When many consumers have not yet had a concrete concept of AI, this technology has long penetrated into our work and life, and to this day, we can see the active figure of AI technology in our clothing, food, housing, and transportation.
In recent years, mainland artificial intelligence has become increasingly mature from basic support, technology-driven to scene application. This year, the sector is expected to develop rapidly driven by policy dividends and industrial maturity. According to the "In-depth Observation of Artificial Intelligence Development" report released by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology, in 2020, the global artificial intelligence industry will be about 156.5 billion US dollars, an increase of 12%. Among them, the scale of the Chinese intelligent industry is about 310 billion yuan, an increase of 15% year-on-year.
The development of the AI industry is exciting
Behind the prosperity of the domestic AI industry, it is indispensable to the cultivation of industrial chain manufacturers.
Along with this, there are also controversies from all walks of life about AI itself and the industry chain manufacturers, like the word "bubble", which has never been absent from the discussion since the domestic AI industry began to develop; in addition, the hematopoietic ability of AI companies has also become a point of repeated criticism, and the protagonist of this article, Yuncong Technology Group Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yuncong Technology"), is also one of them.
In fact, the author believes that for the problem of the AI industry bubble, it is necessary to think about whether there is a strong and sustainable driving force for the future development of the industry; and for the profitability of the enterprise, it is necessary to see whether it can find a more commercial value scenario and achieve landing.
So, where does the impetus to support the continued rapid growth of the mainland AI industry come from?
Looking back at the industrial development in recent years with this question, the first thing that cannot be ignored is that the industrial environment in the field of artificial intelligence in the mainland has entered the rapid development from the beginning. Growing in tandem with the size of the market, there is also the importance attached by the national and provincial and municipal governments to the industry.
The "Proposal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-term Goals for the Year 2035" pointed out that "it is necessary to aim at the frontier fields of artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science and other frontier fields, and implement a number of forward-looking and strategic major national science and technology projects." Among the several cutting-edge technologies listed in the document, artificial intelligence, quantum information, and integrated circuits are placed in the top three, which also shows the priority of their importance to a certain extent.
In addition, according to the statistics of the Prospective Industry Research Institute, in 2020, the six provinces of Shandong, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Fujian, Anhui and Liaoning and the four cities of Beijing, Chongqing, Chengdu and Jinan have successively issued relevant policies that are conducive to the development of the artificial intelligence industry.
This also means that as one of the important areas of economic transformation and upgrading and new infrastructure, artificial intelligence is also accelerating its integration with traditional industries while growing rapidly.
Looking forward to the next few years, the artificial intelligence sector will usher in rapid development, is expected to enter the stage of large-scale commercialization, according to the Data of the China Communications Institute, it is expected that the scale of domestic AI core industry is expected to reach 157.3 billion yuan in 2022, with a compound growth rate of 58%, and the industry is expected to continue to grow rapidly. Therefore, the leading companies in the industrial chain will benefit from it.
From this, we can continue to think about the second question, does a company have commercial value and the ability to land industries?
As the head manufacturer of the human-machine collaboration industry chain, Yuncong has focused on finance, governance (government, public security, justice, emergency), travel, smart city and other fields since its inception, which have experienced three stages of development of informatization, digitalization and intelligence in the past 20 years, and have produced massive demand for intelligent platforms in the process.
As demand for smart platforms surges, the cloud has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of technology revenue, customers, and number of projects over the past three years.
According to its disclosure, the company's revenue from 2017 to 2021 soared from 0.64 billion yuan to 1.076 billion yuan, a total of more than 3 billion yuan; the number of projects in which the cloud recognized revenue from technology also increased from 648 in 2018 to 2179 in 2021.
The asset-liability ratio decreased from 49.03% in 2018 to 22.76% in 2021, and the comprehensive gross profit margin increased from 21.7% in 2018 to 37.01% in 2021. At the same time, its losses have further narrowed, from 810 million yuan in 2020 to 630 million yuan in 2021, and its operating conditions have continued to improve.
From the perspective of performance attribution, the cloud has maintained rapid growth from the two major business units of technology (human-machine collaborative operating system and artificial intelligence solutions), especially the cloud with high gross profit from the technology human-machine collaborative operating system, accounting for 31.50% of the main business revenue from 6.41% in 2018 to 31.50% in 2020, with an average growth rate of 198.62% in three years.
Looking at the second question specifically, behind each of the above digital changes is actually the embodiment of the core value and competitive advantage of the cloud from technology.
The pivot point under strong growth
First of all, from the core technology level, the cloud is different from most enterprises in the industry, and it is constantly deepening in the field of software and hardware product research and development and core algorithms; not only has the core technology of artificial intelligence that is independently controllable and constantly innovating, but also covers the entire field of image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing and machine learning in the technical direction, and has built a technical closed loop from perception to cognition to decision-making.
It is understood that the cross-border tracking, 3D structured optical face recognition, double-layer heterogeneous deep neural network and adversarial neural network independently developed by Yuncong Technology are at the leading level in the industry. The company and its core technical team have won the laurels in the field of intelligent perception at home and abroad for 9 times, and won the first prize of the "Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Progress Award" in 2018.
Not only that, Yuncong Technology was also invited to participate in the formulation of 30 national and industry standards such as artificial intelligence national standards and ministry of public security industry standards, and also undertook the construction tasks of national major projects such as the National Development and Reform Commission's "Artificial Intelligence Basic Resources Public Service Platform" and "High-accuracy Face Recognition System Industrialization and Application Project". According to its prospectus, Yuncong Technology has 316 patents (of which 133 are invention patents), 354 software copyrights and other intellectual property rights in the field of artificial intelligence.
Of course, in the closed loop of technology from the cloud, "talent" is an indispensable and important component.
As we all know, for cutting-edge scientific and technological fields such as integrated circuits and artificial intelligence, talent resources have always been the top priority to promote the development of enterprises and industries, and the founder Dr. Zhou Xi is also well aware of this. Under his leadership, Cloud Technology has now established a mature R&D team. By the end of 2021, the company has nearly 600 R&D personnel, of which 40.17% have a master's degree or above, and 51.34% of R&D personnel.
Its core R & D personnel have rich industry experience and solid technical skills, the R & D team structure is reasonable, comprehensive skills, the formation of technical talent barriers, a strong support for the company's technological innovation and product development. In addition, Yuncong Technology also attaches great importance to the cultivation of talents and the construction of research and development teams, and has formulated a sound talent selection mechanism and a rich talent training program to ensure a steady supply of talents and the improvement of the ability of internal personnel.
Secondly, from the perspective of business expansion direction, cloud has been deeply cultivating vertical industries from technology for many years, extensively laying out multiple business areas such as smart finance, smart governance, smart transportation, smart business, and smart city, deeply understanding the needs of users, providing a variety of efficient solutions to empower customers in different vertical fields, and forming a leading scenario-based experience accumulation and high-quality brand image.
After long-term close cooperation with key customers in various vertical fields, Yuncong Technology has continuously optimized the algorithm platform through a large number of scenario data training, cultivated unique data analysis and application capabilities for different industries, accumulated in-depth understanding of the industry and core service capabilities, and established high business barriers.
As of 2021, Yuncong Technology has provided products and technical services in the field of smart finance for more than 100 financial institutions, including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Postal Savings Bank and Bank of Communications; the field of smart governance has served multiple types of application scenarios such as political law, schools, and scenic spots in 30 provincial-level administrative regions across the country; the field of smart travel has been deployed in hundreds of civil hub airports, including China's top ten airports; the field of smart cities has been deployed in Guangzhou, Sichuan, Hunan and other places have built "digital base" benchmarking projects.
Finally, let's talk about the layout of the cloud from science and technology, in fact, artificial intelligence is a very general concept, so in the process of developing the domestic AI industry, the positioning and strategy of enterprises are also different. Based on the trend of platformization and softwareization in the era of intelligence, cloud focuses the strategy of artificial intelligence landing from technology on the human-machine collaborative operating system.
The human-computer collaborative operating system covers full-stack technology from perception and recognition decision-making such as vision, speech and big data analysis, realizes natural and convenient human-computer interaction, and provides trusted intelligent decision-making based on automated learning and industry knowledge reasoning storage, equipped with AI engineering innovation technology, with a complete set of intelligent application integration and development environment, improving the efficiency of redeployment from algorithm to application development, and realizing the rapid landing of application intelligence.
In the view of the cloud from the perspective of technology, creating an open third-party ecosystem through the operating system is always better than a closed ecology. On the one hand, such a strategy can enable it to start from various industry application platforms (such as the financial IBIS integrated biometrics platform, the governance of the Rongzhi cloud, the travel of the Feifeng platform), has been occupying its deep ploughing of the four major areas of finance, security, travel, business entrance, through the scalable, replicable business model gradually expand more scenarios in the industry, the airport business from the security checkpoint identity verification and other single-point technology applications, extended to the air traffic communication intelligent supervision and other broader scenarios; on the other hand, the cloud from technology to To B business The industry operating system has stronger professional capability characteristics, which is not only fundamentally different from the system in the 2C field, but also has a broader prospect.
Become a Tier1 manufacturer in the AI industry
Zhou Xi, founder of Cloudcong Technology, proposed that the core goal in the next three years is to develop a human-machine collaborative industry chain around the human-machine collaborative operating system, so as to become a Tier1 manufacturer in the AI industry, because this will make the cloud more irreplaceable, strong in the right to speak and high in profit margins, and will also make the cloud never achieve high growth, high profitability and high stability of the second curve.
Using the automotive industry chain as an analogy, he analyzed the level of the human-machine collaboration industry chain, from bottom to top:
Tier3 - core technology layer: including face, voice, NLP and other underlying algorithms, providing three major value propositions;
Tier2 - technology platform layer: including training platform, reasoning platform, business platform, etc., to solve the problem of mass production;
Tier1 - Integrated Platform Layer: Provides the core brain CWOS of the software, outputs Al Sprites, similar to the car assembly, plays the role of powertrain, integrates and amplifies the capabilities and efficiency of Tier2/Tier3;
OEM layer: Al Genie manufacturer, AI assistant and expert in various industries and scenarios.
In the past, the cloud has accumulated certain results in Tier3 and Tier2, such as cross-mirror tracking that has repeatedly broken world records and privacy computing has become the industry standard setter, and it is a matter of course to strengthen the construction of Tier1 in the future. The focus is on Tier1 and Al Genie products (OEMs) to improve the quality of the solution. The core base for achieving this is the cloud-derived human-machine collaborative operating system CWOS.
Write at the end:
As the domestic artificial intelligence industry enters the fast lane of development, the head enterprises are growing at an alarming rate. Since 2019, the FOUR AI Tigers have opened the road to IPO listing and financing. At the same time, who can become the "first AI stock of the science and technology innovation board" has also attracted the attention of the industry and the capital market.
In fact, in the process of the growth of these enterprises, the discussion and controversy are from the intermittent, until April 6, 2022, the cloud from the technology officially got the customs clearance approval of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as the youngest of the four tigers but the first to pass the customs of the enterprise, is undoubtedly the best proof of the cloud from the technology potential, when the "AI platform first share" halo added, but also in the true sense of the cloud from the technology industry status.
Going public is not the end, but a new starting point. Although on the next road, the cloud from science and technology will face more challenges and noise, but with its core technology closed-loop and forward-looking strategy blessing, to further achieve industrial landing, we are bound to see the scene of "long wind and waves will sometimes hang on the clouds and sails to the sea".