900 million APP users, propping up an IPO

　　Reporter | Ma Xiaoyu Jiang Wei

　　Edit | Jiang Yujun

　　The artificial intelligence track will gain another IPO.

　　On August 4th, Hopewell Information held its first meeting in Shanghai Stock Exchange.

　　"Intelligent character recognition and commercial big data technology are the core technologies of information integration." Founder Michael Zhen introduced.

　　Founded in Shanghai in 2006, the company's two major technologies correspond to its three apps: Scanning Almighty King, Business Card Almighty King and Kaixinbao.

　　As the first scientist in the world to apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to smart phones, Michael Zhen, 55, has been studying artificial intelligence for many years and has patented over 100 inventions.

　　With a technical background, he has a smooth road to commercialization.

　　Sky Eye Survey shows that Hopewell Information has completed seven rounds of financing since its establishment, and there are many star institutions such as Jingwei Venture Capital, Oriental Fuhai and JD.COM Science and Technology in the investment team.

　　The company has been profitable for three consecutive years, with a revenue of nearly 1 billion yuan a year.

　　As the industry technology matures, Michael Zhen welcomes more competitors.

　　Two-way cultivation

　　Michael Zhen pays attention to both B-end services and C-end products.

　　Scan the three core apps of Almighty King, Business Card Almighty King and Kaixinbao to support the popularity of Hehe Information.

　　Look at the user base first.

　　By the end of 2022, the users of the above three apps in the APP Store and Google Play application market had downloaded more than 800 million for the first time, and the total monthly activities of each channel exceeded 130 million.

　　In the Huawei application market, in the past three and a half years, the cumulative first download volume of three apps is about 72.72 million.

　　Roughly estimated, Michael Zhen products radiated nearly 900 million users, and the revenue from C-end APP business was 730 million yuan last year, accounting for more than 70% of the total revenue.

　　VIP users have a monthly subscription and an annual subscription, while ordinary users pay a single fee. With the help of C-end products, the annual order volume in Michael Zhen exceeds 10 million, and the user's stickiness is not low.

　　Take the scanning almighty king who carries the banner of income as an example.

　　Last year, the average monthly VIP renewal rate of old customers of this APP reached 82.65%, and the proportion of overall paying users increased from 3.73% in 2020 to 4.33%.

　　Not only business people with strong ability to pay, but also non-business users such as teachers and students.

　　Michael Zhen conducted a survey in June, 2020, and the percentage of students scanning Almighty King was 24%, and the percentage of users in education and training scenes was 11%.

　　The B end is for nearly 30 industries such as banking, securities, insurance, manufacturing and retail. According to the prospectus, among Fortune 500 companies in 2022, Michael Zhen has covered more than 125 customers, such as Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Samsung, Lenovo and Amazon.

　　Among the company's top five customers, Google, JD.COM, ByteDance and others spent 66 million yuan on advertising.

　　In the past three years, B-end service revenue has increased by over 100 million yuan, with a compound growth rate of about 27%.

　　In terms of segmentation, the growth rate of financial customers is obvious.

　　Especially in 2021, the income of customers in banking, securities and other financial sectors increased by 73.86% year-on-year.

　　It is worth mentioning that with the development of B-end business, Michael Zhen attracts sales talents with high salaries.

　　During the reporting period, the number of salespeople increased from 165 to 2.20, and the average salary increased from 320,000 yuan to 444,000 yuan.

　　As the actual controller of the company, before the IPO, Michael Zhen controlled 39.9% of the company's shares with an annual salary of about 4.2 million.

　　Technical bottoming

　　"The company is driven by technology. Four of the five people who started their business together were born in artificial intelligence."

　　Chen Qingshan, deputy general manager of Hopewell Information, publicly disclosed that he and Michael Zhen, Luo Xiping, Longteng and others were former employees of Motorola China Research Institute, responsible for the research and development of handwriting recognition system and speech recognition technology.

　　Michael Zhen was born in Jingzhou, Hubei Province in 1968. After receiving his doctorate in pattern recognition and artificial intelligence from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000, he joined Motorola Global Laboratory, specializing in OCR technology.

　　After the establishment of Hopewell Information, Michael Zhen led a team to complete the research and development of business card omnipotent king and scanning omnipotent king.

　　For example, in order to improve the recognition rate of scrawled handwriting, he and his team developed technologies such as deep learning, quantization and accelerated compression based on edge devices, and the average recognition rate of handwritten characters of scanning Almighty King reached ninety-seven percent.

　　The overall credit awareness of the society has improved, and individual users are good at querying corporate business big data in business negotiation, product marketing, job hunting and other scenarios. In 2022, the C-end market of China's business information inquiry will reach 1.13 billion yuan.

　　Michael Zhen led a team to explore the commercial value of enterprise-level data. In 2015, Qixinbao began to run.

　　"The acquisition of data is all open channels."

　　Chen Qingshan said in a public interview that the business card omnipotent king with a large amount of business personal information is only connected with Kaixinbao in one direction. "The data of the business card omnipotent king are all private data and will not be touched internally."

　　It is reported that Qixinbao has collected more than 100 billion pieces of real-time dynamic data from 230 million enterprises in China, and provided more than 1,000 data feature labels such as industry and commerce, equity and judicial litigation.

　　According to burning knowledge consulting, in the C-end market of commercial big data in China in 2022, Qixinbao City occupied 7%, ranking third.

　　Do the bottom, Michael Zhen is willing to pay people.

　　From 2020 to 2022, the total investment in research and development of Hehe Information is about 680 million yuan, accounting for nearly 30% of the operating income; By the end of last year, there were 499 R&D personnel, accounting for 55%.

　　The 1.5 billion funds raised by this listing will all be used for R&D projects such as intelligent character recognition and commercial big data.

　　Seek a breakthrough

　　The technology gene is the foundation, and the combined information is stable and profitable.

　　In 2022, the company's revenue reached 988 million yuan; The net profit exceeds 280 million yuan, and it is expected to increase by 35.38% to 62.46% in the first half of this year.

　　The performance is gratifying, and Qixinbao has not kept up.

　　This APP revenue accounted for the proportion of total revenue, which decreased by 4 percentage points to 7.72% in the past two years; The market share is also far from that of Tianyancha and Enterprise Investigation, and the market share of the latter two is about 78%.

　　Michael Zhen said frankly in the prospectus that "it failed to carry out large-scale marketing promotion in the early stage of determining the competitive pattern."

　　From 2017 to 2019, the advertising expenses of Qixinbao totaled about 73.8 million yuan, and in the same period, Tianyancha invested nearly 200 million yuan.

　　Last year, Michael Zhen spent more than 22 million yuan on advertising, only about 1/3 of that of a year ago. However, competitors hired spokespersons with high profile and beat below-the-line, which widened the gap in brand awareness.

　　Kaixinbao also encountered compliance risks.

　　In September, 2021, Hopewell Information was submitted for the first time. In the second round of inquiries by the CSRC, the company's compliance management and data security were questioned. At that time, the B-side stock credit information business had not been rectified; In November of the same year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reported that Qixinbao collected personal information in a certain version of Huawei's application market.

　　In the prospectus, Hehe Information admits that there are risks related to data security and personal privacy protection; In addition, in recent years, overseas business income accounted for more than 30%, and the legal and regulatory environment involved was complicated.

　　In view of this, Michael Zhen is committed to scenario application and promotes intelligent industrialization. "Park investment is a typical application scenario of commercial big data technology."

　　Its investment promotion brain of Kaixin aims at the government and parks, aggregates global 1,000+strategic emerging industries, 280+ industrial chains and 8 million+enterprises, combs the development trends of industrial chains, industrial layout and distribution of key enterprises, and empowers regional industries.

　　Taking advantage of AI Dongfeng, Michael Zhen is making every effort to seize the B-end business opportunities.