"Focus on short-term performance, but also on long-term growth," David Cote expressed in his book Long-TermIsm. When he took over honeywell as CEO in 2002, it was a company on the verge of bankruptcy, and when it left in 2018, it had become a fortune-500 technology giant, with a market capitalization soaring from $20 billion to $120 billion.
Under his leadership, Honeywell's internal changes have changed dramatically, at first, the people of this company are like the last maniacs, only focusing on the completion of immediate performance, even financial fraud, and later, through the adjustment of corporate culture, organizational processes, etc., long-term doctrine and short-term and long-term simultaneous development strategy, throughout the company.
At present, under the wave of the fourth scientific and technological revolution, the economy is facing cyclical fluctuations, and the importance of long-termism is beyond doubt, it has become the only way for technology companies to cross the cycle and reach the top of the wave.
iFLYTEK is one of them. From an AI voice assistant to an AI leader, iFLYTEK's market-oriented label and value have been changing and becoming thicker and thicker. All this is inseparable from the long-term strategic drive upheld by iFLYTEK.
At the recent 2022 Cloud Annual Meeting, from the outbreak of base business in 2021 to the release of the "iFLYTEK Super Brain 2030 Plan", iFLYTEK maintained a good growth trend while turning its attention to new technologies, new fields and new scenarios - on the one hand, short-term performance, on the other hand, long-term growth, long-term and short-term emphasis driven by long-termism, which has also become its foundation.
Business into the ground
"The year of base business taking root", at the cloud annual meeting, Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, summed up 2021 in his speech.
In the 14th Five-Year Plan period, iFLYTEK has put forward the grand goal of "one billion users, 100 billion revenue, and trillion ecology" and a two-wheel drive model of base business and systematic innovation. Looking back on the past 2021, iFLYTEK has delivered a perfect answer sheet driven by this goal and basic model.
According to the data released by iFLYTEK, in 2021, its base business will account for more than 50% of revenue, and has formed a sustainable development model of "just need + generation difference", which is enough to support iFLYTEK through the economic cycle, and it is expected that the growth rate of this business will exceed 60% in 2022.
Specifically, in the education base area, iFLYTEK's aptitude-based education business added 20 urban counties last year, and its revenue increased by 48%. The learning machine business returned to the main position of on-campus education, adding 20,000 classes to achieve intelligent teaching and personalized learning. In 2022, the aptitude-based education program is expected to expand to more than 50 urban districts and counties, and the gross profit of contracts is expected to increase by more than 80%.
The consumer business has also achieved significant growth. The learning machine business has achieved B and C-end two-wheel drive, especially for the C-end market, the learning machine has achieved an overall sales growth of 150%, the NPS value recommended by users is ranked first in the industry, and this year's revenue is expected to increase by more than 200%.
In addition, in the consumer base area, iFLYTEK's online marketing platform C-end hardware growth in 2021 also reached 140%, the "naming degree" of target groups in key cities increased by 99%, and the GMV increased by 152%, and the overall situation developed for the better.
In terms of feedback from the local business, iFLYTEK has made a good start in the short march of the 14th Five-Year Plan period, and continues to take root in the fields of education, medical care, consumers, smart cities, operators, automotive intelligent services, etc. 2022, as Liu Qingfeng looks forward, will be the harvest year of iFLYTEK.
As one of the main contents of the fourth technological revolution, artificial intelligence is highly respected, but all innovation and technology must be based on business and products, and the stable profitability of pure AI enterprises has always been a hot topic. iFLYTEK's 2021 performance and 2022 outlook prove that artificial intelligence can "enter the ground" and find a solid foundation for the future.
"2022 is more confident than ever to achieve the 14th Five-Year Plan goal!" At the recent iFLYTEK 2022 Cloud Annual Meeting, Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of iFLYTEK, said in his speech that the business achievements in the fields of education, medical care and consumers are the "ferry ticket" for iFLYTEK to cross the cycle and achieve long-term victories.
Anchor 2030
What is iFLYTEK's "base business"? According to Liu Qingfeng's explanation, there are four major criteria for judging the business of the base, such as the benign dependence of users, long-term operating ability, sustainable growth potential and industry demonstration value.
Or, in layman's terms, the "base business" is both the current business and the future business, which determines the basic disk of iFLYTEK at present, and also determines its future space - this is a proposal that profoundly embodies the core of iFLYTEK's long-term thinking.
For iFLYTEK, this is the main orientation for it to build many base businesses.
For example, in the consumer base area, iFLYTEK has relied on its rich AI capabilities and software and hardware products to create a user-level flying powder home, providing users with an ecological community platform, while increasing user adhesion, with the help of users to reverse promote product innovation and brand upgrades.
For smart cities, iFLYTEK mainly does three things, one is to build a sustainable and evolved AI+ data underlying platform, the other is to continue to operate the people's livelihood APP that can reach users, and the third is to form a long-term trust and benign cooperative relationship.
As a result, iFLYTEK's long-term doctrine has been running through all of its businesses and permeating into every business number.
Of course, this is not the end. Facing the development of the next decade, iFLYTEK once again proposed the "iFLYTEK Super Brain 2030 Plan", proposing a new goal of robots entering every home, and the long-term doctrine it upholds is more clearly presented from three levels.
First, take precautions and play a good "first hand chess".
Two years ago, in order to realize the desire to let robots enter every family, iFLYTEK and the University of Science and Technology of China jointly established a robot joint laboratory, and completed some phased technical reserves, such as the exoskeleton robot with rehabilitation training function has developed a prototype, the bionic sports four-legged robot dog has entered the design stage, and the intelligent driving car and high-precision navigation module have entered the mass production stage.
In addition, iFLYTEK and Beijing Normal University jointly undertook the "Brain Science and Brain-like Research" 2030 major project "Research on brain development cohorts of Chinese school-age children", and cooperated with Beijing Anding Hospital to create an authoritative depression knowledge base.
This means that before the "iFLYTEK Super Brain 2030 Plan" was launched, iFLYTEK had already built a preliminary industry-university-research system to lay a good foundation for future technology research and development and application, and carry out a multi-dimensional layout.
Second, strategize and implement the "three-step" strategy.
Around the "iFLYTEK Super Brain 2030 Plan", iFLYTEK has also made sufficient plans for the implementation of the strategy, clarifying three implementation stages to effectively promote robots into tens of millions of homes.
The first phase is 2022-2023, iFLYTEK will master the bionic robot ontology technology, multi-modal perception and expression technology and active dialogue technology, and release pet toys and professional virtual human families that can be cultivated by soft and hard robots.
In the second phase, from 2023 to 2025, iFLYTEK will focus on multi-sensor fusion motion control technology, multi-modal emotion understanding and continuous learning technology and deep knowledge understanding and application technology, and release adaptive walking exoskeleton robots and accompanying virtual human families.
In the third stage, from 2025 to 2030, iFLYTEK will tackle complex scenario fusion decision-making and flexible drive, cross-modal fusion independent learning technology and common-sense reasoning and associative decision-making technology, and release accompanying robots that understand knowledge and can learn and virtual people who can learn independently.
In the "three-step" strategy, from technology mastery to product release, iFLYTEK has clarified its development goals one by one, and will promote the long-term planning step by step.
Third, precision strikes, and comprehensively promote AI services.
From the perspective of product performance, iFLYTEK's long-term doctrine is also reflected in the service awareness of human beings, the virtual human family is deeply coupled with customer service, doctors, idols, teachers and other industries, providing practical help for the development of the industry; pet robots use active dialogue, scene perception and understanding and other technologies to strengthen the sense of companionship; adolescent depression screening platform is free to open to the whole society...
From the perspective of releasing products, iFLYTEK obviously pays more attention to the service value of AI, thus establishing a sustainable development system for the AI service market and customers, and continuously promoting AI services to the society.
In general, doing a good job in the early layout, clarifying the landing standards, and attaching importance to value feedback can be seen at the "Xunfei Super Brain 2030 Plan" released this time, which is also the key presentation of iFLYTEK adhering to long-term doctrine.
The virtual person opens a new space
If you put a long line, can you catch a big fish? The key also depends on whether the location chosen is good or not.
From the perspective of the "iFLYTEK Super Brain 2030 Plan", iFLYTEK will fully anchor the virtual human + virtual pet market in the future, so can this strategic direction help iFLYTEK achieve its long-term ism?
At present, the virtual person market is on fire, and idol virtual people and practical virtual people frequently go out of the circle, constantly combining with the real industry and bursting out of huge commercial value.
According to CITIC Securities, the size of the mainland virtual person market will reach 270 billion yuan in 2030. Among them, the scale of the practical virtual person market increased to 243 billion yuan, accounting for 90% of the overall virtual person market size.
This trend is there for all to see. On October 20, 2021, the website of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television released the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Radio, Television and Online Audio-visual Science and Technology", proposing to promote virtual anchors and gradually replace the existing anchor pattern. iFLYTEK, which responded quickly, said four days later that the 3D data human micro-expression developed has made progress in stages, and the number of virtual people has increased to 54.
With the perfect layout of AI, AR, VR, 5G and other technologies, virtual people who can show both technical strength and market prospects can become the next key area for iFLYTEK to achieve long-term ism to a large extent.
However, for the time being, the virtual person is still only a realistic form of presentation, and the most critical thing is the technical ability and scene experience of the technology enterprises behind it. Based on these two considerations, iFLYTEK's past accumulated technical capabilities and scene experience are forming its unique technology + scene advantages.
On the one hand, iFLYTEK is consolidating the AI R&D base platform and continuing to build the underlying capabilities of systematic innovation. Based on the platform support, iFLYTEK has achieved a rapid breakthrough in multilingual technology, launched more than 60 languages and 5 major capabilities such as synthesis, recognition and translation, and increased research efficiency by 50%. In November 2021, iFLYTEK won 22 first prizes in the NIST Multilingual Recognition Competition.
On the other hand, due to the development of applications such as digital employees and enterprise services, iFLYTEK has accumulated services for different industry scenarios, covering education, medical care, consumers, smart cities, operators, automotive intelligent services and other fields, and has built professional technical services in a short period of time.
For example, at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, iFLYTEK quickly built a speech and language service platform for the Winter Olympics, which can support 60 language speech synthesis, 69 language speech recognition, 168 language machine translation and 3 language interactive understanding at the same time.
It is not difficult to find that when such technical capabilities and scene experience are applied to the field of virtual people, it can quickly create the unique market core advantages and brand space of iFLYTEK.
epilogue
The current AI has to answer two questions: whether the business scenario is "in the ground" to support the current profitability; whether the technology is "heavenly" enough to support the long-term vision.
Looking back at iFLYTEK's 2021, the success of the consumer and education base business proves that iFLYTEK has entered the ground, and the continuous revenue source is supporting this AI leader in accelerating its layout.
Looking forward to iFLYTEK's 2022, the "iFLYTEK Super Brain 2030 Plan" was released, iFLYTEK fully anchored virtual people and virtual pets, and under the support of strong technical capabilities and rich scene experience, it continued to verify its innovation ability for new scenarios and new fields, and also accelerated its transformation into its performance support point in the next 5 to 10 years.
As a result, the long-term company will build its future-oriented fundamentals step by step.