On June 28, Ruqi Travel officially launched the Hong Kong stock IPO public offering, and plans to sell about 30,004,800 new shares globally through the Hong Kong stock IPO, including about 3 million shares in Hong Kong and about 27 million shares in the international offering, with an issue price of HK$34.00 ~ HK$45.40 per share, and is planned to be listed on July 10, which is expected to sprint to "the first share of autonomous driving operation technology".
According to public information, Ruqi Mobility was established in 2019 by Tencent and Guangzhou Automobile Group, and the company's business includes travel services, technical services, and fleet sales and maintenance that provide a full set of support for drivers and capacity franchisees. Among them, travel services are the key business of Ruqi Travel. Ruqi's cornerstone investors include GAC Industries, Pony.ai, WeRide, and Voyager.
According to the stock book, in 2019, the founding round of financing of Ruqi Travel was completed. At that time, GAC Group joined hands with Tencent and Didi to jointly invest, with an investment of 900 million yuan; The Series A financing took place between January 2022 and April 2023, and GAC Group continued to add more; The third round of financing of Ruqi Mobility, from September 2022 to August 2023, was directly led by GAC Industry, the parent company of GAC Group, and the actual controller behind it was Guangzhou State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
Since its inception, Ruqi Mobility has received three rounds of pre-IPO investment from investors including GAC, GAC Industries, Tencent Mobility, Pony.ai, SPARX Group, DMR, Guangzhou Industrial Investment Group, Hefei Guoxuan and other institutional investors.
In terms of unmanned driving business, it is understood that in 2021, Ruqi Travel will begin to promote the development and commercialization of Robotaxi, and has now provided commercial hybrid operation services of manned online car-hailing and Robotaxi services in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. By the end of 2023, the company's Robotaxi service had accumulated more than 20,000 hours of operation, covering 545 sites.
According to Frost & Sullivan, Ruqi Travel is the second largest travel service platform in the Greater Bay Area in terms of transaction volume in 2023, with a user penetration rate of more than 45% in the Greater Bay Area.
Judging from the prospectus data released by Ruqi Travel, in 2021~2023, Ruqi's travel revenue will be 1.013 billion yuan, 1.368 billion yuan and 2.161 billion yuan respectively, gradually increasing, and the losses during the year will be 684 million yuan, 627 million yuan and 693 million yuan respectively.
Ruqi Travel said in the prospectus that it expects to continue to generate net losses and net operating cash outflows in 2024, 2025 and 2026, so the company has formulated a profit roadmap: including expanding business scale and promoting revenue growth; improve gross margin; Enhance operational and management efficiency and improve current net debt position.
According to financial data, Ruqi's gross profit margin narrowed from -24.2% in 2021 to -10.7% in 2022, and further decreased to -7.0% in 2023.
From the perspective of revenue structure, online car-hailing is still the main source of income for Ruqi Travel. The order volume of Ruqi Mobility's ride-hailing service increased from 4.6 million in 2021 to 9.73 million in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 45.4%. The transaction value of ride-hailing services increased from RMB1,311 million in 2021 to RMB2,714 million in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 43.9%.
It is worth mentioning that in the first half of 2024, the three online car-hailing companies of Dida Chuxing, Ruqi Chuxing, and Cao Cao Chuxing all submitted listing applications to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The first two have gone through two or more application applications, among which Dida Travel has officially landed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on June 28, with a net global offering of about HK$182 million, becoming the first share of shared travel in China.
At the capital market level, at present, the Hong Kong stock market is relatively open, and it is welcome to emerging economy enterprises. As far as online car-hailing companies are concerned, the issue of profitability has always been a major difficulty, and Cao Cao Travel and Ruqi Travel are still in a state of loss.