Author | Huang Yu
Edit | Zhou Zhiyu
After the first submission to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange expired last year, Mobvoi, which wanted to grab the label of "AIGC first share", knocked on the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange again.
On April 16, Mobvoi Inc. (Chinese referred to as "Mobvoi") officially opened its IPO, which ended on the 19th, and plans to officially list on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the stock code "2438" on April 24.
Under the banner of "AIGC's first stock", Mobvoi's next market performance reflects the market's attitude towards most AIGC companies to a certain extent.
Wall Street learned from people close to Mobvoi that Mobvoi's Hong Kong stock quota was more than 8 times covered on the first day, and it was more than 13 times covered in less than two days, and the international placement part was exceeded on the first day.
However, Huang Lichong, co-founder of Xiezhong Strategic Management Group, told Wall Street that judging from the first day of Mobvoi's IPO, the enthusiasm of the capital market subscription is not high, and the enthusiastic subscription can generally have 3 or 40 times coverage.
To a certain extent, this also reflects that after the capital carnival, investors are no longer as enthusiastic about AIGC as before.
Mobvoi has a rather luxurious lineup of investors, and the founder is also a technology expert. However, it is slightly inferior in terms of products and operations, which also makes investors cautious about it.
It is reported that Mobvoi intends to offer 84.568 million shares globally (excluding any shares that may be issued under the over-allotment option), accounting for only 5.67% of the total issued share capital, of which 90% will be offered internationally and 10% will be offered to the public in Hong Kong.
Based on the maximum offer price of HK$4.1 per share, the maximum amount of funds raised by Mobvoi IPO will be about HK$347 million, the maximum market value of the IPO will be about HK$6.115 billion, and the IPO price corresponds to about 11 times the PS (price-to-sales ratio, total market capitalization ÷ main business income) in 2022.
In Huang Lichong's view, Mobvoi's listing subscription is not ideal, on the one hand, because the overall capital market is sluggish, and on the other hand, it also has the problem of overvaluation.
In addition, Huang Lichong said that in the end, only more than 200 million net fundraising was only a drop in the bucket for Mobvoi to develop a large model, and it did not make much sense, probably because there was a VAM agreement with investors, so it was in a hurry to go public.
Before the IPO, Mobvoi's investor lineup has covered a number of financial investors and strategic investors such as SIG Haina Asia, Google, Sequoia China, Goertek, Zhen Fund, and Yuanmei Optoelectronics.
Although it is an AIGC concept stock, Mobvoi has been established for ten years. Like most AI companies, Mobvoi has a founder with a strong technical background.
Zhifei Li, the founder of Mobvoi, is a Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University, a former scientist at Google headquarters, an expert in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, and one of the main developers of Joshua, the world's mainstream machine translation open source software.
At the beginning of its establishment, Mobvoi mainly focused on selling smart devices, and later expanded its business to AI enterprise solutions and AIGC solutions in 2017 and 2020 respectively.
As early as 2020, before the wave of AI large models arrived, Mobvoi developed the general large model "UCLAI", but due to its difficult commercialization, Mobvoi stopped investing in large models and began to deploy AIGC products instead, such as AI dubbing assistant Moyin Workshop and AI digital human Wonder Yuan.
Later, with the explosive development of AIGC, Mobvoi began to restart the development of large models, and upgraded it to a multi-modal large model "Sequence Monkey" in April 2023.
As a start-up company, Mobvoi now also emphasizes that it does not simply pursue the competition of computing power and parameters, but takes the production model combination company of "production and modeling, and model production", and puts AI applications at the core.
At present, Mobvoi focuses on generative AI and voice interaction technology, and has three main businesses - AIGC solutions, AI enterprise solutions, and smart devices and accessories.
AI software solutions, including AIGC solutions and AI enterprise solutions, have become Mobvoi's main source of revenue. According to the prospectus, the revenue from AI software will increase from 60 million yuan in 2021 to 343 million yuan in 2023, and the corresponding revenue proportion will increase from 15% in 2021 to 67.7% in 2023.
However, from the perspective of overall income, Mobvoi's growth has slowed down, and in 2023, it will even be basically stagnant in China. According to the prospectus, from 2021 to 2023, its revenue will be 398 million yuan, 500 million yuan and 507 million yuan respectively.
In terms of profit, in 2022 and 2023, Mobvoi will record losses of about 670 million yuan and 803 million yuan respectively.
For the purpose of the IPO fundraising, Mobvoi plans to use about 44.3% to expand the scale of the "sequence monkey" in the next three years.
However, it is not an easy task for a startup to develop a large model, which requires a huge investment.
Li Zhifei said in March that at present, the model is the product, and the difference between the major models is the performance of the model, and the performance is the result of violence, and behind the violence is resources (money, people, data). Therefore, in a situation where technology, competition, and products are completely confiscated, the resources that can support the continued violence are the barriers.
He believes that there may only be two types of winners when the competition converges, one is rich and has deep pockets that can continue to support violence, and the other is those who have no money but have a long life, because the cost of the same violence will eventually drop tenfold every year, as long as the ultra-low power consumption and long battery life are maintained and the entry point is found to participate in the competition in the later stage of competition convergence, there is a probability of winning.
Obviously, Mobvoi does not belong to the former, and whether it can become the latter will take time to observe.
Huang Lichong is not very optimistic about the large models developed by small companies or the large open source models of the shell, he told Wall Street that a company like Mobvoi, which only has 146 million yuan in cash on the books, cannot make people believe that they can do a good job of large language models, and if their applications use their own models, it is equivalent to castrating themselves.
Previously, Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, has also pointed the way for AI entrepreneurs many times, believing that "it is meaningless to roll up large models, and there are greater opportunities for volume applications".
Of course, while emphasizing the advantages of self-developed AI large models, Mobvoi also strives to highlight its own AI application capabilities. In the context of the increasing speed of AI large models and application iterations, it is destined to be a journey full of unknowns whether Mobvoi, which can go more steadily and further with the help of Mobvoi, which is in the spotlight.
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