Recently, according to the information disclosed on the website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, the listing counseling and filing of Qichacha Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Qichacha") was accepted by the Jiangsu Securities Regulatory Bureau, and the counseling agency is CITIC Securities. According to the counseling process arrangement, Qichacha will complete the counseling acceptance in May 2024.
Red Star Capital Bureau noted that this is another domestic head business inquiry giant hitting the capital market after Qixinbao's parent company, Hehe Information, sprinted to the Science and Technology Innovation Board.
However, as a business query platform, problems such as serious industry homogeneity and incorrect data disclosure have also brought many challenges to the IPO road of Qichacha.
Data map according to Visual China
(a)
The entrepreneurial story of unintentional willows
The founder of Qichacha is Chen Deqiang, a native of Wenzhou, Zhejiang. He once said in an interview with the media that the founding of Qichacha is an unintentional story.
In 2014, Chen Deqiang and two other partners, Yang Jing and Shi Yang, both like sports, decided to do a stadium rental project, mainly providing venue rental services.
But they looked around at that time and found that many times the "boss" of the venue they found was just a middleman, and how to find the real boss became a big demand for them.
At that time, Jiangsu, Shanghai and other places in China opened up industrial and commercial information, so Chen Deqiang and others made a query tool for WeChat public account, and entered the name of the venue on it to query industrial and commercial information.
Originally, this official account was a supporting service for the project, but Chen Deqiang found that his business friends liked to use it very much, and they wanted to check the company's "details" through this platform.
Immediately after the reform of the national industrial and commercial registration system, the data of the industrial and commercial system were connected to the then State Administration for Industry and Commerce. As a result, Chen Deqiang's unintentional business became bigger and bigger, and in just three months, the number of users increased from 200 to 70,000. Chen Deqiang also said that this was an unexpected result.
According to public information, Qichacha has a corporate credit database covering nearly 550 million enterprises around the world, with more than 400 million users and a cumulative query volume of more than 10 trillion times, bringing together business information from 80 industrial chains, 8,000 industries and 6,000 subdivisions in China.
To sum up, Qichacha's business model mainly crawls public data through technology, and then integrates the data to serve enterprise customers (ToB) and general users (ToC).
According to international online reports, the profit model of Qichacha is: most of the services to C are basically free, and the deeper services are customized members, and users need to buy memberships or recharge and pay before they can use specific services;
From the perspective of the financing process, Qichacha has received 8 rounds of financing.
In 2015, Qichacha received its first investment, which was 2.2 million yuan from Xianfeng Investment. In 2019, Qichacha received hundreds of millions of yuan in Series C financing from Wind Investment and Xingfu Capital, and after the completion of the C round of strategic financing, Qichacha was valued at more than 3 billion yuan.
In 2020, the company seized the D round of financing from Guofang Innovation, Oriza Chenkun, and Xingfu Capital, and in October 2023, it received the D+ round of financing from CITIC Securities, and the latest valuation was not disclosed.
(b)
The homogeneity of the industry is serious
From the perspective of the industry, at present, the head aggregation effect of the domestic business inquiry sector has been very obvious.
According to the "Research Report on the Development of Enterprise Credit Big Data Industry" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, in 2022, Qichacha and Tianyancha will rank first and second in the enterprise credit big data application market with a market share of 42.32% and 38.63% respectively, and other "Chacha" companies will occupy less than 20% of the market share, forming a "three-legged" situation in the market.
At the same time, the homogenization of the business inquiry field as a whole from products to services is very serious.
Taking the two companies of Qichacha and Tianyancha as examples, the similarity of the two platforms in the main interface and content layout is very high, and the top of the Qichacha search box displays "Check the enterprise, check the risk, check the bidding", and Tianyancha shows "Check the company, check the boss, check the relationship".
In terms of membership payment, Qichacha VIP members charge 388 yuan a year, SVIP members charge 1,800 yuan a year, Tianyancha individual annual membership charges 360 yuan, and SVIP members charge 1,800 yuan a year. The fees charged by the two companies are also basically the same.
Source: Qichacha official website
The service content is too homogeneous, so that the product experience of Qichacha may lack a competitive advantage, because for most consumers, the service of which one to buy seems to be similar.
It is worth mentioning that the two companies, Qichacha and Tianyancha, have also had some disputes due to incidents such as the "three checks" advertising slogan.
In July 2019, Tianyancha sued Qichacha to the court because it believed that Qichacha used the advertising slogan "check the company, check the boss, check the relationship" in which it had prior rights in its operation.
On April 8, 2020, the Beijing Haidian District People's Court issued an injunction against Qichacha, requiring it to no longer use Tianyancha's "three checks" advertising slogan and similar terms that are likely to cause confusion and misidentification on any occasion.
On June 29 of the same year, Qichacha issued an "Announcement on Suing Tianyancha for Unfair Competition" on its official Weibo, stating that it had filed a civil lawsuit with the Suzhou Intermediate People's Court against Tianyancha for suspected "unfair competition" and claimed 5 million yuan.
On the evening of the same day, Tianyancha issued "Some Suggestions to Friends and Merchants "Enterprise Chacha"" in response, bluntly saying, "Don't shout to catch a thief, I am ready to countersue." ”
In general, in the business of business inquiry, each company is faced with the same public data, and it is difficult for the products to form essential differences, resulting in serious homogeneous competition in the entire track, and ultimately leading to non-stop "fighting" among them.
How to find its own competitive advantage is a question that Qichacha has to think about when it plans to impact IPO.
(c)
Data "oolong" has become a hidden danger
In addition, as a big data platform, Qichacha has also become a potential risk for the development of enterprises due to the "oolong" incident caused by incorrect data disclosure.
In fact, on the China Judgment Network and the Black Cat Complaint Platform, there have been many lawsuits and complaints related to enterprise investigations, including individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises, and large enterprises.
Taking Ant Financial as an example, on May 5, 2019, Qichacha pushed the information "Ying Jun, a new member of the liquidation team of Ant Micro Loan", to users, and listed the risk level of this information as "warning information", which attracted more attention.
Immediately Ant Financial made an urgent clarification, saying that the news was untrue, and that Ant Micro Loan had been operating normally and in good condition since its establishment.
In early 2016, Ant Financial submitted to the industrial and commercial authorities to terminate the liquidation and continue to operate normally. The "oolong" incident also caused Qichacha to go to court with Ant Financial.
On the user side, such "oolong" incidents are also not uncommon.
For example, on October 1, 2021, some netizens complained on the Black Cat complaint platform: "The legal person of Hunan Tangzhu Construction Labor Co., Ltd. on the Qichacha platform shows that it is my name and is associated with my other enterprises. In fact, I have no relationship with this company, and I am currently in talks about investing...... As a result, there was a gap between me and my partner, and in the end, the negotiation was not successful. ”
On October 15 of the same year, Qichacha replied on the Black Cat complaint platform: "The information has been dislinked, I'm very sorry." ”
Source: Black Cat Complaint
In addition, on the black cat complaint platform, you can also see some users complaining about the enterprise check, the reason is "wrong mobile phone number", "wrong name" and so on. It can be seen that as a big data platform, Qichacha frequently has problems with data accuracy, which may bring a greater trust crisis to enterprises.
Source: Black Cat Complaint
For Qichacha, how to reduce and control misinformation has become a top priority for enterprises. Because of wrong or false information, it will directly damage the corporate image of Qichacha, and may also bring business risks and legal risks.
brief summary
As the first business query platform in China, Qichacha has developed for nearly ten years, and now it is one step closer to the capital market, but how to tell its own story in the homogeneous market and how to ensure the accuracy of its own data has become a major test for Qichacha.
Red Star News reporter Liu Mi
Edited by Yu Dongmei
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