(Report produced by: GF Securities)
1. Leading enterprise in domestic digital earth, GEOVIS products drive development
The company focuses on the development, service and sales of GEOVIS digital earth series software technology. Founded in 2006, the company is a state-controlled high-tech enterprise invested by the Aerospace Information Innovation Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2016, Xi'an Zhongke Star Map Spatial Data Technology Co., Ltd., a holding subsidiary of the company, was established, mainly developing two product lines of GEOVIS digital earth space big data products and intelligent processing platform. In 2017, the company released the fifth generation of digital earth product "GEOVIS 5 Digital Earth", which was listed as a key project in the field of new information technology in 2018. In 2018, through asset restructuring, the company acquired the asset group of the gas and sea business department under Zhongke Jiudu, expanding the market layout of GEOVIS Digital Earth in the field of meteorology and ocean. In the same year, the company completed the shareholding reform, and in 2020, the company was listed on the science and technology innovation board. In 2022, with the full implementation of the company's group strategy, all businesses have achieved rapid growth, meteorological ecology and enterprise energy continue to be deeply cultivated, and the initial results of enterprise customers have been achieved, Star Map Tianxin and Star Map Measurement and Control have become horse racing companies, and Star Map Measurement and Control was listed on the New Third Board in February 23; GEOVIS Online Digital Earth Construction was launched, promoting online business transformation and ecological construction.
As one of the pioneers and leaders in the research and development and industrialization of digital earth products in China, the company's main technical level is in the forefront of the industry after years of iteration. The company has formed digital earth-related products and core technologies with independent intellectual property rights, covering the industrial chain links such as the acquisition, processing, bearing, visualization and application of aerospace big data. The company's main four types of business include: software sales and data services, technology development and services, all-in-one product sales, system integration. The company has successively launched GEOVIS digital earth basic software series products, forming a GEOVIS digital earth application software series products with six major business sectors as the core of special fields, intelligent government, meteorological ecology, aerospace measurement and operation control, enterprise energy, and online business.
The company's main product, GEOVIS Digital Earth, has been developed and updated over the years and has solid core competitiveness. GEOVIS digital earth basic software platform is the company's core product formed in the process of industrialization application and promotion by relying on the national high-resolution earth observation system "national high-resolution earth observation system" national high-resolution resource sharing service platform, through the deep integration of new generation information technology, geographic information technology and aerospace industry such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. After nearly ten years of incubation and development, the company has successively launched GEOVIS 1-GEOVIS 4 generations of digital earth. In 2017, the company successfully released the GEOVIS 5 aerospace big data bearer and intelligent service platform, GEOVIS 5 digital earth completely covers the common needs of aerospace big data connection, storage, processing, organization, distribution, sharing, analysis, visualization, etc., and achieves the product development goal of "automation, intelligence, integration, lightweight, localization and ecology". In 2018, the company officially released the "GEOVIS+" strategy, on the GEOVIS digital earth basic software platform, for special fields, government and enterprise applications, to create industry-exclusive GEOVIS digital earth application software. The company's newly developed new generation of GEOVIS 6 digital earth adopts the digital earth theory framework of "Cartesian coordinates + layer superposition", and combines the Beidou network segmentation theory to expand the application scenarios and boundaries of the digital earth.
The GEOVIS Online service platform being developed by the company consists of five parts: digital earth supercomputer, intelligent data factory, spatiotemporal big data service, spatiotemporal analysis cloud platform service and online digital earth service, which is expected to expand the layout of GEOVIS in the public application field and the landing of online scenes.
The company is backed by the strong scientific and technological strength of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As of April 13, 2023, Jiudu, Star Atlas Qunying and Shuguang held 28.17%, 18.01% and 15.65% of the shares of the company respectively, and the Aerospace Information Innovation Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as "Aerospace Institute") is the actual controller of the company, and the company continuously improves its innovation capabilities with the help of the aerospace information talent advantages of the Aerospace Institute, the high-end computing advantages and hardware support of the Aerospace Institute. The company has formed a group development with six major sectors as the core, including special fields, intelligent government, meteorological ecology, aerospace measurement and operation control, enterprise energy, and online business, and completed the establishment of four sub-groups of star map space, star map defense, star map wisdom, star map earth and two direct subsidiaries such as star map measurement and control, star map and wei tianxin. Among them, Star Map Earth mainly undertakes GEOVIS Online online digital earth construction project, Star Map Space mainly undertakes GEOVIS Digital Earth Basic Software Platform product research and development and other activities, and the subsidiary Star Map Measurement and Control was listed on the New Third Board on February 28, 2023, which is the bearing platform of "Aerospace Measurement and Operation Control", one of the six major business sectors of Star Map of China Science and Technology. According to the company's 2022 annual report, the number of technical personnel of the company reached 1012, accounting for 60.82% of the total employees.
The company's performance has achieved rapid growth and profitability is relatively stable. At present, with the rapid growth of modern information technology, the scale of the geological information industry continues to expand, the digital earth market tends to mature, and the downstream market application is gradually promoted, the company, as the earliest enterprise engaged in the research and development and industrialization of digital earth products in the mainland industry, has long focused on the development of digital earth products, and its business performance and profit level are generally good. The company's main business income increased from 364 million yuan in 2018 to 1.577 billion yuan in 2022, with an average annual compound growth rate of 44%, mainly benefiting from the development of market coverage and the expansion of the group's business scale, and constantly improving the layout of products and industrial chains. The company's gross profit and net profit will have an average annual compound growth rate of 40% and 36% from 2018 to 2022, respectively, and the gross profit and net profit will reach 770 million yuan and 303 million yuan respectively in 2022, and the gross profit margin has remained at about 50% and the net profit margin has remained at about 20% in recent years.
During the period, the expense ratio improved and the proportion of R&D investment increased. From 2018 to 2022, the company's management expense ratio decreased from 11.56% to 8.27%; In 2019, due to increased marketing, the sales expense ratio increased to 11.99%, and then gradually decreased to 8.76% in 2022; The finance expense ratio remained stable at a low level; The R&D expense ratio gradually increased from 11.99% in 2018 to 14.15% in 2022. R&D expenditure increased from 44 million yuan in 2018 to 342 million yuan in 2022, with an average annual compound growth rate of 67%, and the company pays attention to the support of R&D investment for product and technology iteration. In terms of product technology, relying on digital earth products and applications in various fields, the company has built three types of digital earth service capabilities of "cloud, edge and device" collaboration; In terms of industry applications, the company continues to promote the deep integration of digital earth and industry applications, and promotes the full-coverage application of GEOVIS digital earth products for government, enterprises, special fields, commercial and other users.
GEOVIS Digital Earth Technology Development and Services contributed primarily to profitability. The company's GEOVIS technology development and service is based on digital earth related products and core technologies, according to the customized needs of specific users, through technology development and service forms, to provide users with customized application system development of a business, is also the company's main source of income. According to the company's 2022 annual report, in recent years, the overall revenue trend of the sector business has been upward, mainly due to the expansion of the company's business scale and the continuous growth of product orders, and the business revenue of this sector will reach 960 million yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 22.61%, and the average compound growth rate from 2018 to 2022 will reach 47%. In terms of gross profit margin, GEOVIS technology development and service contribution mainly gross profit, benefiting from downstream market development, the overall profit performance in the past five years has been upward, GEOVIS technology development and service gross profit margin has remained above 50%, GEOVIS technology development and service gross profit margin has also remained above 60%, there has been a recovery trend in the past two years, which has a good supporting effect on the company's overall gross profit margin.
In terms of fields, the company's main income and profit come from special fields. According to the company's 2022 annual report, special fields, smart government, meteorological ecology, aerospace measurement and operation control, enterprise energy and other sectors are the cornerstones of the company's business, and their business performance is stable and fast-growing. The revenue of the special field industry increased from 214 million yuan in 2018 to 723 million yuan in 2022, an increase of 31.29% over the same period in 2021; The aerospace measurement and operation control industry increased by 46.69% over the same period of the previous year, and the smart government industry increased by 51.38% over the same period of the previous year; The meteorological ecological industry increased by 107.65% over the same period of the previous year. The meteorological ecology and enterprise energy increased significantly, mainly due to the deep cultivation of the subdivision track and the initial results of enterprise users.
Second, the digital earth: the carrier of space and space information system, mining the value of data
(1) Digital earth: an important carrier for the realization and application of aerospace data information
Digital Earth is an information system for decribing, processing and analysing the Earth's environment and space activities. According to the "Digital Twin Earth Integrating Beidou and Gaofen" (Liu Guangming et al., 2022, GPS), using a variety of Earth observation methods such as remote sensing satellite and aerial photography, the digital earth can quickly and efficiently obtain high-precision earth observation data, reconstruct the three-dimensional virtual earth frame model based on a unified spatiotemporal reference, and carry and integrate the spatial information of various industries according to the needs of the industry to solve specific application problems; A huge amount of data on the earth obtained through satellites, airplanes, balloons, ground surveying and mapping, geochemistry, geophysics, and other observation means is combined with application models by computers to reproduce the real earth in the computer network system, forming a giant system, which is the "digital earth." The data and information it provides will enable mankind to quantitatively study the earth, understand it in depth, and scientifically analyze the earth.
The digital earth bears aerospace data and connects to aerospace information applications, which has the characteristics of high technical complexity, large infrastructure investment, wide operational coverage, and close coordination with the national technology strategy. According to the company's 2022 annual report, the main characteristics of the digital earth are as follows: First, the technical complexity is high, the digital earth needs to integrate data processing and multi-circle data, including geographical, meteorological, ecological, economic, social and other fields, with multi-dimensional, multi-scale, multi-source characteristics, a single data processing means can not meet the accuracy and timeliness requirements, need to integrate parallel computing, deep learning, machine learning and other new generation information technology to achieve large-scale, multi-source data efficient processing and analysis, mining earth information characteristics and laws , systematically identify and analyze the earth's natural environment, social economy, human activities and other aspects. Second, the investment in infrastructure is large, the digital earth has the characteristics of diverse computing tasks, complicated computing processes, and huge amount of deep learning, and it is difficult for small-scale computing facilities to efficiently cope with the needs of numerical simulation and deep learning of the earth, which brings difficulties to dynamic monitoring, intelligent analysis, and quantitative simulation. Third, the operation coverage is wide, and the existing digital earth service capabilities have become increasingly mature after years of development, but the means and methods to enjoy the convenience of the digital earth are still in the development stage, and it is necessary to form a public innovation system and service operation system for earth applications based on the online service platform, continuously expand the service coverage, and provide services to industries, enterprises and individual users. Fourth, it is closely coordinated with the national technology strategy, and the upstream and downstream industries that make up the digital earth are closely coordinated with the national technology strategy, such as earth observation and navigation, space information infrastructure construction, and data element circulation infrastructure, etc., all of which are areas that the state policy focuses on and invests in, and the technological innovation and market operation of the digital earth need to be closely coordinated with the national strategy, and national resources should serve national security, economy, and social construction.
(2) Digital earth industry chain: an important path for aerospace information data to achieve value-added
Through the processing and flow of aerospace information raw data in the industrial chain, the value-added of layers is achieved, and the popularization of digital earth will help give birth to new application models and value-added space of aerospace big data. Taking the value-added process of commercial Earth observation data as an example, according to the Earth Observation Data & Services Market (Euroconsult, 2022), satellite operators can sell commercial data or telemetry directly, or they can provide value-added services (VAS); Professional VAS suppliers can obtain VAS revenue through the processing of procurement data. Value-added services are divided into different levels according to the specific degree of data processing and the level of output, so as to clarify and quantify the value generated by value-added services. The upstream of the digital earth industry chain is mainly the acquisition of aerospace data: (1) aviation and aerospace remote sensing: remote sensing satellite and its payload manufacturing industry, UAV and its remote sensing payload manufacturing industry; (2) Satellite navigation: navigation and positioning satellite manufacturing industry, as well as location data service industry based on navigation satellite applications. From upstream to downstream, the main data value-added processes include: data acquisition (acquisition→ decoding → original images), data processing (correction→ interpretation→ advanced products), data carrying (building earth models), data visualization, data application. The downstream application industries of the digital earth include: end users mainly in special fields, meteorology, ocean, ecological environment, forestry, agriculture, transportation, emergency, aerospace and many other industries, as well as value-added developers who provide customized system services for end users.
With the development of a new generation of information technology, the capabilities of digital earth data value-added suppliers have been improved and application scenarios have expanded. Digital earth is closely related to remote sensing technology, navigation and positioning technology, geographic information system technology, and Internet technology. After more than 20 years of technological development and product upgrading, the digital earth has begun to be applied in many industries such as national security, government management, enterprise management, and mass consumption. With the rapid development of the new generation of information technology and geographic information technology, the technical fields involved in the digital earth have expanded to the new generation of information technology such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, and the application scenarios are becoming increasingly rich. According to the prospectus of Zhongke Star Map, at least 80% of all the data that can be obtained in the world is related to spatial location, and the digital earth can easily integrate the data of different industries and different users for analysis and mining through spatio-temporal association. Therefore, the digital earth and related industries have a large degree of correlation and strong adhesion, and can become an important emerging software platform for the major needs of the country such as "digital economy", "smart city", and "precise poverty alleviation".
Third, the supply side: data element nuggage, satellite layout acceleration, AI empowerment
(1) Policies to exert efforts in the data element market, and improve the value-added capacity of commercialization of the aerospace big data industry
The vigorous development of the digital economy also provides a broad application space and downstream market for the digital earth industry. The digital economy takes digital knowledge and information as the key production factors, digital technology as the core driving force, and modern information network as an important carrier, and continuously improves the level of digitalization, networking, and intelligence of the economy and society through the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, and accelerates the reconstruction of the new economic form of economic development and governance mode. According to the company's 2021 prospectus and the Outlook of China's Industrial Economic Development (CAICT, 2022), the scale of the mainland digital economy market will increase from 22.6 trillion yuan to 45.5 trillion yuan from 2016 to 2021, with an average annual compound growth rate of 19%, and the proportion of GDP will increase from 30.3% to 39.8%. According to the company's 2022 annual report, relevant statistics show that the scale of the mainland's digital economy will exceed 50 trillion yuan in 2022, accounting for more than 40% of GDP, continuing to maintain a high growth rate of 10%. According to the company's 2021 annual report, the State Council issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Digital Economy" in 2022, pointing out that in the future, the scale of mainland software and information technology service business will increase from about 8.14 trillion yuan in 2020 to about 14 trillion yuan in 2025, and the added value of the core industries of the digital economy will account for 10% of GDP.
In the era of digital economy, the importance of data has increased, ranking it as the fifth major production factor along with land, capital, technology and labor. According to the "Special Topic on Data Element Market: Policy Top-level Force + Industrial Supply and Demand Resonance, Data Element Market Development Promotion" released by GF Securities Media Group on April 22, 2023, data has become an indispensable and important element in the development of the digital economy, playing an increasingly important role in all aspects of social and economic development. With the increasing importance of data, data has been officially listed as one of the factors of production at the national level: in October 2019, the Fourth Plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China listed data alongside land, labor, capital, and technology as an important factor of production for the first time. In April 2020, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the "Opinions on Building a More Perfect Market-based Allocation System and Mechanism for Factors", which officially listed data as a production factor separately and became one of the basic resources required for social and economic production activities. Data elements are expected to be combined with cutting-edge digital technologies such as AI to further empower more industries and accelerate the development of the digital economy.
With the gradual improvement of the basic data system in the mainland, industries with satellite applications, geographic information and other data as important production factors are expected to develop more standardized, and promote the commercialization of data elements. According to the Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Building a Data Infrastructure System to Better Play the Role of Data Elements (2022.12.19), data, as a new production factor, is the foundation of digitalization, networking and intelligence, and has been rapidly integrated into production, distribution, circulation, consumption and social service management. According to the "Data Element Market Topic: Policy Top-level Force + Industrial Supply and Demand Resonance, Data Element Market Development Promotion" released by GF Securities Media Group on April 22, 2023, we believe that the attitude of policy level to the development of data element industry can be divided into three stages: (1) The first stage (2014-2019): The national "big data" strategy is officially proposed, data has become the country's basic strategic resource, and the construction of big data infrastructure has been steadily advanced; (2) The second stage (2020-2021): data resources have been officially established as the fifth major factor of production, with a solid strategic position, and gradually began to explore data rights confirmation, data transactions and other links; (3) The third stage (2022-present): The introduction of policies related to data elements is frequent, the property rights system, circulation and trading system, and revenue distribution system of data elements are promoted and improved, the standardized development of the data element market is accelerated, and the potential of data production and data application is further released. It is expected to stimulate the management vitality of suppliers with digital capabilities in satellite applications and improve the guarantee ability of commercialization of data elements.
All aspects of the data element market are developing in a coordinated manner, and the potential space is expected to accelerate the release. According to the data of the National Center for Industry and Information Security, the market size of mainland data elements reached 54.5 billion yuan in 2020, a year-on-year increase of 45.33%; In 2021, it will increase by 49.54% year-on-year to 81.5 billion yuan, and it is expected that the market size of data elements will grow to 174.9 billion yuan in 2025, with a CAGR of 25% from 2022 to 2025, and the overall growth will maintain rapid growth. In terms of subdivision, in 2021, all links of the industrial chain will grow healthily, among which, the market size of data collection, data storage and data processing in the data production link will reach 45, 180 and 16 billion yuan respectively, and the market size of data trading, data analysis and data service in the data circulation and analysis link will reach 120, 175 and 8.5 billion yuan respectively.
The use of data is an important part of the true value of data elements. According to the "Special Topic on Data Element Market: Policy Top-level Force + Industrial Supply and Demand Resonance, Data Element Market Development Promotion" released by GF Securities Media Group on April 22, 2023, the use of data and data production and circulation complement and promote each other: on the one hand, the production and circulation of data paves the way for the data demander to use data in the next step and deeper; On the other hand, the use of data on the data demand side will form new data with richer structure and greater information density, providing original data materials for data production and circulation, and at the same time generating new problems in the process of data use, which in turn will give rise to new data production and circulation needs. In addition, the use of data can also provide feedback for production and circulation, helping to optimize and improve the production and circulation links. Therefore, data use is not only the final application link of data production and circulation, but also the collaborative symbiotic link of production and circulation effect evaluation, demand feedback and data reproduction. The mainland aerospace information industry is expected to accelerate its transformation with the release of data element economic vitality. According to the company's 2022 annual report, driven by the two-way drive of policy and market, the digitalization process of the mainland aerospace information industry has accelerated, focusing on data value generation and value realization, data-related industries have accelerated the aggregation, the professional division of labor has become more refined, and professional collaboration has become closer. As a result, the ubiquitous application of aerospace information will become more and more popular, and the ubiquitous demand for the public and a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises will form a new incremental space, and the timeliness, personalization, and customized application scenarios of aerospace information services will be significantly expanded.
(2) The satellite layout is accelerating, and the "Beidou + High Score" integration expands new business formats
The number of global satellite launches has increased, the application layout has been perfect, and satellite data sources have been continuously enriched. According to the prospectus of Zhongke Star Map, the upstream industries of the digital earth mainly include navigation and remote sensing satellite manufacturing, and the large number of satellite launches and the rich satellite data generated by them have provided a strong impetus for the vigorous development of the digital economy. According to the statistics of the American Satellite Industry Association (SIA) quoted in the company's 2022 annual report, the revenue scale of the global aerospace industry reached US$386.4 billion in 2021, of which the satellite industry accounted for more than 70%; Judging from the data, China's total domestic investment accounts for 10% of the global share. With the change of satellite development mode and launch mode, the entry cost of satellites is greatly reduced, which brings benefits to the supply side. According to the "Blue Book of China's Space Science and Technology Activities (2022)" (Space Outlook Think Tank, 2022), a total of 2,472 satellites were launched worldwide in 2022, of which 2,049 were launched by the United States and 182 were launched by the mainland, ranking second. In terms of remote sensing satellites, the mainland launched a total of 105 remote sensing satellites in 2022, a new high in recent years. At the same time, with the advancement of technology, the resolution of satellites has been continuously improved, and more and more images have reached the submeter level. According to the 14th Five-Year Plan of various departments, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Meteorological Bureau, and other departments have plans to launch satellites in the future. The richness of the satellite ecology determines the speed of development of the digital earth industry, and as more and more satellites are put into use, the digital earth will also usher in vitality and vitality on the supply side.
"Beidou" + "High Score" enriches the dimension of spatiotemporal data, integrates navigation and remote sensing technology, and gives birth to new business formats. According to "The Digital Twin Earth of Beidou and Gaofen Fusion" (Liu Guangming et al., 2022, Global Positioning System), with the official launch of Beidou's global service and the wide application of Gaofen series of satellite observation results, Beidou and Gaofen jointly build the continent's space-time high-frontier. "Beidou + High Score" is the continent's independent and controllable spatiotemporal infrastructure with the most development potential, and it is also the main technical means for the digital twin earth to efficiently collect massive spatiotemporal big data. The basic platform of the digital twin earth is a digital earth with "Beidou as the body" and "high score elephant". Beidou transmits the space-time reference for the digital earth, and the high score provides a holographic mirror image of the digital earth, realizing the accurate mapping between the virtual and real earth. According to the company's 2022 annual report, the Beidou-3 global satellite navigation system has provided services to global users after global networking in 2020, and the global users of Beidou's high-precision service have exceeded 1 billion in 2021, and large-scale applications in the fields of smart cities, autonomous driving, and three-dimensional transportation construction will promote new growth points in the production industry; The Gaofen system will make overall plans to build a high-resolution earth observation system based on satellites, stratospheric airships, and aircraft, improve ground resources, and combine with other observation means to form an all-weather, all-day, and global coverage of earth observation capabilities. According to "Beidou + High Score": "Digital Earth" to Build a New Infrastructure in Time and Space (Invention and Innovation (Big Technology), 2021), "Beidou as the body" is to rely on the Beidou system to obtain real-time dynamic and high-precision traces; "High-resolution image" means providing high-temporal and spatial resolution with the help of high-resolution satellites. The combination of the two can overcome many topics that were difficult to overcome in the past by a single means, for example, building a more refined smart city spatial-temporal big data management and control platform, detailing buildings, components, facilities, etc. to the centimeter level, including the three-dimensional display of natural landforms and underground pipe networks, more precise emergency prevention and control of meteorological and geological disasters, and even accurate emission assessment that can be applied to carbon neutrality. According to the 2022 annual report, the GEOVIS 6 digital globe developed by the company is based on the independent Beidou split grid theory, integrates the space infrastructure capabilities of "Beidou + high score", and greatly expands the application scenarios and boundaries of the digital earth.
(3) The Aerospace Institute builds a large model of the AI industry to empower the aerospace information industry
AI promotes the demand for high-quality data, lowers the threshold for data use, and improves the effectiveness of data use. In the field of remote sensing, artificial intelligence technology represented by deep learning has been applied to a variety of remote sensing image interpretation tasks; the remote sensing data is wide and the scene content is complex; a standard scene image can reach billions of pixels, covering tens of thousands of square kilometers, which is quite different from the natural scene data. Most existing deep neural network models are initialized using the pre-trained weights of natural scene images, and the performance and universality of remote sensing data interpretation tasks need to be further improved.
1.AI Empower interpretation capabilities and improve the production efficiency and information transformation capabilities of aerospace big data
Along with the goal orientation of the construction of a new basic surveying and mapping system, traditional photogrammetry technology and artificial intelligence as the core of new computer vision technology and computer graphics technology are closely integrating and developing. According to the 2022 annual report of Zhongke Star Map, the neural radiation field rendering (NeRF) technology that has emerged in recent years shows the characteristics of faster reconstruction efficiency and finer coloring effect than traditional photogrammetry, and more integrated three-dimensional reconstruction technology will further promote the iterative development of the digital earth from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, from element to entity, from attribute to semantics. According to "Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded AntiAliased Neural Radiance Fields" (Jonathan T. Barron, 2022, Google, Harvard University), Google Research and Harvard University jointly released the "Mip-NeRF 360" model in March 2022, in which the camera rotates 360 degrees around a point in the target scene. This reduces mean squared error by 57% compared to Mip-NeRF and enables the generation of realistic composite views and detailed depth maps for highly complex, unbounded real-world scenes. Unlike most upfront methods, the Mip-NeRF 360 gives a way to interpret light and reduces otherwise lengthy training time by establishing a region of interest boundary, enabling "unrestricted" scenarios such as extended backgrounds and skies.
From a domestic point of view, the Aerospace Academy released the first generative pre-training large model for cross-modal remote sensing data, which promoted the improvement of remote sensing data interpretation capabilities. In August 2022, the Institute of Aerospace Information Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as the "Aerospace Institute") led the development of the first generative pre-training large model "RingMo" for cross-modal remote sensing data, aiming to build a general multi-modal multi-task model and provide a set of general, convenient and high-performance solutions for multi-industry applications in the field of remote sensing. The team deeply combines the imaging mechanism and target characteristics of cross-modal remote sensing data such as optics and SAR, carries out technological innovation in the direction of model design, model training, inference optimization, etc., and verifies in typical downstream tasks such as scene classification, detection and positioning, fine-grained identification, feature extraction and change detection. The model has reached the leading level of its kind on eight international standard datasets, effectively filling the gap of cross-modal generative pre-training models in the field of remote sensing. At the same time, based on the Ascend AI basic software and hardware platform, especially the MindSpore AI framework, the Aerospace Institute and Huawei will jointly build a flexible and easy-to-use self-supervised pre-training universal suite that can efficiently support parallel training of large models and the development of downstream tasks.
The "Space-Space-Lingyan" large model is expected to promote the development of space-land-sea integrated solutions by improving the interpretation ability of space-space information. At present, the relevant results of this model have been published in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, a top journal in the field of remote sensing. At the same time, the model has been tested in many fields such as national defense and security, real-world three-dimensional, and the measured results in target detection and recognition, and classification of feature elements have been significantly improved compared with the general visual model. In the future, it is planned to further promote to land resources, housing construction, transportation, water conservancy and environmental protection and other industries, providing a set of solutions for the integrated application of space, air, and ground. According to the official website of the Aerospace Institute, the "Aerospace Spiritual Eyes" model has the following main features:
(1) R&D-driven by remote sensing characteristics: Different from the existing remote sensing pre-training methods, which usually carry out supervised or contrastive learning paradigms, the model relies on the mask self-coding structure, which is a remote sensing generative self-supervised pre-training model with more general representation capabilities for complex scenes. For example, in view of the problems of different imaging mechanisms and target characteristics of remote sensing data from different platforms, large observation area of remote sensing images but relatively small targets, large differences in target size and uneven distribution, the model adopts a self-supervised learning method guided by target characteristics, and makes the model automatically extract the common features of remote sensing features by introducing geometry, electromagnetism, target structure and other multi-feature constraints, and has strong generalization ability for new tasks. The model adopts the recently popular Transformer backbone networks such as ViT and Swin Transformer, which can effectively model the dependence of local and global features of remote sensing data.
(2) Have cross-modal remote sensing datasets: The existing remote sensing sample library relies on manual mapping by professionals in terms of labeling, and the labor and time costs are extremely high, which is difficult to meet the large-scale, high-rich, and easily expanded remote sensing data requirements required for large model training. In order to improve the feature expression ability of the remote sensing pre-training model, the training dataset of the model contains more than 2 million remote sensing images with a resolution of 0.1m to 30m, which are respectively derived from platforms such as the China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station, the Aerial Remote Sensing Aircraft, and the Gaofen series satellite, Jilin satellite, and QuickBird satellite. At the same time, the dataset contains more than 100 million target instances with arbitrary angle distribution, covering more than 150 typical cities, towns, and commonly used airports and ports around the world. The sample data used has the professional characteristics of remote sensing, and the entire sample set does not need to be labeled, which can greatly save the cost of training data labeling.
(3) Ability to generalize application tasks: Due to the different difficulties of different application tasks, the data and goals used are also different, the existing interpretation methods need to design a dedicated network structure for different downstream tasks, and use a large number of labeled data for fine-tuning, and the remote sensing models obtained are often not versatile enough, do not have strong task generalization capabilities, and are only suitable for specific application tasks. The model has the ability to understand and restore remote sensing data, and can realize the common semantic spatial representation of cross-modal remote sensing data. For different downstream tasks, only the prediction head network needs to be modified, which can be flexibly and quickly migrated to downstream tasks in different fields, and simple fine-tuning can adapt to multi-target fine-grained classification, small target detection and recognition, complex feature extraction and other tasks.
(4) Achieve localization adaptation: Aerospace Institute and Huawei have in-depth cooperation, provided technical support by Beijing Ascend AI Ecological Innovation Center, relying on the computing power support of the Chengdu Intelligent Computing Center, a model project of "East Data and West Computing", and based on the Ascend Base and MindSporeAI framework, the existing models and training methods are domestically adapted, and the performance of self-supervised big data training is optimized, and remote sensing is carried out for researchers from all walks of life based on localized software and hardware platforms Pre-training and downstream task development provide strong support to promote business application and implementation.
2.AI Empower content generation and become an important driving force for potential customer mining
The development of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has become one of the important means to realize the "computable" mode of digital earth, providing important impetus for digital earth to reach the needs of C-end users. According to the company's 2022 annual report, artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) is a new type of content creation method after PGC (professionally generated content) and UGC (user-generated content), which can automatically or semi-automatically generate two- and three-dimensional digital content through generative artificial intelligence large model technology, including text, images, audio, video, 3D models and other spatiotemporal ubiquitous formats, which can exponentially increase the content richness of the digital earth. At present, in addition to special and some G-end and B-end large customers have full cognition and application of the digital earth, most C-end and some B/G-end customers still need to further improve their understanding of what services the digital earth can provide and what kind of needs to be met, with the continuous enrichment of products and the improvement of targeted solution capabilities, potential customer groups and market demand are expected to be continuously tapped.
Fourth, the demand side: application scenario expansion, remote sensing data value exploitation
On the demand side, downstream application scenarios continue to expand, driving data suppliers and service providers to tap the value of satellite data. The "Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Goals for 2035" proposes to build a global coverage and efficient operation of communications, navigation, remote sensing space infrastructure systems, accelerate the digital transformation of traditional infrastructure such as transportation, energy, and municipal administration, and lay a solid implementation foundation for the large-scale and commercialization of remote sensing and navigation data. At the application end of the industry, remote sensing data has become a necessary means of perception to meet the diversified needs of economic and social development and the public. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and satellite remote sensing technology, a series of intelligent remote sensing methods have been widely used in resource investigation, environmental detection, disaster detection, smart cities, agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
(1) Special fields: data types are gradually enriched, and digital aerospace information processing is becoming more and more perfect
Zhongke Xingtu products provide conditions for the unified aggregation of different types of data information and spatio-temporal correlation in special applications. According to the company's prospectus, GEOVIS digital earth application software in special fields, guided by the information needs of special fields, builds a common two- and three-dimensional integrated information service basic platform based on a unified technical system and standards and specifications, and realizes common functions such as rapid construction, perception, action planning and task planning of multi-dimensional environment. By providing functional standards and secondary development interfaces that conform to the technical system in special fields, it can support multi-level application expansion and provide support for the construction of systems in special fields. According to the company's 2022 annual report, at the application level of the middle level, the product is oriented to the application of special fields, and the GEOVIS+ special field platform integrates general data, scheduling control, business production services and experimental training business in special fields, so as to realize the unified aggregation, spatiotemporal association, organization and management, fusion analysis, shared distribution, visual expression and other functions of different types of data information in the special application environment; At the level of application systems, business systems such as environment construction, target analysis, training simulation, command and control, and test training in special fields are laid out. Among the research projects, the "Digital Earth in Special Fields" project intends to base on a unified technical system and standard specifications, make full use of artificial intelligence and other new technologies, quickly build global perception of the environment, situation awareness, simulation deduction and other capabilities, and then support the application of auxiliary decision-making, experimental training, logistics support and other special fields, and become the core application platform of information systems in special fields under the conditions of digitalization, networking, service, and intelligence.
(2) Space measurement, operation and control: space construction has accelerated, and the demand for space asset management has increased significantly
Aerospace measurement and control management plays an important role in midstream launch services and satellite operations in the aerospace industry. The upstream of the aerospace industry is spacecraft manufacturing, the midstream includes launch services and satellite operations, and the downstream is various terminal applications; Aerospace measurement and control management involves the launch business and satellite operation of the midstream of the aerospace industry.
In 2021, the global space industry market will invest nearly 100 billion US dollars, the United States will lead the layout of satellites in orbit, and countries will accelerate sky development. According to the Euroconsult report, countries around the world spent a total of $92 billion on the space sector in 2021, according to the Euroconsult report. According to statistics from The Union of Concerned Scientists, as of May 2022, there are 5,465 satellites in orbit worldwide, of which the United States has an absolute advantage in the number and type of satellites. According to the public transfer manual (draft declaration) of star map measurement and control, the United States leads other countries in space strength in terms of the number of satellites in orbit and satellite functions, and is still expanding its space-related layout, the US Space Development Agency plans to invest $11 billion in fiscal year 2021-2025 to deploy large constellations, of which $10.6 billion will be used for the construction of a "satellite layer" for research, design, development and testing of large satellite constellations. Other countries and regions around the world have also accelerated space development, such as the European Union's launch of a new space program in February 2022, which aims to introduce "space traffic rules" as soon as possible, which is another major step taken by the EU in the field of space in recent years.
With the acceleration of space development and the increase in the number of satellites and other aircraft, the efficiency of spacecraft operation has been gradually improved through space measurement and control. According to the public transfer manual (draft declaration) of Star Map Measurement and Control, in the past 20 years, there have been 566 confirmed, unintentional, system-related in-orbit debris events in space, generating millions of potentially harmful debris, resulting in "Kessler syndrome" gradually turning from a theoretical idea to a practical dilemma. At the same time, with the complexity of the design functions of various types of aircraft, the diversification of tasks undertaken, and the rapid development of commercial spaceflight, the demand for cost assessment of aircraft design and operation, improvement of aircraft operation efficiency, and realization of full-life cycle management and control continue to rise, the construction of digital aerospace and intelligent aerospace has become an urgent industry problem to be solved in space exploration. The mainland's requirements for accurate and reliable aerospace measurement and control are also constantly improving. In August 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences submitted the "Proposal on Implementing Major Science and Technology Projects of "Building 'Digital Space' and Building 'Space Brain'" to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, pointing out that the mainland has not yet established a "space soft power" support system that can provide full-process and full-cycle services for "space hard power", and lacks digital and intelligent space security "multipliers".
Based on the GEOVIS Insight application software, Zhongke Star Map leads the layout of standardized services in the field of space measurement, operation and control, which is expected to benefit from the increase in demand for space asset management. According to the company's 2021 fixed addition specification, the GEOVIS Insight application software is a system-level space mission full-cycle analysis software, which provides professional information calculation and analysis for space mission design, testing, launch, operation and application, which can meet the specific needs of space missions such as space launch, sensor analysis, collision warning, orbital operation, precise orbit determination, space operation, space simulation training, and space-ground joint training. Facing the professional market of space measurement, operation and control, we will build four systems: satellite business measurement and operation control services, satellite data global receiving station network services, satellite in-orbit operation health monitoring services, and satellite data exchange, sharing and distribution services, so as to provide specialized and standardized services for commercial satellites.
(3) Real-world 3D, agriculture, emergency management, etc. jointly promote the expansion of the 2G/2B market
1. Real-world 3D: The market size will be about 40 billion yuan in 2025, and artificial intelligence will help improve application capabilities
The real-world 3D platform and application market is expected to reach 40 billion, and the G-end sinking space is large. 3DRealScene is a digital virtual space that reflects and expresses human production, life and ecological space in a real, three-dimensional and temporal manner. According to the Notice of the General Office of the Ministry of Natural Resources on Comprehensively Promoting the Construction of Real Scene 3D in China, the tasks of real scene 3D construction include terrain-level real scene 3D construction, city-level real scene 3D construction, component-level real scene 3D construction, IoT perception data access and integration, and online system and support environment construction; Among them, the component-level real-world three-dimensional construction encourages social forces to actively participate, and is carried out through demand-driven, diversified input, and market-oriented operation. According to the "Report on the Response to the Inquiry Letter for the Review of Application Documents for the Issuance of Convertible Corporate Bonds by Aerospace Hongtu Information Technology Co., Ltd. (Revised Draft) (2022 Half-year Financial Data Update)", the market size forecast of Taber Think Tank quoted that the direct market of Real Vision 3D in the field of natural resources (mainly data collection and processing) will reach 3.966 billion yuan in 2025, with a CAGR of 132.07% from 2019 to 2025. According to the driving effect of 1:10, the platform and application service scale of 3D may reach about 40 billion yuan in 2025.
The company combines new artificial intelligence technology to improve the ability of real-world 3D application. Facing the increasing demand for real-world 3D, the company has researched and broken through the large-scale urban building complex 3D reconstruction technology based on single/double purpose and high-precision 3D reconstruction and high-fidelity scene rendering technology based on neural radial field rendering technology (NeRF), which can realize the rapid construction and efficient rendering of large-scale three-dimensional scenes.
2. Meteorological ecology: Automated, intelligent and seamless forecasting services have become a new trend in the world's meteorological development
The demand for the construction of a meteorological power has driven the improvement of the earth system model, the improvement of climate change science and technology, and the increase in the application of modern information technology and artificial intelligence in meteorology. According to the China Meteorological Science and Technology Development Plan (2021-2035) (Department of Science and Technology, China Meteorological Administration, 2022), "WMO adopted a strategic plan for a more integrated Earth system approach, the United States launched the development of a next-generation global forecasting system, and the European Medium-Term Weather Forecasting Center proposed the strategic goal of developing a seamless Earth system model and creating a digital twin Earth by 2030." Speeding up the development of earth system science and realizing automated, intelligent and seamless forecasting services have become a new trend in the development of meteorology in the world. ”
The digital earth carries out multi-source meteorological data organization and management, comprehensive analysis and visualization, detects and forecasts meteorology through the application of meteorological satellites in remote sensing, comprehensively improves the level of meteorological forecasting, forecasting and early warning, and helps meteorological informatization and modernization. The GEOVIS meteorological digital earth application platform independently developed by Star Map is a meteorological service cloud platform for key layout and independent research and development in the meteorological field. The platform breaks through the high-resolution intelligent meteorological assimilation and forecasting technology, opens up the link of "assimilation-meteorological numerical model-artificial intelligence", and integrates cyclic assimilation, forecasting and revision, which can improve the spatiotemporal resolution while obtaining accurate meteorological initial fields, ensure accurate simulation of small and medium-scale meteorological processes, and help improve the accuracy of weather forecasting. At the same time, GEOVIS+AI can equip short-term weather forecasting with a "smart brain", improve the model forecasting effect by building a short-term forecast model, and continuously optimize the model parameters according to the forecast results.
3. Emergency management: From focusing on post-disaster relief to focusing on pre-disaster prevention, the digital earth helps comprehensive disaster reduction
Digital Earth can comprehensively improve the ability of industry users to detect all elements of emergencies. Digital Earth provides an emergency business full-process management application system to achieve peacetime duty and emergency response; Incident duty duty, information reporting; Assist decision-making, command and dispatch during the event; After-the-fact summary and analysis, process retrospection and other capabilities, so as to achieve accurate early warning and efficient handling of emergencies. Combined with the actual status and development trend of mainland emergency management, Zhongke Xingtu independently developed a set of multi-dimensional emergency management platform based on GEOVIS digital earth. The platform focuses on building "one data center," "one management platform," and "one application system" oriented toward emergency management, forming a "one-map map for emergencies" with the characteristics of "unified command, specialized and permanent preparation, sensitive response, linkage between upper and lower levels, and peacetime and wartime integration."
5. Layout: Deeply cultivate aerospace big data and lay out the second curve of Online
(1) Backed by the Aerospace Academy and the Dawning of China Science and Technology, the aerospace data processing and value-added capabilities are perfect
The actual controller of the People's Aerospace Institute has accumulated profound technology in the fields of electronic and information science and technology, remote sensing and earth observation, and computer optical imaging, and its shareholder, Shuguang, is deeply engaged in the field of high-end computers. The Institute of Aerospace Information Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences is the actual controller of the company, which is integrated and established by the Institute of Electronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Remote Sensing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Optoelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As a national scientific research institution, the Aerospace Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is mainly engaged in basic and forward-looking research in the field of aerospace information. According to the prospectus of the Star Map of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the overall strategic positioning of the Aerospace Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is to face the major strategic needs of the national aerospace information security and the main battlefield of national economic construction, and to carry out original theories and scientific research in major fields such as space electronics/optical core devices, advanced payloads and systems, remote sensing and digital earth science, aerospace information processing and application, aviation/adjacent space observation platforms, and navigation technology, break through core and key technologies, and provide system solutions to meet the major national strategic needs of aerospace information. According to the prospectus of Zhongke Star Map, it is one of the few companies that provide HPC systems, according to the "China High-performance Computer Performance TOP100 Ranking", Shuguang has won the first place in the number of HPC shares in the field of high-end computers for eight consecutive years. At the same time, Sugon has participated in the annual shortlisted bidding of IT equipment since 2016, and passed the review of the company's qualified supplier directory, becoming a qualified supplier of Zhongke Xingtu.
In this context, the company is deeply engaged in the development and industrialization of technology in the field of digital earth, improves aerospace data processing capabilities, and actively participates in major projects. According to the reply of China Science and Technology Star Map and CSC Securities Co., Ltd. on the review inquiry letter, the digital earth mainly includes five links: acquisition, processing, bearing, visualization and application of aerospace big data with remote sensing data as the main body. In addition, relying on the development of the AI large model of the Aerospace Academy and its important position in the major projects in the field of artificial intelligence in the mainland, the ability of Star Map AI to empower the application of aerospace data and information has been rapidly improved. According to the article on May 8, Zhongke Star Map was approved as a major project of scientific and technological innovation 2030 "new generation artificial intelligence" "Remote sensing cross-modal basic model key technology research" project, this time the application of science and technology innovation 2030 - "new generation of artificial intelligence" major project is led by the Aerospace Institute, and the project in which Zhongke Star Map participates in the application will build a set of remote sensing multimodal multi-task remote sensing sample set containing tens of millions of data/100 million-level target examples, and develop a localized remote sensing cross-modal basic model that supports the scale of hundreds of billions of parameters. It supports no less than 10 downstream tasks such as scene classification, semantic segmentation, object detection, change detection, and three-dimensional reconstruction, and carries out application demonstration and evaluation in no less than 5 fields such as land resources, urban and rural construction, national defense and security, water conservancy and environmental protection, and emergency disaster response.
(2) The asset-light model and low-cost data acquisition capabilities promote profitability leadership
Upstream enterprises in the industrial chain show asset-heavy business characteristics. Judging from the two financial indicators of depreciation and amortization in the current period and capital expenditure (cash paid for the purchase and construction of fixed assets, intangible assets, and other long-term assets), the two financial indicators of Obit and China Satellite in the upstream of the industrial chain are relatively large. From 2018 to 2022, the average satellite of Obit and China will reach 136 million yuan and 303 million yuan, which is significantly higher than that of Zhongke Star Map, Aerospace Macro Map and CTI Navigation located in the middle and lower reaches. Aerospace Hongtu In 2021, due to the start of the construction of its independent commercial SAR satellite constellation, capital expenditure increased by 498 million yuan compared with 2020.
The middle and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain show relatively high investment in R&D and sales. Judging from the cost indicators of R&D expense ratio and sales expense ratio, the two indicators of aerospace macromap, Zhongke Star Map and CTI navigation in the middle and lower reaches of the industrial chain are higher than those of upstream enterprises. Combined with the business of midstream and downstream companies, in addition to cooperating with large customers in special fields, this model meets the needs of To G/To B business development needs to lay sales channels at the provincial, municipal and even county levels. Zhongke Star Map is expected to rely on the advantages of large customers in special fields, the early sales channel laying and the subsequent business model of combining online and offline to gradually improve the sales expense ratio.
On the whole, the profitability of midstream and downstream enterprises has certain advantages, and the net profit margin level of Zhongke Star Map is leading. Judging from the gross profit rate, the gross profit margin of the middle and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain is higher than that of the upstream enterprises. The average gross profit margin of Aerospace Vision, Zhongke Star Map, and China Measurement and Guidance fluctuates around 55%, while the gross profit margin of Obit basically remains around 35%, and the gross profit margin of China's satellite remains around 13%, which will slightly decrease to about 10% in 2022. Judging from the net interest rate, the net interest rate of enterprises in the middle and lower reaches of the industrial chain is relatively stable. Except for the negative net interest rate of Obit in 2019 due to local fiscal tightening and the implementation of key projects not meeting expectations, the gap between the net interest rate and the middle and downstream enterprises in other years is small.
In addition, compared with the ability of companies in the same industry to obtain business data, the company has certain low cost and channel advantages. According to the reply of China Science and Technology Star Map and CSC Securities Co., Ltd. to the review inquiry letter, in the absence of its own satellite, it made full use of the national high-resolution earth observation system, coordinated the three kinds of military and civilian data sources, established a low-cost, sustainable, timely, and high-quality data acquisition system, and built its own data engineering centers in Xi'an and Beijing, realized the localized storage of remote sensing satellite data for companies, and solved the data security problem through dual backup. We should make full use of the national high-resolution Earth observation system to coordinate the three kinds of military and commercial data sources, of which the project-related data obtained free of charge can meet 80 percent of the business data needs, and 20 percent of the commercial remote sensing data purchased at market prices can effectively supplement business data. Considering that the company is currently deeply engaged in large customers in the special field and government field, and has a certain market position in the commercialization field, the relevant low-cost data acquisition ability is expected to continue.
(3) The group horse racing mechanism drives the first curve and incubates high-quality assets
Deepen the strategic measures of collectivization, with the horse racing mechanism as the core to ensure the first growth curve. According to the company's 2022 annual report, at present, the company has formed a group development trend with special fields, smart government, meteorological ecology, aerospace measurement and operation control, enterprise energy, and online business as the core, and completed the formation of four sub-groups of Star Map Space, Star Map Defense, Star Map Intelligence, Star Map Earth and two direct subsidiaries, including Star Map Measurement and Control, Star Map Tianxin, of which Star Map Measurement and Control has been listed on the New Third Board in February 2023, and Star Map Tianxin is currently undergoing share reform. In addition, in December 2022, Zhongke Starlight Information Technology Co., Ltd. was established under the group to provide electromagnetic information equipment and system services, based on the GEOVIS electromagnetic sphere, from the resource layer, service layer and application layer, and continuously expand, enrich and build the electromagnetic business ecology. In the development of each subgroup and subsidiary, through a standardized evaluation mechanism, subsidiaries with strong product innovation ability, rapid growth in business performance and perfect internal control management system will be continuously selected as the group's "horse racing" subsidiaries for key training, support their independent development, and achieve their own development goals and vision, including going to the capital market, so as to continuously ensure and promote the company's first growth curve with the horse racing mechanism as the core driving force.
In addition, the "Star Map Partner" plan was released to stimulate the vitality of innovative operation, promote high-quality development and the implementation of the company's development strategy. According to the company's 2022 annual report, the company has built the happiness project of the star map endeavor through the "Star Map Partner" program, selected and encouraged core talents, and cultivated and developed the academic qualifications and professional abilities of core talents through the Digital Earth College, so as to achieve the purpose of continuously attracting outstanding talents and continuously developing high-potential talents, so that the company's talent team can achieve stable and high-quality development.
(4) Build the second curve with the cloud service business model and strengthen the ability to reach C-end customers
European and American satellite remote sensing and digital earth related industries are leading the development, and Google Earth and other international suppliers are at the leading level in the field of digital earth commercialization. The digital earth was first proposed by the United States in 1998, and with the help of the United States' first-mover advantage in remote sensing earth observation and global satellite positioning and navigation, Google Earth of the United States Google Company has become the earliest and most mature digital earth product in development, and is also the leader of international digital earth technology. According to the company's prospectus, the technical characteristics of Google Earth are as follows: Its Google Earth KML (Keyhole Markup Language) format has been used as an open international standard; The 3D technology used pushes satellite imagery to a new level, realizing the realistic construction of various three-dimensional scenes; Mature broadband streaming technology can provide efficient retrieval efficiency and realize rapid location search and location; Google Earth Engine provides petabyte-scale public datasets, an efficient spatiotemporal optimization computing engine, more than 800 APIs, and a web-based development platform. Since the digital earth system platform involves a large number of high-precision target information of important national facilities, many countries in the world have imposed different degrees of restrictions on the use of Google Earth for national security and industrial security considerations. France, Russia, the European Union and other aerospace powers are developing their own alternative products, catching up and trying to surpass Google Earth. The restriction of data security not only puts forward a clear demand for autonomy and controllability, but also seeks a good competitive environment for the development of the digital earth industry in mainland China.
The company conforms to the industry trend and formulates strategies and improves operational capabilities according to the three major contexts of "communication and remote integration, sky-ground integration, geographic information industry and Internet technology integration". In terms of product intelligence, the company's GEOVIS digital globe core products can provide basic data support and common service support for various industry applications, for example, GEOVIS iCenter space-space big data sharing service software, on the basis of the traditional three-dimensional space-time framework, it realizes the support for Beidou grid code and the dual engine of digital earth spatiotemporal big data service; GEOVIS iExplorer aerospace big data visualization software realizes the smooth loading and display of oblique photography model data or vector data at the global level, GEOVIS iMap visual intelligent map software, is a new intelligent map editing production and application support platform software integrating AI extraction and GIS analysis. In terms of application diversification, GEOVIS carries and integrates spatial information of various industries on the basic software platform according to the needs of the industry, expands industry applications, and gradually develops and uses them for the public. In terms of online operation, the company will focus on the GEOVIS Online Digital Earth project in the future, which has designed three types of digital earth service models of "cloud, edge, and device" synergy, which will realize the comprehensive online operation of the digital earth and provide online digital earth experience for users in all fields such as domestic governments, enterprises and the public.
Refinancing layout GEOVIS Online Digital Earth, realize online transformation of core technologies and business transformation and upgrading, and deploy C-end capabilities. In 2021, the company will increase the layout of the GEOVIS Online Digital Earth project, breaking the traditional GEOVIS 6 traditional offline delivery mode and the low number of concurrent users. According to the company's 2022 annual report, the company's GEOVIS Online online digital earth construction has been fully launched, and an online digital earth service system including spatiotemporal big data service (DaaS), spatiotemporal analysis cloud platform service (PaaS), and online digital earth service (SaaS) has been initially built, forming a complete GEOVIS Earth digital earth service operation capability, laying a solid foundation for online transformation, expanding new business fields and building an industrial ecology around the digital earth of the foundation. Through important measures such as application to the cloud, data to the cloud, and computing to the cloud, the online transformation of core technologies and the transformation and upgrading of services have been realized. Based on the autonomous digital earth theory, autonomous space infrastructure, autonomous digital earth software and independent IT infrastructure, the Star Map Online Earth product system has been formed, and a service system that covers the cloud, edge and end has been initially constructed, providing a broader growth space for GEOVIS Digital Earth in traditional industries such as governments and enterprises and non-traditional digital earth fields such as government, enterprises and communities, education, tourism, etc.
6. Profit forecast
Core investment logic: (1) On the supply side, the rapid development of the aerospace industry and digital economy, the acceleration of aerospace industry construction, and the reduction of the threshold and cost of aerospace data acquisition; AI empowers aerospace information services, improves timeliness, personalization, and customization, and promotes the expansion of application scenarios. (2) On the demand side, special fields benefit from the demand for information construction, and the needs of meteorological ecology, emergency management, enterprise energy, smart cities and other scenarios are gradually emerging; Satellite application technology iteration catalyzes the sinking of the To G/B/C multi-dimensional market; With the construction of the global space industry, the demand for space asset management is expected to stimulate the demand for space measurement, operation and control. (3) Competitive advantage, the company is backed by the Aerospace Institute, deeply engaged in technology development and industrialization in the field of digital earth, and has the ability to obtain low-cost data; Grouping drives the first growth curve; Benchmarking against Google Earth to create GEOVIS Online's second growth curve; The integrated layout of "heaven, space, land and sea" makes up for the shortcomings of the industrial chain, promotes the coverage of the multi-circle observation system, and breeds the third growth curve with internationalization. At present, benefiting from the expansion of digital earth application scenarios, we are optimistic that the company will benefit first with its technical level, and we expect the company's consolidated operating income to reach 23.25/32.41/4.396 billion yuan in 2023-25, respectively, an increase of 47%/39%/36% year-on-year, and the overall gross profit margin in the next three years is expected to be 48.6%/48.6%/48.4% respectively.
Specifically:
(1) In terms of special fields, the company has deeply cultivated special fields, built a GEOVIS delivery system, and considered the needs of information construction, and expects that the revenue of this business will increase by 45%/38%/35% year-on-year in 2023-25, considering the further R&D improvement of product technology and the optimization of software and hardware product delivery structure, and the gross profit margin of this business is expected to be 43%/44%/45% respectively in 2023-25.
(2) In terms of smart government, the company's massive real-time data processing technology based on cloud computing, data sharing and spatiotemporal data analysis based on Beidou grid code provide spatiotemporal base support and smart decision-making support for government governance and new smart city construction, and the revenue of this business is expected to increase by 35%/33%/30% year-on-year in 2023-25, considering the future urban construction demand and policy support, the gross profit margin of the business is expected to be 43%/43%/43% in 2023-25, respectively.
(3) In terms of space measurement and control, considering the increase in global investment in space asset construction, the continuous pull of commercial space demand, and the improvement of the safety operation efficiency requirements for space assets, it is expected that the revenue of this business will increase by 45%/35%/35% year-on-year in 2023-25, respectively, considering the subsequent large-scale construction, the gross profit margin of the business is expected to be 60%/58%/55% in 2023-25, respectively.
(3) In terms of meteorological ecology, the demand for meteorological monitoring accuracy is improved, and considering the demand for generative content empowered by artificial intelligence and data elements, it is expected that the revenue of this business will increase by 60%/45%/40% year-on-year in 2023-25, and the gross profit margin of this business is expected to be 60%/58%/55% in 2023-25, respectively.
(4) In terms of enterprise energy, the company's corporate customers are in the expansion stage, the performance base is small, considering the increase in the demand of corporate customers for asset security, post-loan management, etc., and the company's increase in the expansion of relevant sales channels, it is expected that the revenue of the business will increase by 90%/60%/45% year-on-year in 2023-25, and the gross profit margin of the business is expected to be 58%/56%/55% in 2023-25.
(5) In terms of other businesses, the company's layout of online business, considering the current small performance base and the gradual increase in the number of users, it is expected that the revenue of this business will increase by 40%/33%/33% year-on-year in 2023-25, and the gross profit margin of this business is expected to be 60%/60%/60% in 2023-25.
(6) In terms of expense ratio, combined with the company's revenue growth and related market development and business integration, it is expected that the company's sales expense ratio will be 9.5%/9.3%/9.1% and management expense ratio of 8.3%/8.3%/8.1% in 2023-25, respectively.
In summary, it is estimated that from 2023 to 2025, the revenue of Zhongke Star Map will be 23.25/32.41/4.396 billion yuan, respectively, an increase of 47%/39%/36% year-on-year; The net profit attributable to the parent was 3.33/4.69/635 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37%/41%/35%, corresponding to EPS of 1.36/1.91/2.59 yuan per share in 22/23/24, respectively.
(This article is for informational purposes only and does not represent any investment advice from us.) For information, please refer to the original report. ）
Selected report source: [Future Think Tank]. 「Link」