On April 24, Mobvoi Inc. (HK: 02438) was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In this listing, Mobvoi's issue price was HK$3.80 per share, and 84.568 million shares were offered globally, raising a total of about HK$321 million and a net proceeds of about HK$267 million.
On the first day of listing, Mobvoi fell below the IPO issue price. According to Bedo Finance, the opening price of Mobvoi was HK$2.98 per share, down 25.58% from the issue price. As of the close, Mobvoi's decline narrowed to 3.16%, closing at HK$3.68 per share, with a total market capitalization of about HK$5.489 billion.
It is worth mentioning that Mobvoi has received orders from a number of cornerstone investors. Among them, Zhongguancun Development Group spent 62.6 million Hong Kong dollars (8 million US dollars) through Zhongguancun International Co., Ltd., and Nanjing Xingang High-tech Investment invested 32.4 million Hong Kong dollars through Jingkai Juzhi, with a total subscription of 95 million Hong Kong dollars, which has begun to show losses.
According to the prospectus, Mobvoi provides AI-generated content (AIGC) solutions, AI enterprise solutions, smart devices and accessories. According to the CIC report, in terms of revenue recognized in 2022, it ranked third in China with a market share of 1.4% in the field of AI speech technology and natural language processing (NLP) software solutions.
Tianyancha App shows that the main business entity of Mobvoi is Shanghai Yufanzhi Information Technology Co., Ltd., which was established in August 2012. At present, the registered capital of the company is only 105,000 yuan, the legal representative is Li Zhifei, and the wholly-owned shareholder is Shanghai Mobaiyi Information Technology Co., Ltd., which is wholly owned by Mobvoi HK Limited.
Mobvoi said in the prospectus that in the field of AIGC, the company is one of the market participants in Asia that can build its own large models. According to reports, Mobvoi's self-built large model "Sequence Monkey" has multimodal generation capabilities, which can understand and generate human-like text, audio, images and videos.
In 2021, 2022 and 2023, Mobvoi's revenue will be 398 million yuan, 500 million yuan and 507 million yuan respectively, and its gross profit will be 149 million yuan, 336 million yuan and 326 million yuan respectively, recording a loss (net loss) of 276 million yuan, 670 million yuan and 803 million yuan for the year, respectively.
During the reporting period, the total comprehensive income attributable to equity shareholders of Mobvoi during the year was about 205 million yuan, 986 million yuan and 867 million yuan respectively. During the same period, the net loss from continuing operations was RMB182 million, RMB685 million and RMB803 million, respectively, and the adjusted net profit was -RMB73.439 million, RMB109 million and RMB17.535 million, respectively, achieving a turnaround in 2022.
In terms of revenue structure, Mobvoi's revenue mainly comes from AI software solutions, smart devices and other accessories. Among them, the revenue of AI software solutions was 59.519 million yuan, 303 million yuan and 343 million yuan respectively, accounting for 15.0%, 60.6% and 67.7% respectively, which is the company's main source of revenue.
As of the latest practicable date, Mobvoi has more than 15 million users worldwide, including content creators, enterprise customers and consumers. In 2021, 2022 and 2023, the company has about 2.8 million, 4.6 million and 4.2 million users, respectively.
In 2021, 2022 and 2023, Mobvoi's AIGC platform recorded about 1.5 million, 3 million and 4 million users, respectively. As of the Latest Practicable Date, its AIGC solution has attracted approximately 865,000 cumulative paying subscribers and generated more than 1 million payments.
It is understood that Mobvoi has completed multiple rounds of financing, with a total financing of more than 255 million US dollars, and investors include Sequoia Capital, Zhen Fund, SIG Haina Asia, Google, etc. In September 2019, the company raised $100 million in Series D-2 financing, valuing it at approximately $757 million and costing $0.4848 per share.
In the years since, Mobvoi has not received new financing. Not only that, but the company's market capitalization (valuation) has not increased significantly. In other words, the recognition of Mobvoi by capital is not high. In this listing, Mobvoi was subscribed by cornerstone investors, but the start performance was very poor, and the follow-up trend remains to be seen.
Prior to this listing, Li Zhifei held 26.72% of Mobvoi's shares through Mobvoi Limited, Li Yuanyuan held 3.02% of the shares through CMWW Limited, and Lei Xin held 3.00% of the shares through Amberlei Limited, and the above three shareholders were acting in concert and held a total of about 32.74% of Mobvoi's shares.
Among them, Li Zhifei is the founder, chairman, executive director and chief administrative officer (CEO) of Mobvoi. According to the prospectus, Li Zhifei has more than 13 years of experience in the AI industry, and worked as a research scientist at Google Inc. (now known as Google LLC), mainly responsible for the algorithm research and development of its language translation model.
At the same time, SIG Haina Asia holds 17.03% of the shares of Mobvoi, Google holds 13.26% of the shares, Sequoia Capital holds 10.92% of the shares, Goertek holds 10.03% of the shares through Hong Kong Goertech, Zhen Fund holds 3.07% of the shares, Digital Growth holds 2.93% of the shares through GWC, and Jinmeng Holdings holds 2.47% of the shares.