On December 30, SenseTime, China's "FIRST AI Stock", was successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (0020. HK）。 After the opening, the stock price rose rapidly, with the highest intraday rise of more than 20%. As of the close, SenseTime closed at HK$4.13, up 7.27%, trading 330 million shares, turnover of HK$1.4 billion, market value of HK$137.4 billion (about 112.3 billion yuan), creating the world's largest IPO in the FIELD of AI.
Xu Li, chairman and CEO of SenseTime, said in his speech: Historically known as anti-progress theory and anti-technology theory, and the epidemic has also triggered the suspension of globalization, geopolitical factors have led to SenseTime being repeatedly suppressed by the United States for no reason, but SenseTime people always believe that the incremental value brought by the change of artificial intelligence technology will promote the advent of an era of inclusive and fair intelligence.
Some commentators believe that the successful listing of SenseTime reflects the capital market's optimism about the long-term value of hard technology. As a leading enterprise in the industry, SenseTime took the lead in breaking through and landing in the capital market, which also brought the development of the global artificial intelligence industry into a new stage.
SenseTime has been listed as a breakthrough model for hard technology enterprises
The listing of SenseTime is a breakthrough sample of hard technology. The survival and development pressure of hard technology enterprises, on the one hand, comes from the long cycle of research and development investment, and must endure a long process of technology accumulation and precipitation, as well as the problems of talents and funds that need to be solved; on the other hand, it is the continuous suppression of Hard Technology in China by the United States.
Xu Li also said in his listing speech, "First there is continuous large-scale technology investment to bring innovation, and then there is business model development, which is a rare road." The hard part is the uncertainty of the business." However, it is the strong belief that original technology can bring disruptive changes to the industry, allowing SenseTime to grow into an Asian leader in artificial intelligence in seven years.
The continuous market driving force of the AI industry has always been that the internal driving force of digital transformation and intelligent upgrading of industry users, including the requirements of digital transformation of traditional industries, is also promoting the progress of AI technology.
With the deepening of industrial development, the needs of the market have also become subdivided and complicated. According to the "China 2021H1 Artificial Intelligence Software and Application Market Tracking Report" recently released by IDC, a well-known research institution, in the first half of 2021, the driving force of the Chinese intelligent market lies in the continuous penetration of medium and long tail fragmentation scenarios.
SenseTime has long been aware of this development path and has made it its R&D goal to address the long-tail fragmented AI needs. After 7 years of grinding a sword, SenseCore's artificial intelligence infrastructure SenseCore AI device that SenseTime has continued to build has significantly improved the production efficiency of AI software and provided a foundation for SenseTime to empower different industries.
Industry-leading, efficient and easy-to-use automated machine learning (AutoML) technology, support for the training of high-performance, high-precision AI-based models, industry-leading privacy computing and data desensitization capabilities... SenseCore enables the scale effects of AI models and industrial-grade mass production.
It is also the consistent adherence to independent research and development and the insistence on long-termism that have allowed SenseTime to successfully break through from many American crackdowns.
With reference to SenseTime's previous disclosure documents, 60% of the funds raised in this IPO will continue to be used for research and development. Industry comments said that the financial flexibility brought by the IPO will also form a synergy with SenseTime's original capital reserves and technical advantages to help the development of enterprises.
The radiation effect of listing drives the "acceleration" of the entire AI industry chain
SenseTime's IPO radiation effect will further drive the industry to grow together. At the capital level, the landing of leading enterprises in the industry in the capital market can better boost investment confidence.
Some commentators believe that the IPO at this point in time is of great significance to the development of the AI industry, and the IPO will also give more hard technology companies the confidence to list. It is expected that more hard technology companies will go to the capital market in the future and be listed on the Hong Kong stock market, the science and technology innovation board and the Beijing Stock Exchange.
During the IPO phase of SenseTime, its international placement and Hong Kong public offering parts have been oversubscribed. "The market demand for corporate IPOs is still there, no matter how complex the international environment is." An investor told CBN.
The IDC report also believes that the landing of AI companies in the capital market is also beneficial to AI industry participants, AI companies have been successfully listed, and there will be more mergers and acquisitions in the future, which is also one of the driving forces of the AI market.
As a leading AI company in China, SenseTime has raised a total of US$5.2 billion in its history before the IPO. The prospectus discloses that its major investors include SoftBank, Primavera, Silver Lake, IDG, China State-Owned Enterprise Structural Adjustment Fund, Shanghai International Group, Sailing and CDH.
At the same time, SenseTime's IPO will drive more talents into the AI industry and provide a steady stream of vitality for the development of hard technology. Xu Li said that SenseTime's breakthrough in the field of visual recognition technology stems from the gathering of talents, and the key to competition in the field of artificial intelligence in the next 3-5 years is talent. The high technical threshold for entry determines that artificial intelligence talents need a longer period of training. This is also why SenseTime has continued to build a systematic industry-university-research system since its inception, and has jointly built joint training laboratories with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Hong Kong Chinese University, Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University and other universities, which not only allows college talents to deeply participate in the technology landing research of the industrial community, but also forms a guarantee for the supply of SenseTime scientific and technological talents.
At the listing ceremony, Academician Lin Zhongqin, president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xu Li's alma mater, also congratulated SenseTime on its listing. Academician Lin said, "As an outstanding representative of China's artificial intelligence industry, SenseTime takes 'adhering to originality and letting AI lead human progress' as its mission, bringing together a large number of outstanding scientists, professors, and young scientific research talents, with the spirit of persistence, fearlessness, pioneering and enterprising, long-term deep ploughing and studying at the forefront of science and technology, overcoming difficulties, and constantly achieving transformative and subversive breakthroughs in artificial intelligence technology, winning high recognition from the industry and continuous attention from the world in the global future scientific and technological competition." ”
At present, nearly 3,600 of SenseTime's 5,000 employees are R&D personnel. The company also has 40 professors leading the research and development work, in addition to more than 250 doctoral and doctoral candidates, published more than 600 top academic papers.
It is worth mentioning that since SenseTime settled in Shanghai, it has begun to develop by leaps and bounds and drive the expansion of the AI industry. Take the large-scale Artificial Intelligence Computing and Empowerment Data Center (AIDC), which will be put into use in Shanghai Lingang, as an example, its peak computing power is 374 billion billion floating-point operations per second, and SenseTime has a final power of 4.91 billion billion floating-point operations per second.
As one of the largest supercomputing centers in Asia, SenseTime AIDC will be an artificial intelligence computing and empowerment platform that radiates the whole country, and an artificial intelligence computing platform that integrates massive data processing engines, heterogeneous computing power scheduling systems and deep learning training frameworks, which is an indispensable core driving force for the innovation and development of artificial intelligence; it will greatly improve the efficiency of the use of basic computing power and the iterative efficiency of independent original algorithms, accelerate the evolution and application of various artificial intelligence technologies, and make the algorithms, The three basic elements of computing power and data become an organic whole.
Zhang Ying, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology, once said: "SenseTime's Shanghai Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Computing and Empowerment Platform Project is not only an important task in the Shanghai version of the 'New Infrastructure' action plan, but also an important measure to implement the 'Shanghai Plan' of artificial intelligence. ”
Growth and long-term investment value are more of a concern
SenseTime's revenue has maintained a strong growth trend. According to the prospectus, in 2018, 2019 and 2020, SenseTime's revenue was 1.85 billion yuan, 3.03 billion yuan and 3.45 billion yuan respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of 36.4%; in the first half of 2021, SenseTime's revenue was 1.65 billion yuan, an increase of 91.8% over the same period last year. The cumulative revenue in the first half of 2018-2021 was 9.98 billion yuan; the gross profit margin also increased from 56.5% in 2018 to 73% in the first half of 2021.
Thanks to accurate judgment of market drivers and technical layout, SenseTime has achieved an industry-leading position. According to IDC data, in the first half of 2021, SenseTime ranked first with a market share of 20.5%. In the 7 years since its establishment, SenseTime has handed over a good report card.
However, in the long run, listed companies need to continue to make progress in R&D and commercialization to give confidence to the market and capital.
SenseTime has developed, deployed and commercialized more than 22,000 AI models in multiple industries, and provides SenseCore-based AI-as-a-Service services to customers, enabling customers to produce AI models that meet their needs at minimal cost.
Thanks to the rapid iteration of original technology and the opening of large-scale production links, SenseTime has reduced the production cost of artificial intelligence models by 300 times in the past three years.
SenseCore's SenseCore AI device drives SenseTime's platform development, which enables SenseTime to efficiently advance multi-domain business with fewer manpower. SenseTime is advancing in four major sectors of smart business, smart city, smart life and smart car, and dozens of fields at the same time, leading the industry in human efficiency.
Taking the research and development of intelligent cars as an example, in the past 5 years, SenseTime has produced more than 1,400 AI models for automotive scenes with AI large devices, realized the mass production of dozens of AI functions, and signed more than 20 million fixed points to cover 30 car factories.
The underlying platform that has been continuously built has greatly improved the productivity of the AI model, and the results of SenseTime's platforming have begun to appear. Some insiders said that if SenseTime can continue to build an original underlying platform at the same time, quickly seize the opportunity of intelligent change in different industries, the future leading position will be far more than one step.