Yangtze Business Daily News ● Yangtze Business Daily reporter Zhang Lu
China's online audio platform Himalaya, which has 270 million users, has been deeply rooted in its obsession with listing.
Recently, Himalaya Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as " Himalaya ") submitted an prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, intending to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In April and September 2021, Himalaya submitted prospectuses to the U.S. Nasdaq and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange respectively, but due to the influence of domestic regulatory policies and the failure to expire audit data, this is also the third prospectus handed over by Himalaya.
As the number one player in the online audio industry, Himalaya has received 9 rounds of financing since its establishment in 2012, with a valuation of 24 billion yuan. In 2021, its average monthly active users have reached 270 million.
However, a reporter from the Yangtze Business Daily noticed that with huge content investment and marketing expenditure, Himalaya has been in losses for many years, with a loss of up to 2 billion yuan in the past three years.
In the face of intensified competition in the track, high investment and high growth model, Himalaya is in a difficult situation due to the urgent need of a large amount of funds and the lack of a clear profit schedule.
sprinted to the IPO three times. Does Himalaya have any new stories to tell?
revenue growth slowed down, losing 2 billion in three years
As China's leading audio sharing platform, Himalaya has always had a strong attraction to capital. Qichacha shows that from 2012 to the present, Himalaya has completed 9 rounds of financing, and in April 2021, it completed a US$900 million E round of financing, continuously attracting Internet giants such as Tencent , Xiaomi , and JD to support it.
According to statistics from iMedia Consulting , in 2021, the online audio platform will still present the 28 law . Judging from the number of user devices, Himalaya, Dragonfly FM and litchi account for 75%-85% of the market share. The prospectus shows that Himalaya ranks first among online audio applications in China with an average monthly active users of 116 million on mobile terminals, and another audio company, Lizhi, which was listed in 2020, had an average monthly active users of 58.4 million.
From the user equipment, Himalaya firmly sits in the industry's number one spot. But even so, Himalaya is still in a dilemma of years of losses.
prospectus shows that from 2019 to 2021, Himalaya's revenue was 2.68 billion yuan, 4.08 billion yuan and 5.86 billion yuan, respectively, an increase of 81.4%, 51.1% and 43.7% year-on-year. Although the rapid growth trend of revenue is obvious, the growth rate is slowing down.
and Himalaya's profit seems to be far away. The prospectus shows that from 2019 to 2021, the company's annual losses were 1.925 billion yuan, 2.882 billion yuan and 5.106 billion yuan, respectively, with a cumulative loss of 9.913 billion yuan; the adjusted losses were 749 million yuan, 539 million yuan, and 759 million yuan, respectively, with a cumulative losses of 2.047 billion yuan.
It is worth mentioning that Lizhi, which is also positioned at the audio track as Himalaya, has achieved quarterly profits last year. Lizhi's revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 hit a record high, up 33% year-on-year to 560 million yuan. For the first time, it turned losses into profits at the GAAP level, achieving a net profit of 8.92 million yuan, and its adjusted net profit increased by 237% year-on-year to 18.25 million yuan.
Specifically, Himalaya's revenue includes four parts: subscription (member subscriptions and paid on-demand listening), advertising (performance advertising), live broadcast and other innovative products and services (Internet of Things devices, IP derivatives, etc.). In 2021, the revenue accounts for 51.1%, 25.4%, 17.1%, and 6.4% of the total revenue respectively.
It can be seen that subscription payment is undoubtedly Himalaya's main source of revenue at present. Specifically, from 2019 to 2021, the payment rates of Himalaya mobile paid members were 5.2%, 9.3%, and 12.4%, respectively, and the payment rates continued to grow.
In terms of the number of paid users, in 2021, Himalaya's number of paid members was 14.4 million, an increase of 52% year-on-year. Let’s look at the unit price again. From 2019 to 2021, the monthly payment amounts of a single user will be 11.6 yuan, 10.8 yuan and 11.2 yuan respectively. The average customer price will not increase but decrease compared with two years ago.
"If users cannot be continuously attracted and retained and users are increased and users' payments are increased, the company's business prospects may be significantly affected."Himalaya revealed in its prospectus. Therefore, some industry insiders believe that under the seemingly eye-catching revenue data, it is exposed that Himalaya is still using price reduction strategies to support the growth of paid users.
marketing costs are high, and infringement storms are plagued by
Yangtze Business Daily reporters noticed that huge content investment and marketing expenditure are actually the crux of Himalaya's losses.
prospectus shows that from 2019 to 2021, Himalaya's marketing expenditure was 1.219 billion yuan, 1.707 billion yuan and 2.63 billion yuan respectively, with a total of 5.556 billion yuan in three years, accounting for The proportion of revenue is 45.17%, 41.88%, and 44.9%, respectively, which is equivalent to nearly 1 yuan of every 2 yuan of revenue marketing cost .
In addition, in Himalaya's operating costs, the revenue share of content creators and the content cost of purchasing copyright accounted for a large proportion. From 2019 to 2021, the total expenditure of these two costs was approximately RMB 1.064 billion, RMB 1.549 billion and RMB 1.931 billion, respectively, accounting for 39.5%, 38% and 33% of total revenue, respectively.
Taking 2021 as an example, Himalaya's subscription revenue accounted for 51.1% of the total revenue that year, which is a well-deserved "current" Jin Yi Ge”, with a total amount of approximately 2.99 billion yuan. However, the single marketing expenditure almost consumed Himalaya’s subscription revenue that year.
Although these expenses dragged down Himalaya’s loss-turning process, Himalaya still stated that in order to increase brand awareness and expand the scale of users, the company will continue to invest in marketing.
It is worth noting that although Himalaya spends a lot of money on content purchase, there are still copyright disputes. According to the Judgment Document Network, as of early April this year, there were 394 judicial documents in Himalaya involving cases of infringement of the rights to disseminate works information networks. According to the prospectus submitted by Himalaya, the company had From 2018 to 2020, due to copyright infringement disputes, 1.5 million yuan, 6.1 million yuan and 37 million yuan were compensated respectively, and a total compensation of 44.6 million yuan in three years was 44.6 million yuan.
In addition, Qichacha data shows that Himalaya's parent company Shanghai Himalaya Technology Co., Ltd. involved 2,793 cases, 2,039 defendants, and 53% of the cases involved were disputes for infringing on the Internet dissemination rights of works information.
At the same time, when Himalaya was still struggling on the road to copyright and fostering payment for households, platforms such as short videos and live broadcasts have been snatching people's time and attention in a large number of cases, and the online audio market was greatly squeezed. Although the number of online audio users has been increasing in recent years, compared with short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, the penetration rate of online audio products is far from that of . According to data from Zhuoshi Consulting, in 2020, the penetration rate of domestic online audio users was 16%, online music was 57%, while long videos and short videos were 74%.
In order to open up a new situation, Himalaya told a new story and improved platform content penetration and user stickiness by layout of smart homes, smart speakers and vehicle networking. However, these have not caused much waves yet. In this regard, industry insiders said that if we cannot find a new, unique, and sufficiently effective way of monetization, and only want to cultivate users' use of audio software, then Himalaya still has a long way to go to lose money.
