Text | Wei Wen
Edit | Peng Xiaoqiu
Jifei is already an agricultural technology company. Compared with DJI agricultural drones, Jifei's product line is more complete. It has expanded from agricultural drones to the whole agricultural industry chain, including agricultural unmanned vehicles, agricultural self-driving instruments, remote sensing drones, agricultural Internet of Things, and intelligent agricultural systems. That is to say, the target of Jifei is not agricultural drones, but the difficult bone of agriculture.
Under this strategy, the price of Jifei is high investment in research and development and consecutive years of losses. From 2018 to 2020, Jifei earned about 1.2 billion yuan, but lost 220 million yuan, and the total R& D investment was 210 million yuan. Looking closely at the prospectus, it earned 461 million yuan in the first half of 2021 and invested 80 million yuan in research and development.
Source: Jifei prospectus
Jifei founder Peng Bin is a geek out of Microsoft, co-founder Gong Qiqin is a geek who wants to go to Mars to cultivate the land, this gene is transmitted to Jifei, the team is mostly R & D personnel. As of June 30, 2021, there were a total of 527 R&D personnel, accounting for 38.47% of the company's total employees. Now, that number stands at 700.
Jifei was fortunate to catch up with intelligent hardware, autonomous driving, agricultural outlets, and many capitals pouring into Jifei. From the $5 million that became capital in 2014, to the 280 million yuan invested by Baidu, to the SoftBank Vision Fund, the Innovation Factory, and the more than 300 million yuan from Hillhouse. The valuation of Jifei has gone from 100 million to 3.8 billion to 5.1 billion yuan, which is only a few years. Among the institutions here, Baidu is optimistic about the automatic driving of Jifei Agriculture, while SoftBank is optimistic about the layout of Jifei in smart agriculture, and the layout of AI, robots and unmanned future in the innovation workshop Lee Kai-fu.
Although Jifei has brought agricultural drones to farmland, digital, mechanized and intelligent agriculture is its next destination. But the dangerous side is that relying only on selling equipment, the scale effect of Jifei has not yet appeared. Therefore, compared with DJI's delay in listing, Jifei submitted a prospectus to the Shanghai Stock Exchange as early as 2021 to be listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. It explained in the prospectus: "The industry is still in a period of rapid growth, the company's research and development investment is high at this stage, the new product line is still in the market promotion stage, and the sales scale effect has not yet been reflected." ”
The main income comes from the sale of agricultural equipment
Started the agricultural drone business
In the beginning, both Jifei and DJI were drone track players. In 2006, Wang Founded DJI. In 2007, Peng Bin created XAIRCRAFT, the predecessor of Jifei. The two stand on the same running line, do model drones, And Jifei also released the SUPERX UAV flight control system in 2011 for UAV players to assemble.
After the transformation in 2012, DJI launched phantom 1, drones entered the consumer market. Peng Bin must start to find his own market, the team experimented with aerial photography, scientific expeditions, inspections, search and rescue, logistics, agriculture and other scenarios. But in the end, perhaps because of the consideration of the market space, it was decided to bet on agriculture.
Two years later, DJI accounted for 70% of the global consumer drone market share and was selected as one of the top ten technology products of the year in Time Magazine in 2014.
In 2013, Peng Bin found that customers in Xinjiang did not buy drones, but bought Jifei's unmanned aerial vehicle flight control system. The Jifei team went to Xinjiang with curiosity and found that local farmers had assembled the UAV flight control system into a plant protection UAV. They found that in the vast fields, under the direct 40-degree sun, manual work is really torturous and inefficient, and drones can play a big role in doing something for agriculture. This will be a new growth curve for Jifei.
Also in this year, at the outlet of intelligent hardware investment, the capital Kang Pi invested in the A round of Jifei with 5 million US dollars, corresponding to the valuation of Jifei 17.73 million US dollars. Then in 2019, Becoming Capital invested another 60 million yuan in the B+ round of financing, at which time Jifei has been valued at 1.83 billion yuan. Now, Becoming Capital (Hong Kong Jifei) is the second largest shareholder of Jifei in addition to founder Peng Bin. According to the valuation of Jifei now nearly 10 billion, it has become a full pot of capital.
At that time, Jifei took this financing to build a model drone, launched the world's first plant protection drone, and bought more than 200 trucks. Using the model of direct asset management, more than 200 trucks drove into the cotton fields of Xinjiang with hundreds of plant protection drone operators and drones.
In 2016, DJI adopted a "follower strategy" and also sold plant protection drones. Since then, the agricultural drone market has appeared in both sides. At this time, Jifei began to sell equipment through dealers and entered the stage of large-scale promotion and application of agricultural drones. It is worth noting that in the past, the sprinkling of pesticides is a pressure nozzle, when Jifei went to Japan, the customer required that the pesticide spraying could not leak a drop to the ground, so with the Ferrari sports car for the body spray carbon nanomaterial technology inspiration, Jifei launched an intelligent centrifugal atomization technology, which can spray pesticides like spray spray, break a medicine into micron level, and accurately adjust the size of the drop (sprinkler flow) through the rotation speed. In the pesticide box carried by the drone, the measuring instrument can monitor the amount of medicine sprayed by the agricultural drone.
Pictured: An atomizer carried by an agricultural drone
Then, Jifei launched a remote sensing drone to digitize farmland with RTK (carrier phase difference) technology. RTK was originally a military technology, after the use of RTK technology to establish the foundation, through the correction technology can make the ground accurate to 1-2 cm, while GPS (Global Positioning System) will have a deviation of 1-10 meters. This deviation can easily allow pesticides to enter the pond and kill a pond of fish and shrimp.
Based on the remote sensing positioning accuracy to the centimeter level, a large area of agricultural land is drawn by "drone + sensor + big data" to draw an agricultural map. Perhaps the future of agricultural information systems can provide soil information, crop information, personnel, climate information, etc., after all, data is more trustworthy.
In 2018, people began to appear who specialized in the plant protection drone business. Jifei shunshi sold the drone to the pilot, who formed a team by himself, bought several planes, a second-hand pickup truck, and worked everywhere in the field. Created a new farming profession , the pilot. At that time, Jifei's P30 plant protection UAV had a market share of more than 50%.
The development route of Jifei
Xinjiang is an important market for Jifei. Interestingly, the meaning of "20" and "30" in Jifei P20 and P30 is simply what farmers can understand, and can hold 20 pounds and 30 pounds of pesticides. The plant protection drone takes red as the appearance color, also because the peppers grown in Xinjiang are red, and the peppers produced in Xinjiang are used to extract capsaicin to make lipstick, and the pigment raw materials of Chanel and Dior come from here.
Pictured: P80, can spray 80 pounds of pesticides
In the past, a person carrying a pesticide bucket and dragging a sprinkler pipe had to walk through the entire farmland step by step. Now, a plant protection drone with a price of 20,000 pieces can complete the whole process, and the ratio of pesticides and water has been reduced from 1:2000 to 1:10, which greatly improves the efficiency of sprinkling. The commercial application of plant protection UAVs has replaced the operation mode of manual pesticide spraying with their backs to the sky. The average annual growth rate of plant protection drone ownership reached 100%. In 2017, China's plant protection drones have exceeded 10,000 units, and by 2025, the market size may expand by 20 times.
Expanded into big agricultural businesses
In order to do a large agricultural business, Jifei began to add fertilizers and seeds to the original plant protection drone, and renamed it an agricultural drone, and launched agricultural unmanned vehicle R80, agricultural machinery self-driving instrument APC1 and smart agricultural management system SAS2020 and other products, to provide agricultural producers with smart agriculture overall solutions.
Specifically, through remote sensing drones, farmland images can be obtained, farmland boundaries, crop density and growth trends can be outlined, and then the amount of pesticides or fertilizers that need to be consumed in the area can be calculated through AI learning to form a "farmland prescription map". Farmers only need to purchase agricultural materials according to the "prescription", and according to the "prescription", the agricultural unmanned vehicle and the drone can execute the system command.
One of the things that XECO is still doing is building a digital infrastructure for agriculture to document crop growth. Under the agricultural Internet of Things device, there is soil nitrogen content and water content, which can tell the software system irrigation time, crop maturity time, etc. At present, Jifei is more mature is the monitoring of cotton, it is reported that the current monitoring has reached 90% accuracy, and it is still in the verification stage, perhaps in the future, this technology can also be commercialized to achieve a closed loop. As Ji Fei said, "Farming like a game."
Product distribution of Jifei
The future of agriculture is very imaginative, from the perspective of policy vanes, in 2018, the "Rural Revitalization Strategic Plan (2018-2022)" pointed out that it is necessary to vigorously develop digital agriculture, real-time smart agricultural projects and "Internet +" modern agricultural actions to encourage the digital transformation of agricultural production.
These also require constant R&D investment and hot money influx. From the perspective of R&D investment, from 2018 to the first half of 2021, Jifei's R&D investment continued to increase, with the amounts of 48.84 million yuan, 69.47 million yuan, 97.35 million yuan and 81.3 million yuan respectively, accounting for 15.18%, 19.49%, 18.36% and 17.35% of the revenue ratio.
After Jifei proposed a blueprint for digital agriculture, the valuation continued to rise. In 2020, when Baidu invested 280 million yuan, Jifei was already valued at 3.8 billion yuan. When SoftBank entered with $80.12 million in Series C financing, The valuation of Jifei was already 5.1 billion yuan. Subsequently, Hillhouse Venture Capital added 300 million yuan to invest in the market, and before the IPO, Jifei had been valued at nearly 10 billion.
The future agriculture that Jifei wants to build is a young man who only wants to farm, and can be achieved by using a software from Jifei with hardware (drones, unmanned tractors, etc.). From the perspective of the core technology route, this is also the difference between Jifei and DJI, DJI aircraft is flexible and man-machine integration, people are the eyes in flight, and the control is very good. Perhaps agriculture does not need manipulation, but is a business that tobs and farmers. The other difference between Jifei and DJI is that Jifei is all in agriculture, and DJI adopts the way of investing in Fengjiang Intelligence to cut off the difficult bones such as agricultural unmanned vehicles, focusing on agricultural drones.
For the difference between the two, an agricultural track investor analyzed 36Kr: If an agricultural technology company such as Jifei can continue to raise funds, increase research and development to the inflection point of the agricultural industry, and may be able to run out of the leading company. The inflection point here refers to the improvement of the construction of digital and intelligent infrastructure in rural areas. However, some agricultural robot practitioners said that the sales of Jifei in agricultural drones have not caught up with DJI, and now the agricultural unmanned vehicles and auxiliary driving equipment in the deployment of multi-products have not landed.
In 2020, the sales volume of plant protection drones ranked
As an agricultural tool, tractors can be cultivated and mounted, which is an important part of agriculture, and it is indeed a link that agricultural technology companies must bless. Agricultural self-driving instruments can enable traditional tractors to achieve autonomous driving functions, eliminating labor costs.
The above-mentioned agricultural robot practitioners admitted to 36Kr that he believes that the landing of agricultural self-driving instruments is a pseudo demand. "I use an analogy to install an agricultural self-driving instrument on an oil-burning tractor, just like installing autopilot accessories on a fuel truck, and running down as a whole is not as good as a tram." And if there is a problem, I don't know whether to find an agricultural self-driving instrument manufacturer or a tractor manufacturer. That is to say, "in the future, perhaps pure electric unmanned tractors and spray drones will be the main force of agricultural robots." ”
Polar fly agricultural path
But there is no doubt that with the entry of DJI and Jifei Volume Company, the price of drones is decreasing year by year. From 40,000 sets when the market began to accept them in 2018, It has dropped to 26,000 units in 2021. The price of remote sensing drones dropped from 23,000 yuan to 7,546 yuan.
The price of Jifei products
Secondly, the number of agricultural drones in the mainland has reached more than 60,000, and the operating area has reached 1 billion mu (2020 data). However, it should be noted that when the market is laid, the quality of agricultural drones and the quality of after-sales training still need to be improved. In the spring of 2021, the frequent appearance of bombers has damaged the reputation of Jifei. It is reported that the fryer often appears in the first 100 acres of novice operations. Training farmers and pilots, flying in the field, and after-sales service are important points in the agricultural UAV industry chain.
Last year, Jifei submitted a prospectus to be listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and also plans to raise 1.5 billion yuan. However, some time ago, due to the impact of the epidemic in Shanghai, it was impossible to complete due diligence and respond to audit inquiries within the prescribed time limit, and has applied to suspend the review. It is expected that in the second half of this year, Jifei will submit a prospectus again. The story of Jifei's agriculture is fascinating, but it still requires continuous blood transfusions. In the future, whether the desperate strategy can succeed and whether it can become the next 100-billion-level company is still unpredictable.
Resources:
1. Yuan Silai's "Focus Analysis| Jifei, which lost 200 million yuan in three years, submitted an IPO, and agricultural drones are still a good business.
2. Prospectus of Jifei Technology
3. Kai-Fu Lee Times Magazine column "The Future of China's World Factory + AI"
4. He Fan, "Variables, Seeing Small Trends in Chinese Society"
5. He Jiayan interviewed Peng Bin