Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, the "year-end summary" of major companies arrived one after another. China's economy has finally put an end to the epidemic, and there are both challenges and new prospects in 2023. Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, said frankly in his latest internal speech that the company has stabilized the situation amid many uncertainties in 2022 and will move towards the 100 billion goal with higher quality and more leisurely.

On January 18, Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, delivered a keynote speech on "singing again in spite of the wind and rain" at the internal annual meeting. "finally reaching 2023" was his first sentence on the stage.

Unlike Internet companies, iFLYTEK's "year-end summary" is usually held two days before the start of the Spring Festival holiday. On this day, the president of the company will make a business report to all the staff, and the chairman will publish the content related to the strategy. IFLYTEK's "Base Business and systematic Innovation", an important strategy in the era of artificial intelligence, was first released at the company's annual meeting.

In his speech at this year's annual meeting, Liu Qingfeng talked about many topics such as base business, iFLYTEK Superbrain 2030 Project, and high-quality development. He said that although 22 years have not been easy for everyone, relying on the growth of the base business, iFLYTEK laid a solid foundation in 2022 and continued to promote the iFLYTEK Superbrain 2023 project. "relying on the base and systematic innovation, 2023 will open a new stage of high-quality development."

Stabilize the situation and maintain healthy growth of business in the base areas

In 2022, the world situation is treacherous, and the triple pressure of weakening is expected to increase with the shrinking demand and supply shocks faced by the Chinese economy.

The latest data show that China's manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI) fell 1.0 percentage points to 47.0 per cent in December from the previous month, the third consecutive month of decline and the lowest since March 2020, indicating that the economy is in a contraction range. According to the National Development and Reform Commission, the youth unemployment rate reached 17.1% in November 2022. Chinese science and technology Internet companies seem to have a tacit understanding to send out adjustment signals, emphasizing the need to reduce costs and increase efficiency and pay more attention to sound operation in the new year.

IFLYTEK's business also suffered several rounds of impact in 2022, with more than 10 projects in the education business delayed in the third quarter alone, involving 1.6 billion contracts. IFLYTEK's revenue is generally seasonal, accounting for more than 40 per cent of revenue in the fourth quarter, taking 2021 as an example.

However, in the fourth quarter of 2022, with the dynamic changes of the epidemic and the optimization and adjustment of prevention and control strategies, various provinces entered the epidemic peak. "December was supposed to be a precious sprint, but it almost stopped," Liu Qingfeng admitted.

In such a difficult situation, iFLYTEK's base business still recorded 13% year-on-year revenue growth in Q4 and 23% growth for the whole year. Liu Qingfeng revealed at the annual meeting that the progress made in the base business enabled the company to stabilize the situation in 2022 and further consolidate the basic market.

IFLYTEK defines the business with long-term operating capacity, sustainable growth potential, high user dependence and industry demonstration value as the base business. The core of the base business is to "meet the rigid needs of society and promote social progress with value creation". In business, it is directly manifested in helping iFLYTEK to obtain long-term and stable growth in income and enable it to have the ability to cross the economic cycle.

For example, in the education base business, Liu Qingfeng said at the scene of the annual meeting that the examination business, learning machine business and personalized learning manual business increased respectively in 2022.

In terms of medical base business, Ke Daxun Fei Zhi Medical Assistant business districts and counties covered 380 in 2022, with 530 million AI assistance times and 630,000 revised diagnoses. The gross profit of intelligent medical assistant contracts increased by more than 110% in 2022 and is expected to maintain a rapid growth of over 80% in 2023.

"Base business is to deal with the uncertainty of global economic development, it can go through the economic cycle, what it does is rigid demand, no matter how the economy changes, how the society changes, it must be used." Liu Qingfeng said that in the next five years, the annual operating income of the base area will reach 50 billion yuan, with a gross profit of 20 billion yuan, which will become the basic market for the development of the company.

The project of Superbrain 2030 is progressing steadily.

At the annual meeting in 2021, iFLYTEK released the future-oriented "iFLYTEK Superbrain 2030 Project", which is used as a traction to promote the systematic innovation of source technology, so that artificial intelligence can "understand knowledge, learn well and evolve". Finally let the robot into every family.

At this annual meeting, Liu Qingfeng introduced that key technologies such as iFLYTEK speech recognition, speech synthesis, picture and text recognition, and cognitive intelligence will continue to make breakthroughs in 2022, and the new breakthrough in dialogue system has brought new commercial opportunities, and will take the lead in automotive, medical, education and other industries, such as car human-computer interaction, AI consultation, virtual teacher, and so on.

For example, SMART-TTS, a multi-style and multi-emotion speech synthesis system released by the company, greatly improves the speech synthesis experience, has a rich timbre style, and supports 10 + scenarios and 11 emotions, 40 levels of strength adjustment.

Liu Qingfeng said that picture and text recognition continues to maintain the advantage of generation difference, the recognition rate of complex formulas is significantly ahead of the industry, and the original organic chemical recognition scheme has broken through the available threshold for the first time in the industry. "Last year mathematician S.T. Yau came to iFLYTEK. I was very excited to see that very complex formulas could be identified, and I felt it brought great convenience to mathematicians. He also wants us to use robots to translate Euler's Latin papers into English and Chinese and show him the great works. "

Liu Qingfeng continued that machine comprehension has evolved from reading comprehension to knowledge reasoning, making new breakthroughs. The company has successively won the first place in the knowledge reasoning reading comprehension evaluation competition OpenBookQA and QASC, exceeding the human average. At the same time, it has refreshed the world's best results in the logical reasoning reading comprehension competition ReClor.

"We have achieved what is generally recognized as the best level of athletic ability." Liu Qingfeng pointed out that the 0-1 movement intelligence core technology made a big breakthrough last year, so iFLYTEK dared to release the robot superbrain platform AIBOT. By the end of December, there had been 205 developer teams involved. The massive intervention of the development team allows the company to have a large amount of motion process data to train, and the system will take it to a new level in the future.

2023, high-quality development

Relying on base business and systematic innovation, Kodafi will open a new stage of high-quality development in 2023.

For the high-quality development of iFLYTEK, Liu Qingfeng mainly focuses on four dimensions: profit, cash flow, per capita benefit and sustainability.

In the new stage of high-quality development, iFLYTEK's goal is to achieve annual profit growth of more than 30%, cash flow to match profits, and simultaneous and healthy growth. In addition, the per capita benefit has doubled in three years, while operating base areas and continuous flowing business have accounted for more than 80% in five years.

The management change corresponding to this stage of development is to change from scale priority to benefit priority in organizational assessment, upgrade the efficiency index of per capita gross profit and fee-to-gross ratio to profit index, and increase the weight. as a key monitoring index in the process.

The key to achieving high-quality development is talent, the appreciation of talent is the most important appreciation of the company, but also the most valuable asset of the company. Liu Qingfeng said that iFLYTEK ensures the appreciation of talents by enriching the types of echelons, speeding up high-potential development, continuously attracting outstanding talents from schools, strengthening the building of a contingent of cadres, and maintaining the vitality of cadres.

While ensuring profits, Liu Qingfeng also stressed that "if major strategic opportunities arise, we will unswervingly do our best to invest, and iFLYTEK has a bigger dream in mind."

Speaking of iFLYTEK's goal in the era of artificial intelligence, Liu Qingfeng said, "We will unswervingly achieve the goal of hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, but we will face the new domestic and international political and economic situation on a more solid foundation." higher quality and more leisurely. "

By the close of trading on January 17, 2023, the market value of iFLYTEK was 59 times higher than when it went public, while the Shenzhen Composite Index fell 10% and the Shanghai Composite Index fell 11% over the same period. Liu Qingfeng said he was "not worried at all" about the current market capitalization of iFLYTEK, adding that the key issue for the company's development is to return to the root of value creation, and that the company's value will be recognized by more and more long-term investors.

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