Recently, a proposed IPO company that responded to the third round of inquiries from the exchange due to multiple questions has attracted the attention of the market. One of the reasons is that the actual controller of this company is Yuan Yue, a well-known entrepreneur who often publishes books and appears in various media, this company is Beijing Zero Point Data Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zero Point Number").
Zero Point Count was established in 1993, starting with research and consulting, after creating the well-known brand "Zero Point Survey", it was changed to a joint-stock company in 2016 and landed on the New Third Board, and is now a cutting-edge data analysis and decision support service agency in China. The founder is the well-known entrepreneur Yuan Yue, who currently holds 81.43% of the equity of Zero Point, and is the actual controller and chairman of the company.
According to "Thinking Finance", Zero Point had planned to list on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, but in view of business development, capital planning and other factors, in July last year, the company changed its route to apply for the ChiNext IPO, and recently replied to the third round of inquiries on the ChiNext IPO, in which the same industry competition, equity holding and other issues have attracted attention.
There are more than 100 companies under the name of the actual controller
According to the prospectus, Zero Point Has planned to raise nearly 300 million yuan, mainly for the "Zero Point Cloud Evaluation" project, the "Knowledge Wisdom Spectrum" project, and the "Cloud Brain with Decision Making" project. However, there are voices in the market that the zero point number does not seem to be "short of money".
As an asset-light operation company, Zero Points mainly relies on its own funds for business expansion, daily operation and technology research and development investment, and the current monetary funds on the book are 6.66 million yuan, and there are no short-term liabilities or borrowings, and the asset-liability ratio has fluctuated at a low level of about 30% on average in recent years.
On the other hand, this may not be unrelated to yuan yue, the actual controller and chairman of the company. Yuan Yue was born in 1965, according to Baidu Encyclopedia, he is a doctor of sociology from Peking University, an MPA of Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, and a master of law from Southwestern University of Economics and Law; in December 1992, Yuan Yue resigned and went to the sea to found the Beijing Investigation and serve as general manager.
In February 2012, he served as chairman of Beijing Investigations and concurrently served as the executive director and general manager of its subsidiary Zero Point Consulting, and since March 2016, he has served as the chairman of Zero Point. In recent years, he has been labeled as one of the 92 school entrepreneurs, a pioneer in China's professional research and consulting market, and a well-known media person. The industry even ridiculed that his fame was greater than the zero point number itself.
The most eye-catching thing is that he himself founded an entrepreneurial management service organization Pegasus Brigade (according to the official website of Pegasus Brigade, its operating entity is Shanghai Oriental Pegasus Enterprise Service Co., Ltd., hereinafter referred to as "Pegasus Enterprise Service"). Although Yuan Yue is no longer the actual controller of Pegasus Enterprise Services, due to the company's complex structure and many affiliated companies, it has still been closely focused on by the NDRC. According to the enterprise investigation, Yuan Yue still directly and indirectly holds 35% of the equity and voting rights of Pegasus Enterprise Services.
Source: Reply to the company's inquiry letter
According to public media reports, Yuan Yue once gave a platform to a P2P company called Cheneng Loan at a public event. According to industrial and commercial information, this company was also a project invested by Pegasus Brigade, and the public judgment of the Ningbo court shows that because of illegal storage, the company's legal person has been sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment, and there are still more than 60 million yuan of money that has not been paid off. Later, after the problem of Cheneng Loan, although Pegasus Brigade asked Cheneng Loan to repurchase the equity and paid part of the money, the above-mentioned court judgment showed that the court froze the relevant accounts of Pegasus Brigade.
In addition, in addition to Pegasus Brigade, Yuan Yue also has many affiliated companies. According to Tianyan, Yuan Yue has worked in a total of 60 companies and is the actual controller of 117 companies. Backed by such a strong shareholder, how can there be no money in zero points? In fact, what the NDRC and investors are more worried about may be where the money is spent and whether it is spent correctly.
Performance is suspected of encountering a "ceiling"
Judging from the performance of zero points, its core business is public affairs data and business data analysis and decision support services. The former mainly serves institutions or organizations from the central to the grass-roots level, while the latter mainly serves well-known enterprises in various industries such as consumption, real estate, and finance, such as Baidu, Meituan, and China Resources. However, with the continuous expansion of the business scale, its performance growth has slowed down.
From 2017 to 2019, the company's revenue was 316 million yuan, 349 million yuan and 381 million yuan, an increase of 10.44% and 9.17% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to the mother was 33.2639 million yuan, 35.7614 million yuan and 37.3493 million yuan, respectively, with a year-on-year growth rate of 7.5% and 4.44%. In the first half of last year, the company's revenue was less than half of 2019, and its net profit also lost 5.3405 million yuan.
In addition, 9 of the company's 13 holding subsidiaries have lost net profits, and 3 subsidiaries have been written off. In the industry's view, most of the company's subsidiaries have not been established for a short time, but they have fallen into the vortex of weak performance growth, which undoubtedly brings a certain burden to the overall growth of the company.
In fact, with the rapid development of the research and consulting industry, the increasing market demand, the industry competition is also intensifying, the price of products and services continues to decline, and the decline in gross profit margin is plaguing the entire industry. In the profit forecast risk warning, Zero Point Count expects the company's revenue to be 367 million yuan in 2020, down 3.61% year-on-year.
The gross margin of Zero Points has been lower than the peer average. From 2017 to the first half of 2020, the company's comprehensive gross profit margin was 30.18%, 31.38%, 33.11% and 30.03%, respectively. However, the company explained that this is due to the difference in the cost accounting caliber, such as the comprehensive consideration of operating costs, sales expenses in the salary expenditure of employees and other factors, which is not much different from comparable companies.
Source: Prospectus