Shangtang technology, the leader of the “Ai four dragons”, successfully realized the Hong Kong stock IPO at the end of 2021. Before listing, almost all observers criticized and questioned the company’s long-term financial situation, uncertain business model and scientist oriented governance structure.
However, the stock price trend of Shangtang after its listing shows the different real views of investors in the secondary market.
On December 30, 2021, the opening price of Shangtang soared by 23% and the closing price still rose by more than 7%; On December 31, Shangtang technology suddenly rose by more than 30%; On January 3, 2022, Shangtang rose 41% again, closing at HK $7.75, with a turnover of nearly HK $3.2 billion. Its share price has doubled over the issue price in three days, with a total market value of HK $257.9 billion.
Tang Xiaoou is worth 53.4 billion
Shangtang’s share price soared. The first beneficiary is the company’s founder.
According to the prospectus, before the IPO, Tang Xiaoou, founder of Shangtang technology, held 21.73% of the shares. Based on the current market value, Tang Xiaoou was worth HK $53.475 billion.
The Chinese AI community has an interesting evaluation of Tang Xiaoou: an outstanding talk show actor delayed by the cause of artificial intelligence.
“it’s my turn to give a speech. I’ll send a notice for the conference first. Lunch is cancelled today and afternoon tea is changed. Don’t worry. Listen slowly.”
“the organizing committee told me that there were about 10 million people watching the live broadcast on the Internet today, so I was very nervous. I made a 100 page ppt. I think 100000 people can afford the audience. However, the organizing committee was very nervous. I kept asking me if it would be overtime to talk about 100 pages in 40 minutes. I promised them, rest assured, it will.”
“we eat grass and squeeze AI.”
According to the retrospective data, Tang Xiaoou, born in Anshan City, Liaoning Province, went to the United States for further study the year after he graduated from the University of science and technology of China and won his master’s and doctoral degrees. After graduating from MIT, Tang Xiaoou returned home to join the Chinese University of Hong Kong and founded the Multimedia Laboratory of CUHK. It was in this laboratory that Tang Xiaoou became the Huangpu Military Academy, bringing out the founding team of Shangtang technology.
At hkcua, Tang Xiaoou met a young man, Xu Li. Xu Li, from Shanghai, was sent to the computer department of Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2000 and was sent to graduate school four years later. Subsequently, he received his doctorate from the Department of computer science and engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Among the following CO founders, Wang Xiaogang graduated from the youth class of China University of science and technology; Xu Bing is also from the Multimedia Laboratory of CUHK. When he was a sophomore, he took Tang Xiaoou’s computer vision course and then joined the multimedia laboratory; Then came Yang Fan, who had worked in Microsoft Research Asia for many years.
Xu Lizeng said publicly, “the competition of artificial intelligence is the competition of talents.” By the end of June 2021, Shangtang technology has a technology R & D team including 40 professors, more than 250 doctoral and doctoral students, and 3593 scientists and engineers, accounting for more than two-thirds of the company’s staff, with an average age of 31.
In addition to the founding team, the cornerstone investors of Shangtang technology’s IPO may most directly benefit from the soaring stock price.
Previously, for some well-known reasons, Shangtang technology’s Hong Kong stock IPO was interrupted and restarted quickly. But there was a change in the restarted IPO – the list of cornerstone investors changed.
Previously, Shangtang introduced nine cornerstone investors, including the mixed ownership reform fund initiated by China Chengtong, Guosheng overseas Hong Kong, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry equity investment fund, SAIC Hong Kong, GF fund, Pleiad fund, WT, focustar and helved.
However, in the new IPO, the original mixed ownership reform fund initiated by China Chengtong, Guosheng overseas Hong Kong, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry equity investment fund and SAIC Hong Kong remain unchanged, and Shanghai Xuhui capital, Guotai Junan Securities Co.Ltd(601211) securities investment, Hong Kong Science and Technology Park venture capital fund, Xima ophthalmology and Taizhou culture and tourism are newly introduced; However, Guangfa fund, Pleiad fund, WT, focustar and hel ved in the original list have disappeared.
This advance and retreat, I don’t know how the parties feel.
debate on the long-term value of Chinese AI enterprises
Why did Shangtang’s successful IPO and soaring share price attract high attention in the market?
many disputes around Shangtang can be seen as the epitome of the external judgment on the business logic and development situation of China’s AI industry in recent ten years.
Over the years, Chinese AI enterprises have basically based themselves on the model of to B, and its essence is customized “outsourcing” business. Seemingly tall AI companies do the “hardest work” for hardware companies such as algorithms and SDK projects, and “the landing caliber is narrow and the demand is unstable”.
When entering the vertical track, AI enterprises encounter the competition of traditional industry leader “+ AI”. Behind this, some technologies that AI companies used to be proud of are being popularized and popularized. AI companies and non AI companies can no longer be regarded as simple and effective industry barriers. Some general and infrastructure technologies are being imperceptibly used by companies in all industries.
When building the platform layout, AI enterprises are faced with the attack of free and open platforms of Internet giants such as bat. The industrial reality behind this is that the threshold of general AI technology has been reduced very low; The calculation of the giants is to attract more enterprise users, create ecology and accumulate data, and form a profit closed loop of “Ai soliciting customers and cloud computing making money” with existing cloud computing and other businesses.
In the face of the above industrial reality, why does today’s Shangtang get the “high view” of the capital market?
Some people in the AI industry hold a view that with the continuous implementation of AI commercialization, there will be more and more long tail segmentation needs in all walks of life. Although the application frequency is low, it has great commercial value and is the key to open the value closed loop. There is also a conclusion in the industry: the most direct reason for the difficulty of commercialization of AI is that the uniqueness of each scene determines the high customization cost.
However, the huge scale and complex scenarios of China’s complete industrial chain can realize the model of “standardization + customization” after accumulating to a certain level, which has been verified in the e-commerce F2C model. Today, with the continuous evolution of the industry and the continuous accumulation of cases, the proportion of standards is rising, the demand for customization is deepening, and the cost will be effectively controlled after crossing the threshold.
Thus, the original technical route is a single direction and a single route, but today GM is becoming possible. A powerful general model coupled with industry attributes can promote a breakthrough in the industry.
However, these require not only the algorithm research of professional AI team, but also the long-term capital investment of computing power accumulation and platform construction. Every year before, Shangtang invested nearly 40% of its revenue in core R & D. since its establishment, it has built several supercomputing centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tokyo, Singapore and other places, and invested 10 billion in computing infrastructure.
Unlike the consumer Internet, AI can quickly create business and profit scale by relying on the migration of business model and the influx of large capital. Technology research and development, scene mining, market education, general ability and customization ability all need time. Time cannot be compressed and will not be let down.
This makes Shangtang explore a unique survival zone between “traditional industry + AI” and “Internet open AI platform”.
just a few days ago, Xu Li said affectionately at the listing ceremony: “it is a rare road to have continuous large-scale technology investment to bring innovation, and then business model development. The difficulty lies in business uncertainty. But when we see that artificial intelligence has broken through the ‘industrial red line’ in many industries, let us more firmly believe in the inclusive value that technology breakthrough can bring.”
(Shanghai Securities News)
