On December 17, SenseTime was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which caused countless netizens to shout and shout, and China's AI industry ushered in hope.
In fact, senseTime's road to listing can be described as full of difficulties and difficulties. However, SenseTime has not given up and has been fighting for the opportunity to go public. In the end, SenseTime achieved its goal and entered the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Some people commented that the listing can help SenseTime solve the problem of funding, and sensetime is likely to develop into the strongest AI company in Asia in the future.
Asia's strongest AI company
SenseTime, Yitu Technology, Megvii Technology, and Yuncong Technology are called the "FOUR LITTLE DRAGONS OF AI" in China, each dominating the AI industry. However, compared with the other three companies, SenseTime's technical level is stronger and its commercial layout is broader. In terms of technical level, SenseTime does not stick to a subtle field, but realizes the strategy of "blossoming everywhere". From face recognition and voice input to AI chips and AI robots, the core technologies in all aspects of the AI industry are currently involved in SenseTime.
In terms of business layout, the cutting-edge projects of the AI industry such as smart city, smart industry, and smart medical care are all within the commercial territory of SenseTime, and it is better to say that SenseTime is an AI company than an AI company. At present, SenseTime has won more than 70 global championships and more than 800 AI invention patents, and many people in the industry do not shy away from praising SenseTime as the most powerful AI company in Asia.
The reason why SenseTime has achieved such high achievements is inextricably linked to its strong scientific research team. In fact, SenseTime is the "science class origin" of the Eight Classics of Zheng'er. The founding team is the same doctoral degree winner, among which Tang Xiaoou and Wang Xiaogang are alumni of MIT, both are doctors of MIT, and Tang Xiaoou is also a professor at MIT. The other two co-founders, Xu Li and Xu Bing, are PhD recipients from CUHK, and both of them are also quite strong in their academic strength.
As of now, SenseTime's R&D team has 40 professors, more than 250 PhDs, and more than 3,000 scientists and engineers. It is precisely because of this that the scientific research technology of the entire SenseTime technology enterprise is so strong, and the entire enterprise exudes a strong academic atmosphere, and this R&D team has an almost crazy attachment to technology. It is precisely this kind of persistence that has made SenseTime reach today's height.
Behind the strong strength is a series of losses
However, behind senseTime's strong scientific research strength, it is actually the company's consecutive years of losses. Looking at the financial statements of SenseTime in recent years, we can find that SenseTime has been in a loss in the past three years, with a loss of 3.433 billion yuan in 2018, a loss of 4.968 billion yuan in 2019, a loss of 12.158 billion yuan in 2020, and this year's experts predict that the amount of loss of SenseTime may exceed 15 billion yuan.
It can be seen that SenseTime is not only in perennial losses, but also the strength of the loss is getting bigger and bigger, which makes many people inevitably sweat for SenseTime, even though SenseTime has frequently raised funds more than ten times in recent years, but there is still no way to alleviate the tense capital chain problem of SenseTime.
However, because sensetime's financial situation in recent years is not very optimistic, so the listing application of SenseTime has not been passed, if it continues likely to be in a desperate situation because of financial problems, fortunately, at the critical moment, the state has provided certain policy support for SenseTime, which makes SenseTime technology able to go public smoothly. In fact, the reason why SenseTime has been in a loss in recent years is not because of business problems.
First of all, SenseTime's investment in technology research and development is very large, which is almost a common problem of domestic science and technology enterprises, and many large domestic enterprises are basically borrowing money to survive in order to develop technology. At present, among domestic AI companies, SenseTime's annual R&D investment is the highest, reaching tens of billions of dollars per year.
Secondly, SenseTime's research technology is too avant-garde, and many technologies are not yet useful, so the monetization ability of these technologies is very limited, which is also an important reason for the difficulty of realizing the research results of SenseTime.
summary
Overall, senseTime's listing is good news for the Chinese people, which means that Asia's strongest technology company finally no longer has to worry about funds. However, SenseTime should pay attention not to forget the original intention, after the capital intervention, because of the profit-seeking nature, sometimes will not allow enterprises to be too idealistic, SenseTime is likely to give up some of the weak liquidity of the research and development projects, and may even be influenced by capital development direction, which is a very troublesome thing.
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