In 2026, industrial investment has entered a deep-water zone, where capital, technology and industry are accelerating their integration. The old investment logic no longer applies, and new consensus is taking shape. The 2026 Industrial Future Conference focuses on opportunities in the new cycle, and jointly explores the future of the industry and the birth of the “Light of China”. From September 9 to 10, the 2026 Industrial Future Conference hosted by 36Kr was held in Yizhuang, Beijing, with the theme of “Resonating for New Life Above the Deep Water”. Participants from state-owned asset platforms, industrial investment funds, corporate CVCs, innovative enterprises, experts and scholars gathered to focus on the industrialization of future industries such as quantum technology. The conference deeply discussed the current cutting-edge technology and industrial perspectives, intensively demonstrated breakthroughs in technical routes such as superconductivity, photonic quantum and ion trap, and shared a large number of specific industrial scenarios, industrial system construction, and the prospects of heterogeneous computing, to jointly explore the future of technology industry investment.
The following dialogue is organized and edited by 36Kr:
Speaker: Xu Fan, Co-founder & CTO of Shuowei Optoelectronics
Xu Fan: Thank you for the host’s introduction, and thank you for the invitation of the Industrial Future Conference. I am Xu Fan from Shuowei Optoelectronics. Today I will introduce the development ideas and current status of Shuowei Optoelectronics in the field of space perovskite photovoltaics. This topic also reflects the company’s vision: to become a pioneer and leader in China’s space perovskite photovoltaic and new generation space energy system sectors.
My presentation is mainly divided into three parts. The first part is about the industry and market landscape. In the early stage, industry participants including Elon Musk have carried out various attempts in the field of space photovoltaics, with application targets including satellites, starships and so on; at the same time, the national “15th Five-Year Plan” has also incorporated commercial aerospace, new energy, new materials and other sectors into key strategic directions.
With the support of relevant policies, we believe that starting from 2026, space photovoltaics will usher in an important development window. As low-orbit constellations enter the intensive launch phase, the number of satellites is increasing continuously, and the power of single satellite is also evolving from early low-power satellites to future high-power medium and large-sized satellites. For medium and low-orbit satellites, solar energy is still the most main and most mature energy acquisition method. Solar energy is the only feasible energy form for all medium and low-orbit satellites.
In terms of market space, relevant applications will gradually extend from short-term communication, navigation and remote sensing satellites to space computing satellites, and further to space-based energy infrastructure in the longer term. We judge that with the continuous development of space infrastructure, the market scale is expected to grow from the hundred-billion-yuan level to the ten-trillion-yuan level or even higher. Looking at the development trend of satellite energy systems, taking Starlink satellites as an example, the area of solar wings has increased from more than 20 square meters of the first generation to hundreds of square meters at present, which also reflects that the power demand of single satellite is constantly rising.
The right side is the public schematic diagram of computing satellites. It can be seen that the designed area of the solar wing reaches 600 square meters, and the wingspan is about 70 meters, which is almost equivalent to the wingspan of a Boeing 747 airliner. If all existing high-cost technologies are adopted, the cost of a single satellite for the solar wing alone will reach an extremely high level, which may be close to 100 million yuan.
Therefore, the future development trend of space energy technology will definitely continue to pursue lower cost, higher efficiency and higher specific energy ratio, which also returns to the core direction of our company: to develop new generation perovskite space photovoltaic technology. At present, there are two main types of mainstream space photovoltaic technologies.
The first type is crystalline silicon, and the second type is gallium arsenide. At present, the second-generation gallium arsenide thin-film cells are widely used in China, but the cost of gallium arsenide is still an important constraint affecting its large-scale application, and the selling price per square meter can reach 200,000 to 300,000 yuan. Facing the large-scale satellite deployment in the future and the rapid development of the commercial aerospace market, this high-cost gallium arsenide cell will face the challenge of cost reduction, and its structure can hardly support long-term sustainable development.
The perovskite photovoltaics selected by our team belong to the third-generation new photovoltaic technology, with abundant raw material reserves, low cost, and compatible with flexible substrates, which can well meet the needs of future space applications. In comparison, gallium arsenide is restricted by rare metal materials and high cost factors; as a transition solution, the first-generation crystalline silicon also faces certain challenges in further improving efficiency and reducing weight, and the room for further improvement in efficiency and weight is relatively limited. Perovskite technology has good adaptability to space application scenarios, and has obvious potential in lightweight, which is expected to achieve about 80% weight reduction; meanwhile, the cell efficiency also has high development space and is better than traditional crystalline silicon cells; more importantly, from the perspective of material and manufacturing system, its cost has great potential for reduction, and the cost of bare cell is expected to be about 1/20 of that of current gallium arsenide. We believe that by around 2028, perovskite is expected to form a coexistence pattern of multiple technical routes with gallium arsenide; in the medium and long term, with the continuous improvement of technology maturity and reliability, perovskite is expected to become one of the important technical routes in the field of space photovoltaics and space energy, and will become the leading technical route for future space photovoltaics and space energy.
The second part introduces the situation of our company.
The full name of our company is Beijing Shuowei Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. Its R&D headquarters and space photovoltaic related production lines are all located in Yizhuang Economic Development Zone. Founded in April 2023, the company is now a National High-tech Enterprise, Technology-based Small and Medium-sized Enterprise, Innovative Small and Medium-sized Enterprise and Beijing Municipal Intellectual Property Pilot Unit.
Our team has rich accumulation in patents, standards and papers, and currently owns more than 50 patents. Yesterday, we jointly with China Star Network, Shanghai Institute of Space Power-sources and other units jointly released the industry’s first perovskite solar cell technical specification standard for space applications, and also obtained other honors such as the science and technology demonstration product of the 14th Five-Year National Key R&D Program, which will not be expanded here.
There are many domestic ground photovoltaic enterprises, but space photovoltaics are not a simple extension of ground photovoltaics. We sum it up as five thresholds from multiple dimensions: whether it is the spectral condition, the photovoltaic cell itself, the aerospace environment, the evaluation and verification and the supply chain system, there are significant and essential differences between space photovoltaics and ground photovoltaics. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a set of technology, product and verification system more targeted at space applications, and ground technologies and products cannot be directly used in space scenarios.
The Shuowei Optoelectronics team has a strong aerospace native background. As early as 2018, the core members of our company started to carry out related work around the near-space; since the establishment of the company in 2023, we have continued to focus on the space application scenarios of perovskite. From 2024 to 2026, the company has gradually formed a pattern of in-depth cooperation with two “national teams”.
Our team’s aerospace technology accumulation started from the near-space about 35 kilometers above the surface, and now it has covered thousands of kilometers, and even the deeper space scenarios further away in the future. In August 2018, our chief scientist of the joint team, relying on Peking University, Northwestern Polytechnical University and Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, carried out experiments by mounting the relevant perovskite cell technology on a near-space balloon in Inner Mongolia; in 2021, Professor Tu Yongguang, the chief scientist, served as a review expert for relevant NASA projects in the United States; after the company was established in 2023, it fully focused on perovskite space applications, and continued to be recognized by Shanghai Institute of Space Power-sources under China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, and carried out in-depth research cooperation; in 2025, we jointly with Shanghai Institute of Space Power-sources, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University established a joint laboratory of flexible photovoltaic technology under the relevant team of the State Key Laboratory of Space Power-sources; in June 2026, the National Laboratory for Deep Space Exploration made a strategic equity investment in the company, and the two sides began to further deepen the strategic cooperation, and will continue to carry out explorations around deep space energy in the future.
At present, we maintain in-depth cooperation with the two “national teams”.
We have established a joint laboratory with No. 811 Research Institute, and we are also the only enterprise side that has been publicly announced to carry out in-depth cooperation by this “national team”. In the future, relying on the on-orbit mounting channel of No. 811 Research Institute, we will carry out cooperation in joint application for military product projects, subsequent mass production procurement and equity cooperation.
In terms of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, we mainly focus on deep space energy, and jointly established the Deep-Shuo Space Power Application Joint Innovation Center, to carry out cutting-edge research around future large-scale space constellations, Earth orbits, extraterrestrial orbit, planetary exploration and other directions.
This also makes us the only perovskite enterprise in China that simultaneously carries out in-depth cooperation with the scientific research forces of the two major national-level space energy laboratories. We not only pay attention to the recent space photovoltaic applications, but also actively lay out the longer-term deep space energy.
In terms of the aerospace photovoltaic technology system, facing the complex aerospace environment, we have carried out key layout and R&D in aerospace-grade materials, processes and cell substrates around the directions of single-crystallized perovskite, radiation resistance stability, and space spectrum adaptation.
In terms of product layout, we adopt the route of “combining rigidity and flexibility”: there are rigid perovskite cells similar to the traditional gallium arsenide product form, and also flexible perovskite products that can be wound and thinned. Relevant products have obtained test reports from domestic and foreign aerospace institutes, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation has also issued the application scenario certificate of the company’s products, as well as stability related reports, and the overall test performance is good.
This is our “Yuxi” series product matrix, including three perovskite cell chips for aerospace-grade applications. The product names are taken from traditional cultural imagery such as *The Book of Documents* and other Chinese classics, and are named as three series: “Tianyuan”, “Chuiyun” and “Taisu”.
The Tianyuan series mainly has the advantages of rigidity and lightweight, facing low-cost space applications, and is suitable for mass replacement scenarios of communication, navigation and remote sensing satellites in the future.
The core advantage of the Chuiyun series is that it is flexible and can be wound, with a high storage ratio, and will be applicable to scenarios such as large computing satellites, large space stations and constellations in the future.
The Taisu series is a tandem cell based on perovskite technology, with efficiency reaching more than 30%, which can meet the demand of satellites for smaller occupied area and higher power per unit area in the future.
Based on these three perovskite cell chips, in March this year, we released the industry’s first system-level perovskite solar wing “Yuxi Tianyuan” series at the Shenzhen Commercial Aerospace Exhibition. This product is mainly equipped with rigid and lightweight Tianyuan cell chips, realizing integrated power generation from the cell slice to the whole solar wing panel system. The product was released in March, and soon received the first solar wing order from April to May. At the same time, this year we will also intensively carry out normalized satellite mounting and near-space tests to accelerate the verification of the product’s performance in the real environment.
This is also related to our enterprise positioning. As mentioned earlier, there are obvious differences between the space photovoltaic supply chain and the ground photovoltaic supply chain. The market scale of commercial aerospace was relatively limited in the past, so in addition to the traditional “national team” system, the relevant market-oriented supply chain is still in the process of continuous improvement in some links. The market scale of commercial aerospace was small in the past, so in addition to the traditional “national team” system, the relevant market-oriented supply chain is still relatively blank in many links.
Therefore, we have also carried out a series of layouts for the supply chain, including finding suitable suppliers for aerospace-grade perovskite materials and components; at the same time, relying on national research institutions such as No. 811 Research Institute and Deep Space Laboratory, we are promoting a number of tests and process requirements for space-grade materials.
We mainly promote cooperation through four starting points: relying on the joint laboratory of the State Key Laboratory of Space Power-sources to hold quarterly meetings, and invite industry, government, media and investors to participate; taking the lead in applying for military product projects; jointly participating in the preparation of top-level guidelines with the Deep Space Laboratory; and striving to enter the national team’s priority procurement system after mass production. We believe that these layouts will help to further consolidate and enhance the company’s industry position in the space perovskite photovoltaic field.
Finally, I will introduce the company’s development vision. We believe that the overall commercialization path of space perovskite photovoltaics can be divided into three stages. From 2026 to 2028 is the verification period, and the technology maturity has not reached level 9 to 10. Therefore, in this stage, continuous testing, mounting and iteration are needed to gradually obtain customer recognition for product reliability.
In this stage, the revenue mainly comes from technical services and project funds. After 2028, it will gradually enter the commercialization stage, mainly selling cell slices, solar wings and power systems and other system-level products; after 2030, with the advancement of large-scale deep space constellation construction, the company hopes to further transform into an energy service-oriented enterprise under appropriate circumstances.
We are not just selling cell slices. In the long run, we also hope to participate in the operation of energy systems related to large constellations. According to the overall plan, in the early stage, we will gradually realize the replacement and expand the application with perovskite photovoltaic cells for communication, navigation and remote sensing satellites; in the medium and long term, we will further target the new generation of space energy systems and the construction of future space energy infrastructure.
This page shows the investment highlights, which is also a summary of the overall situation of the team. We build technical barriers relying on industry-leading and differentiated technologies, and form in-depth cooperation with No. 811 Research Institute of the Eighth Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory; at the same time, we are building a partner matrix for commercial aerospace, and more commercial satellite companies will join in the future.
On this basis, our team completed two rounds of financing, Pre-A and Pre-A+, in the first half of this year, and is currently promoting the Pre-A++ round of financing with a financing amount of about 80 million yuan. Interested investment institutions are welcome to further communicate and connect with us.
The above is all my presentation. Thank you for listening. Thank you!
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The pictures in this article are from：作者拍摄
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