At noon on March 29, Himalaya updated the prospectus document on the official website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
According to the prospectus, Himalaya is currently the largest online audio platform in China, accounting for 28% of the market share. According to the data, Himalaya's average monthly active users in 2021 were 268 million, the average monthly active payment rate was 12.9%, and the operating income was 5.86 billion yuan, an increase of 43.7% year-on-year; the gross profit margin increased from 49.1% in 2020 to 54.0% in 2021.
In the ten years since the mobile Internet has soared forward, as a "unicorn" in the audio track, Himalaya has continued to attract capital influx, from the launch of the application in 2012 to the submission of the prospectus, a total of 12 financings have been completed.
Before the listing, shareholders included Xingwang Investment (10.6%), Trusttrust Capital (7.4%), Tencent (5.3%), Transatlantic Investment (4.1%), PwC Capital (4.1%), Xiaomi (3.4%), Yuwen Group (3.1%), Whale Capital (2.9), Chuangshi Partner CCV (2.1%) and many other well-known institutions.
Himalaya's most recent financing occurred in April 2021, strategic investors Tencent, Yuwen, Baidu, etc., financial investors including the United States Transatlantic Investment Group, Trusttrust Capital, Goldman Sachs and other institutions participated in the Himalaya E-4 round of 900 million US dollars financing, post-investment valuation, 4.3 billion US dollars, compared with the angel round of 3.45 million US dollars, the scale is magnified by a full 1259 times.
The excellent performance and the luxurious financial background make people look forward to the performance of Himalaya after the listing, but the company's consecutive years of losses and intensified competition in the audio track seem to make investors "like needles and felt".
Monthly active users 268 million, annual revenue of 5.86 billion yuan
According to the prospectus, in 2021, the average monthly active users of Theraya were 268 million, an increase of 24.4% year-on-year, of which the average monthly active users of the mobile terminal reached 116 million, and the average daily listening time per capita was 144 minutes.
The rapid progress of user data has led to the steady growth of the company's financial data. Himalaya's operating income from 2019 to 2021 was 2.68 billion yuan, 4.05 billion yuan and 5.86 billion yuan, respectively, and the gross profit margin increased from 44.5% in 2019 to 54.0% in 2021.
In addition, in 2021, himalaya Internet of Things and other open platforms have 152 million monthly active users, an increase of 35% year-on-year. Among them, the monthly active users of vehicle intelligent terminals and home intelligent terminals are 0.49 billion.
(Image from prospectus)
As a top-stream content platform, paid subscriptions, advertising, and live streaming have become the three major monetization methods of Himalayas. In 2021, Himalaya's total revenue increased to RMB5.86 billion. Among them, subscription revenue was 2.99 billion yuan, an increase of 49.0% year-on-year; advertising revenue was 1.49 billion yuan, an increase of 38.8% year-on-year; live broadcast revenue was 1 billion yuan, an increase of 39.6% year-on-year.
Of course, high-quality and consistent audio content is not "cheap." The high revenue share, copyright purchases, and even bandwidth costs have gradually become a black hole in Himalaya's capital, making it difficult to make a positive profit in the short term.
Among them, the impact of revenue sharing is the most obvious. From 2020 to 2021, Himalaya's operating costs increased from 2.07 billion to 2.69 billion, of which the platform's share of content creators was 1.3 billion and 1.6 billion, accounting for 31.9% and 27.3% of the year's revenue, respectively.
In 2019, 2020 and 2021, Himalaya's intra-year losses were RMB1,924.8 million, RMB2,882.1 million and RMB5,106 million, respectively. Adjusted for losses (not measured under IFRS) of RMB748 million, RMB539 million and RMB759 million respectively.
Ten years of grinding, creating the audio track leader
Yu Jianjun, the founder of the Himalayas, was born in Pucheng, the northernmost part of Fujian Province.
When he was a child, Yu Jianjun loved to fight and study poorly, and was a serious "problem student" of teachers and parents, but with the "counterattack" of the college entrance examination, he was successfully admitted to Xi'an Jiaotong University.
In college, Yu Jianjun was attracted by the charm of the Internet, simply pulled up four classmates, started his first business, made a software called simulating China, and obtained 1 million investment.
However, due to lack of management and operation experience, and immature products, after burning more than 600,000 investors, Yu Jianjun's first venture ended in failure.
In 2001, 25-year-old Yu Jianjun founded a company that made panoramic stitching software. This venture helped Yu Jianjun complete the first "original accumulation" in his life. By selling software rights, the company earns tens of millions of dollars every year, and the panoramic scenes in the movie "Harry Potter" are made with Yu Jianjun's Jetto software.
In 2009, Yu Jianjun began to pay attention to virtual reality technology, which is today's VR, and wanted to use street view pictures to replace modeling and build a virtual platform on the Internet, so he registered "That World".
After Zendai CEO Dai Zhikang learned of Yu Jianjun's idea, he decisively invested 20 million yuan as an angel investment. However, two years later, due to the lack of application of the project, the employees left one after another, and the original team of 80 people was finally left with only 7. The year that the "World There" project was announced to be "yellow" also became the inflection point in the life of Yu Jianjun, a decade-old entrepreneurial veteran.
In the anxiety and wandering, Yu Jianjun was determined to adjust the direction after deep reflection and make a product around C-end users, and to achieve hundreds of millions of levels.
In 2012, after 3 months of user research and testing, the "Himalaya" prototype was launched.
After going online, Dai Zhikang, who had previously "burned" 20 million yuan on Yu Jianjun, once again invested 15 million yuan in the "Himalayas" in his personal name.
Dai Zhikang has publicly stated that he does not understand the Internet, and his investment in Yu Jianjun is entirely out of personal feelings.
Obviously, Dai Zhikang's "feeling" is correct, And in the more than two years since Himalaya was launched, the number of users has continued to grow rapidly in the form of a "snowball". In 2013, it was 10 million, in June 2014 it exceeded 50 million, and by the end of the year it had exceeded 100 million.
Beautiful user data also attracts more capital blessings. In March 2014, Himalaya raised $11.5 million in Series A financing, and in October 2015, it completed a $50 million Series B financing, at which point the audio sharing platform was valued at RMB1.2 billion.
In June 2016, Himalaya launched content payment, launched Ma Dongqihua said that the team's "Speak Well" tested the water, 6-8 minutes of audio content per day, priced at 198 yuan throughout the year, and the result was that 25,000 sets were sold within 24 hours of going online, with sales exceeding 5 million, and sales exceeding 10 million after 10 days.
Since then, Himalaya has begun to run wild in the field of knowledge payment, drawing on the e-commerce promotion model to create festivals, and achieving sales of 196 million in the second knowledge payment festival in 2017.
In 2018, more than 3,000 knowledge Internet celebrities such as Wu Xiaobo, as well as head brands such as "Financial Lang Eye" and "Logical Thinking" have also settled in Himalaya, and the platform has accumulated more than 10,000 paid courses covering 16 categories such as audiobooks, foreign languages, emotions, music, and business.
High-quality audio creation not only allows the platform to gain a stable fan base, but also allows creators to get a good return.
There are college students recording suspense novels in the dormitory, just graduating to earn six or seven hundred thousand a month; there are car 4S shop sales turned into anchors, earning millions a year; there are also girls who love to tell jokes, the number of hits in each program has reached more than 5 million, and the advertising fee has earned a lot of money... These are the stories that Yu Jianhua shared with relish when he told the outside world about his entrepreneurial experience in The Himalayas.
According to China Insight Consulting' data, Himalaya is China's largest online audio platform in terms of total mobile listening time and total online audio revenue in 2021.
According to Ai Media Consulting data, the Himalaya platform is the first choice for users to listen to in smart terminals. In smart phones, car terminals, smart speaker listening terminals, Himalaya accounted for 81.7%, 71.7% and 61.8% respectively, which is undoubtedly today's track leader.
The Internet landscape has changed suddenly, competition has intensified, and the valuation of Himalaya is difficult to guarantee?
According to the prospectus, Since receiving an angel round of $1.1 million in 2012, Himalaya has completed 12 financing rounds totaling US$956 million and RMB2.9 billion. The company's valuation soared from $3.45 million to $4.344 billion, an almost geometric increase in size to 1259 times.
But an investor said that although the Valuation of $4.3 billion was placed in the Internet circle a year ago, it was a decent achievement, but after the collective collapse of China's Internet stocks in 2022 and the implementation of anti-monopoly supervision, whether it can maintain this valuation must be questioned.
At the same time, the audio track has not been optimistic about capital in the secondary market in the past few years. As of press time, the annual revenue scale is 1/2 of The Himalaya, the gross profit margin level is 29%, and the lychee FM, which has achieved a turnaround, currently has a market value of only $83 million in the US stock market; the stock price of the real-time audio API Sound Network once hit a high of $110, but now it is rubbing around $10; the elderLY IP of the knowledge payment industry, "Luo Ji Thinking", has sat on the "cold bench" for a year and a half after submitting the CHINext prospectus.
In addition, the audio track is becoming more and more competitive. Audio content aggregation platform Dragonfly FM won a series G round of financing in November 2021, with IPO expectations, and reached cooperation with content platforms such as Chinese Online and Xiaomi to take a differentiated route; Lazy Listening completed the merger in January 2021, and the buyer was Tencent Group, which has a larger user base and refined operation capabilities than Himalaya. (Text/Xu Kuntao, Source/Touzhong Network)