Author | Li Lan
Edit | Chapter Ripple
On March 30, three years ago, officer Lei announced to build a car. One hundred days later, Xiaomi led nearly 20 supply chain manufacturers such as Zongmu Technology, a smart driving solution provider.
As one of the first companies to invest and bet after Xiaomi entered the car, on March 28, 2024,On the day when Xiaomi’s first car, SU7, went public, Zongmu Technology also formally submitted a prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, intending to list the main board.
This is the third listing of Zongmu Technology.
In January 2017, Zongmu Technology was listed on the New Third Board and delisted in December of the same year. The reason given was "needed for the adjustment of the company’s operation and development strategy".
In November 2022, Zongmu Technology science and technology innovation board’s IPO application was accepted by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, and it planned to raise 2 billion yuan, but in September 2023, it chose to withdraw its listing application in science and technology innovation board.
Now,Vertical scientific and technological choiceGive up science and technology innovation board and launch a sprint to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
fromAccording to the prospectus,Zongmu Technology has been more cautious in its wording this time, and put more emphasis on products. At the same time, before applying for IPO, it also carried out a series of "light" actions.
asThe "veteran" who broke into the capital market for the third time doesn’t know.Can the listing of Zongmu Technology go smoothly this time?
01
The financial report has improved, and the business is exploring.
The most eye-catching part of the prospectus is that the gross profit margin has finally turned positive.
Compared with the unprofitable situation in November 2022, Zongmu Technology has achieved a positive gross profit margin. From 2021 to 2023, Zongmu Technology’s gross profit margin was -8.9%, -3.5% and 3.5%, respectively, corresponding to a gross profit of-20.07 million yuan,-16.29 million yuan and a profit of 17.33 million yuan. Revenue has a steady growth with a compound annual growth rate of 48.7%.
Moreover, the cash flow of Zongmu Technology has also become stable. According to the prospectus, there is still a lot of room for fault tolerance. As of January 31, 2024, Zongmu Technology had 33.2 million yuan in cash assets, leaving 1.19 billion yuan in unused bank facilities.
How did Zongmu Technology achieve "rebirth"?A lot of factors benefit from the continuous growth of the market as a whole.
Before the real commercialization of L4 comes, L2+ has the widest application prospect, among which, the "integrated operation and parking" has the highest cost performance. According to the monitoring data of the Institute of Advanced Technology Intelligent Automobile, in 2023, 3,504,800 new cars with automatic parking were delivered as standard in China market (excluding import and export), up by 22.10% year-on-year.
According to the data in the prospectus, in 2022, about 20% of the ADAS solution market for passenger cars in China will be automatic parking. Among them, APA solutions account for more than 80%. Based on the corresponding income in 2022, Zongmu Technology is the second in China and the first in China respectively.
At present, most parking and parking integrated solutions in the market are actually designed and integrated based on the 1.0 architecture, which simply combines the driving SoC and the parking SoC into one box. The biggest technical moat of technology is that only a single SoC can solve the two problems of parking and parking.
Although three of the top five automatic parking APA schemes are foreign suppliers,However, domestic suppliers have the advantage of being "close to the water", which is convenient to provide personalized customized services to domestic new energy vehicle enterprises. The market share of domestic suppliers has increased from less than 5% in 2018 to 16.7% in 2022, and it is expected to exceed 25.0% in 2027..
According to the data of burning knowledge consulting, in terms of sales revenue in 2022, the ranking of the company among mainland suppliers in China is as follows: Zongmu Technology ranks fifth in the ADAS market with a market share of 1.0%; Ranked second in the automatic parking solution market, with a market share of 4.9%; Ranked first in APA parking solution market, with a market share of 5.6%.
According to the prospectus,AVP and APA platforms have been used in 28 models, and the energy service robot for intelligent mobile energy solutions is equipped with L4-level autopilot function supported by Drop’nGo platform..
From the most basic composition, the products of Zongmu Technology can be divided into two main directions:First, intelligent driving hardware and solutions, including domain controller and camera, 4D millimeter-wave radar, ultrasonic radar and other gauge sensors; Second, provide research and development services related to autonomous driving.
The hardware part is divided into three products,That is, panoramic surveillance camera, automatic parking assistance function and autonomous parking function, which respectively correspond to three scenes: car panoramic "reversing radar", automatic parking in the car and remote parking outside the car..
A domain controller is a computer that manages specific vehicle functions or fields, such as active safety, automatic driving, parking or parking. The controller of Zongmu Science and Technology Domain collects data from sensors around the vehicle (including radar, camera and ultrasonic sensor) to build a model of the surrounding environment. The software algorithm embedded in the domain controller will then determine the appropriate action of the vehicle according to the model. Moreover, Zongmu Technology has also developed a separate software algorithm, which can be delivered as a comprehensive software embedded hardware product or as an independent software product.
Finally, the computing platform of Zongmu Technology provides the basis for all function iterations, and the Drop’nGo platform supports the development of intelligent driving functions from L0 to L4.
According to the prospectus, since its launch in 2017, the Drop’nGo platform has gone through several iterations, enhancing its multi-sensor data fusion capability, improving its adaptability to weather and lighting conditions, and expanding its application scenarios from indoor to outdoor.
The third generation of Drop’nGo platform can provide L2+ comprehensive intelligent parking function on passenger cars, and further empower energy solutions with L4 automatic driving function.
The hardware that science and technology can make money has changed year by year.
In December 2022, in the prospectus of Zongmu Technology,Describing himself as "one of the few first-class suppliers in China that can provide intelligent driving systems for automobiles, including L0-L4 intelligent driving control units and intelligent sensors", the importance attached to control units has declined.
From the perspective of income structure, Zongmu Technology mainly relied on car trajectory sensors for profit last year.
At present, the domestic self-driving auto market dominated by L2+ level still needs the second-gear APA integrated parking solution. According to the prospectus, the company is in a leading position in the market of ADAS, automatic parking and APA (automatic parking assistance system) parking solutions.
From the perspective of profitability, the highest gross profit margin is the R&D services related to autonomous driving. In 2021 and 2022, the gross profit margin reached 42.7% and 50.8% respectively. However, in 2023, there was a waist cut, only 18.6%. Looking at the technology, it is pointed out that this is mainly due to the increasingly fierce market competition and the increase in project complexity, resulting in increased costs.
From the data of the prospectus alone, although Zongmu Technology does not have much exponential growth, it still has extraordinary incremental space.
Moreover, there are more choices when getting through the depth of customers. As of December, 2022, the overall customer matrix is still relatively simple. Among them, Cyrus accounts for more than 50% of the revenue, and the top five customers account for nearly 90%. By 2023, the number one customer has dropped to 43.8%, the customer diversity has increased, and the ability to resist risks has also been significantly enhanced.
Zongmu Technology is also constantly adjusting its customer service mode, and the autonomous driving R&D service has received a large order. In December 2023, it successfully obtained the Amphiman 3000 fixed-point from Changan Automobile to support its new car platform for a series of models, and it is expected to be mass-produced in 2024.
However, Zongmu Technology is still at a loss.
From 2021 to 2023, the net losses of Zongmu Technology were 434 million yuan, 588 million yuan and 564 million yuan respectively, and the adjusted net losses were 382 million yuan, 477 million yuan and 516 million yuan respectively.The total net loss for three years exceeded 1.3 billion yuan.
Of course, Zongmu Technology also has an explanation for this persistent loss.Even similar to the contents in the prospectus required for listing in science and technology innovation board in 2022, the chip is too expensive.
According to Zongmu Technology,With the overcapacity of global chips, this adverse impact on costs will be significantly reduced in the future. After all, whether it is hardware upgrade or solution iteration, the core need is computing power..
02
High-profile financing, multiple IPOs
Zongmu technology has always been highly anticipated by the capital market.
In the latest shareholding structure, Hong Kong Zongmu is the largest shareholder of the company, holding 22.17% of the shares. As a concerted action, Tang Rui and his mother Li Xiaoling control 33.3% of the shares of the company through multiple entities. In addition, Junlian Capital holds 7.55% of the shares as the second largest shareholder, while Xiaomi Group, which has received much attention, ranks the fifth largest shareholder with 4.73% of the shares.
The earliest round of financing record of Zongmu Technology occurred in 2015. In the previous year, in 2014, Mobileye, the world’s largest ADAS manufacturer, landed on the New York Stock Exchange, which means that the track of ADAS has been verified and opened a financing channel for Zongmu Technology, which is on the same track.
In June, 2021, Zongmu Technology announced the formal completion of Series D financing with a cumulative amount of $190 million.. Among them, the D3 round was led by Xiaomi Changjiang Industrial Fund, and the investors included Fosun Chuangfu, Langtai Capital, Shanghai Kechuang, Industrial Bank, strategic investors Changan Automobile and Coboda Investment.
Zongmu Technology completed 9 rounds of financing before IPO, and the accumulated subscription amount reached 2.247 billion yuan. Among them, in the E round of financing in March 2022, Zongmu Technology raised 867 million yuan at the subscription price of 93.56 yuan/share, and the company’s valuation exceeded 9 billion yuan.
However, the financing journey of Zongmu Technology is always interrupted for various reasons..
Zongmu used to be very close to listing. On January 19th, 2017, Zongmu Technology was approved to be listed on the National Small and Medium Enterprise Share Transfer System (NEEQ) with the stock code of 870816. However, "considering the business strategy and compliance cost at that time, we adjusted the future development strategy". Less than one year later, Zongmu Technology completed the termination of listing on December 11th, 2017.
The vigorous Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2022 has almost become a reality. However, in the end, due to the development strategy and other reasons, Zongmu Technology voluntarily withdrew its previous A-share listing application, and the withdrawal was officially accepted on September 27, 2023.
In the meantime,There is also news from the pulse that Zongmu Technology has a saying that the salary of fresh graduates will be reduced by 20%.
It may be that the road to listing is not smooth and the top management has fluctuated.In February 2024,CTO Wang Fan joined Beidou Zhilian, and Wang Fan was one of the four core executives of Zongmu Technology. He started to build the Beijing Autopilot R&D Center, and completed the research and development of AVP1.0 in Zongmu Technology in 2017.
Fortunately, the new employee was the original team, and he was replaced by Jiang Weiping. He joined Zongmu Technology as early as 2013, and had previously worked in CSR Semiconductor Company and NVIDIA. Later, he left Zongmu Technology due to infighting and did not return to Zongmu until the end of 2022.
03
Go to the new track
On the premise that the APA market is saturated, Zongmu Technology tries to go further to the charging robot track.
In 2023, nearly 65% of Zongmu Technology’s revenue sources are car gauge sensors. Compared with technology companies, Zongmu Technology is more like a manufacturing enterprise. This may come from another manufacturing attribute of the founder, Tang Rui, CEO, who also founded Can Cong Robot.
In the official LinkedIn,The latest position of Zongmu Technology is the on-site operation and maintenance engineer of intelligent energy storage charging robot, and some positions are in Ningbo, mainly in Shanghai.
In late January of this year, Zongmu Technology and Can Cong Science and Technology launched the charging treasure in the automatic driving field and the low-speed fully automatic driving charging robot FlashBot. According to the prospectus,The first generation of FlashBot is equipped with 104 kWh storage capacity, which is one of the robots with the highest storage capacity among all L4-class self-driving energy service robots developed in the world.
Tang Rui said, "Can Cong robots are building a highly flexible mobile energy network to promote energy trading in a larger space-time range." At the application level, the most intuitive embodiment is to save electricity and money.
In December last year, two Flashbot were put into commercial operation in Zhangjiang Park, and an average of 272 kwh of electricity was purchased from the local microgrid every day, of which 185 kwh was sold back to the microgrid, and 87.5 kwh was used to provide charging service for new energy vehicles, with an average daily cycle of 2.6 times, which brought more than 12,000 yuan in income in that month, that is, the average daily net income of each device was close to that of 200 yuan.
Before the robot officially appeared, Zongmu Technology had actually been laying out its energy business.Zongmu Technology has also designed a set of SaaS software and a DragonNet program to maintain on-site operation. If the charging robot of Zongmu Technology can be commercialized, it may make some changes in the charging pile scene.
According to the data in the prospectus, from 2021 to 2023, the sales revenue of Zongmu Technology from wireless charging equipment and accessories for new energy vehicles was 129,000 yuan, 11.357 million yuan and 437,000 yuan respectively.
In addition, as an "external charging treasure" loaded with sensors, Flashbot is also a part of the flywheel that I hope to build. The energy service robot conducts algorithm training in different driving cases, and then gives data support to the ADAS car-level hardware.
Looking at the highlights of this reorganization of business, Zongmu Technology began to break through into more subdivided markets, and may be able to complete the listing more lightly. At that time, it will be the third listed company in the Xiaomi automobile industry chain after Sagitar and Hesai.
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