On April 24, Mobvoi Co., Ltd., the "first share of AIGC", was officially listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with 1,000 shares traded in each board lot.
As of 9:40, Mobvoi was trading at HK$3.23 per share, with a market capitalization of HK$4.818 billion.
According to the announcement of the allotment results, Mobvoi offered 84.568 million shares globally, 42.284 million shares and 42.284 million shares for public offering, of which the public offering was subscribed 117.39 times. The final offer price was HK$3.8 per share, raising net proceeds of approximately HK$267 million from the global offering.
It is reported that Mobvoi's subscription during the IPO period was extremely hot, setting a record for Hong Kong stocks to issue more than 100 times the subscription shares with a scale of more than 40 million US dollars so far in 2023, setting off a new boom on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. "AIGC First Share" is hard to find on Mobvoi, and the winning rate is only 2%. It is reported that veteran long-term institutions, top hedge funds, and well-known investment institutions have all entered the market.
Zhongguancun International Co., Ltd. and Nanjing Jingkai Juzhi Science and Technology Innovation Investment Partnership participated in the offering as cornerstone investors, and were allocated 8.441 million shares and 16.484 million shares respectively. Among them, Zhongguancun International Co., Ltd. is affiliated to Zhongguancun Development Group, the sole general partner and fund manager of Jingkai Juzhi is Nanjing Xingang High-tech Investment, the only limited partner is Nanjing High-tech Park Development Company, and the ultimate beneficiary is the Finance Bureau of the Management Committee of Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone.
In the past 12 years, Mobvoi has gone through the era of mobile Internet and the AIoT era represented by intelligent hardware, and has deployed AIGC before the wave of generative AI, becoming the first company in China to achieve profitability and the first to land in the capital market, spanning a 12-year industry cycle, which can be called the epitome of China's AI development history.
The first large-scale model company to achieve profitability, AIGC revenue compound annual growth rate of more than 300%
Founded in 2012, Mobvoi is an artificial intelligence company with generative AI and voice interaction technology as its core business, and is committed to providing AI CoPilot solutions for users including global content creators, enterprises and consumers, including AIGC solutions, AI enterprise solutions, smart devices and accessories.
According to the CIC report, Mobvoi is one of the earliest and largest AI companies focusing on generative AI in Asia, one of the few companies in Asia with general-purpose large model capabilities, and a leader and pioneer in the application of AI CoPilot technology in Asia.
At a time when many companies in the AIGC industry are still burning money and raising funds, Mobvoi has relied on its own products and cash flow to achieve profitability for two consecutive years.
According to the prospectus, from 2021 to 2023, Mobvoi's revenue will be 397 million yuan, 502 million yuan and 507 million yuan respectively, of which the revenue from AI software will increase from 60 million yuan in 2021 to 343 million yuan in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 140%, and the revenue of AIGC solutions from 2021 to 2023 will be 6.822 million yuan, 39.857 million yuan and 118 million yuan respectively, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 300%.
From 2021 to 2023, Mobvoi's gross profit margin will be 37.5%, 67.2% and 64.3% respectively, and its gross profit and gross profit margin will remain at a high level. With the accumulation of full-stack technology, Mobvoi has the ability to do cost-effective R&D with low R&D costs, and its speech synthesis, multimodal, and digital human technologies are in the forefront of the country and even the world.
Visionary and maverick drive 12 years across industry cycles
Li Zhifei, the founder and CEO of Mobvoi, is a Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University, a former scientist at Google headquarters, and a natural language processing expert, with decades of experience in the artificial intelligence industry. With a deep industry background, he has deep foresight and foresight, and Mobvoi has always been at the forefront of the AI wave, and has been the first to see the huge market potential of generative AI.
As early as January 2020, before GPT-3 was released, Li Zhifei proposed at the company's annual meeting that "generative AI is the future" and laid out related projects. In June 2020, when GPT-3 was released, Li Zhifei was the first expert on the nature of large language models for popular science in China, and his "aesthetics of violence" became a classic expression widely used to describe the "emergence" of large models and Scaling Law.
In 2020, Mobvoi launched UCLAI, a large model that can understand and generate text, and released the first commercial application of generative AI in China, the AI dubbing platform "Moyin Workshop". In 2023, Mobvoi will launch an upgraded version of the general large model "Sequence Monkey", as well as AIGC solutions such as the one-stop digital human production platform "Wonderyuan", the enterprise AI interactive digital employee generation platform "Wonderful", and the overseas version of "Magic Sound Workshop" "DupDub".
In the AIGC track, players mainly from small and medium-sized enterprises gather at the application layer, players represented by Internet manufacturers focus on the model layer, and Mobvoi is one of the few companies in the industry that "combines production and model", trying to create a new commercialization model for the industry.
In terms of organizational strength, Mobvoi has the organizational ability and operational ability to quickly adapt to the steep changes in technology from hardware to software and internationalization, and is a "building block company" with a combination of different capability plates.
Thanks to the strategy of "combining production and model" and the organizational ability of "building block company", Mobvoi took the lead in commercialization among AIGC companies in China, realizing the trinity of "technology, product and commercialization" with product drive and user drive.
Since the launch of the product and model, the number of paying users and enterprise customers of Mobvoi has continued to increase, attracting more than 10 million cumulative registered users and about 865,000 cumulative paying users, and the solution has served about 15 million users since 2020, making it the largest AIGC solution platform in the field of China's creator economy.
Global genetic layout is favored by well-known international capital
In the revenue composition of Mobvoi in recent years, overseas revenue accounts for nearly 50%, which is due to Mobvoi's advanced international products and channel layout.
As early as 2016, Mobvoi began its journey to the sea, and its smart wearable brand TicWatch was a great success in its first crowdfunding.
With a keen sense of globalization and localized operation capabilities, Mobvoi has achieved good results in overseas markets. In the following years, TicWatch has been in the top 3 of the BestSeller list of smart watches for many years. Among them, TicWatch Pro 3 has become the world's first wearable device based on Qualcomm 4100 chip + Google Wear OS operating system, and this is also the first time that a Chinese company has impressed Qualcomm, which has always been rigorous in R&D and products, and has become an alpha user in the wearable field of Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 chip.
It can be said that on the road to internationalization, Mobvoi's TicWatch series products have long become the world's leading AI wearable brand with exquisite design, high-quality user experience and ultimate technological innovation. Today, the TicWatch series products have been iterated to the flagship version of TicWatch Pro 5, which are exported to more than 150 countries and regions such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada.
Based on international genes and global layout, Mobvoi has an experienced full-stack AI international team very early, and is one of the few global startups in the industry that has R&D, product, brand, e-commerce, sales, and toB solution capabilities, and has a solution-oriented global R&D structure.
In this wave of AI, Mobvoi also grasped the opportunity to go overseas in the field of AIGC and began to deploy globally very early.
In addition to smart hardware going overseas, in 2022, Mobvoi launched the pace of AIGC going overseas and launched the overseas version of the "Magic Sound Workshop" product "DupDub". With more than 130 realistic voices and more than 15 editing functions, "DupDub" supports more than 37 languages, providing audio and video creators with transcription, subtitle alignment and downloading, as well as digital human tools and platforms, becoming an important tool for creators on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. On this basis, Mobvoi has also developed ultra-realistic speech synthesis technology to help DupDub achieve three-second cloning of human voices and maintain its technological leadership.
Today, "DupDub" provides services to more than 40 countries and regions around the world, and has been selected into the "AI Product List" to go overseas on the list of stars.
With the support of diversified layout and strong technical strength, Mobvoi has received investment from internationally renowned institutions such as Zhen Fund, Sequoia Capital, SIG Haina Asia, Goertek, Google, etc., among which Google has been running for nearly ten years.
Nvidia is also an in-depth cooperation company between Mobvoi in the field of AIGC, and the results of Mobvoi and NVIDIA's cooperation in 3D digital human were presented at the GTC 2024 event. In the future, Mobvoi will further increase its strategic layout of globalization.
He is an unswerving believer in innovation and a pragmatic person in the AIGC track
If entrepreneurs in the technology track want to succeed, it is never achieved overnight, they need to survive the hard work of no one in technology, grasp the opportunities of the times in business, and work hard before the wave comes, so as to make some gains when the time comes.
After 12 years of cycle spanning, from the early exploration of intelligent voice assistants, the rapid rise of intelligent hardware, to the first profitability of large models and AIGC, Mobvoi, as a pioneer in each generation of technology waves, has always written a maverick entrepreneurial story with the product spirit of "extreme polishing" and the forward-looking cognition of "leading change", and its 12-year history has also set a benchmark for China's AI industry.
"Technology followers believe because they see, and technology innovators see because they believe. In the future, we will continue to uphold the spirit of a pioneer, continue to practice our belief in scientific and technological innovation, and create long-term social value that is truly sustainable and sustainable. Li Zhifei said at the listing ceremony that Mobvoi is a long-term practitioner of this spirit and a pragmatic person on the AIGC track.
When foreign giant players and domestic start-ups have officially announced the commercialization process of AIGC, the AIGC industry is moving towards a critical period of commercialization opportunities. Mobvoi has become the "first stock of AIGC" and will also become a pioneer force in promoting China's large model industry.