Titanium Media Note: This article is from the WeChat public account investment community, Titanium Media is authorized to publish.
In recent years, the biggest opportunity in the market is undoubtedly the electrification and intelligence of automobiles, which has brought about a considerable number of investment opportunities, spawned the Ningde era with a market value of trillions, as well as a number of industrial chain companies and automobile terminal companies with a market value of more than 100 billion. Nowadays, the investment opportunities in the new energy vehicle sector have been in the middle of the game, and it is necessary to find the next historical level of big opportunities.
Where will this opportunity be?
Recently communicated with a star fund manager, the other party said in explaining the investment method that the first step in stock selection is to look at the long-term track, first brainstorm to select thirty or forty clues at the medium and long-term strategic level, the direction that can make a lot of money, and choose a high ceiling. The long-term track is theoretically the direction of future life, in line with the trend of the industry and the trend of the times, from the ten-year or five-year dimension, looking forward to what changes in life, the future growth of the leading enterprises in the change is definitely in the forefront.
Reflecting the direction of future life, in line with the trend of the industry and the trend of the times, what specific industries have such potential? A simple and long-term hard logic is that the mainland's population growth potential is declining, and young people would rather deliver food than do repetitive assembly line work. In the future, it is inevitable and necessary for machines to replace humans to do jobs that people are unwilling to do.
From this perspective, service robots are a big opportunity for the future. Although the scale is not large, only about 30 billion overall scale, it has shown great potential. There is a growing shortage of service personnel, and the increase in technical capabilities will improve the robot's ability to solve real problems. It is foreseeable that service robots are about to usher in an industrial explosion.
Just as electric vehicles will replace traditional fuel vehicles, and service robots will replace people for boring, repetitive, and dangerous work, opportunities will always arise in such changes. Of course, the current form of service robots can not bear the future expectations, from the degree of software-defined intelligence, to the hardware-defined robot flexibility and other capabilities, but also need the head of the enterprise to improve and define, so that service robots have smart hands and intelligent brains, and truly have the ability to replace people. Just like electric vehicles should be really hot, not because of subsidies, but because the experience is indeed better than traditional cars.
Service robots, the prospects are incomparably bright, but the road to breaking the situation is a long way to go.
A historic opportunity comparable to an electric car track
Now we have seen service robots in different scenarios, with different forms and functions. Sweeping robots run in homes, guide robots and cleaning robots are parked in shopping malls, and food delivery robots are in hotels and restaurants. Service robots are not far away.
The current market size of service robots is not large. According to a report released by the Chinese Institute of Electronics, in 2021, the market size of China's service robots will be 30.26 billion yuan; by 2023, it is expected to exceed 60 billion yuan, which is in the early stage of industrialization, but the growth rate is very considerable.
Service robots have a big logic of long-term growth. With an aging population and young people reluctant to have children, future labor shortages are inevitable. The data shows that at the end of 2021, the mainland's population increased by only 480,000 people compared with the end of the previous year, setting a record low. The birth rate in 2021 is 7.52 per thousand; the mortality rate is 7.18 per thousand; and the natural population growth rate is 0.34 per thousand, which is also a record low.
Even if the downward trend of the population can be controlled, the future employment structure will change dramatically – young people will not choose to do simple, repetitive, low-achieving jobs, and young people today will no longer want to work on the assembly line. Under the trend of aging, there will be a huge gap in labor demand for the companionship and daily care of the elderly. Agriculture, housekeeping, cleaning, waiters and other jobs will face huge gaps.
The only thing that can solve this problem is robots. Robots have many advantages, for example, they can work 7× 24 hours a day; taking care of the elderly, there can be a caregiver to direct multiple robots to serve the elderly. In the future, in the fields of home care, hotel restaurant service, cleaning, agricultural planting, etc., service robots will have a huge market space. The demand in each area is enormous. Taking the family nanny robot as an example, Huang Xiaoqing, the founder of Damin, believes that there are 450 million families in China, assuming that 100 million robot nannies are rented out in 2035, each nanny will collect 3,000 yuan per month, one month is 300 billion, and one year is 3.6 trillion.
There are also many scenarios that can be standardized – such as greenhouse picking in agriculture, cotton picking, etc. The service robot developed by Damin has been applied in the picking scene, saving manpower and enabling long-term operation. In Huang Xiaoqing's view, agriculture is a huge market, China has about 150 million acres of greenhouses and greenhouses, the labor cost of picking round fruits in china alone in this market is more than 300 billion yuan per year, and the application space of robots in the future is very wide.
The sum of many vertical segments is that the scale of the service robot market is beyond imagination.
In fact, VC/PE has long seen the bright prospects of this track. Statistics show that in 2021, there were 113 financing incidents related to the service robot track, and the total amount of financing exceeded 44 billion yuan. Among the leading enterprises, Damin Robot completed a B+ round of financing of more than 1 billion yuan, Purdue Technology completed a 500 million yuan C round financing, and a delivery robot Candela completed a 375 million yuan B round of financing.
Industrial capital also came. Tesla also said in August last year that it would make a robot, and it was a humanoid robot, which could be placed in a car to help people do some idle work. A physical version of the robot could be available next year, and was designed to handle unsafe, repetitive, and boring tasks. The global automotive market is $2.6 trillion, and the global workforce is a $38 trillion market, more than 10 times more than the car. Musk believes that humanoid robots will have a profound impact on the future economy. In the future, manual work will be an option, you can do it if you want, and don't do it if you don't want to.
The logic behind it is not difficult to understand - there is too much labor work that people are reluctant to do, and the space left for robot services is too large. From the perspective of imagination alone, the market for service robots is even larger than that of smart cars.
The reality is very bone, why hasn't the service robot exploded yet?
The prospects are good, but that doesn't mean that the current service robotics industry is worth so much money. For many investors, they will not sell industries with market penetration below 5%, on the grounds that the industry is too early, too variable, and not strong enough.
The reality is also true, and the current service robot faces many variables. From a functional point of view, many robots are still relatively chicken ribs, standing in the mall to give people directions, prompt point coupons, dispensable, no unique value. The service robot goes to the family scene to take care of people, the flexibility is still too poor, the bending of the upper and lower limbs, going up and down the stairs, the ability to bear weights, the smoothness of walking, there are still relatively large technical challenges. Intelligence is also a big problem, can only complete some simple input instructions, complex problems can not be handled, independent learning ability is even more insufficient.
From the cost point of view, at least tens of thousands of yuan or even hundreds of thousands of prices, the cost-benefit ratio is not good enough, so that the B-end merchants and C-end users after the accounting, feel that there is no need to buy.
Service robots, in the eyes of many people, are still a big toy, not a productivity tool.
To achieve the expected industrial scale in the next decade, in recent years to rapidly move through the early stages of low penetration, service robots need technological and product advancements to improve the robot's ability to solve problems in real scenarios, so that robots have value for money. Taking the sweeping robot as an example, the amount has been very fast in recent years, precisely because it has solved the engineering problems such as obstacle avoidance and sweeping and dragging, so that the robot really has the ability to sweep the floor like a person, and is no longer treated as a toy.
If the entire service robot wants to usher in an outbreak, it is also necessary to form the ability to solve problems in specific scenarios. These include:
First, the brain passes. Robots should be intelligent enough, through independent learning, with industry knowledge, and the ability to deal with complex problems in specific scenarios. This requires constant upgrades in the cloud. Enhance intelligence through cloud data, much like Tesla. It is difficult to ensure the improvement of the robot's intelligence level by relying only on the computing power provided by the chip of the body, because the amount of data that can be collected and processed is too small.
Second, the hardware passes. Breakthroughs should be made in core components such as joints, sensors, and materials, among which the standardization, intelligence, and low cost of joints are pain points. The core of robot problem solving is to have enough flexibility, and the high flexibility of people is largely due to the many joints on the body. Robots, especially humanoid robots that will take on more tasks in the future, need to have stronger development and production capabilities in the joints. This is also a common problem in many industries on the mainland, with assembly capabilities, lack of technical strength in core components, and subject to people. Therefore, it is necessary to have the ability to replace domestic products and even surpass foreign products in core components such as joints, so that robots are more flexible, mobile, and work like people in complex scenarios.
Therefore, for service robots, there needs to be a big improvement in both hardware and software. In this regard, the domestic service robot industry is in a process of accumulating quantitative changes to trigger qualitative changes. Taking the leading enterprise Damin Robot as an example, in terms of hardware, because a major technological breakthrough has been made in the most complex intelligent joints in the execution system, the robot can complete many complex actions and greatly improve the efficiency of the robot. At the software level, cloud capabilities enable the accumulated massive amounts of data to be quickly processed in the cloud, allowing robots to quickly form an understanding of complex environments and make reasonable decisions. At present, Damin robots have been applied in retail reception, security distribution, education, agriculture and other scenarios, and robots are no longer decorations, but productivity that can really solve problems in real scenes.
This is also very similar to intelligent electric vehicles, hardware to pass, software level to have the accumulation and processing of data, improve the level of intelligence, so that cars and robots are no longer pure machinery, but data-driven organisms.
Looking at the service robot jianghu, who will be the leader?
There is no doubt that the current service robot is still in the early stages of the industry. As investors have said, this stage needs industry leaders to lead, through the upgrading of technology, products, models, to define the industry's technology, products, models should go where. Just like whether VR can detonate the meta-universe, the future needs to see how Apple's new products are defined; the direction of smart cars depends on Tesla's technology and product routes.
Service robots also need the formulators and definers of the industry's development route, pointing out a path for the entire industry, and through this path to achieve the upgrading of capabilities. Judging from the choice of strategic routes and the current development, Damin robots are playing such a role.
Founded in 2015, Damin Robot has already possessed considerable strength in terms of cloud software, computing power, communications, etc., in the hardware-side robot body, core components such as joints, etc., and has served more than 2,400 customers in the industrial chain. Commercialization began in commercial retail, public health, communications, education, public safety, power and energy, agriculture, sanitation and other vertical industries.
In the eyes of people who are not familiar with the robot industry, the products made by Damin Robot and traditional robot companies are basically the same, but the scene is different. But there is a big difference between the two. The positioning of traditional robot companies is that of robot companies, and Damin has become a service robot platform company through the upgrading of cloud intelligence and high-end manufacturing software and hardware.
Traditional robotics companies are hardware thinking. On the basis of hardware, the robot has limited computing power through the computing power of the body and the edge, and this route determines that the ceiling of the robot's intelligence is extremely low. Damin robot is actually from the deployment of cloud brain and artificial intelligence force, when found that the robot body on the market is not good enough, only to do the ontology hardware. When it is found that the key components are not strong enough, we develop core components such as smart joints. The starting point of logic is the cloud brain, and the end point is the intelligent and sustainable improvement of the robot. Damin has reserved relevant technologies in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, digital twins, human-machine fusion intelligence, network security, blockchain, cloud intelligent control and other aspects, and has established an industry leader in key artificial intelligence fields such as natural language processing, computer vision and autonomous navigation. This makes Damin's service robot intelligent improvement space greater.
The logical starting point of traditional robot companies is to make the hardware first, and then consider the problem of intelligence, this route is difficult to bring a smart enough service robot, and the ability to solve practical problems will be very limited.
From the hardware level, the idea of Damin Robot is to first solve the core technology of card neck. Robot companies with core competitiveness must make breakthroughs in core components and cannot be satisfied with only being an assembly plant. Damin has developed and mass-produced intelligent flexible joints (SCA), integrating various components such as motors, motor drives, reducers, sensors, high-speed communication, external interfaces, and real-time operating systems, becoming the core components of the robot's motion and control communication node, making the robot's body movement more flexible, reliable, and adapting to more scenarios.
Unlike robot companies that choose OEM and asset-light models, Damin is a high-end equipment manufacturing company. Damin's intelligent robot "Damin New Town" covering an area of 243 acres in Shanghai is about to be completed, and after the industrial base project reaches production, the annual production of robot joints is expected to reach 10 million sets.
From the cloud to the body to the key components, the layout of smart factories, the production of industrial robots to serve the robot, flexible actuators, intelligent joints and other technologies of research and development, Damin has the end-to-end full-stack ability to grasp the whole industry chain of the company will have more advantages to break the game, which is similar to the path of Tesla's development that year.
The path of Damin robot is platform thinking. Damin has both software and hardware advantages, and excellent external robots can be connected to Damin's cloud system to improve the level of intelligence. The expansion of the ecology brings more data, making the industry enter a virtuous circle. Damin's own core components and intelligent manufacturing capabilities can also be opened to the industry.
For example, Damin's self-developed intelligent flexible joint (SCA) breaks through the limitations of standardization and integration of key components of robots, and can provide standardized robot joint modules for all robot manufacturers, and any robot body manufacturer can use SCA to quickly assemble the required service robots. At present, hundreds of robot, medical, scientific research and other partners have joined the ecological construction of Damin SCA. Relying on SCA, Da min was approved as a strategic emerging industry project in Shanghai in 2021, which is the most supported project since the establishment of the project. At present, more than 100 ecological customers are using Damin SCA, including medical robots, rehabilitation robots, special robots, etc., which is the leading level in China.
Damin aims to become a platform-level company for the entire service robot industry, which is the value of the existence of leading companies, and the software and hardware levels can empower the industry and drive the development of the industry.
How much is a service robot head company worth? Demystify the valuation system of service robots
More and more service robot companies are ready to enter the capital market, and the head companies that do the platform will obviously receive more attention. Whether it is the promotion of its own robot body sales and scene solutions, or the revenue brought by the provision of core components to the industry's ecological partners, as well as the empowerment of cloud intelligence, the revenue of leading enterprises will be plugged into the wings of rapid growth.
The take-off of leading enterprises can also feed the development of the robot industry. Leading enterprises provide core software and hardware for the industry, improve the level of the industry, make the ecology bigger, and promote the entire industry to enter a virtuous circle, and the market scale and penetration rate can be continuously improved.
In the current domestic market environment, the market is more recognized high-end manufacturing, hardware is easier to sell than software, when the hardware is enough, the penetration rate is high enough, the next step is the demand for cloud intelligence.
Therefore, the valuation that the market can accept at this stage is more of a hardware and high-end manufacturing level.
From the perspective of the listed service robot company Coworth, Stone Technology, etc., everyone is also paying more for hardware, and software upgrades have not yet formed a business. Unlike smart cars, Tesla has made self-driving software packages a source of revenue. From this point of view, there are hardware products and scenario solutions in the near future, and there is an intelligent revolution in software-defined robots, which constitutes the short-term and medium- and long-term valuation logic of service robots.
Sweeping robot leaders Coworth and Stone Technology are sought after to varying degrees in the capital market, and at the moment when the market conditions are not good, the market value of the two is still about 60 billion and 30 billion respectively. The scale of revenue and profit of the two has also reached a certain level. For example, the revenue and profit of Stone Technology last year were 5.8 billion yuan and 1.4 billion yuan, respectively.
Why is the valuation of the sweeping robot relatively high? Some investors have said that the barriers to sweeping robots are not high, but it does not prevent it from having an explosive process. This product does solve the pain points of consumers, sweeping and dragging together, especially suitable for Chinese.
At the end of the day, the sweeper has a good valuation because it solves the actual problems of users, so that there is a rapid increase in sales and penetration. Only when the penetration rate reaches a certain stage, it is possible to talk about valuation, otherwise it is too early. Of course, now the valuation of the sweeper has dropped a lot from the high point, the core reason is that the barriers are not high, and it is easy for new entrants to come in and make the industry pattern worse, which is a situation that fund managers do not like.
From the rise and fall of sweeper valuations can be explored the valuation principles of service robots.
First of all, industries and products that have begun to achieve rapid increase in product volume and penetration rate are likely to obtain a better valuation. This means that the product has the ability to solve real problems, has been validated by the market, and can be reflected in rapidly growing revenue and profit.
At present, the service robot market is already in the stage of rapid increase in penetration rate, and there has been a good penetration rate in the scenes of service, cleaning, security, delivery, etc., and has entered the stage of rapid promotion; in addition, in commercial retail, public health, communications, education, public safety, power energy, agriculture, sanitation and other labor shortage areas, service robots are forming more and more mature programs, forming benchmark cases, reflecting value, and will soon enter the stage of scale and volume.
Secondly, whether the subsequent valuation can be improved and whether the performance growth rate can be maintained depends on whether the barriers are high enough. If the barriers are low, there will be a large number of new entrants, breaking the industry market pattern and breaking the previous higher valuation.
Robot companies that are only positioned in a certain scene, the barriers are quite low, and many companies can come in to push products and fight price wars. Where are the barriers to service robots? Both software and hardware have barriers, hardware, to have a breakthrough in the core components, to achieve the core of the autonomous controllable, there is a high-end manufacturing capabilities; software level, through the edge and the ontology of computing power to enhance the degree of intelligence is limited, the cloud computing power to improve is a very high barrier. At the same time, the more robots supported by the platform and big data, the higher the intelligence level of the robots and the lower the cost, so that the high barriers formed by the platform are impossible for enterprises without platform capabilities.
Companies that really break through the core technology will form real barriers, whether it is software or hardware level, Da Min has completed a lot of technical attacks, as of December 31, 2021, the number of patent applications of Da Min reached 2153, the number of patents in the field of cloud robots in the world's first.
More importantly, platform-level companies will have higher barriers, because the platform defines the direction of the industry, has a higher influence and discourse power in the industrial chain, and on this basis, the valuation will be more supportive.
Cases in many industries show that the main C-end products will have higher valuations, because the products are more standardized, do not need to be customized, do not need to be deployed and installed for customers, and the growth is stable and the volume is faster. The high valuation of sweeper companies also has a reason for this.
The greater opportunity for Damin in the future is definitely on the C-end, including family nannies, pensions and other scenarios of service robots will bring more explosive growth space to Damin. As the only strategic partner of China Mobile's 5G cloud robot, the two sides will jointly explore typical application scenarios of 5G and form a scale effect of 1+1>2, which will undoubtedly help Damin leverage the development of C-end business with B-end business and gradually open up a broader market for 5G cloud robots to gradually enter the home.
From the perspective of the development of the entire service robot, it is likely to be the first B-end and then the C-end, when standing firm at the B-end and starting to put volume on the C-end, it will soon enter the Double-click moment of Davis double-clicking performance and valuation.