Aiko Medical (艾柯医疗) Returns to IPO: How Far Can a Single Product Run?

A comeback with a single star product

Aiko Medical (艾柯医疗) has refiled for a Science and Technology Innovation Board (科创板) IPO after voluntarily withdrawing its 2024 application. The company says it has swung from a RMB 360 million loss to a RMB 36.39 million profit in the latest reported period, driven by faster commercial rollout of its Lattice flow-diverter stent. Lattice is now reportedly used in over 800 hospitals with more than 11,000 implants, giving Aiko roughly a 20% share of the niche flow-diverter market and placing it third behind Medtronic (美敦力) and MicroPort NeuroScience (微创脑科学). But numbers alone do not guarantee market confidence. How long can one product carry an IPO story?

Competitive risks and product concentration

Lattice’s technical selling points — it is the first domestic flow-diverter with a mechanical balloon delivery system and supports in‑situ release and repeat retrieval — helped rapid adoption. Still, Aiko remains heavily dependent on that single product: Lattice accounted for more than 95% of revenue in the past two years. The company has introduced other devices, such as a distal closed‑cell thrombectomy stent and an aspiration catheter, but none yet provide a clearly diversified revenue base. It has been reported that the planned Lattice NEXT iteration offers only incremental improvement (a “no-extended guidewire” feature), raising questions about whether product iterations will meaningfully narrow the clinical-evidence gap with incumbents. At the same time, domestic competition is proliferating — some 24 flow-diverters have been approved in China, 20 of them local — and global incumbents retain advantages in long-term clinical data and physician familiarity.

Procurement pressure, margins and valuation reality

Centralized procurement (集采) in China has shifted the industry’s economics: successive rounds since 2020 have driven large price declines and normalized national tendering for increasingly sophisticated devices. Aiko reported very high gross margins (about 85%) and near‑20% net margins in early 2025, but those figures were achieved before procurement entered the deep‑water phase for flow‑diverters. If winning tenders forces prices down — as seen when flow‑diverter prices fell from tens of thousands to roughly RMB 50k–70k in recent alliances — the company’s “volume for price” growth logic may be squeezed. Investors are already pricing in that structural change: Chinese medtech valuations have fallen sharply since 2021 and the market now shows much less tolerance for single‑product risk. Can Aiko demonstrate a sustainable, platform‑level growth story this time? That question will determine whether its IPO attempt is a short sprint or the start of a longer run.