iFLYTEK, which grew up with BAT, has always had some deep skills and fame.
Around the "first share of speech recognition" and "the first share of AI" iFLYTEK, the industry has two very different cognitions.
One side is very optimistic, the reason is that iFLYTEK's revenue continues to rise, and even exceeded the 10 billion mark in 2019, and the layout of open platforms and other businesses bet on the future.
The other side has many doubts, especially about the market value of iFLYTEK's 100 billion yuan or so, because of the "old problems" such as the net profit that cannot go up, the low stock price and too much government subsidies.
Evidence of these two attitudes can be found in iFLYTEK's 2021 financial data.
On April 21, iFLYTEK released its 2021 annual report and 2022 first quarter financial report, which is still data-oriented, and even before the release of the financial report, Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, once excitedly wanted to inform the revenue performance of 2021 in advance at the cloud annual meeting.
The above-mentioned old problems revealed from the financial report still exist, and new problems are gradually revealed, with the gross profit margin of various businesses falling repeatedly and the growth rate of net profit slowing down.
What exactly does iFLYTEK do?
This is the key to spying on its growth problems.
In this regard, Su Shu, a reporter from Phoenix WEEKLY, had an exchange with Shule, and poor Dao thought:
iFLYTEK, which takes voice intelligence, has always been very embarrassed, and voice intelligence is still in a state of "stuttering".
Because of this, iFLYTEK inevitably opened its mouth and "lost its voice", but it has not stalled to "lose its body". 、
iFLYTEK's revenue has exceeded 10 billion yuan in 2019, and the revenue growth rate has been more than 25%, with revenue in 2021 being 18.314 billion yuan, up 40.61% year-on-year; and net profit of 1.556 billion yuan, up 14.13% year-on-year.
But what is interesting is that iFLYTEK's revenue has been rising at a high speed, but the net profit has increased by a small amount and the net profit is small.
The origin is not complicated, and the more money is spent more is developed for the sake of saving lives.
Relying on its expansion of artificial intelligence, related hardware, and various commercialization scenarios, iFLYTEK has indeed tapped into some new incremental markets and achieved a rapid increase in revenue.
However, the above achievements depend on the same massive investment in technology research and development and market incubation strategies.
As a unicorn enterprise in the field of intelligent voice, it is facing a market that needs to be opened up, and the purchase and original "hoe" is enough to consume a large amount of its revenue.
This can also explain why under the good performance, the stock price of iFLYTEK is still relatively low.
What's more, when the market value of iFLYTEK fell below 100 billion, many people's views were still "falling into the well", believing that from the financial data of iFLYTEK, net profit, deduction of non-net profit, and business point of view, can not support this market value.
But the market value itself is an imaginary number, and what really affects the fate of iFLYTEK is whether it can open the blue ocean of intelligent voice.
At present, the global intelligent voice market scene has not really opened, and the various services provided by iFLYTEK, especially the service of toB, are still very simple, which further confirms its title of "not worthless".
But at the same time, a question has also been haunting, everyone knows that iFLYTEK is a unicorn in the field of intelligent voice, but when it comes to details, it will be confused.
The core barriers of iFLYTEK lie in speech recognition technology, but from the perspective of the proportion of iFLYTEK's business, education products and services, AI open platforms and "information engineering" in smart cities are the main sources of revenue, but the core barriers of these main businesses do not seem to be related to intelligent speech.
What exactly does iFLYTEK do?
I have to say that iFLYTEK's business scope is relatively wide, and intelligent voice is only an ingredient in these businesses, often not the main ingredient, or does not achieve the most effective value imagined.
The reason for this result is that the implementation scenario of intelligent voice is still very fragile, just a "mascot" of iFLYTEK, but it is not enough to support the current revenue of the company.
Without the support of the "side business" that is not very related to intelligent voice, iFLYTEK cannot survive.
In other words, iFLYTEK has to get out of its own embarrassment, and only by excavating a wide range of popular application scenarios of toB or toC that are truly effective in intelligent voice.
At present, its technology is only a supplement or a chicken rib in most of the scenes it puts into use, but from the perspective of the story, it is still promising. Hence the evaluation of the double heaven of ice and fire.
Zhang Shule is a columnist of people's daily newspapers and people's posts and telegrams, and a senior analyst in the Internet and game industries