01
Actively look for beautiful pictures of the second growth curve
"How long have you not used the Meitu App?" ——From the once national application to obscurity, when beauty became the standard on smartphones and the user experience was constantly upgraded, the Meitu App seemed to be a little lost. In addition to the Meitu App, Meitu has also tried to take "beauty" as a starting point in recent years, making selfies and beauty mobile phones, developing Meipai platforms to explore the blue ocean of short videos, and even intending to enter the field of medical beauty.
Similar user groups can be the icing on the cake for mobile phones and short video platforms, but it is difficult to contribute to Meitu, which has reached a bottleneck period. As a result, Meitu's various "beauty industries" have gradually declined after several turns, and Meitu has also faced years of losses, so much so that it will speculate heavily in 2022 to seek short-term financial stimulus.
ALTHOUGH THE ROAD HAS BEEN BUMPY, THANKS TO THE SAAS BUSINESS FORMED BY THE ACQUISITION OF MEIDD IN DECEMBER 2021, MEITU RECORDED REVENUE OF 463.3 MILLION YUAN IN THE FINANCIAL REPORT OF MAID'S 2022, MAKING MEITU'S FINANCIAL REPORT IN MARCH THIS YEAR VERY BEAUTIFUL. In 2022, Meitu achieved total revenue of RMB2.085 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25.2%. Adjusted net profit was RMB111 million, up 29.9% year-on-year. This is Meitu's first full-year IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) profit. Looking at the financial report data over the years, Meitu's performance is not good, and it has only achieved a profit once in 2020, but the company, which is committed to "making people beautiful", has never stopped looking for a second growth point outside the Meitu App.
02
The Meitu App, eager to seize the AICG limelight
For decades, it seems that Meitu's proud works are only the Meitu App, and the growth of users can be said to be all due to the Meitu App.
The latest financial report data shows that the Meitu App turned the tide in 2022 and pulled Meitu back from the brink of decline. Specifically, Meitu App users grew by 13%, while beauty cameras and overseas versions of the Meitu App BeautyPlus decreased by 13.8% and 12.4%, respectively.
Since 2022, Meitu has once again started from the "old bank" retouching and officially entered the B-end field to build an image SaaS business. At present, Meitu is riding the east wind of AIGC, Rio Tinto's SaaS business increment of image editing and imaging, and Meitu's products currently cover AI painting, AI design, AI video, AI retouching, etc.
Taking Meitu Cloud Repair as an example, the product is aimed at the commercial photography industry, based on professional image editing services based on AI technology, providing users with a one-stop intelligent retouching solution, which can shorten the retouching time by about 90%, reduce the post-image cost by about 50%, increase the revenue of secondary film selection by about 40%, and compress the delivery process of the photo studio or studio from 5-7 days to 1 day.
In addition, Meitu has also partnered with Microsoft to provide AI skin testing and related SaaS solutions to global skincare brands, medical beauty institutions and beauty salons through MeituEve. MeituEve now operates in more than 2,900 offline stores around the world, and has reached strategic cooperation with more than 130 well-known brands such as Dior, Shiseido, and Fan Wenhua.
At present, the topic of AIGC and its application scenarios is showing explosive growth, but on the other side of the boom, the scenes that can really land are still rare. At present, the more successful applications are mainly concentrated in the field of personal consumption, and most of the applications of AIGC in the industry are still in the exploratory stage. While Meitu has achieved initial results in B-side services, it has also begun to actively deploy C-side applications.
03
The AI mapping camp of the Meitu App
Meitu, which strives to grasp the wind of AIGC, naturally attaches great importance to the application track such as AI drawing, which can be closely integrated with the image field that it is already good at. After a period of precipitation and change, the Meitu App has now formed a special AI painting section, which is currently subdivided into five sections: "Tusheng Tu", "Wensheng Tu", "Doodle Shengtu", "Avatar Production" and "Line Drawing Coloring", and "Wensheng Tu" as the latest online function of Meitu's "AI painting", officially introduced its ability to convert the natural language text entered by the user into an image, as long as the keywords of the imaginary picture are entered with commas, the algorithm can generate images according to the text description.
In the Meitu "Wensheng Diagram" function, up to 300 words can be entered for description, and in order to express clearly, the author entered "Help me draw a dish picture of a beautiful frog fish head" in the content box, however, waiting for the results of the picture after a few seconds made the author somewhat unappetizing.
Next, the author used "help me draw a picture of the dish of 'husband and wife lung slices'" as the text description, this time the result is obviously much better, you can see that it is a bowl of dishes, but the problem is that this is obviously not the famous Sichuan dish "husband and wife lung slices".
Obviously, Meitu's "Wenshengtu" function is difficult to pass in the generation of Chinese dishes, and next, the author tries "In the ancient battlefield, the general wore armor to resist the invasion of foreign enemies, and the soldiers sacrificed their lives to protect the general from the charge. And "a purple-haired man half-kneeling on the ground." It was an extremely beautiful man, with long eyebrows, a body like a jade tree, the pure white shirt on the upper body was slightly wet, and a thin sweat oozed out through the shirt, highlighting the original excellent body even more delicately and clearly. The long purple hair is draped behind the snow-white neck, which can be described as delicate. A man can look like this, which is rare in the world. " for text description, test again.
From the above results, the Meitu App's "Wen Sheng Tu" function is more like solving the existence of existence, and its imaging effect is somewhat difficult to say, and with some apprehension, the author clicked on the "Tu Sheng Tu" function. After the user uploads an image according to the prompts, the system will automatically generate three styles of pictures: "comic protagonist", "idol" and "summer bouquet".
Judging from the picture, in addition to the avatar of the character being replaced with a two-dimensional style, the clothing, environment and even the dishes on the table have been changed, and the overall painting style does not violate the sense of harmony. In addition to the three default styles, "Tushengtu" also provides CG live-action, Korean comics, blood basket comics, fugitive princesses, ink Yun and other different styles of picture generation templates.
After the user clicks on an effect, it will default to the secondary generation of the picture just uploaded, here can be liked that all kinds of effects are free to try, users can generate pictures according to personal needs, but it should be noted that some effects will not only modify the character and environment accordingly, but also modify the gender of the character.
From the effect point of view, the picture of "Tusheng Picture" is somewhat distorted, but the picture is still a little similar in the overall design, which can fully meet the needs of users for entertainment and sending friends. For users who need the authenticity of the picture, you can try the "avatar creation" function.
In Meitu's ever-changing AI avatar creation function, users are required to upload 3~10 unobstructed selfie photos as the data basis for avatar creation, which also ensures that the AI avatar design is more realistic.
In addition to the picture materials, Meitu's "avatar production" will also let users choose gender and age during the AI generation process, but what is more embarrassing is that the production is currently a paid project, 6.6 yuan can generate 50 avatars, although not expensive, but for first-time users of this function, there will be some hesitation. It took the author nearly 10 minutes to generate the projection, but it was quite satisfactory from the perspective of the generation effect.
In general, from the three popular functions of Meitu AI drawing experienced by the author, the effect of "Wensheng Tu" is somewhat different from expectations, "Tushengtu" is more of an entertainment application, and "Avatar Production" not only takes the longest time, but is a paid project, but it is still a bit surprising from the generation results.
Editor|Zhang Yi
Review|Wu Xin