The Mining Truck Company That Stopped Selling Trucks
EACON Group has burned cash for three years running its own autonomous mining trucks. Its Hong Kong IPO prospectus shows a service fee model now drives most of its revenue.
EACON Group has burned cash for three years running its own autonomous mining trucks. Its Hong Kong IPO prospectus shows a service fee model now drives most of its revenue.
For three years, EACON Group ran its autonomous mining truck business two ways at once. In one, the company bought the trucks, hired drivers and maintenance crews, and booked the asset cost on its own balance sheet. In the other, it handed the vehicles to mining customers and collected a service fee. By 2025 the second model had pulled ahead. Customer-provided fleets, what the prospectus filed on June 29, 2026 calls "light-asset" operations, generated 56.8 percent of revenue, displacing company-owned fleets for the first time. EACON is bringing that pivot, not the 1.24 billion yuan cumulative loss it accumulated along the way, to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under stock code 7687.
The mix shift, reported by Lei Feng Wang and corroborated by Beijing News, did more than redraw the revenue chart. In 2023, company-provided fleets, "heavy-asset" in industry parlance, accounted for 56.5 percent of EACON's revenue, while customer-provided fleets contributed 41.7 percent. Two years later the picture had inverted: heavy-asset 42.7 percent, light-asset 56.8 percent. Gross margins on the heavy-asset side climbed from negative 39.3 percent in 2023 to a thin 1.5 percent in 2025, while margins on the customer-provided side moved from 6.1 percent to 16.0 percent. The product mix is what did the lifting: by 2025, EACON's "Zhu Shan" (著山) autonomous mining-truck solution accounted for 99.5 percent of total revenue, while the company's digital-mining platform "Mu Ye" (暮野) remained a rounding error.
The 1.24 billion yuan loss across 2023 through 2025 was largely the residue of operating mining trucks the way a mine operator would, not the way a software vendor should. According to a 2021 strategy session reported by Beijing News, co-founder and vice president Lin Qiao anticipated that once the benchmark for autonomous mining-truck operations was set, the industry would split into specialists. EACON absorbed the early phase end-to-end, including excavators and manned engineering teams, to prove out the technology. The cleanup is visible in the prospectus: a 118 million yuan write-down in 2025 on 190 first-generation trucks slated for sale, evidence of the legacy heavy-asset drag finally being cleared.
R&D spending tells the same story in reverse. Absolute R&D rose from 177 million yuan in 2023 to 271 million in 2025, but the ratio to revenue collapsed from 65.4 percent to 18.8 percent. EACON is now spending more on engineering while devoting a smaller share of each revenue yuan to it. That is what a maturing software-and-services business looks like, not what a pre-revenue AV startup burns. Revenue itself ramped from about 271 million yuan in 2023 to 1.435 billion in 2025, more than a fourfold increase in three years.
The operational footprint behind those numbers is unusual for a company of this size. According to the HKEX prospectus, EACON runs autonomous fleets in 9 of China's 11 super-mine sites with more than 100 autonomous trucks each; one site hosts more than 500 vehicles, which the company describes as the world's largest single-mine autonomous fleet. China Securities Network cites a roughly 50 percent share of China's mining-autonomy market, a figure that would make EACON the dominant domestic operator but has not been independently verified against the prospectus segment data. The HK Stockstar IPO overview corroborates the listing metrics.
The concentration risk is harder to ignore. "Zhu Shan" at 99.5 percent of revenue means the IPO is being underwritten on a single product line in a single end market: autonomous haulage at large Chinese open-pit mines. The customer-provided fleet model mitigates capital intensity but not customer concentration. Working-capital data in the available excerpts is truncated; the receivables-days figure stretched from 48.8 days in 2023 to longer settlement cycles in 2025, and the exact 2024 and 2025 numbers still need to be confirmed against the full prospectus PDF before any quantitative claim about working-capital pressure holds.
Overseas, EACON is signalling that the model is portable. In 2025, Thiess, Norton Gold Fields, and EACON launched an autonomy trial in Australia, and in July 2025 Thiess signed an MoU with XCMG, a major Chinese mining-truck original equipment manufacturer, on autonomy and new-energy solutions. OFweek and Sina Finance have tracked EACON's targeting of high-value overseas markets, though no overseas unit economics have been disclosed.
The prospectus is a snapshot of a company mid-transformation. The 1.24 billion yuan loss is the cost of becoming the operator that could prove out the technology; the 56.8 percent revenue share is the result. Whether the customer-provided model can hold a 16 percent gross margin through a down-cycle in Chinese commodity demand, and whether "Zhu Shan" can be diversified into adjacent autonomy use cases before single-product customer concentration becomes a single-product cliff, is the next question the prospectus, and the IPO, will have to answer.