Hanshow Technology Co.,Ltd. (301275.SZ) has recently entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with X-Era Lab (Shenzhen) Technology Co., Ltd., marking a significant advancement in its AI-driven retail strategy. The two companies will collaborate on embodied intelligence retail robots and retail loss prevention intelligent technologies, with the initial application focus set on supermarket inventory counting, gradually expanding to replenishment, display compliance, and inventory management across more operational scenarios.
As one of the world's leading providers of digital store comprehensive solutions for the broader retail sector, Hanshow Technology Co.,Ltd. currently serves over 550 retail customers globally, with its products deployed across nearly 70,000 stores in more than 80 countries. Since fully launching its AI retail strategy in 2025, the company has built an AI product ecosystem encompassing intelligent hardware, solutions, and AI software platforms, all designed to enhance operational efficiency for retailers worldwide.
X-Era Lab, incubated by Sun Yat-sen University's Human-Machine-Object Intelligence Fusion (HCP) Laboratory and the Pengcheng National Laboratory, specializes in world action model development. The team has published over 500 papers in top-tier conferences and journals, amassing more than 100,000 citations in the embodied intelligence field.
Global AI Retail Leader: Nearly 70,000 Stores Create a Formidable Scenario Moat
The core challenge for embodied intelligence in commercialization lies in whether it can reliably, stably, and safely execute specific tasks in real-world environments while delivering measurable business value. Retail stores provide an ideal testing ground for such capabilities. The highly standardized shelf layouts, aisles, displays, and operational processes within chain retail systems create favorable conditions for cross-store technology replication. However, the dynamic nature of continuously updating SKUs, moving customers and shopping carts, and unexpected temporary displays and product obstructions imposes far more demanding requirements on AI understanding and execution than those found in laboratory settings.
Hanshow Technology Co.,Ltd. has focused its robotic value proposition in stores on three high-frequency, repetitive tasks with clear operational value: inspection, inventory counting, and replenishment. Inventory counting directly impacts stock accuracy and influences replenishment, display, and operational decisions, making it a strategic entry point for this collaboration. The company's inspection robots have already entered retail environments both domestically and internationally for POC testing. This partnership with X-Era Lab represents a critical step toward extending capabilities from inspection to more advanced tasks such as counting and replenishment. The two companies plan to complete a closed loop from technology validation to replicable solutions within real store environments.
From SKU-Level Data Gateway to Execution Brain: The AI Retail Evolution Path
Hanshow Technology Co.,Ltd. entered the AI retail domain based on a clear strategic judgment: the next wave of efficiency improvement in physical retail will not come from better displays or faster payments, but rather from enabling AI to truly "enter" between physical shelves—both understanding the scene and changing it. This conviction forms the foundation of the company's AI retail strategy.
The company's competitive advantage lies in its digital network deeply embedded in nearly 70,000 real stores. Through years of global deployment, Hanshow Technology Co.,Ltd.'s electronic shelf labels and IoT infrastructure have extensively connected products, shelves, and store business systems. For AI and robotics, these digital nodes in Hanshow-equipped stores serve not only price display functions but also provide product information and business context corresponding to specific shelf locations. This allows robots entering these stores to avoid relying entirely on pure visual recognition to understand their environment from scratch. More importantly, this network unifies electronic shelf labels, AI cameras, smart shopping carts, and robots onto a shared store digital foundation, eliminating silos between terminal devices.
According to public information, the collaboration will initially focus on validating key capabilities such as product and shelf recognition, spatial navigation, continuous operation, and task execution. As technological maturity improves, the partnership will progressively expand to higher-level tasks including replenishment and display compliance. Once these capabilities are refined, both parties intend to extend this closed-loop solution to more high-frequency labor scenarios, creating replicable and scalable retail robot solutions.
Retail stores uniquely combine standardized processes with dynamic environments, while labor costs for high-frequency repetitive tasks continue to rise—providing clear economic value for robot substitution. For Hanshow Technology Co.,Ltd., this initiative represents not merely an extension of its technological territory, but a critical milestone in realizing the long-term investment value of its AI retail strategy across real-world applications.