On June 30, the share price of Hong Kong stock SenseTime-W plummeted. As of midday that day, SenseTime-W fell 44.22% to HK$3.28 per share, and fell to the "half-cut line" during the session, setting a new low in half a year since its listing. It lost HK$87.1 billion in half a day, and its current total market value is only 1,099. billion Hong Kong dollars.
Faced with the plummeting stock price, SenseTime Technology gave an explanation that today is the day when the stock ban is lifted. The company also issued an announcement early in the morning. Xu Li, Wang Xiaogang, Xu Bing and other SenseTime executives and certain management , have made voluntary lock-up commitments and are confident in the long-term value and prospects of the Group. Unfortunately, this announcement did not save SenseTime’s stock price.
In addition, SenseTime told the market, "We do not comment on the stock price."
SenseTime Group Co., Ltd. is mainly engaged in the provision of computer vision software. Its products can be used in smart cars, residential properties, urban management, manufacturing, infrastructure, medical and other fields. In 2021, the company achieved revenue of 4.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.4%. It is worth mentioning that in the past four years, SenseTime has invested more than 8 billion yuan in research and development.
In fact, as early as 2014, the GaussianFace facial recognition algorithm released by SenseTime founder Tang Xiaoou and his team achieved an accuracy of 98.52% on the LFW database, which was also the first time in the world to break through human eye recognition capabilities. Subsequently, the DeepID series of algorithms released by Tang Xiaoou's laboratory gradually increased the accuracy of face recognition to 99.55%, officially opening the era of technology implementation in the entire face recognition industry.
It can be said that SenseTime does have certain strength. However, SenseTime’s ability to “burn money” is also top-notch. In 2021, SenseTime suffered a huge loss of 17.2 billion yuan, which was 3.6 times its revenue in the same period, and has a gradual increase trend. From 2018 to 2020, SenseTime's losses were 3.4 billion yuan, 5 billion yuan and 12.2 billion yuan respectively, with a total loss of 37.8 billion yuan in four years.
Before its listing, SenseTime’s funds mainly came from the entry of major capitals, including China Chengtong’s Mixed Ownership Reform Fund, Xuhui Capital, SAIC Group , Guotai Junan , Hong Kong Science and Technology Park , Taizhou cornerstone investors such as Cultural Tourism also include Softbank Capital, which holds 14.88% of the shares, Alibaba, which holds 7.59% of the shares, and capital giants such as Primavera, Silver Lake, and CDH.
For this reason, although many company executives expressed their optimism about the future of SenseTime and clearly postponed the lifting of the ban, it is still unknown whether the above-mentioned major capitals who have finally waited for the "Carnival Day" will choose to leave.
(Author丨City City Feng Chenchen)
