Behind the sharp rise in the stock price of Geling Shentong: the family-seeking technology has attracted attention, and the star shareholders are retreating

Image source: Visual China

Blue Whale financial reporter Xu Xiaochun

The news that a wealthy man in Hebei has found his son after 25 years has aroused public opinion, and Geling Shentong, who has provided scientific and technological support behind it, has also been pushed to the forefront. On December 4, Geling Shentong opened high and rose, with the highest intraday rise of more than 17%, and an increase of 7.66% as of the closing day.

Geling Shentong issued a statement after the market on the same day, saying that the company mainly cooperated with the police to provide tools such as technology and algorithms for the search for relatives, and then handed them over to the police to apply. According to the statement, Geling Shentong did not develop the so-called "paid version of the family search APP", nor did it authorize any unit or individual to sell related software.

In his statement, Geling revealed that "technology is not a panacea. Although technology is developing rapidly, it is still very difficult to find relatives across ages. As a technology company, Geling Shentong has been assisting the police in developing technology to find missing persons, and this year has indeed made a big technological breakthrough, and has also helped the police find some abducted children. ”

The technical support behind the family search

On December 1, Hebei "billionaire" Xie Kefeng recognized his son who had been lost for 25 years, which attracted public attention. The next day, Xie Kefeng's family held a thank-you banquet to entertain relatives and friends, and at the banquet site, many parents from all over the country who had lost their children and were still running around to find them also held up a search notice, hoping to bring good news to their families.

On December 3, Geling Shentong, a listed company on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, "claimed" the AI technology behind the search for his son on Weibo, and the company mentioned that behind the family reunion, Geling Shentong's self-developed "cross-age and kinship face comparison algorithm" contributed a lot. The office of the board of directors of Geling Shentong told the Blue Whale financial reporter that for the family search incident, the company mainly cooperates with the police to provide technical support to narrow the scope to the smallest possible range, and the police still have to do a lot of work in the early and later stages. And this is not the first case of Geling Shentong finding children through technology, the company has already recovered 4 children through this technology during the year.

Affected by the relevant news, on December 4, Geling Shentong opened high, with the highest intraday rise of more than 17%, as of the close, the company's share price was 22.22 yuan / share, an increase of 7.66% on the day.

In March 2022, Geling Shentong landed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and the company's current business is mainly to deeply integrate computer vision technology, big data analysis technology, robotics and human-computer interaction technology with application scenarios, providing artificial intelligence products and solutions for smart finance, urban management, commercial retail, rail transit operation and maintenance, sports and health, and metaverse.

Geling Shentong told reporters that the company's accumulation is mainly in the two fields of smart finance and urban management, and smart finance is also the company's main source of revenue. At present, the company's six application directions have achieved varying degrees of commercialization, in contrast, rail transit operation and maintenance, metaverse and sports and health are still in the stage of pilot and R&D iteration.

According to the company's third quarterly report, from January to September, Geling Shentong achieved a cumulative operating income of about 225 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.76%, and the company's net profit loss attributable to the parent company was about 17.279 million yuan in the same period, a year-on-year decrease of about 8%. The company said that the loss was mainly caused by a year-on-year decrease in operating income and an increase in R&D investment. On November 27, Zhao Yong, chairman and general manager of Geling Shentong, responded at the performance briefing that the company will open sources and reduce expenditure, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and strive to recover revenue growth and profitability as soon as possible.

In the first three quarters, the total R&D expenses of Geling Shentong were about 1.25 billion yuan, accounting for 55.46% of the current operating income. In fact, the difficulty of making profits for artificial intelligence companies is also a common problem in the industry. According to Wind data, in the first three quarters, more than half of the seven artificial intelligence listed companies on the Science and Technology Innovation Board accounted for more than 50% of their R&D expenses, and Yuntian Lifei reached a maximum of 90.93%. At the same time, only EZVIZ Network and Arcsoft Technology achieved profitability among the seven companies.

It is worth mentioning that in the first year of listing, Geling Shentong achieved profitability for the first time in the annual report, in addition to the increase in the company's operating income during the year, the company achieved net interest income of more than 32.37 million yuan through fund management, an increase of 771% over the previous year, which has also become a major reason for the company's profitability. However, this profit of Geling Shentong is not stable, and in the third quarter report of this year, Geling Shentong fell into a loss again.

A number of star shareholders reduced their holdings at a high level

The concept of "large model" has become the latest outlet for AI companies to get closer, and Geling Shentong is also involved in the large model industry, the company told the Blue Whale financial reporter that at present, the company is only a large model for behavioral analysis of inherent customers such as banks.

According to the semi-annual report, the company added 11 patents and 39 software copyrights in the first half of the year. As of the end of June, Geling Shentong has obtained 31 invention patents, 9 utility model patents, 5 design patents, and 121 software copyrights, totaling 166.

On March 17 this year, the first anniversary of Geling Shentong's listing, and at the same time, the ban on restricted shares was lifted upon expiration, and a number of shareholders quickly reduced their holdings and withdrew. Five days after the lifting of the ban, Ceyuan Venture Capital, Zhen Fund I, and Aolin Spring respectively threw out plans to reduce their holdings of the company's shares by no more than 3.7 million shares, with a total reduction of no more than 6% of the total share capital.

On the day of the lifting of the ban, Huang Huidong, the head of sales of Geling Shentong, took the lead in reducing his holdings on the shareholding platform Aolin Spring, which reduced his holdings of 1.065 million shares of Geling Shentong Company for the first time, cashing out 32.5251 million yuan. On March 22, Aolin Spring once again reduced its holdings of 59,000 shares at a price of 34 yuan, cashing out more than 2 million yuan.

On March 28, Sequoia Capital also joined the group to reduce its holdings, and it plans to reduce its holdings of no more than 2% of the shares of Geling Shentong within six months. On April 20, Hyundai Motor and Hyundai Mobis announced their shareholding reduction plans, which will reduce their holdings of the company's shares by no more than 3,239,700 shares and 460,000 shares respectively, that is, a total of no more than 2% of the company's total share capital.

Up to now, the above-mentioned shareholders have cashed out more than 600 million yuan by reducing their holdings of Geling Shentong shares. It is worth mentioning that on November 10, Geling Shentong issued an apology announcement that due to the wrong calculation of the distribution ratio of shareholders in the reduction of shares, Hyundai Mobis reduced its holdings by more than the original plan by 90,700 shares, but the total number of shares reduced by concerted actors was not exceeded by the proportion.

In an interview with the media, Green Shentong once said that the shareholders who issued the shareholding reduction announcement mainly invested in the early days of the company's establishment, and it has been about 10 years, and as a fund shareholder, it is understandable that it needs to solve the maturity of its fund and the redemption of LP, which is a normal operation of the capital market.

As for the reduction of his own holdings, Geling Shentong also said in the reply on the interactive platform that the company has fully communicated with the shareholders before the IPO, hoping that they will avoid or reduce the reduction of holdings to avoid impacting the company's stock price.