On December 15, Tang Xiaoou, a leader in the AI industry, founder of SenseTime and a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, passed away at the age of 55. **This has been reported, and many colleagues said that "the superstar has fallen, God is jealous of the talent, and mourns deeply".
At present, it is at a critical stage of the development of artificial intelligence, the competition of large models is becoming increasingly fierce, and the death of the soul has cast a shadow on the subsequent development of SenseTime.
On December 18, SenseTime (00020.) of Hong Kong stocksHK) jumped down 1111%, closed at 1HK$12 shares, with a market capitalization of 374HK$900 million.
The fall of superstars has attracted attention
According to SenseTime's 2023 semi-annual report, Tang Xiaoou passed through Amind IncHolding 69 of SenseTime0.6 billion Class A shares, accounting for about 2063%, since Class A shares have "super voting rights", each share can vote 10 votes, Professor Tang actually holds more than 68% of the voting rights of SenseTime.
However, before the market opened today, the company issued a new announcement that Professor Tang's super voting rights have been terminated, and his holdings will be converted into Class B shares (ordinary shares, each share can vote 1 vote) at a ratio of 1 to 1. After the conversion, the number of Class A shares currently outstanding in the company is only 61.4 billion shares, with a Class B share of 3285.5 billion shares.
As for the follow-up, whether the relevant shares will usher in large-scale ** is a place where the capital market is quite skeptical.
Previously, on November 30, SenseTime announced that the four executive directors of the founding team - Professor Tang Xiaoou, Dr. Xu Li, Dr. Wang Xiaogang, Mr. Xu Bing and the entities controlled by them have voluntarily extended the lock-up period of their shares for two years to December 30, 2024. It can be seen that the senior management of SenseTime has a sense of responsibility for the company and confidence in the future development.
If Professor Tang's shares are inherited in the future, legal professionals said that the shareholders are likely to still hold the company's shares through a BVI company (a company registered in the British Virgin Islands), and they should still need to meet the lock-up period requirements.
With a halo of SenseTime, where will it go in the future?
Tang Xiaoou is a leading figure in China's AI, especially in the field of computer vision, and he founded the Hong Kong Chinese University Multi-** Laboratory, which was later called the "Whampoa Military Academy" of China's AI visual recognition.
In June 2014, the Deepid series of algorithms published by Tang Xiaoou's laboratory gradually improved the accuracy of face recognition to 9955%, beating Facebook's Deepface.
In the same year, SenseTime was officially established, and the founding team was either from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chinese Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, Peking University and other top universities with doctorates and masters, or from Microsoft, Google, Lenovo, and other related fields, including many of the top Chinese scientists in the field of artificial intelligence.
At the end of 2021, the company became the first company among the "AI Four Tigers" to enter the capital market, and it was in the limelight for a while.
But then, due to the cohesion of technological idealism, enterprises have not been able to find a profitable direction in the cruel business competition, while R&D investment remains high, resulting in the company's financial report is not good.
According to the data, in the three years from 2020 to 2022, SenseTime's cumulative net loss exceeded 35 billion yuan, while the total revenue in the same period was only 1195.5 billion yuan. In the first half of this year, the company achieved revenue of 143.3 billion yuan, but the net loss during the period was as high as 314.3 billion yuan.
In addition, as of the end of June this year, SenseTime's total accounts receivable was as high as 772.6 billion yuan, about five times the revenue in the first half of the year.
Fortunately, since the explosion of ChatGPT, SenseTime, as an AI manufacturer, has also released a large model of "daily new" and deployed relevant intelligent computing facilities. In the first half of this year, SenseTime's generative AI-related revenue increased significantly by more than 6 times year-on-year, and it is expected to continue to develop rapidly in the future.
Conclusion – SenseTime's sluggish performance may be the main reason for its long-term weakness. Since its listing, SenseTime has seen a cumulative decline of more than 80% and its market value has evaporated by more than HK$100 billion. When a company has hematopoietic capacity is worth keeping track of.
Author: Flying Fish.