Year-to-date, the stock price is up 128%! iFLYTEK "bets" on the big model, and the performance will be "up" first when the capital picks up

China Times (www.chinatimes.net.cn) reporter Lu Xiao and trainee reporter Shi Feiyue reported from Beijing

Under the general trend of soaring artificial intelligence sector, iFLYTEK, which is in a new round of stock price rise cycle, ushered in a "soaring" again this week. On June 13, iFLYTEK's share price soared 9.27%, a record high, and on June 14, it continued its upward trend again, slightly up 0.37%, and the stock price rose by 128% year-to-date. Behind the capital carnival is iFLYTEK's timely perception and capture of artificial intelligence hot spots: in May, iFLYTEK launched a large cognitive model, bluntly benchmarked against ChatGPT, and upgraded the version a month later and landed practical application.

However, as the first domestic AI stock, iFLYTEK has been constantly questioned since it stepped into this field, including the AI simultaneous interpretation fraud turmoil, and the "shell OpenAI" name, coupled with the commercialization problems reflected by "increasing revenue without increasing profits", iFLYTEK's AI golden signboard does not seem to be so solid.

In the view of Zhang Yi, CEO and chief analyst of iMedia Consulting, iFLYTEK certainly has some problems of little significance in the application of AI products, but the development of artificial intelligence technology often requires a certain cycle and practical experience to continuously improve the algorithm and application effect, and what iFLYTEK can do is to continuously accelerate the innovation and large-scale commercial landing of AI technology.

The stock price doubled in half a year

At the opening of trading on June 13, iFLYTEK's stock price was 67.23 yuan / share, soaring all the way after opening ten minutes, reaching a maximum of 75.3 yuan / share on the day, and closing at 74.85 yuan / share in the afternoon, up 9.27%, with a turnover rate of 7.44%, a volume of 1.584 million lots and a turnover of 11.578 billion yuan; on June 14, iFLYTEK's share price rose slightly by 0.37% to close at 75.13 yuan / share.

Stretching the front to last year, it can be found that iFLYTEK's rally has lasted for half a year. In December 2022, iFLYTEK's stock price was still hovering at more than 30 yuan / share, and it began to rush all the way in January this year, and it has risen to more than 60 yuan / share in March, and has been hovering around 60 yuan / share for more than two months, and soared again to more than 70 yuan / share in June. Up to now, iFLYTEK's share price has more than doubled from half a year ago.

Zhang Yi told the "China Times" reporter that the reason for the sharp rise in iFLYTEK's stock price can be attributed to the market's optimism about the artificial intelligence industry and increased confidence in iFLYTEK. "iFLYTEK is in a leading position in the field of artificial intelligence, and its technology and applications are being more and more widely recognized and adopted; In addition, the government's support policies for the AI industry will also contribute to the development of this industry, thereby enhancing investors' confidence in iFLYTEK."

In the past two months, iFLYTEK has continuously released good news, especially the launch and upgrade of large-model products. On May 6, iFLYTEK officially released the iFLYTEK Spark cognitive model; On June 9, iFLYTEK held the Spark Cognitive Model V1.5 Upgrade Conference, which improved the capabilities of iFLYTEK Spark Model.

According to the official introduction, iFLYTEK Xinghuo cognitive model is a new generation of cognitive intelligence model with Chinese as the core developed by iFLYTEK, which can provide a variety of capabilities including content generation ability and language understanding ability in the process of dialogue and interaction with people's natural dialogue... In addition, the iFLYTEK Spark cognitive large model also has special capabilities such as dialogue games and role-playing.

In the upgraded version on June 9, iFLYTEK demonstrated the practical application of the Spark cognitive big model. iFLYTEK told the China Times reporter that iFLYTEK further promoted the application of the Xinghuo cognitive model in education, medical care, industry, office and other fields, enabling products such as the Xinghuo Language APP, medical post-diagnosis rehabilitation management platform, Antelope industrial Internet platform, iFLYTEK hearing smart screen, etc., and opened the development interface of iFLYTEK Spark to work with developers to build a "Spark" ecosystem.

Benchmarking and questioning

In the official introduction of iFLYTEK, the primary goal of iFLYTEK's cognitive big model is to benchmark ChatGPT and GPT-4 to achieve "intelligent emergence", which requires objective evaluation of large samples covering multi-dimensional, multi-task and multi-industry.

After ChatGPT became popular at the beginning of the year, Chinese technology companies encountered this rare popularity and launched their own large-scale model products, and a feast of artificial intelligence also came, such as Baidu released Wen Xin's words, 360 sacrificed wisdom brain, SenseTime launched SenseChat, Kunlun Wanwei and Singularity Zhiyuan cooperated to develop Tiangong...

In Zhang Yi's view, large models are an important technology in the field of artificial intelligence, which can process massive data and deep learning, improve the accuracy and efficiency of algorithms, and its application will be a new growth point for AI enterprises.

As the first domestic AI stock, iFLYTEK naturally will not give up such a great popularity and quickly develop the iFLYTEK Spark cognitive model. Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, is full of confidence in his own products and announced that he will surpass ChatGPT in Chinese capabilities in the future. "For the technical investment of large models, we should not be soft, we should invest in everything, saturated investment. We don't need so much manpower and funds, and now iFLYTEK's team and funds are completely reliable. These inputs are autonomous and controllable, and we can ensure that it is not stuck in the neck of foreign countries, and in the long run, it can continue to move forward step by step. ”

However, iFLYTEK Xinghuo's cognitive large model was questioned shortly after its launch, "Shell OpenAI". In response, iFLYTEK previously responded in the investor relations activity record form that the Spark model "ChatGPT of OpenAI" is neither factual nor logical. "If it is a shell ChatGPT, it is impossible for the iFLYTEK Spark model to respond faster than ChatGPT, let alone the results of the iFLYTEK Spark model are better than ChatGPT in terms of text generation, knowledge question and answer, and mathematical ability."

Zhang Yi believes that iFLYTEK Xinghuo Cognitive Model V1.5 can further improve the application effect and prediction performance by adding support for knowledge base and natural language processing technology, which is expected to create more value for iFLYTEK's business and synergies with related products to enhance product competitiveness.

In fact, from voice to artificial intelligence, the outside world has been questioning iFLYTEK for many years, especially many people think that its products are more conceptual and have little significance in terms of application.

"iFLYTEK does have some problems that are not meaningful in the application of artificial intelligence products in practice, but this situation cannot be generalized." Zhang Yi said frankly that iFLYTEK should continue to strengthen technological innovation and exploration of application scenarios, combine market demand, optimize products leanly, and accelerate the large-scale commercial implementation of AI technology to stabilize investor confidence in order to be more effective.

Results fluctuated sharply

Despite the constant skepticism, from speech recognition, image recognition, to the "iFLYTEK Super Brain Project", the translation machine, and then to this year's iFLYTEK Spark Cognitive Model, iFLYTEK has gradually grown from the "first voice stock" in China to the "first AI stock", and the growing scale and rising performance have added a lot of confidence to the sustainable development of iFLYTEK.

At the 2020-2021 iFLYTEK Annual Planning Conference, Liu Qingfeng was ambitious and put forward the goals for the next five years: to reach one billion users, achieve hundreds of billions of revenues, and drive a trillion industrial ecology.

If the performance trend before 2022 is followed, hundreds of billions of revenue may be possible to achieve in a few years. In the decade from 2012 to 2021, iFLYTEK's performance growth can be described as "rapid", and its annual revenue soared from 784 million yuan to 18.314 billion yuan, with an annual growth rate of double digits.

However, all this came to an abrupt end in 2022, when iFLYTEK's revenue only increased slightly by 2.77% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to the parent fell sharply by 63.94%. By the first quarter of 2023, iFLYTEK fell into the quagmire of declining revenue and net profit loss, with revenue falling by 17.64% year-on-year and a net loss of 57.8953 million yuan.

Zhang Yi analyzed that the main reasons for iFLYTEK's poor performance in the past two years include: intensified market competition, weak growth of the artificial intelligence industry as a whole, and the company's own revenue in some business areas.

In fact, although the revenue has been rising, there has always been an obvious problem in iFLYTEK's performance - increasing revenue does not increase profits. Of course, the "profit" here is not that there is no growth, but relative to the growth of revenue, the growth of net profit is really slow. From 2012 to 2021, iFLYTEK's net profit attributable to its parent increased from RMB182 million to RMB1.556 billion, accounting for 23.2% to 8.5% of revenue.

For the trend of performance, iFLYTEK remains optimistic. iFLYTEK told the China Times that although the special socio-economic environment affected the progress of many large projects last year, the company's fundamentals were not affected. iFLYTEK expects positive revenue and gross profit growth from the second quarter.

Zhang Yi suggested that iFLYTEK can make great efforts to reduce costs and increase efficiency, reduce marketing expenses, open up new markets and customers, optimize product development and upgrade plans, enhance technological innovation and application capabilities, and expand the scale and business scope of enterprises.