In China's audio market, there is a company that has always been the focus of everyone's attention, that is, known as China's long audio leader Himalaya, after repeated denial of listing, as for Himalaya took the most important step of listing, submitted a listing application to the New York Stock Exchange to officially begin to enter the US stock market, in this case, many people are paying attention, as a leading enterprise in China's sound economy, can the story of Himalaya's listing be recognized by the market? Can Himalaya, which has lost 2 billion yuan in three years, really conquer the US stock market?
First, Himalayas finally admitted to going public
For a long time, the news of The himalaya listing has been widely spread by the market, but in most cases, the Himalaya official has come forward to deny it, but this time it is finally no longer denied. According to the Global Network, Ximalaya recently filed an initial public offering (IPO) application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and CICC as joint underwriters. According to the prospectus, Tencent, Yuwen, Baidu, Xiaomi, Good Future and Sony Music are strategic investors in Himalaya. The main financial investors include Transatlantic Investment Group, TrustTrust Capital, Goldman Sachs, Boom Investment, Genesis Partners Capital, PwC Capital, Hop Whale Capital, etc.
Founded in 2012, after 9 years of development, Himalaya has become a popular online audio platform for users, committed to sharing wisdom and happiness through sound, and being a spiritual food for a family for a lifetime. At present, Himalaya's online audio service has covered the rich content that users need at different age stages from -1 year old to 100 years old, and the prospectus shows that as of the first quarter of 2021, himalaya's monthly active users in all scenarios have reached 250 million. In 2020, there were 5.2 million active content creators in Himalayas. As of the first quarter of 2021, the total length of audio content on the platform exceeded 2 billion minutes, which can be heard by one person without repeating for more than 3,900 years. The company's main monetization channels include paid subscriptions, advertising, live streaming, educational services, and other innovative products and services. Among them, the paid subscription service is the basic disk of Himalaya, contributing more than 1.7 billion yuan in revenue in 2020, accounting for 43.3%.
In the first quarter of 2021, Himalaya's monthly active users in all scenarios reached 250 million, including 104 million monthly active users on mobile terminals and 146 million users on IoT and other open platforms. In terms of user time, from 2018 to 2020, the average daily listening time of mobile users increased from an average of 123 minutes to 141 minutes.
However, on the other side of these data, Himalaya really has not made money, according to the prospectus, from 2018 to 2020, Himalaya's revenue was 1.48 billion yuan, 2.68 billion yuan and 4.05 billion yuan, respectively. The platform has not been profitable so far, with net losses of 773.7 million yuan, 773.3 million yuan and 605.1 million yuan in the same period of the three years. Taking the last two periods as an example, for the whole year of 2020, the company's operating loss was 650 million yuan, with an operating loss ratio of 17%; in the latest first quarter of 2021, the company's operating loss was 300 million yuan, with an operating loss ratio of 26%.
Second, can the Himalayas really conquer the US stock market with the sound economy?
Faced with the high growth of The Himalaya business and the fact that it has not yet been profitable, many investors are asking whether such a Himalaya can really conquer the US stock capital market?
First of all, the sound economy is a market with good market prospects but competition has become a Red Sea market. From the perspective of the overall market, the sound economy market is one of the largest main battlefields of Himalaya, and on this main battlefield, Himalaya can be said to have achieved the leading position of the long audio track, at least in this segment of the vertical category, Himalaya's advantage is still very large. However, according to the latest report of Essence Securities Research Center, the size of the global online audio market will grow from 10.5 billion yuan in 2018 to 30.7 billion yuan in 2023, but in the next 3 years, both content production and profit growth trends will slow down significantly. At present, according to the data of China Insight Consulting, the Internet user penetration rate of domestic online audio in 2020 is only 16%, compared with 57% of online music and 74% of long/short videos. In the future, with the rapid development of China's automobile industry, especially the new energy automobile industry, China's audio market needs will be likely to further increase, but for Himalaya, this market is no longer only the blue ocean of Himalayas, with more and more giants gradually paying attention to the audio market, this market has gathered dragonfly fm, litchi fm as the representative of the traditional market competitors, as well as the central broadcast background of cloud listening, Tencent music, byte system of tomato listening, The addition of these giants has made the entire audio track a bloody Red Sea, and in this situation, The Himalayas can be described as a crowd of enemies.
Secondly, losses are not a big problem, but whether the money-making model can make a lot of money is the problem. All along, we have a point of view, that is, as long as the Internet company can make money, the loss is not a big problem, from Amazon to Tesla, from JD.com to Pinduoduo, who is not out of the loss, the loss of the Internet company does not have to worry too much, but what needs to be worried about is whether your business model can make a lot of money, we will find that the problem of Himalaya is not how much it loses now, but the profit efficiency of Himalaya's business model is not high enough. On the one hand, among the cost expenses of Himalaya, the procurement cost of content is not only the moat of Himalaya, but also the largest cost expenditure item of Himalaya, due to the higher procurement cost, which directly leads to the relatively low level of profit contribution of Himalayan unit content. On the other hand, Himalaya's main business income comes from advertising and paid subscriptions, but a series of market pioneers represented by iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video have told us that these two sources of income are difficult to have room for high-power growth, and it can be said that it is difficult to achieve high growth in revenue growth is the biggest problem for Himalaya.
Third, can the Himalayas really conquer the U.S. stock market with a sound economy? We see that Himalaya has always liked to use the "sound economy" or "ear economy" to describe itself, but for the context of US stock investors, in the context of the relatively gentle English, the sound economy is likely to be considered part of the audio market, so that The traditional business of Himalaya before it is difficult to bring more attractive stories to the US stock capital market, but fortunately, In recent years, Himalaya has had some updated stories. This is to learn the lessons of Lychee listing and market value management in these years, Himalaya spared no effort to seize the powerful market power of the Internet of Things. In the prospectus, Himalaya wrote that "in the first quarter of 2021, of Himalaya's 250 million monthly active users in all scenarios, 146 million monthly active users accessed Himalaya through iot terminals such as smart speakers, car audio and other third-party open platforms." "Although Xiaoya speakers are not as famous as Xiaodu and Xiaoai, after all, the concept of the Internet of Things is still far more popular than the audio track in the capital market, so if you say the story of the Internet of Things, Himalaya still has a lot of routines to tell."
However, we cannot ignore the potential risks of the Himalayas: First, the copyright of the Himalayas is always the sword of Damocles above its head. For any content platform, copyright is the biggest problem, after all, only enough content to attract users can really tie users, so that users continue to create value for the platform, but for Himalaya, copyright problems are always there, Mustang Finance has reported that "Douluo Continent", "Left Ear", "Ruyi Chuan" and other well-known IP holders have had disputes with Himalaya, and Beijing Daily has recently had similar reports. For any content platform, how to deal with copyright issues is a headache enough.
Second, is the payment of knowledge a false proposition? In recent years, with the rise of knowledge payment, many people are telling the story of knowledge payment, but there are also many people who say that knowledge payment is a pseudo-proposition, and we do not dwell on whether knowledge payment is a pseudo-proposition. But for Himalaya, Himalaya's knowledge payment is actually quite a lot, but according to the calculation of Caihua Society, as far as arpu is concerned, the scale of Paid Users in the first quarter of 2021 is about 41.7 million, and the total amount of 889 million yuan after excluding B-end advertising revenue in the current quarter contribution income, rough calculation platform arpu is 21.32 yuan, to say that the cost contribution rate of this knowledge payment is really not high, how to make knowledge payment to contribute more income to enterprises is also a relatively large problem.
Therefore, the listing of Himalaya is already at hand, whether it can really win the US stock market, to be honest, we still ride a donkey to see the record book and see!