Wu Ying, CEO of eclickworld: Leading the new wave of brands going overseas with AIGC and creating a leading third-party independent advertising platform

On the evening of April 24, eClick released its 2023 annual report, achieving a net profit of 203.9988 million yuan excluding foreign exchange gains and losses, a year-on-year increase of 4.80%; The net profit attributable to the parent company excluding foreign exchange gains and losses was 207.0959 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6.43%. On the same day, EclickWorld released its performance report for the first quarter of 2024, with a significant increase in profitability driven by technology investment and product research and development, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies in the first quarter of 2024 was 50.0943 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21.23%; The net profit attributable to the parent company excluding foreign exchange gains and losses and share-based payments was 64.3319 million yuan, an increase of 38.75% over the same period last year.

The following is a letter from Ms. Wu Ying, CEO of eclickworld, to investors:

Dear investors of Eclick,

See you in good faith!

2023 is the first year that I took over the CEO role from Peter, and it is also a year in which global technology, markets, and industries are undergoing profound changes that are different from the past, and I would like to call it the beginning of major changes unseen in a century.

In 2023, EclickWorld has clarified the new strategy of "leading the new wave of brands going overseas with AIGC", and will continue to build and improve our benchmarking and differentiated product and service capabilities in the changes of technology, market and industry, so as to expand a broader growth space. So, today, I will talk about what Eclickworld thinks and does in 2023 from the changes in technology, market, and industry.

The change of technology is like a new fire

From the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, which attracted great attention in the industry, to the release of large model products by Google, Meta, Alibaba, Huawei, and Baidu, the rise of large model startups such as Baichuan Intelligence, Zhipu AI, and the Dark Side of the Moon, and then to the release of Sora at the beginning of 2024, in just one year, AIGC has become a hot topic on the streets from a niche professional concept. As an intelligent marketing technology company that has been deeply involved in the global market for more than ten years, our main business is effect advertising, which is to accurately match the marketing demands of the advertisers we serve through the distributed network architecture with millisecond response speed, from the massive advertising requests sent by 7 billion devices in more than 200 countries and regions around the world, and carry out display and effect feedback. Therefore, since OpenAI released GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters in 2020, EclickWorld has begun to pay attention to AIGC-related technologies, actively reserve talents, and begin to think about the paradigm changes it will bring to the advertising and marketing industry.

In 2023, after taking the lead in accessing general large models including GPT-4, StableDiffusion, Midjourney, Wenxin Yiyan, Tongyi Qianwen, etc., we combined with specific business scenarios such as marketing digital human model, enterprise knowledge base model, material generation model, and AI Q&A customer service model to carry out AI transformation of the internal technology middle platform, and helped our e-commerce customers achieve an increase in advertising CTR click-through rate of more than 35%, and a cost per click of 45% and the completion of KPIs for advertising performance in a single month reached 123%. Then, in July 2023, we released AIGC's transformative ability to improve the efficiency of advertising creatives in the form of KreadoAI, a digital marketing creation platform, for creators and businesses around the world. In less than 10 months, KreadoAI has reached 203 countries around the world, with more than one million registered users and monthly user visits, which also confirms the meaning of Kreado in Esperanto - the value of "creation" to content creators around the world.

After the release of Sora and multimodal models, we firmly realize that large models and generative AI technologies will provide new possibilities for innovation and efficiency improvement in the whole link of the advertising and marketing industry, and precision, intelligence, and efficiency have become a new trend in the industry that more and more advertisers pay attention to. Subsequently, we launched a data analysis and growth model product based on self-developed models - Digital Eye Intelligence, and an intelligent multi-cloud management platform - Gears.

The former is an important tool for accurate decision-making from data based on AI algorithm models after AIGC provides us with efficiency leaps in production capacity, so that advertisers can really allocate budgets reasonably when advertising and intuitively see the future revenue curve. The latter is from the perspective of serving the infrastructure of overseas enterprises to conquer the world, helping our customers solve the problems of global network security, stability and efficiency in one stop, and ensure the rapid development of business.

It is under this comprehensive AI layout of "one horizontal" (from market insight, marketing strategy to creative generation, budget allocation to data feedback) and "one vertical" (from cloud to data to strategy and marketing) that we have worked with Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Huawei, Alibaba and other global leading models and cloud service partners to truly implement cutting-edge technologies into business value that can benefit advertisers, media and end consumers at the same time.

The change of the market is the blessing of the dependence

Let's talk about the changes in the market.

At the beginning of this year, I did a two-week inspection in the overseas market, and I not only saw the new opportunities brought by the output of the Chinese model, but also saw the rise of new technologies and new media, CTV (smart TV large screen), new energy vehicle screens, and AR, MR, XR hardware iteration, which brought new space for intelligent marketing. The global market is changing rapidly due to the multiple superimposed influences of politics, economy, society and culture.

On the advertiser side, we have seen more and more brand customers from different industries begin to make a firm strategic decision to "go overseas or you may be out", and move towards a truly global enterprise. Among them, we are not only helping Transsion, the "king of African mobile phones", to go overseas for the second time, expanding the brand awareness of the new brand Infinix Note series in the Southeast Asian market, but also helping Lege, a leading smart home company in China, to market in the United States, Japan, Australia and other markets. In addition, in the process of going overseas from 0 to 1 in Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and North America, the world's fourth largest coffee chain brand, Cudi Coffee, EclickWorld also provided it with a one-stop solution of "intelligent cloud + marketing services".

On the main side of traffic, zMaticoo, an AI-driven programmatic advertising platform released after our listing in 2022, has created a malicious advertising identification and defense system through its self-built machine learning platform and big data analysis technology, helping traffic owners effectively prevent risks such as malicious advertising and click fraud, which has been widely praised by traffic owners and has greatly grown in business scale. Not only has it successfully helped popular puzzle games like "Save the Doge", which ranks third on the download list of China's overseas mobile games, to increase their ad monetization turnover by more than 70% in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, but also in Q1Q2 2023, it has continuously topped the "Global Mobile Traffic Platform Market Share List" released by Pixalate, an omni-channel traffic detection and fraud prevention company, and achieved the first good result of IOS in the Asian market and top Android traffic.

So far, the business and products of EclickWorld have achieved full-link marketing coverage from DSP marketing management platform to ADX advertising exchange platform and then to SSP traffic monetization platform, which can not only meet the needs of brand enterprises of different sizes and stages of development for overseas marketing, but also help global traffic owners and developers achieve efficient advertising monetization, and its own profitability has been further improved.

It is worth mentioning that in 2023, with the rapid iteration of global mobile consumption scenarios and the rapid development of AI technology, "short dramas going overseas" has become a rapidly rising new market. According to industry public data, the #shortdrama hashtag has reached 680 million views on TikTok alone, and by the end of 2023, the entire short drama market size is expected to be 200-30 billion. In the face of such rapidly emerging and rapidly developing market demand and opportunities, EclickWorld flexibly used its accumulated experience in "online literature going overseas" to help Chinese Online's short drama app ReelShort and women's leisure reading app Dreame successfully expand overseas markets in 2023.

Our ability to quickly judge and respond to the emerging needs of customers we have served and the emerging customers in the industry is the embodiment of the continuous standardization, productization and intelligence of the global marketing and digital experience we have accumulated over the past ten years. This allows us to have stronger combat effectiveness and vitality when facing the future, and are willing and able to accompany high-quality customers to expand the broad global market for a long time.

The change of the industry is born to the future

The development of technology and the change of the market also have a profound impact on the transformation and evolution of the industry.

According to the latest "Global Trade Update" report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, at the end of 2023, the global trade volume will shrink by about 1.5 trillion US dollars to less than 31 trillion US dollars, a decrease of 5% from 2022. Lamps and lanterns in Zhongshan, furniture in Foshan, toys in Shantou, consumer electronics and medical health in Shenzhen, automobile and motorcycle accessories in Sichuan and Chongqing, and small household appliances in Ningbo have all developed rapidly into typical cross-border export e-commerce industry clusters.

China's leading cross-border e-commerce platforms provide innovative models such as POD (on-demand production), full custody, and semi-custody for the industrial belt, which not only lowers the threshold for a large number of production-oriented sellers to enter the cross-border e-commerce field, but also creates an opportunity and time window for them to digitally transform. We have every reason to believe that in the future, more and more overseas brands with excellent product power will continue to emerge on the platform of China's cross-border e-commerce "Four Little Dragons", and their growing marketing and digital needs in the global market will also become the direction of EclickWorld's efforts to serve and satisfy.

Based on technological evolution and product innovation, driven by market changes and demand replacement, and driven by industrial progress, in this "new wave of brands going overseas", we are more concerned about: can cutting-edge AI technology be quickly and effectively transformed into commercial value recognized by customers and end consumers?

As I mentioned here today, there are "ten-year-old" friendships, "five-year-old", "three-year-old", and "one-year old", many of whom have grown from start-ups to unicorns and even super unicorns. Ten years ago, when EclickWorld was still a start-up company that was first involved in the global marketing of mobile Internet, our determination to become a "unicorn enterprise with a valuation of one billion dollars" seemed like a dream to outsiders, but with the tide of mobile Internet and the east wind of "Made in China" going overseas, we have come to this day. At present, we are still firmly committed to the vision of "helping to build 1,000 global brands and serving 100,000 enterprise customers", and continue to move towards the world's leading third-party independent advertising platform with a new round of technological change and the globalization development trend of Chinese enterprises as the dual engine. On this road, the EclickWorld team will not forget its original intention and work together with our customers, partners and investors!

Wu Ying, Director and General Manager of EclickWorld