As the mobile Internet enters the age of stock, the content carrier with the most user time and traffic is no longer a short video, and the value space contained in its commercial ecosystem is also being focused and explored. Although there is still great uncertainty in the macro environment, and the economic recovery is not as fast as expected, after half a year of fundamental restoration, Yunxiang Technology (02131), the “first stock in short video marketing,” proved with a financial report full of highlights that the company has returned to a “profit track” and has accumulated more room for performance imagination.
In terms of revenue, in the first half of 2023, the company achieved total revenue of RMB 1,621 billion (same unit below), a slight increase from the first half of 2022. Total bills reached RMB 3,840 billion, an increase of 6.63% over the previous year. The above two core data reflecting the scale of the business have maintained an upward trend, which undoubtedly further validates the company's steady growth.
In terms of profit, in the first half of 2023, the company recorded gross profit of 97.02 million yuan, with a gross margin of 5.99%, up 5.07 percentage points from the previous year; it recorded a net profit of 31.46 million yuan, and net interest rate rebounded 7.33 percentage points compared to the full year of last year. It should be pointed out that after only half a year, the company drastically reversed the loss situation that first appeared in the whole of last year, and turned a loss into a profit. The profitability revealed in this also revealed the deep absorption effect of the company's foundation.
The steady scale of revenue and the recovery in gross margin and net interest rate have also prompted Yunxiang Technology's cash flow to continue to improve — by the end of the reporting period, the company's cash and bank balance had reached 526 million yuan, which is more abundant than at the end of last year, which further illustrates the optimization of the company's capital use efficiency.
In the capital market, performance has always been the most direct “litmus test”, and the expansion of Yunxiang Technology's revenue scale in the first half of the year and the recovery in profitability undoubtedly showed the outside world the company's gold content. So, as a leading enterprise in the domestic short video marketing circuit, Yunxiang Technology can still maintain steady progress in a complex external environment. What kind of layout did it actually originate from?
1. Actively embrace the new wave of AIGC and promote the short video marketing business to achieve breakthroughs in “quality” and “quantity”.
As the domestic short video business ecosystem matures, its marketing technology has also greatly advanced, and has collided with the integration of various new technologies to create a new spark. At present, Yunxiang Technology has achieved a multi-faceted layout in the short video field. Its business covers digital content industries such as short video marketing, SaaS cloud services, and brand live streaming operations. Among them, the short video marketing business is the company's basic market. At a time when ChatGPT is setting off a new wave of AIGC, the company is also actively using the power of “Dongfeng” to embed AI technology into internal operation technology systems and external SaaS commercial products, encouraging continuous breakthroughs in team efficiency and improving the profitability of the business.
This can be seen through Yunxiang Technology's growing per capita total bill and per capita video production capacity — according to financial data, the company's per capita total bill amount for the first half of the year increased 18.76% year-on-year to 10.16 million yuan. At the same time, the peak monthly production capacity of its internal video production team has exceeded 21,400 films, and the per capita monthly production capacity has increased by 31.05% over the same period last year to 359 films. Overall, Yunxiang Technology's large-scale production capacity in the commercial short video field has always remained at the forefront of the industry.
Of course, Yunxiang Technology's embrace of AIGC doesn't stop there. During the period, the company completed the construction of a VR production base, further explored VR technology, and established a strategic partnership with Metaverse and AI technology service company Yuanxiang XVERSE. Through Yuanxiang XVERSE's industry-leading metaverse infrastructure and underlying artificial intelligence technical capabilities, Yunxiang Technology will also strengthen its marketing service capabilities for VR virtual reality scenarios, further helping the company expand its creative production capacity from short videos to 3D. Currently, Yunxiang Technology has developed metaverse marketing-related cooperation with leading overseas game manufacturers and leading domestic internet platforms.
The positive effects brought about by the above layout also prompted Yunxiang Technology's short video marketing business to achieve a breakthrough in “quality” and “quantity”: during the reporting period, the company provided customized online marketing solutions to 791 advertisers and customers. The number of customers increased 37.8% year-on-year, and the business revenue was 1,542 billion yuan; in particular, business gross margin exceeded the same period last year, up 5.3 percentage points from the same period last year.
2. Expand the value chain vertically+broaden the service system horizontally to further explore the business value of e-commerce services.
In terms of brand e-commerce business, Yunxiang Technology also continued to deepen its exploration of the business value of e-commerce services in the first half of this year. In recent years, with the rapid popularity of short videos, the “short video +” industry has also gradually been given impressive power, and the development space behind it should not be underestimated. In the case of “short videos+e-commerce,” this segmented track has gradually become a “dark horse race track” in the short video industry.
According to iResearch data, the e-commerce market for live short videos in China will exceed 3.4 trillion yuan in 2022, with an annual growth rate of 53%. It is estimated that in 2023, the e-commerce market for live short videos will exceed 4.9 trillion yuan. In this context, the cloud that has laid out this track in depth wants to achieve the integration of multi-dimensional business scenarios by exploring more diversified and in-depth commercial monetization models, and will undoubtedly gain a great deal of incremental space.
Specifically, during the reporting period, Yunxiang Technology, on the one hand, broadened its service system horizontally. That is, while actively broadening the track for consumer goods and lifestyle services, it also continued to deepen its service capabilities in advantageous industries such as 3C digital and daily chemicals, thus further opening up the company's growth space. On the other hand, the company is also expanding its value chain vertically, further expanding the upstream and downstream of the e-commerce supply chain, and collaborating with multiple business segments linked to the e-commerce ecosystem to form a comprehensive e-commerce service chain. Furthermore, Yunxiang Technology opened its Midwestern headquarters in Xi'an in June of this year to vigorously optimize the Group's talent structure and enhance business agglomeration and operating efficiency in the e-commerce sector.
Based on these benefits, in the first half of the year, Yunxiang Technology has provided e-commerce services to more than 20 domestic and foreign brands in categories such as digital, apparel, pets, mother and baby, and daily chemicals. In total, it has achieved a total effective product transaction volume (effective GMV) of 570 million yuan, an increase of about 530% over the previous year, and the growth rate is very impressive.
3. Strengthen technical barriers and encourage the company's platform-based technology system to further help “improve quality and efficiency” of the business.
As a technology-innovative enterprise, Yunxiang Technology spared no effort to further strengthen the company's platform technology barriers in the first half of the year. Thus, the company's platform-based technology also encouraged the company's platform-based technology to feed back the company's development and help the company achieve the goal of improving quality and efficiency.
During the reporting period, on the one hand, by improving the closed loop of data between mainstream short video platforms and leading traditional e-commerce platforms, Yunxiang Technology formed a short video marketing Click ID technology service for e-commerce customers using SaaS platforms as carriers, which greatly enhanced the deep connection with KA customers; on the other hand, the company announced that it was opening up and merging the two major technology platforms “Lianshan Smart Investment” and “Tianji”, thereby achieving effective integration and collaboration between the operation link of content and delivery management and the financial link for budget management in short video marketing, which also helps to further improve KA advertisers Short video marketing efficiency, operational effectiveness, and data control autonomy.
This can also be seen from the benefits brought by the Tianji platform in half a year. According to financial data, by the end of the first half of 2023, the quarterly turnover of the company's Tianji platform had increased to 1,262 billion yuan, and the number of platform users had risen to 270. As the first cross-platform account management platform in the industry, the Tianji platform is similar to “Alipay” in the Internet marketing industry. It can greatly improve the efficiency of capital operations at the marketing account management level, and the continuous increase in turnover amount on the Tianji platform in the first half of the year undoubtedly also confirms the “efficiency” and “revenue increase” effects of this technology.
In addition to this, during the reporting period, Yunxiang Technology also realized the merger of its two major standardized SaaS products — that is, integrating the short video marketing operation management tool “Cloud View Customer” and the programmatic creative marketing tool “Group Screening” to launch the “Cloud TV Customer 3.0” version. On this basis, the company also applied AIGC technology to functional areas related to short video production, greatly improving the operational efficiency of short video marketing for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Benefiting from the above layout, the company held a total of 35 product summits in 22 local cities in the first half of the year, adding 2,556 SME subscription customers, generating a total subscription contract value of 25.28 million yuan. Under the development wave of the digital economy, the transformation of SME marketing methods to digital is the general trend. Thus, this also means that Yunxiang Technology's layout in the SME digital marketing market will anchor 100 billion dollars of market space and further enhance the company's performance.
Overall, it can be seen that Yunxiang Technology's continuous increase in profits in the first half of this year did not happen overnight, but stemmed from the long-term effects brought about by multiple layouts, such as actively embracing new trends, consolidating technical barriers, and building diversified businesses. “Keep an eye on tradition”. Looking forward to the future, the continuously strengthened brand moat will gradually raise the growth ceiling of Yunxiang Technology, and the company's performance is expected to show a long-term positive trend.