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Foreword :
The "AI Four Dragons" have opened the road to listing, following Megvii Technology and Yuncong Technology to seek the listing of Hong Kong stocks and A shares respectively Later, Yitu Technology also joined the IPO team. And opening an IPO at this node is of great significance to Yitu and the entire industry.
Author | Fang Wen
Picture source| network
AI industry enters the capital redemption period
"2020 Hurun Global Unicorn List" shows that Shangtang, Megvii, Yuncong and Yitu are valued at 50 billion and 300 respectively Yitu is at the bottom of the "Four Little Dragons" valuation.
Since 2019, the primary market has turned cold. According to the head research institute, China's investment in artificial intelligence industry in 2019 was 71.3 billion, down 40% year-on-year, and it was the first decline.
is therefore difficult to raise funds in the primary market due to its high valuation, ability to burn money, and difficulty in landing. At present, in addition to Shangtang Technology, the other three companies have turned to the secondary market to seek listing and financing.
In August 2019, Megvii Technology submitted the prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and now the prospectus has "expired";
In August 2020, Yuncong Technology launched A-share listing guidance;
In November 2020, Yitu Technology was the first to submit the prospectus Books, leading the way in the listing process.
In July 2020, the Cambrian, which lost 1.6 billion in 3 years, and Qi Anxin, which lost 3 billion in 4 years, were successively listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, with a market value of more than 70 billion.
This gives Yitu Technology and other AI companies that need financing the confidence to break through the IPO.
Revenue scale and loss are long
On November 4, according to the information on the official website of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, Yitu has formally submitted the prospectus (declaration draft). After signing the counseling agreement with Guotai Junan Securities on September 9 and filing, Yitu officially Started the sprint road of science and technology innovation board.
According to the just announced prospectus, YITU's revenue has increased year after year from 2017 to 2019. From 2017 to 2019, Yitu Technology’s revenue reached 68.718 million yuan, 304.3 million yuan, and 716.8 million yuan, respectively.
YITU's compound annual growth rate from 2017 to 2019 reached 222.97%;
In the first half of 2020, YITU's revenue reached 380.6 million yuan.
However, Yitu Technology has not yet made a profit.
From 2017 to the first half of this year, the net profit of Yitu Technology reached -1168.5 billion yuan, -1068.4 billion yuan, -3.6471 billion yuan and 1.3034 billion yuan. From the book point of view, its losses have a tendency to expand year by year.
As of June 2020, Yitu’s accumulated unrecovered losses have reached -7.2204 billion yuan. For the emerging unicorn with only more than 700 million revenues this year, the loss has been close to several times its revenue. huge.
The two key elements of loss are:
after multiple rounds of preferred stock financing, the overall value level continues to rise, and the fair value of preferred stocks rises accordingly, resulting in a loss of fair value changes of 983 million yuan and 545 million yuan in each period. Yuan, 2.619 billion yuan and 936 million yuan, totaling 5.1 billion yuan, accounting for 70% of the loss book. In order to maintain its competitiveness in the market, Yitu's investment in R&D is also very large. R&D expenses accounted for 91.69% of revenue last year and exceeded 100% in the first half of this year.
In the face of huge R&D investment, Yitu Technology’s current gross profit is not enough to make up for its huge losses.
, especially in the cloud edge and AI chip fields where it is currently focused, is still facing greater R&D investment pressure, which is also an important reason for forcing it to accelerate its listing. In addition to the search chip that
has launched so far, Yitu Technology has also launched the original stone series of intelligent servers, cutting-edge series of edge computing devices, and terminal-oriented AI computing hardware products, including smart cameras, intelligent voice hardware and other products.
Overall, according to the pictureAt present, cloud-side products have found specific application scenarios and have the ability to specifically generate revenue.
combined with self-developed AI chips and algorithms
In the past few years, the contradiction between the rapid development of algorithm performance and the slow increase of machine computing power has always existed. As a result, companies have either reduced algorithm performance to adapt to hardware, or lacked advanced algorithms, wasting computing resources.
Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to define AI chips for actual application scenarios and business logic. Yitu Technology began to explore new directions for breakthroughs.
finds the application scenario of the chip, accurately predicts the most suitable intelligent algorithm in this scenario, customizes the chip according to the two, and uses this "end-to-end design" idea to iterate the AI system or chip architecture, which is expected to fully stimulate the potential of AI .
Therefore, with the combination of self-developed AI chips and top-notch algorithms, Yitu can get rid of many computing power limitations and constraints in the focused business scenarios, seek optimal solutions for specific business scenarios, and improve market penetration.
From the company's revenue structure, YITU's business focus has undergone a "soft to hard" change.
Software revenue in 2017 was 38.413 million yuan, accounting for 55.9%. This proportion has been decreasing year by year, and has fallen to 14.82% in the first half of this year.
At the same time, the proportion of software and hardware portfolio revenue is rising, from 10.32% in 2017 to 60.78% in the first half of 2020.
The development orientation given in the prospectus is to fully solve the fundamental problems of machine viewing, listening, understanding and planning.
provides high-performance, high-density and universal computing power for the application and popularization of AI technology to meet the intelligent computing needs of cloud data centers, edge computing, and the Internet of Things.
raised 7.5 billion yuan to build global AI competitiveness
Yitu Technology’s prospectus disclosed that the scale of fundraising for this sprint to the Sci-tech Innovation Board will reach 7.5 billion yuan.
Yitu Technology is not only an AI vision company, but also developed AI voice and AI semantics. The fundraising project 5 is a new generation of voice semantic capability platform project.
Yitu Technology has a wide layout in both vertical (chip, server, application) and horizontal (visual, voice, semantic) dimensions of the AI industry chain, and it seems that it already has the skeleton of a giant in the AI industry. One of the key layouts of
is: a new generation of artificial intelligence IP and high-performance SoC chips. The project plans to invest 2.3 billion yuan, accounting for 30.89% of the total funds raised. With the support of the
chip, the remaining investment projects involve visual reasoning-based edge computing system projects (811 million yuan), a new generation of artificial intelligence computing system projects (1.071 billion yuan), and high-end visual intelligent computing platform projects (689 million yuan) And a new generation of speech and semantic capability platform project (377 million yuan), etc. In the next development plan of
, Yitu highlights four goals and ambitions:
leads the development of artificial intelligence chips and algorithm technology;
upgrades cloud, edge and terminal AI computing power products across the board;
focuses on high-value business scenarios;
builds Artificial intelligence computing power ecology.
most of the operating capital comes from external financing
Tianyan Check shows that Yitu Technology has experienced 9 rounds of financing since its establishment, with a cumulative financing of over 2.567 billion yuan.
, including Zhen Fund, Hillhouse Capital, Yunfeng Fund, Sequoia Capital China, ICBC International, SPDB International and many other well-known investment institutions are investors of Yitu Technology.
The frequency of financing has increased in recent years. In the early days of Yitu Technology's establishment, it carried out financing once every two years on average; later it became once a year. This shows that Yitu Technology has gradually increased its demand for funds in recent years. Z2z
has a large amount of funds to enrich Yitu Technology’s "ammunition depot", but for Yitu Technology, which has been losing money for a long time, it is a drop in the bucket and cannot reverse its insolvency.
Increasing Reliance on Major Customers + Increasing Competition among Friends The trend continues to rise.
Starting in 2019, Yitu Technology's top five customersThe accounted for more than half of the revenue of the households, this also means that its dependence on large customers is getting stronger and stronger, and its ability to acquire customers is gradually decreasing.
At the same time, the company's top five customers frequently change, Yitu Technology's customer base is very unstable, and the relationship with major customers is not stable.
At present, there are many masters on the AI track. In addition to the competition of "AI Four Little Dragons" Shangtang, Megvii, and Cloud Cong, Internet giants such as Ali and Tencent are also increasing the AI industry, which also makes Yitu Technology continue to increase pressure .
Currently, Nvidia still has an absolute advantage in the AI chip field, and companies such as Huawei HiSilicon and Cambrian also have strong competitiveness in this field. End of
:
With the end of the mobile Internet dividend period, the future platform-level mobile Internet super unicorns will be greatly reduced, and the next opportunity will mainly come from back-end innovation.
is not the best time for AI companies to go public. After all, AI companies currently do not have mature business models and products, and they lack grounding scenarios. It is more conceptual hype.
However, with the shrinking of the market and changes in the external environment, financing has become more and more difficult, and listing has become a duck to the shelves.
Yitu Technology’s problems are universal challenges for all technology-driven AI startups.
