In the second half of 2021, , is the hottest concept, no one. Now, this fire continues to 2022. The story baton of the Metaverse has also been passed from VR and NFT to virtual people.
On New Year’s Eve in 2021, many New Year’s Eve concerts applied virtual people. Among them, Jiangsu Satellite TV restored the image of the late famous singer Teresa Teng through virtual human technology, and arranged for him to collaborate with real singer Zhoushen to three classic songs "Story of Small Town", "Strive on the Road of Life" and " Big Fish ". This combination of virtual and real singing method brings great freshness to the audience, not only helping Jiangsu Satellite TV to win the first place in the national ratings during this period, but the topic of #Zhou Shen and Teresa Teng cross-time and space chorus# also topped the Weibo hot search list.
The virtual people's popularity at Jiangsu Satellite TV's New Year's Eve concert took advantage of the trend and became the virtual reality service provider that provided technical support behind it - Digital Kingdom. After the beginning of the year, the stock price of Digital Kingdom achieved five consecutive positive moments, and as of today, it has risen by more than 40%.
opened today, and the number kingdom rose again. 's increase in once exceeded 16%, but the increase fell in the afternoon. At the close, the stock price fell 1.1% to HK$0.9 per share, with a total market value of HK$3.896 billion.
01
from the foreign transformation
Perhaps no one would have thought that the digital kingdom, founded in 1993, was once a foreign body. One of its founders is the famous Hollywood director Cameron . This director, who once directed " Avatar ", never hesitated to his obsession and praise for digital technology , and the company he founded himself has always had movie action effects.
Digital Kingdom participated in the production of post-production special effects not only Cameron's masterpieces "Titanic" and "Avatar", but also other Hollywood blockbusters "Avengers", "Transformers", " Fast and Furious ", etc., and have won Academy Awards many times for their production on these films.
In 2012, the film special effects industry where Digital Kingdom is located was seriously in circulation, and its parent company accelerated its expansion, and eventually fell into a liquidity crisis due to poor investment. Digital Kingdom was also broken into production and had to be sold by its parent company. Subsequently, after several twists and turns, the Digital Kingdom was acquired several times and was loaded into a Hong Kong listed company whose main business was scrap acquisition in 2013. This once famous film production company, which was once famous in Hollywood, became a Chinese company.
Because of the labor-intensive nature of the film special effects production industry, low-price competition in inverse often occurs, and the number of movies is high and low every year, which leads to low profits and inability to maintain stable revenues. After going public through backdoor listing in Hong Kong, Digital Kingdom has undergone major reforms, and its main business is no longer limited to movie action special effects, but has also begun to expand into the advertising media and entertainment industries.
(Source: Haitong Securities )
Around 2015, the global VR trend was emerging, and the digital kingdom began to lay out the VR track. But the VR at that time was just a gust of air and it passed after it was blown. The real-life technology implementation is difficult and the market acceptance is low. VR has not become a weapon for the digital kingdom to win the turnaround battle as expected. The company's stock price quickly fell after a brief spike, becoming one of the many Hong Kong sen stocks .
After 2016, the revenue of Digital Kingdom began to gradually decline. In terms of net profit attributable to shareholders, the Digital Kingdom has also been in a loss state over the past years.
In the first half of last year, the company achieved revenue of 415 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 23.88%, achieving the highest growth rate since 2015. However, the net profit attributable to shareholders is still negative, with a loss of 104 million yuan in the first half of the year.
02
Virtual people are coming
Betting on the VR business has not made the Digital Kingdom turn around. This time the Metaverse is coming. Can the virtual people story told by Digital Kingdom do this time?
Although everyone is familiar with virtual people, Hatsune Miku in the early years was the idol of countless teenagers. The virtual girl group A-SOUL, which appeared on the Spring Festival Gala, which was founded on the virtual girl group A-SOUL, and Lehua Entertainment , has very high popularity in China.
Especially last year, idol house collapse incidents represented by Zheng Shuang and Wu Yifan frequently occurred, which not only caused a relatively bad social impact, but also caused certain economic losses to the brand owners they endorsed. However, it is difficult for virtual idols to collapse. This has stimulated the demand for virtual idols to a certain extent.
At the same time, since last year, in addition to virtual idols, virtual people have also had many other application scenarios.
virtual beauty blogger Liu Yexi gained 1.3 million followers’ attention from her first short video on Douyin , and the cumulative number of fans has reached 8.29 million. At the beginning of this year, the headquarters of Vanke awarded the company's Newcomer of the Year Award to a virtual person named Cui Xiaopan, because during the ten months she worked at Vanke, the verification rate of prepaid overdue documents urged to be as high as 91.44%. A few days later, ByteDance also quietly invested in a technology company that produces virtual people. It is reported that the company is producing a virtual girl with a truly emotional connection.
From the perspective of application scenarios, virtual people have gradually gone from excessive entertainment scenarios to work and life application scenarios. Many industry insiders believe that virtual people are most likely to be the first track to achieve profitability in the meta-universe concept. This is also due to the advantages of virtual people in commercialization, such as 's life cycle , long behavior, controllable, support for multi-line long-term work, strong thinking and computing capabilities, good plasticity, etc.
The virtual person with image can follow the route of idol stars, monetize business endorsements, create IP to generate revenue through peripherals, etc.; functional virtual persons can act as customer service, tour guide and other roles, and can even play more complex workplace roles like Vanke employee Cui Xiaopan; at the same time, in the world of the metaverse, everyone can choose to represent their virtual person role and interact in the metaverse. This value-added service similar to QQ show in the early years is also one of the ways for virtual people to commercialize.
However, at present, the first thing that virtual people are trying to do is to the pan-entertainment field. Other fields are still unable to be widely promoted and spread due to insufficient technical proficiency. In addition, the technical basis of virtual people is artificial intelligence . Only when artificial intelligence is further developed can virtual people usher in a larger market space.
Judging from the performance of Digital Kingdom in the first half of last year, there seems to be signs of improvement. However, it is still unknown whether it can achieve a turnaround with virtual people. From its recent top ten net buying /sell brokers, we can find that more retail investors are interested in this stock, and doubts in performance sustainability also means that its current surge is more conceptual hype.
