Every reporter: Ye Xiaodan Every editor: Chen Junjie
In March 2021, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Opinions on Further Deepening the Reform of Tax Collection and Administration", and the fourth phase of the Golden Tax was officially launched. From the third phase of the Golden Tax to the fourth phase of the Golden Tax, the big wave of smart taxation and "tax governance by numbers" is surging.
At that time, there were still 3 months before the IPO of Taxyou Co., Ltd. was struck by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and this SaaS platform focusing on the field of finance and taxation has been deeply engaged in the digital market of finance and taxation for more than 20 years. With the arrival of the fourth phase of the Golden Tax, the process of financial and tax digitalization of small and medium-sized enterprises has been further deepened, and it has also brought a broader market space for tax friends. A year later, the bidding of tax friends was successfully shortlisted for the construction of the fourth phase of the Golden Tax system.
The third quarter report of 2023 disclosed that in the first three quarters, the revenue of tax friends was 1.195 billion yuan, an increase of 10.81% year-on-year, the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 103 million yuan, an increase of 13.03% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to non-attributable to the parent company was 85 million yuan, an increase of 39.05% year-on-year.
According to the White Paper on China's Finance and Taxation SaaS Industry released by CIC in April 2022, China's finance and taxation SaaS industry is still in the basic development stage, and finance and tax SaaS vendors are still actively exploring and tapping market demand. With the gradual increase in the penetration rate of financial and tax SaaS, the overall market space is expected to expand. In an exclusive interview with the reporter of "Daily Economic News", Yang Peili, senior vice president and chief financial officer of Taxyou Co., Ltd., also said that the digital transformation of finance and taxation driven by the construction of the fourth phase of the golden tax is superimposed on the current wave of AIGC, and the digital finance and taxation market is ushering in unprecedented opportunities.
Opportunities in the wave of digitalization of finance and taxation
INTU.O, a U.S.-listed company focusing on the financial and tax SaaS market, now has a market value of $174.7 billion, and its stock price has exceeded $600 per share. According to previous media reports, Caijie is a well-deserved leading enterprise in the field of financial and tax SaaS in the United States, ranking third in the market value of global SaaS companies.
According to the data, the U.S. financial and tax SaaS industry sprouted in the late twentieth century and experienced a transformation and upgrading from software to the cloud. With the continuous improvement of SaaS penetration, relevant financial and tax SaaS companies have begun to explore value-added services to create higher product value. Founded in 1983, Caijie is a leading SaaS company that has grown up in response to this round of trends.
In Yang Peili's view, Caijie is an enterprise that will benchmark and learn from Xi in the future. Similar to Caijie's growth background, the current tax friends are also in the wave of a new round of digital and technological revolution.
According to the third quarter report of 2023, the revenue and net profit of Taxyou Co., Ltd. have shown double-digit growth year-on-year, and it is one of the few companies in the industry with strong growth.
The reason for this performance, Yang Peili analyzed, the growth of revenue is mainly due to the growth of B-end business, which has brought greater confidence to the company, especially the SaaS business of 100 million enterprises serving small and micro enterprises, which has grown rapidly and exceeded the target set at the beginning of the year. "Behind this is not only the demand for digital transformation of enterprises, but also the service demand for compliance development, and our products are in line with this direction, so the growth performance is not bad. Yang Peili said.
On the one hand, thanks to the construction of the fourth phase of the national golden tax, under the trend of "tax governance by numbers", micro, small and medium-sized enterprises are facing the demands of cloud and digital transformation;
Yang Peili, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Tax Friends Image source: Courtesy of the interviewee
Transform from traditional SaaS to service-oriented SaaS
In fact, the willingness of domestic users to pay for SaaS tools is generally low, and how SaaS companies continue to make profits is often a test for practitioners.
At present, the company is transforming from traditional SaaS to service-oriented SaaS.
Yang Peili said that the competition threshold of the financial and tax SaaS industry is relatively high, if the product is only a basic tool to improve the efficiency of business processes such as billing, accounting and tax, then the user's unit price is actually very low, how to balance revenue and cost and enhance the added value of products through professional services, which is the most priority to solve whether financial and tax SaaS service providers can continue to operate. In the exploration of the business model, the company continues to explore the service functions based on the underlying application, such as tax planning, tax management and other services.
In the first three quarters of 2023, the share of the B-end business of Taxyou shares will reach 65%, mainly including the finance and taxation of 100 million enterprises and the agency account of 100 million enterprises. Judging from the data disclosed in the first half of the year, there were 1.2 million active financial and tax users of 100 million enterprises focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises, and 46,000 high-value users, an increase of 32.8% from the beginning of the year. Focusing on the accounts of small and micro enterprises, there were 6.5 million active users, an increase of 10.2% from the beginning of the year, and 4.3 million paying users, an increase of 13.2% from the beginning of the year. The average order value of users has further increased.
At present, the development of GPT technology has brought new possibilities to SaaS companies.
"The development of GPT technology will make the digital service content of finance and taxation more intelligent and intelligent, the customer experience will be better, the service quality will be more reliable, and the service cost will be lower. According to Yang Peili's analysis, from the perspective of the entire financial and taxation SaaS industry, with the advancement of technology and services, the services of the entire industry will tend to be more digital, intelligent, ecological and outsourcing.
Yang Peili revealed that Tax Friends is currently focusing on promoting the construction of vertical large language models in the tax field. "However, the tax industry is an industry with extremely strict requirements for data accuracy, and in order to ensure accuracy and security, we use professional tax data accumulated by ourselves for more than 20 years for training and fine-tuning. ”
At the same time, due to the extremely rigorous data related to finance and taxation, the large model of finance and taxation will mainly make decisions by assisting financial and tax practitioners in the future, rather than using large model technology to make direct decisions.
Large model technology has accelerated the prosperity of the SaaS industry ecosystem, but it has also intensified the competition among SaaS ecosystems. In the current period of policy, science and technology, and industry iteration, how to do a good job in the market and improve the ecological layout of tax friends that have landed in the capital market is another point that investors pay more attention to.
In this regard, Yang Peili said: "We also hope that some partners who can empower each other and be ecological to join us in the future, provide us with better technology and better services, jointly empower thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises, help them achieve sustainable and high-quality development, empower the agency service industry, and help them achieve industrial upgrading." So we're also looking at some suitable investment or partnership opportunities. ”
National Business Daily