Liu Yingjian, the 67-year-old chairman of Hanwang Technology, still looks like a child with unlimited ideas for invention. Before the interview began, Liu Yingjian was testing flying his new "toy" with a team outside the office building: an intelligent bionic flapping wing flyer called GoGoBird. This is a small "egg" laid by Hanwang Technology along the way in the process of making technical reserves for the next ten years.
Liu Yingjian, who once won the National Science and Technology Progress Award for Chinese character recognition technology and successfully transformed the scientific research results into a listed company, has both the foresight of a scientist and the shrewdness of an entrepreneur - must be close to the outlet of the next era, and at the same time can not fall into the darkness before dawn. He believes that in the next ten years or so, the whole society will enter the robot era, "We are aiming at the housekeeping robot, a housekeeping robot that can help you peel onions, fold quilts, stir-fry vegetables, and season, this market is very large." ”
"The King of Kanji"
Whether it is handwriting recognition, OCR recognition, image recognition, the technical core of Hanwang Technology established 30 years ago is the important "origin" of today's fire artificial intelligence technology.
Han Wang, meaning "the king of Chinese character input recognition". In 1985, Liu Yingjian presided over the research and development of the world's first online handwritten Chinese character recognition online device to obtain an invention patent, creating a new application era of non-keyboard Chinese character input, leaving a strong mark in the history of computer development, which caused quite a stir at the time. This Hanwang handwriting recognition system not only forced Microsoft to pay money to buy a license, but also won the first prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2001, which is the third domestic IT company to receive this honor after Founder and Lenovo. In addition, Hanwang optical character recognition "OCR" technology and application also won the second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award.
Hanwang Technology's more familiar product is the electric paper book, which was also presented to Japan and South Korea as a national gift by wan gang, then minister of science and technology, in 2009. Liu Yingjian had hoped to open a digital reading era with the help of electric paper books. In 2010, the year hanwang technology successfully landed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, its total sales of electric paper books exceeded 1 million units, contributing 880 million yuan of revenue to the company, accounting for more than 70% of the total revenue.
With the advent of the mobile Internet era, feature-rich tablet computers, large-screen smart phones and amazon kindles with a complete ecology have come out, after which iPad tablets, large-screen smart phones and other products have become the standard in the mobile Internet era, and the Hanwang electric paper book business has suffered a great impact.
In the two years when Hanwang Technology fell into the quagmire of electric paper books and healed itself, deep learning, neural networks, and big data gradually made breakthroughs, raising the performance of artificial intelligence to a new level. In 2011, Apple launched Siri, an artificial intelligence assistant; in 2012, Google scientists taught neural networks how to recognize cats, with nearly 70 percent accuracy. A new round of artificial intelligence marked by face recognition and speech recognition has risen, setting off a new round of technological revolution for mankind.
Liu Yingjian could not help but be excited, "The PC and software period in the 1990s was a unique period for Hanwang Technology, but in the era of the Internet and mobile Internet, Hanwang Technology failed to seize the changes in technology and the market. However, similar to the era of artificial intelligence and the era of software, it pays attention to the landing of application scenarios, which returns to the scenes we are familiar with. ”
Liu Yingjian said that the startup was driven by the vigorous venture capital and took the way of burning money first and then making money, but Hanwang Technology, which was already listed at the time, could not burn money arbitrarily, "At that time, if I wanted to lose money for two consecutive years, I had to be responsible for investors."
"We are leading and costing less in these artificial intelligence technologies such as face recognition, behavior recognition, and video analytics, and our face recognition business has remained profitable for five consecutive years in a fiercely competitive market environment." Liu Yingjian said.
The painting business bloomed
If Chinese character input recognition products are somewhat limited to the Chinese market, then Hanwang Technology's digital painting business is wrestling overseas.
As early as 2007, Hanvon Technology broke through the two key technologies in the field of "wireless passive" and "micro-pressure precision sensing" in the field of digital painting boards. The only two companies in the world have patents for wireless passive electromagnetic touch interaction technology, one is Hanwang and the other is Japan's Wacom.
Recently, the performance of Hanwang Technology's digital painting business has shown amplification growth. In the third quarter of 2020, the single-quarter revenue of Hanwang Technology's digital painting business was 280 million yuan, an increase of 183% year-on-year, accounting for about 60%-70% of the company's single-quarter revenue. Driven by the digital painting business, hanwang technology's net profit in the first three quarters reached 70.2327 million yuan, an increase of 155.04% year-on-year.
This brings the established tech company back into the picture of capital focus. Since the second half of this year, Hanwang Technology has been investigated by more than 80 institutions a total of 22 times.
Liu Yingjian introduced that the company's digital painting products are mainly sold through online channels, and Wacom sales have been blocked under the influence of the epidemic this year, "Wacom does have a certain brand recognition in the professional-level field, but we are consistent with Wacom's technical level, we also have more close to the user's productization capabilities, as well as the current experience accumulated in e-commerce channels, our products are sold to more than 60 countries and regions around the world, the sales situation is very good, we can maintain a net profit margin of 15%-20%." In addition, with the upgrading of the drawing board to a painting screen, the revenue will be further increased. It is understood that the average price of painting board products overseas is about 40-70 US dollars, and the average price of painting screen products overseas is about 300 US dollars.
He also believes that with the development of the content creative industry, digital painting products will be further popularized to the mass market. Liu Yingjian opened the mobile phone today's headline APP casually clicked on a video to show the reporter, "You see this short video inserted in the comic, you may use a digital drawing board, now there are more and more such applications."
In addition to the digital painting business, Liu Yingjian feels "overwhelmed" by the text big data business, and the compound growth rate of this part of the business revenue from 2016 to 2019 reached 76.86%. As the concept of digital economy becomes more and more popular, the need for electronic, textual and structured materials of all kinds of text materials has been further improved, "Our OCR text recognition technology has done the earliest, such as the emperor's recital in the library archives and museums, the prescription of the Tai Doctor, the genealogy of the minister, etc., all of which are digitized by the Han King." But since last year, this piece of business has suddenly risen, and it can be said that it has blossomed everywhere. ”
Hanvon Technology intends to further consolidate its competitiveness in the above business areas. In May this year, Hanvon Technology released a fixed increase plan to raise 600 million yuan, of which the largest investment is the text big data business, that is, 250 million yuan of funds raised to develop a new generation of natural language cognitive technology and text big data open platform and application system.
Hanvon Technology also intends to invest 135 million yuan to upgrade the core chip of pen touch technology and pen interaction intelligent digital product solutions, and invest 850 million yuan to develop a new generation of neural network image video and humanoid behavior analysis platform and enterprise application projects.
Aim for the next era
The digital painting business and the text big data business have brought considerable performance to Hanvon Technology, but technology companies often need "application generation, research and development generation, reserve generation".
Entrepreneur Liu Yingjian has both the sharpness and acumen of a scientist, he has insight into the next era, and has already made relevant preparations for it. "Now is the era of mobile Internet, Apple, ByteDance and other companies are the pride of this era, but there will be a next era, there will be a higher light enterprise." The city head has changed the banner of the king, and now the development is good, do not think that it can always be good, we must have a sense of crisis. Liu Yingjian stressed.
Liu Yingjian believes that the next era is the era of robots, factories can not be separated from robots, families will also be inseparable from robots, "not far away, almost the next ten years or so, can not stop." Liu Yingjian wants to make a real housekeeping robot in the future, "Can the current robot help you peel the onion, can it help you fold the quilt, can it help you cook and smell the incense or the smell?" Not yet, there are still many core technologies to be solved. ”
Since the wind outlet, we must find ways to get closer to the wind outlet, "the most difficult is muscle control", at this time, scientist Liu Yingjian showed the entrepreneur's down-to-earth and technical achievements commercial transformation ability, Liu Yingjian adopted the strategy of "raising war with war and laying eggs along the way" to avoid accidentally sacrificing the darkness before dawn.
He introduced that the company has a team to study the application of olfactory recognition technology for more than three years, and has achieved preliminary results and found commercial prospects. In addition, key technologies such as muscle control are being developed through the development of bionic robot products.
The bionic flapping wing flyer GoGoBird released by Hanwang Technology is an "egg" in the process of moving towards the robot era.
According to reports, this "head bird", equipped with a number of sets of 4-axis sensors such as fixed height and obstacle avoidance, combines a variety of intelligent perception technology and flight control algorithms in intelligent technology to achieve a breakthrough in the autonomous flight of the flapping wing aircraft, and integrates intelligent perception technologies such as position perception, attitude perception, obstacle perception, etc., and at the same time adds somatosensory interaction, infrared interaction and other human-computer interaction technologies to achieve autonomous obstacle avoidance, fixed height flight, somatosensory switch machine, linear flight, specific flight action and other bionic flight actions, which have been sold more than 200,000 this year. Liu Yingjian said that in the future, the "head bird" will also achieve difficult actions such as starting and taking off and "grasping" on the branches.
"High-tech companies must be patient, starting from the original innovation, doing it little by little, there is only this way." Liu Yingjian said.
□ Ding Jianming, Zhang Zhaohui, Yang Jie, reporter of this newspaper
This article originated from China Securities News