander narrative revolves around diamond—from heat dissipation to optical-grade applications, and even to fourth-generation semiconductor materials, Guoji Jingong attempts to paint a blueprint of a "diamond era." Starting with tens of millions in revenue by 2025, the goal is ambitious. However, some cold water needs to be poured here, along with deeper reflection: tens of millions in revenue is an extremely small starting point for a vision aimed at reshaping the semiconductor heat dissipation and materials landscape. It proves the possibility of commercialization, but it is still far from achieving the scale effects necessary to support a vast industry chain. Directly linking the commercialization of diamond to "national strategic scientific and technological forces" is both a vision and a heavy burden. It means that progress cannot remain at the stage of lab papers and small-scale trial products; it must withstand the market's most rigorous cost-performance tests.
Placing these two companies side by side, a clear picture emerges: China is at a delicate stage in key material segments of cutting-edge industries like semiconductors, where "breakthroughs have occurred, but large-scale validation awaits." We are no longer content merely announcing "we have it"; we must confront the questions of "how can we afford it, use it well, and rely on it stably?" Longyang's "sample stage" and Guoji Jingong's "batch supply but still modest revenue" are essentially different progress points on the same exam paper.
This reveals a deep-secked contradiction: our industry narratives and capital enthusiasm are overwhelmingly focused on chasing glamorous, conceptually complete application-layer stars like AI large models and embodied intelligence. Meanwhile, the foundational materials, precision components, and processes that underpin these applications often receive insufficient attention and patience. We marvel at large model parameters doubling in scale but lack awareness of how long it takes for a high-frequency copper foil to pass client validation and how much investment it requires. This "top-heavy" industrial attention ecosystem may leave foundational innovation perpetually in a state of "funding hunger" and "attention poverty," causing even technical breakthroughs to falter at the "last mile" from the lab to the market.
The mentions by Guoji Jingong of "breaking the monopoly of Japanese manufacturers" and "meeting the needs of commercial spaceflight" highlight the dual significance of these material innovations: they are a "domestic substitution" on the economic battlefield—reducing costs and securing supply chain safety—and also a matter of "autonomous control" at the national strategic level, concerning whether future cutting-edge fields can avoid being held hostage. In the current context of intensifying chip wars, these two dimensions are profoundly relevant.
So, next time we cheer for another domestic large model release or another AI application deployment, perhaps we should also turn our gaze to those companies quietly working to develop China's own high-end copper foil and diamond heat dissipation sheets. Their battlefields lack flashy launch events and stunning demos—only long validation cycles and tedious parameter comparisons. But it is precisely these "less sexy" advances that truly determine whether the foundation of our entire technological edifice will be solid in the future. From Longyang's samples to Guoji Jingong's mass production, the road is long, but this step is more solid than any grand blueprint on a PPT. True industry chain upgrades are always built step by step in such mundane—even tedious—terms as "samples" versus "bulk orders," "validation" versus "revenue."
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.