Text/Lu Qianying
Editor/Chen Feng
On April 24, artificial intelligence company Mobvoi (2438. HK) was listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the "first AIGC stock" in Hong Kong.
However, on the first day of listing, Mobvoi was "unfavorable", and the opening price of HK$2.98 fell 21.6% from the issue price of HK$3.8. As of the close of Hong Kong stocks on the 24th, Mobvoi's share price closed at HK$3.68, down 3.16%, with a market value of HK$5.489 billion.
Mobvoi was founded in 2012 by Li Zhifei. Li Zhifei has a deep technical background, is a Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, was a scientist at Google headquarters, natural language processing and artificial intelligence experts, before founding Mobvoi, he has been in business for ten years, leading the development of voice assistants, intelligent hardware and other products.
At the beginning of the business, Mobvoi cut into the voice search track. In the following years, it began to get involved in the field of smart device hardware, launching a variety of products such as headphones, watches, and smart car devices.
It wasn't until 2020 that AI regained the limelight, and Mobvoi changed its direction again and entered the field of generative AI, and later launched self-developed large models and AIGC applications one after another.
However, behind the breakdown on the first day of listing, Mobvoi, which is now wearing the halo of "AIGC's first stock", is also under tremendous pressure.
On the one hand, the AIGC track is crowded, entrepreneurs and money are pouring in, although Mobvoi is the first to go public, its presence in the capital market is not strong before, and it will face more brutal market competition in the future.
According to IT orange data, there were 201 investment events in the AIGC field last year, with an investment amount of more than 165.4 billion yuan. Mobvoi seems to have been snubbed by investment institutions, and the latest D-2 round of financing before the IPO took place in 2019, with a financing scale of about $100 million.
On the other hand, after last year's "100 model war", the large models and AIGC-related applications on the market are now dazzling, and various companies have entered the competition stage of commercialization, and Mobvoi, which is the first to be listed, will face more urgent tests in commercialization.
At present, Mobvoi's AIGC products have taken the lead in commercialization and have a certain advantage in the market. In 2022, the company's AIGC solution revenue ranked first in the market, with a market share of 9.0%. However, the current AIGC market in China is relatively fragmented, with the top five market players accounting for only about 13.8% of revenue, according to the CIC report. This means that the competition has only just begun, and the market landscape is still changing.
To sum up, for Mobvoi, listing is just the beginning, and how to do a good job in technology research and development, product iteration, commercialization, etc. in the cruel market competition are all problems that need to be faced.
1. If you go out to ask, you must go public
Before 2020, Mobvoi was not an AI company. From its establishment in 2012 to 2020, Mobvoi has been in the stage of frequently switching tracks.
In 2013, Mobvoi launched its first product voice assistant "Xiaowen", and after 2014, it began to lay out the field of smart devices, and continued to launch a series of products such as smart watches and smart speakers.
In 2016, Mobvoi began to try to enter the automotive intelligent scene and launch intelligent on-board products and systems. The following year, the company received $180 million in financing from the Volkswagen Group and formed a joint venture with Volkswagen, the Mobvoi JV.
Since then, Mobvoi has started its expansion mode, and in 2018, it proposed an AI new retail strategy and opened 20 offline smart experience stores. However, this round of expansion did not go well, according to the "Entrepreneur State" report, in 2019, the company's scale shrank significantly, many product lines were stopped, and offline stores were all closed.
Until 2020, Mobvoi shifted its focus to AIGC. At the annual meeting at the beginning of that year, Li Zhifei mentioned to the team for the first time that "generative AI is the future".
Next, coinciding with the boom in the AI track, Mobvoi accelerated its AI layout, launched two AIGC products, and released the general large model "UCLAI", which was later upgraded to the "Sequence Monkey" multi-modal large model.
Source: Prospectus
At present, Mobvoi's business territory is divided into three parts: smart devices and accessories, AI enterprise solutions, and AIGC solutions, which are unified into AI software solutions. According to the prospectus, the proportion of revenue of these three business segments has changed significantly in the past three years.
In 2021, the smart device business accounted for the vast majority of the company's revenue, as high as 85%. However, in 2022, the share of revenue from AI enterprise solutions suddenly increased to 52.6%, a fourfold increase compared to the previous year. In 2023, this percentage remains high at 44.5%.
To some extent, this means that Mobvoi is speeding up the completion of the track switch and becoming an AI company.
However, with this, Mobvoi is facing greater financial pressure.
First of all, since 2023, the AIGC industry has been accelerating its evolution from the "100 model war" to the "100 flowers" of the application layer ecology, which corresponds to more and more large models and more and more AIGC-related applications in the market.
According to ChinaVentures, the number of large models released in China has exceeded 300, and more than 40 AI large model products have been approved for filing. These products cover a wide range of enterprises and applications, including but not limited to education, e-commerce, digital humans, Q&A communities, and more.
At present, Mobvoi's market presence is not strong. Compared with it, Zhipu, the dark side of the moon, MiniMax, and Baichuan Intelligence, which are known as the "New AI Four Little Dragons", are obviously more vocal and favored by capital.
In the prospectus, Mobvoi also mentioned that the company faces fierce competition in the AI industry, especially some leading technology companies have expressed their intention to win AIGC market share through price competition.
Secondly, the AIGC track is still in the early stage of development, and for every player in the track, it needs to go through the market verification path from technology to product landing to commercialization, and continuous capital investment is required.
At this level, Mobvoi is also very stressful.
Before this Hong Kong IPO, Mobvoi's last round of financing was in 2019, and before that, it completed seven rounds of financing, totaling $255 million and valuing $775 million.
In contrast, the dark side of the moon, one of the "New AI Four Tigers", has completed a total of $1.3 billion in financing in just one year since its establishment in March 2023.
Therefore, at the capital level, it is not a darling's Mobvoi, and it is indeed necessary to go public, because it needs to raise funds to do research and development and grab the market.
In this technological arms race, Mobvoi's R&D investment is also rising year by year.
According to the prospectus, from 2021 to 2023, the company's R&D expenditure has risen from 92 million yuan to 155 million yuan, and last year's investment has reached 30.5% of total revenue. In the past three years, the company's cash and cash equivalents balance fluctuated between 132 million yuan and 144 million yuan in the same period.
Based on the above points, for Mobvoi, this listing is particularly crucial, which can supplement it with "ammunition" to better cope with market competition.
In this listing, Mobvoi raised a net proceeds of HK$267 million, of which about 44.3% will be used to continuously improve modeling technology for model training, as well as to vertically optimize the underlying basic model through the introduction of excellent technology and talents.
2. "AIGC's first share" is a halo and pressure
The name of "AIGC No. 1 Stock" is certainly a halo, but for the current Mobvoi, it is more likely to be pressure.
From 2021 to 2023, its revenue will be 398 million yuan, 500 million yuan, and 507 million yuan respectively, and the total annual comprehensive loss attributable to the company's equity shareholders will be 205 million yuan, 986 million yuan, and 867 million yuan respectively, with a total loss of more than 2 billion yuan in three years.
From the perspective of business model, Mobvoi's current audience is mainly divided into two categories: content creators and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Among them, content creators are also known as professional consumers, which are different from a wider range of C-end users, the former are more professional and willing to pay for creation. For such groups, the company provides paid subscription services for AIGC products, such as voice generation, video generation and other functions, which correspond to application scenarios such as short video, audio reading, and news broadcasting.
Source: Mobvoi's official WeChat public account
For the B-side, Mobvoi mainly provides three services: AI voice interaction solutions, intelligent customer service solutions and virtual broadcast digital human solutions.
Regarding these two commercialization paths, Li Wei, vice president of Mobvoi, once told the media that Mobvoi, as a small and medium-sized company, cannot compete with large manufacturers in terms of data and user scale, and this choice is to deliberately avoid head-to-head confrontation with giants.
"If the product is not a necessity for users, it will be difficult to convert into paying users, so Mobvoi is aimed at content creators, who are willing to use part of the money to buy platform services when they make money. Referring to why the company's AIGC products are not fully available to end consumers for free, Li Wei said.
At present, from the perspective of revenue structure, the proportion of revenue contributed by "AI software solutions" has increased year by year in the past three years, and from 2021 to 2023, the contribution proportions will be 15.0%, 60.6%, and 67.7% respectively. Correspondingly, the proportion of revenue contributed by smart devices and other hardware continues to shrink.
In terms of splitting, for C-end users, the revenue of AIGC solutions provided by Mobvoi in the past three years was 6.8 million yuan, 39.9 million yuan, and 118 million yuan respectively, accounting for 1.7%, 8.0%, and 23.2% of the company's revenue, respectively.
Currently, the company has about 800,000 cumulative paying users.
For B-end enterprise customers, the AI enterprise solutions provided by Mobvoi have contributed 52.7 million yuan, 263 million yuan, and 226 million yuan respectively in the past three years, accounting for 13.3%, 52.6%, and 44.5% of the company's revenue, respectively.
However, it is worth noting that Mobvoi currently does not have many corporate customers in the direction of AIGC, only more than 100.
Behind this, Mobvoi also faces the risk of relying too much on large customers.
In the past three years, the company's top five customers contributed 37.0%, 62.8% and 49.9% of revenue respectively. Among them, Volkswagen contributed the most revenue to Mobvoi for two consecutive years, contributing 42.6% and 27.4% of the total revenue respectively.
Compared with the unstable revenue structure and the potential risk of relying too much on large customers, Mobvoi faces a more severe test because its technical strength does not currently have a leading edge.
On March 18, the Kimi smart assistant on the dark side of the moon announced that it would support 2 million contextual inputs. As soon as the news was announced, Kimi quickly became popular, and once rushed to the hot search due to server congestion and downtime.
After Kimi broke the circle, large manufacturers also accelerated their follow-up. Soon after, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen announced the opening of a maximum of 10 million words of long text processing capacity, and Wenxin Yiyan issued a notice that the long text processing function will be upgraded to 2 million to 5 million words. 360 also said that 360 Intelligent Brain is conducting internal testing of 5 million words long text processing function.
And in this round of long text PK, Mobvoi did not participate in it. On the one hand, because the company's general large-scale model comprehensive ability is difficult to match with large manufacturers and leading enterprises. On the other hand, the company's core technology is AI voice, which is not prominent in long context window technology.
Looking at it, in the entire AIGC race, Mobvoi's presence is not strong.
3. Listing is only the starting point, and Mobvoi must speed up the make-up class
Although it has been the first to go public, there are still a lot of lessons to make up for Mobvoi.
In terms of the layout of the large model, Mobvoi has fallen behind. In April last year, Mobvoi announced the start of internal testing of its self-developed large language model "Sequence Monkey" and series of products.
It wasn't until November of the same year that Mobvoi opened the sequence monkey to the public. According to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, as of October 2023, the number of large-scale models publicly available in China has reached 238, and the industry as a whole is in a blowout trend.
As for the comprehensive ability of the model level, at last year's press conference, Li Zhifei gave his own model a score of 50. According to media reports, Li Zhifei said frankly, "If GPT-4 is 100 points, our model only has 50 points, although there is still a gap, but I see the hope of going to Harvard." ”
Mobvoi's self-developed large model "Sequence Monkey", the source is Mobvoi's official website
In terms of specific model parameters, according to the "LatePost" report, the AI large model developed by Mobvoi eventually stayed at 6 billion parameters, and now practitioners generally believe that 40 billion to 50 billion parameters is the threshold for the "emergence" of model capabilities. In contrast, Wenxin Yiyan in version 3.0 in 2021 is already at the level of 10 billion, and the parameters of the large model of the dark side of the moon have reached the level of 100 billion.
It can be seen that the technical aspects of Mobvoi's AI large model are still difficult to match compared with peers. It must improve its technical strength as soon as possible in order to be worthy of the halo of "AIGC No. 1".
In addition to the lack of product competitiveness, at the commercialization level, Mobvoi also faces problems such as insufficient application scenarios and narrow audience groups.
At present, the company's product matrix for creators includes four products, namely the AI writing platform "Wonderful Text", the AI painting platform "Words Painting", the AI dubbing platform "Magic Sound Workshop", and the digital human video and live broadcast platform "Wonderful Yuan".
Among them, the company's most successful commercialized application is "Magic Sound Workshop", which currently has more than 8 million users and about 600,000 paying users, and the scale needs to be further expanded.
In comparison, there is still a big gap between Mobvoi and peer companies in terms of application function categories and product numbers.
For example, last year, iFLYTEK launched the AIGC content creation platform, including iFLYTEK Zhizuo and iFLYTEK Music's songwriter platform and other products. The iFLYTEK platform provides services such as AI dubbing, virtual human voice and video broadcasting, voice customization, and image customization, while the songwriter platform provides AI auxiliary tools such as auxiliary lyrics, auxiliary composition, song audition, and quality analysis for songwriters and buyers.
In terms of B-side, most of the solutions provided by the company are still mainly based on voice recognition and interaction technologies, such as customized audio libraries, embedded voice interactions, intelligent wearables and voice dialogue robots.
According to the official website, the application scenarios of its solutions are mainly focused on smart terminals, intelligent customer service, conference transcription systems, etc., which leads to a limited number of industries covered, mainly concentrated in AIoT and automotive industries.
In general, Mobvoi currently provides limited services, and the application scenarios are not diversified enough, making it difficult to cut into other landing scenarios and industries, which in turn makes it difficult to reach a wider range of customer groups.
However, Mobvoi still has time and opportunity, and the domestic AIGC market is still growing rapidly. According to the CIC report, the total addressable market volume of China's AIGC market is expected to exceed about 100 billion yuan by 2027.
On the battlefield surrounded by strong enemies, Mobvoi needs to seize the time to seize more share.
(The header picture of this article comes from the official website of Mobvoi.) ）