Editor's Introduction: In 2021, the object of capital chase has become a "hard technology" that burns money. Although the economic trend is not too good due to the economic impact of the post-epidemic era, "hard technology" is riding the dust and making other industries unattainable. In this article, the author lists 6 related industries, let's take a look.
In 2021, the main theme of the venture capital industry is "hard technology". However, the large amount of hard technology investment and long return cycle are also recognized as a cash-burning industry.
In the upcoming 2021, Times Finance has taken stock of the input and output of six hot hard technology fields, who is the most money-burning "fierce role"?
In this year, ai companies have few landing scenarios and difficulties in making profits have become the consensus of many investors. However, the capital did not recede, and SenseTime finally became the "first ai vision stock" of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the industry's financing still increased by 65 cases compared with last year.
The cloud computing industry is developing steadily, but it still has not generated profits, and the head enterprises have suffered serious losses.
The core-making industry, which pins on the "hope of the whole village", is the most expensive area. SMIC alone has a year of capital expenditure of about $4.3 billion, and "China Core" is slowly moving forward under the support of huge capital injections.
Autonomous driving has a new commercialization story, but also triggered a new round of capital boom, the head of the enterprise a year to absorb tens of billions of gold, but the long commercial eve is not over, the dawn of profitability did not appear in this year.
After last year's capital climax, private aerospace ushered in a period of ebb and flow, and the pace of launching rockets did not stop. This year, the industry's liquid rocket research and development and commercialization progress is making great strides, and the space war in space has secretly sounded the horn.
Entering the second half of the year, the "dark horse" meta-universe has become the craziest "gold-devouring beast" this year, which no one can give a clear definition of the industry, creating a lot of new money, speculation, fraud, sudden wealth, disillusionment of the story continues to play out.
Compared with the long climbing journey of other industries, the fledgling meta-universe is more like a test of human nature.
Ai: A lot of capital looks for concentrated advantages, and as a result, it pays a lot of tuition
2021 was originally an IPO year for AI companies, but it was full of dramatic twists and turns.
In February and July this year, Yunzhisheng and Yitu Technology terminated their IPOs one after another. On the eve of the New Year's Eve, SenseTime was finally listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and its stock price rose by 7.27% on the day of listing (December 30).
The IPO journey of Megvii Technology, which has been on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, is also a twist and turn, the listing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has encountered obstacles, and this year it has returned to A shares, fortunately, it has been with AI companies such as Yuncong Technology and Geling Deep Pupil.
It can be said that the AI industry is still the object of capital favor. According to Yiou data, as of December 20, there were 247 financing incidents of related enterprises in the field of Chinese engineering intelligence this year, an increase of 65 cases over 2020, and the total financing reached 54.99 billion yuan. For example, in June this year, The AI company Simu Technology, which has been established for less than 2 years, completed a B round of financing of 200 million US dollars, and the investors include IDG, Cornerstone, Sequoia China, Lenovo Venture Capital, etc.
Wang Yujing, founding partner of New Dragon Pulse Capital, revealed to Times Finance that in the process of investing in AI companies, many capitals have entered the wrong area, looking for enterprises with concentrated advantages, hoping to shape a company that rides the dust, and as a result, there are many people who lose money and pay tuition.
"At present, artificial intelligence does not have a company or technology that 'dominates the world'." She said that the artificial intelligence industry will not have a centralized advantage, its market is distributed in various segments, and it is recommended that capital focus on technology-based companies with a market size of several billion to tens of billions.
She said that some AI unicorns chased by capital have received a lot of financing, but there are no application scenarios, there is a high valuation, "technology needs to be optimized through products, and yield rates need to be improved through production."
As far as she knows, the reason why some AI unicorns earn hundreds of millions of dollars and lose more than one billion yuan is because they have posted money to test their own technology on projects of other companies, hoping to "splash the water", but it has backfired.
An Guangyong, an expert of the Credit Management Committee of the All-Union Mergers and Acquisitions Union, has a similar view with Wang Yujing, he believes that even if capital throws more money into artificial intelligence, the annual supply of talents is limited, the results that can be developed are also limited, and it is difficult to obtain development space through business model innovation, and the development speed and efficiency of AI enterprises will inevitably fail to meet expectations.
In fact, many AI companies are facing long-term losses. For example, Yuncong Technology, after preliminary calculations, the operating income from January to September this year was 760-800 million yuan, and the net profit attributable to the shareholders of the parent company was between -360 million yuan and -310 million yuan.
According to the cloud from the technology prospectus, the artificial intelligence industry is still in the early stage of development, and the company's industry is fiercely competitive, and it needs to continuously invest in research and development in the later stage, which cannot be profitable in the short term, and there is a risk of continuous expansion of losses.
Zhang Xiaorong, president of the Deepin Science and Technology Research Institute, told Times Finance that there are three reasons for the difficulty of making AI enterprises profitable: one is the lack of application scenarios, the second is the lack of marketization capabilities of manufacturers, and the third is that there are defects in AI products and technologies, which have not been overcome so far, and there will not be much change in the short term.
Second, cloud computing: 86,000 new related enterprises, the emergence of "0 yuan standard"
At the beginning of December, with the release of a full range of cloud products, ByteDance's volcano engine fully entered the cloud market, and the competition for cloud computing among Internet giants became more and more fierce.
According to research firm Canalys, China's cloud infrastructure market reached $7.2 billion in the third quarter of this year, up 43% year-on-year.
In the domestic cloud market, Alibaba Cloud, HUAWEI CLOUD, Tencent Cloud, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud ranked in the top four, with market shares of 38.3%, 17%, 16.6%, and 8.2%, respectively.
As of now, except for Alibaba Cloud's adjusted EBITDA (profit before tax, depreciation and amortization), which is positive, other cloud computing companies have not declared profits.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, Alibaba Cloud Computing's profit turned positive for the first time. In the second and third quarters of this year, the financial data was combined to 736 million yuan, and in the same period, Alibaba's revenue from the cloud computing segment accounted for 9% of the total revenue.
Alibaba did not announce the amount of investment in the cloud computing business in the financial report, but in April last year, it announced that it would invest 200 billion yuan in the next three years for the research and development of major core technologies such as cloud operating systems, servers, chips, and networks, and future-oriented data center construction.
Other giants' investment in cloud computing should not be underestimated.
In 2021, HUAWEI CLOUD will invest 200 million US dollars in the Fertile Land Plan to attract developers and build an ecosystem, and at the beginning of the year, Tencent officially announced that it would invest 20 billion yuan in the national cloud computer headquarters project, and Baidu Intelligent Cloud Kaiwu Industrial Internet will successively land in Chongqing, Suzhou, Quanzhou, Tongxiang, Guangzhou and other regions.
However, due to large investment and high research and development costs, the cloud computing industry as a whole is currently in a state of loss.
For example, listed companies Kingsoft Cloud and Qingyun Technology have not made a profit so far, and in the first three quarters of this year, the net losses of Kingsoft Cloud and Qingyun Technology were 507 million yuan and 886 million yuan, respectively.
According to public information, the reasons why Qingyun Technology has not yet made a profit include:
The capital expenditure of fixed assets required for the early purchase of cloud computing platforms is larger, and the investment in new product research and development is larger;
The industry is fiercely competitive, especially in the public cloud field, because of the addition of giant competitors, the price of resource use in the whole industry has shown a downward trend.
In 2021, "0 yuan standard" and "1 yuan standard" are also common in the cloud computing market. For example, Tencent Cloud won the bid for CNOOC's "Exploration and Development Data Management and Operation Planning" project for 0 yuan.
Pan Helin, executive dean of the Digital Economy Research Institute of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, said in an interview with Times Finance that the operation mode of cloud computing services is to improve the reuse efficiency of cloud resources, and cloud computing enterprises will occupy the scale effect at a low price in the early stage.
According to his observation, cloud computing services are on the rise, and the cloudification of the whole industry is still advancing.
In 2021, cloud computing talents are still flowing into the situation, although enterprises generally lose money, but there is no large-scale talent outflow, many functions of cloud computing are also to be developed, not only the industry itself has business increments, cloud computing boundaries are also broadening.
Third, the core: under the financing boom, at least 10 companies were born
In 2021, under the global "lack of core" situation, the domestic chip industry is also non-stop financing and burning money.
Taking automotive smart chip startup Horizon as an example, in December 2020, it just announced that it had completed the C1 round of financing of $150 million, two weeks later, on January 7, 2021, it announced the completion of the $400 million C2 round of financing, and on February 9, 2021, it announced the completion of the C3 round of $350 million financing.
At the same time, there are at least 10 chip design companies in A-shares this year, including Fudan Microelectronics, Geke Micro, Juxin Technology, Dongxin Shares, etc.
Yunxiu Capital statistics show that the total equity investment in the primary market of the semiconductor industry in 2020 increased from about 30 billion yuan in 2019 to 140 billion yuan, and is expected to reach 150 billion yuan in 2021, and there are more than 50 enterprises with financing scale of more than 500 million yuan in 2021, most of which are high-end chips.
In the financing boom, some investment institutions have made a lot of money. A manager of private equity firm Huasoft Capital revealed to Times Finance that in 2017, the institution participated in the B round of financing of Jichuang North, and withdrew in 2020, obtaining 10 times the income, and the time node was before the company planned to go public.
Times Finance noted that in August last year, Jichuang North terminated its listing counseling work based on its own strategic considerations. In the case of the listing, it received another Series E financing of up to 6.5 billion yuan in December this year.
TrendForce Jibang Consulting data shows that the capital expenditure of the world's top ten wafer generation industry in 2021 exceeded $50 billion.
Similarly, in 2021, SMIC plans capital expenditures of approximately $4.3 billion. In the first three quarters of 2021, SMIC spent a total of US$466 million on research and development, or nearly $3 billion.
It is worth mentioning that the most advanced process put into production by SMIC is the 14nm process, while Samsung and TSMC have put into production 5nm process this year, Chinese mainland chip manufacturing technology is still in the early stage of development, and the road to burning money has just begun.
On the other hand, China's current talent gap in the chip industry is about 300,000 people, and chip companies are piling up to "grab people". This fall, SMIC's microelectronics chip team announced the expansion of hundreds of people, with an annual salary of 3 million caps.
Wang Yujing told Times Finance that this year, more cutting-edge investors will pay attention to chips, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, capital has poured in, the industry is relatively hot, and talents are also inflow.
She mentioned that chip companies related to optics and automobiles have a good return on investment this year, in addition to chip packaging and testing, design companies.
Fourth, automatic driving: retelling the story of commercialization, the head of the enterprise a year crazy to absorb tens of billions of dollars
In the near-past 2021, autonomous driving tells a new commercialization story, and it is crazy to suck up money in the capital market, and almost every financing is hundreds of millions of dollars.
The autonomous driving companies in the market can be roughly divided into three categories: Robotaxi, self-driving trucks, and mine autonomous driving.
Represented by companies such as Baidu, Xiaoma Zhixing, Didi Autonomous Driving, and Wenyuan Zhixing, Robotaxi has a business model similar to that of online ride-hailing, and achieves profitability by charging C-end users.
Robotaxi can be regarded as the most difficult commercialization path, and the investment in research and development is also greater, and each company has received financing of $100 million, and Didi Autonomous Driving has won $600 million in financing.
Image source: Times Finance
This year, Baidu and Xiaoma Zhixing obtained a commercial license in Yizhuang, Beijing, and opened the first step in the commercialization of the industry, Robin Li expects that the overall cost of Baidu Robotaxi will be lower than that of online ride-hailing in 2025, and the scale will expand rapidly to achieve profitability.
But at present, Robotaxi has no signs of profitability, some investors have told Times Finance that the road environment facing Robotaxi is very complex, "the existing simulation environment is completely unpredictable", and this is a technology related to public safety, in view of the current immaturity of technology, regulations, social views, etc., Robotaxi profit may be 10 years later.
Mine autonomous driving is also a larger market, and the head enterprise is Tage Zhixing. Compared with Robotaxi, the mine scene is relatively closed, the complexity is not high, and it is a 2B model, and the commercialization is more mature.
The 6 unmanned mine card formations of The Baogang Baiyun Obo Iron Mine have been operating continuously for more than 1 year, but there is no news of profitability so far.
Due to the simple driving scenario of self-driving trucks, the commercialization difficulty is also lower than that of Robotaxi, and the representative companies are Wincher Technology and Tucson Future.
Tucson Future landed on the NASDAQ in the United States on April 15, becoming the "first stock of autonomous driving". Its IPO price was $40 and its market capitalization was $8.48 billion.
Tucson can be regarded as one of the most effective self-driving companies in the future, but it is also far from profitable.
According to the latest Q3 financial report, its revenue was $1.785 million, nearly tripled year-on-year, but R&D investment increased by 41% year-on-year, and Q3 lost $120 million again, coupled with growing management expenses.
Moreover, Tucson has not yet achieved mass production in the future, and currently has only 80 trucks.
In summary, in 2021, automatic driving is still in the high investment stage, according to the incomplete statistics of Times Finance, the total amount of financing disclosed by the head enterprise has approached 10 billion yuan.
Although commercialization is gradually landing, no company has yet run out of a feasible profit model, and problems such as technical robustness, mass production, and regulatory gaps are still restricting the progress of commercialization.
Fifth, commercial aerospace is cold, and capital is no longer "betting on the future"
When we look at space from the ground, we will find that while autonomous driving is hot, commercial aerospace is cold in the capital market in 2021.
This year, it was publicly disclosed that only two rocket developers who received financing were Galaxy Power and Deep Blue Aerospace, but neither disclosed the specific amount.
The "lifeline" of commercial aerospace is the successful launch of the rocket, the premise of profitability is that the rocket can be recycled, if the above two points can be achieved, the profit space of the enterprise is very large.
As a reference, Space X's launch services revenue last year was $2 billion. However, if the rocket launch fails, no matter how much investment is invested in the early stage, it will be a failure.
Therefore, the investment in commercial aerospace is very much like "betting on the future", due to the high investment in the early stage, the small number of industry players, the long return on investment and great uncertainty, commercial aerospace has not been so sought after in the capital market.
From 2015 to 2019, the total investment in 5 years has just exceeded 10 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared with popular companies such as chips and automatic driving.
However, last year, the commercial aerospace field ushered in a small climax of financing, with a total investment of more than 6 billion yuan and a growth rate of more than 200%. Rocket developers such as Interstellar Glory, Blue Arrow Aerospace, Galaxy Power, and Deep Blue Aerospace have received multiple rounds of financing.
Among them, the single financing amount of Interstellar Glory and Blue Arrow Aerospace reached a maximum of 1.2 billion yuan, refreshing the industry record, and Blue Arrow Aerospace completed 4 financings in one year.
Perhaps last year's financing was too much to digest, or perhaps the rocket launch was delayed, after the failure of the first launch of Interstellar Glory this year, some investors openly questioned the commercialization of spaceflight, suspecting that it was just a beautiful story made up for investors like AI:
How long a year can China's satellite launch center be freed up for private commercial spaceflight, and what is the real demand?
Is there a profit for private commercial spaceflight, which is mainly based on rockets?
Do private rockets have a competitive advantage?
But the cold may be the beginning of the market to become rational, in this year, private commercial aerospace has not stopped progress.
This year, the interstellar glory liquid oxygen methane engine successfully completed the 500-second flight simulation test, and the "firmament" liquid oxygen and kerosene engine independently developed by Galaxy Power were also successful in the large-scale variable working condition turbopump hydraulic test, which made the private commercial aerospace one step closer to the liquid oxygen rocket.
The completion of the meter-level vertical flight test of the deep blue space test rocket also marks an important step in the exploration of China's liquid rocket reuse technology.
Capital has not abandoned commercial spaceflight, but has shifted its perspective from rocket manufacturers to peripheral industries with higher returns on investment.
However, the above financing amount is still far from catching up with the popular track, and domestic commercial aerospace is still far from profitability.
Recently, there have been media reports that Musk's Starlink satellite has twice "rubbed shoulders" with the Chinese space station and almost collided.
With Musk riding the dust, there are more and more people who are worried that he will build a commercial space hegemony. Whether we're ready or not, competition and conflict in commercial spaceflight may already be here.
Vi. Metaverse: The Craziest "Gold Devouring Beast"
Compared with the above hard technology industries, the metacosm as the outlet of the sudden fire in the second half of the year, no one can accurately say which industries and enterprises it contains, and no one can even accurately define what it is.
The metaverse that most people know is the Oasis game from the Ready Player One movie, a digital world parallel to the real world.
However, it is such a vague concept that can be called the largest "gold-devouring beast" in the capital market this year.
The investment network once described a thing that happened to entrepreneurs: the street fast food restaurant ate a mouthful of rice, the next table talked about the meta-universe, talked about a person's extraordinary financing ability, met with investors, and first talked about an hour of philosophy.
Listed companies with this concept have become the new upstart in the market, and the game company Zhongqingbao started from 10 yuan with the stock price of an unlisted game, and after four months of rapid rise, rushed to the highest price of 90.48 yuan.
Another game company, Tianxiaxiu, rose 20% in share price due to the release of an open letter to enter the meta-universe, and its market value soared by more than 5 billion yuan.
The "virtual real estate in the first metaverse world" was speculated to 500,000, and even the income from the sale of meta-universe related courses reached the level of one million.
Regarding the ideal metaverse world, the visible path to realization is VR/AR, so many people are questioning whether the metaverse is VR/AR skin, the question has not been answered, VR/AR companies have taken advantage of the wind to fly.
According to media statistics, from September to November, there were 26 financings of more than 10 million yuan in the domestic VR/AR field, a total of 16 hundreds of millions of financing this year, while the VR/AR industry financing last year was only 2.1 billion yuan, a total of 54.
The total amount of financing raised in the three months this year exceeds the entire year of last year.
Games and virtual social networking were once considered the entry-level products of the meta-universe, and they also received a lot of financing.
Game AI company Parameter Technology completed a $30 million A+ round of financing; MetaApp received a $100 million Series C financing, becoming the highest financing case in the domestic meta-universe track; and RCT AI, an AI-based entertainment interaction technology company, also completed the A2 round of financing.
However, for such a concept that is not yet clearly defined, it seems difficult to define how productive it is.
The profitability of related concept stocks seems to have nothing to do with the meta-universe, Tom Cat still relies on young games such as "Tom Cat Parkour" to make money, the semi-annual report shows that the number of company users continues to decline, and virtual social networking has not appeared to be a profit model that can be landed.
Facebook's non-advertising revenue in the third fiscal quarter was $734 million, mainly from the VR headset Quest2, but Mark Zuckerberg also said that Facebook will invest up to $10 billion in AR and VR-related hardware, software and content in 2021.
Domestic VR headset shipments are far less than Facebook, and AR glasses have not yet been recognized by the C-end of the brand, far from profitability.
An entrepreneur in the AR field told Times Finance that the feasible business model he has found at present is to land in the field of intelligent manufacturing.
And that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the metaverse.
Looking forward to 2022, hard technology will undoubtedly remain the main theme.
Under the big financing, the tide will eventually recede and there will be a day to see who is swimming naked; for true tech optimists, there will also be a day to see the dawn of profits.
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