After the GPT aura is removed.
@New knowledge and originality of science and technology
Author/Zhang Dao Editor/Yi Page
In the early years of the domestic Internet circle, there was a joke that "learn civil and military skills and sell them to BAT". At that time, one of the best ways for start-ups was to seek acquisition by giants. The seemingly beautiful appearance is actually cruel. Under the barrier of expansion of large factories, start-ups have only two choices: cannon fodder and standing in line.
What's more, even if you take the initiative to stand in line, you can't escape the end of losing popularity. For example, in the cooperative office market where the accelerator button has been pressed in the past two years, the current participants mainly include the old OA manufacturers and the new Internet manufacturers.
The latter is dominated by giants such as Alibaba, Tencent and Byte. After the success of the consumer Internet, they turned their attention to the industrial end. And the collaborative office field, where users cover multiple scenarios in various industries, immediately becomes a favorite track.
It can be seen that with the opening of comprehensive competition among nailing, enterprise micro enterprise and flying book, the industry's attention to the old OA manufacturers has decreased year by year. The typical performance is that the title of "three giants of collaborative office" has been firmly established in three later Internet giants.
Recently, the stock price of the old OA manufacturer Zhiyuan Internet soared to a record high. Initially, the stock price performance is related to market speculation, that is, the hot concept of ChatGPT.
But beyond the hot spots, people can't help wondering whether the old OA manufacturers have a future?
"Three Surnames" Zhiyuan
As early as the 1940s, some enterprises in the United States began to use machines to handle office business. At that time, foreign countries called this work method Office Automation (OA).
With economic development and technological progress, the connotation and extension of traditional office automation have undergone major changes. The concept of collaborative office work was immediately broadened from office automation. Because of this origin, the name of OA has also been used today.
From the perspective of historical development, the development of domestic OA software was at the initial stage from 2000 to 2005. The OA system mainly relies on the administrative office and the internal LAN of large enterprises to establish a file and information sharing system.
On March 15, 2002, in Beijing Friendship Hotel, Xu Shi and his entrepreneurial team jointly established "UFIDA Zhiyuan Software Technology Co., Ltd.". From the name alone, we can see that Zhiyuan and UFIDA are inextricably linked.
According to the data, at the initial stage of its establishment, Zhiyuan was a 30% owned subsidiary of UFIDA. With the help of brand effect, Zhiyuan promoted its products through independent participation in the dealer conferences organized by UFIDA or institutions in the industry. It can be said that Zhiyuan started in its early years with the help of UFIDA's channel system.
Since then, in 2009, UFIDA used 12 million yuan for the second capital increase to obtain 5% shares of Zhiyuan. This period is the "honeymoon period" of the two, but the turning point only occurred a year later.
On March 24, 2010, Beijing UFIDA Zhiyuan Co., Ltd. was officially renamed as Beijing Zhiyuan Xiechuang Software Co., Ltd. At this time, the "commission gate" event of Zhiyuan Software had just come to an end.
On March 1, an Internet user exposed the "Zhiyuan Software Bribery Record List" in a well-known forum blog, which includes a detailed list of many government agencies and enterprises, the amount returned for each business order, the payee and many other details. In the list, there are even replies from "Xu Shi, Chairman of UFIDA Zhiyuan" and others.
According to the calculation, in this exposed so-called "bribery list", there were 102 companies involved in the three forms in 2009, with a total amount of 1239639 yuan. Among them, the largest amount is a bank in a city in northeast China, with the amount of 130000 yuan, and other amounts range from hundreds to tens of thousands of yuan.
In order to clarify the matter, Zhang Yi, the executive vice president of Zhiyuan at that time, said that the change of name had nothing to do with the "commission gate" that had become so noisy some time ago. However, judging from the result orientation, Zhiyuan chose to go alone in this crisis regardless of the truth of the storm.
Since then, the relationship between Zhiyuan and UFIDA has gradually alienated. As evidence, in December 2015, UFIDA transferred its shares to 263, Xinyi Yide and Suirui Rongtong, and its shareholding in Zhiyuan decreased to 4.98%.
As for the share transfer, Zhao Heng (known as T guest), a media person in the enterprise service circle, once wrote:
"UFIDA began to develop its own OA products, and adopted the strategy of" suppressing while compiling "to force Zhiyuan to sell. However, Zhiyuan's growth momentum was very strong at that time, and it had become one of the first line of domestic OA manufacturers, and had no intention of belonging, so both sides also missed the best acquisition opportunity. However, with the gradual maturity of the internal OA product research and development of UFIDA in the past two years, Zhiyuan's role in the product system of UFIDA is also very small. At this time, the breakup is also due to this. "
After setting aside UFIDA, Zhiyuan's journey of renaming is not over yet. It was not until March 2017, at Zhiyuan's new three-year strategy conference, Chairman Xu Shi announced that "Zhiyuan Software" was renamed "Zhiyuan Internet", and the company's name was completely determined and has been used up to now.
In most cases, the change of company name also often means the change of strategy. From this perspective, the three stages of Zhiyuan's development almost coincide with the node of renaming: from 2002 to 2009, it released A6 and A8 products; 2010-2018, release V5 and Formtalk cloud service platform; Since 2019, COP and V8 products have been released.
Benefit from "concept"
On October 31, 2019, Zhiyuan Internet landed on the A share of the scientific innovation board of Shanghai Stock Exchange. Before listing, although Zhiyuan Internet's net profit grew rapidly, its revenue growth was slightly weak. But then, Zhiyuan Internet's net profit growth began to decline.
Data shows that in 2019-2021, Zhiyuan Internet will achieve revenue of 700 million yuan, 763 million yuan and 1.031 billion yuan, with year-on-year growth of 21.06%, 9.07% and 35.10% respectively; The net profits were 97.4667 million yuan, 108 million yuan and 128 million yuan, up 33.56%, 10.40% and 18.50% year on year respectively.
In addition, Zhiyuan Internet released its performance report for 2022 at the end of February 2023: it is estimated that the total operating revenue of 2022 will be 1.036 billion yuan, up 0.4% year on year; The net profit attributable to the parent company was 99 million yuan, down 22.77% year on year.
It can be seen that Zhiyuan Internet is also facing bottlenecks in revenue growth, in addition to the dilemma of increasing revenue without increasing profits. On the premise that the performance of various data indicators in the financial report is average and the overall performance forecast is slightly lower than expected, where did the rise of Zhiyuan Internet's share price come from?
On March 16, Microsoft officially announced that Microsoft 365 service will be fully connected to the chat robot AICopilot. Through Copilot, "Your words have become the most powerful productivity tool on the earth. Copilot has opened a new era of computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work." Jared Spataro, vice president of Microsoft's modern work and business applications business, said.
In essence, Copilot is a productivity tool built by Microsoft based on the GPT4 model, Microsoft Graph (user data pool) and Microsoft 365 Family Bucket products, or more vividly, it is an office AI assistant with a top 100 and never leaves.
By combining the Large Language Model (LLM) with Microsoft's office tools, Copilot has achieved greater productivity improvement, which also involves the combined application of some functions in AI and OA, which is expected to help users save costs and improve efficiency.
Based on this, Cinda Securities believes that in the future, with the access of the head OA manufacturers to AI, the product competitiveness is expected to improve, and the price is expected to increase accordingly.
Minsheng Securities also holds the same view. From the perspective of the development history of the OA industry, technological progress is without exception, which has brought significant changes and opportunities to the OA industry.
"We believe that under the ChatGPT mode, OA, a product with such high frequency of use and such a complex use mechanism, is expected to become one of the earliest and most deeply reconstructed products. ChatGPT is expected to bring about the paradigm revolution of OA software and drive the paradigm reconstruction and model change of systematic product side. "
Previously, on February 16, Zhiyuan Internet announced that it would become the first ecological partner of Baidu Wenxin Yiyan, and its cooperative operation platform COP would fully experience and access Wenxin Yiyan.
As Wenxin Yiyan appeared at the press conference on March 16, as the first competitor of ChatGPT in China, Zhiyuan Internet's share price rose sharply with the help of the concept stock.
Of course, the benefits brought by new technology still need to be digested by the market. Its share price has begun to decline gradually recently, which is also a further feedback from the market. As can be seen from the long time line, since last May, the stock price of Zhiyuan Internet has started to rise, and the key driving factor behind it is also Sinotron.
Xinchuang, that is, information technology application innovation, is centered on domestic substitution.
In 2020, driven by the comprehensive promotion of the replacement of party and government office applications, ICT ushered in the first year of large-scale development, and the domestic ICT industry gradually entered the "2+8+N" landing rhythm. At present, the replacement of the party and government's credit innovation stock is nearly finished, and gradually enters the second half of the localization of incremental demand; Driven by the policy, ICT in industries such as state-owned enterprises and educational and medical institutions is expected to open an accelerated mode.
As the OA software belongs to the upper application software of IT system, with the rapid increase of the penetration rate of domestic substitution of the underlying hardware and basic software of the IT system of government and enterprise units, the demand for updating the OA software suitable for domestic software and hardware systems is further released, and the market is expected to usher in new growth points.
On the whole, with the help of ICT and GPT, the entire OA industry has indeed ushered in opportunities, but at present, for Zhiyuan Internet, the dilemma is also obvious.
Two sticking points of Zhiyuan
At present, Zhiyuan Internet faces two problems:
First, the platitudes about the difficulty of cloudization.
In 2016, driven by the "cloud transformation" strategy, the company launched the PaaS collaborative cloud platform Formtalk. Based on the Formtalk cloud platform, the company successively launched SaaS applications such as Digital Intelligence Human Cloud (payroll), Data Acquisition Cloud (Zhilian Cloud).
The current standard products of Zhiyuan Internet mainly include: A8 for medium and large enterprises and group enterprises, G6 for government organizations and public institutions, A6 for small and medium-sized enterprises/organizations, and collaborative cloud platform.
From the perspective of revenue composition, A8 and G6 series products have always been the pillars of the company's revenue and gross profit. The proportion of A8 series products has remained above 68% in recent years, 69.1% in 2021; Benefiting from the promotion of party and government information innovation, the proportion of G6 series products has increased year by year, and will be 14.5% in 2021.
In the process of cloud transformation, Zhiyuan Internet customers are mainly concentrated in the field of key customers, while large enterprises have higher customization requirements, and enterprise collaboration needs are mainly focused on in-depth customization or personalized development at more business levels. Therefore, Zhiyuan Internet needs to coordinate the difficulty of cloud.
Second, the challenges Zhiyuan Internet faces in the OA industry chain.
In 2020, an article titled "Giant Everywhere, No Grass Lives" triggered a debate in the industry. The article pointed out that nailing online OA products for giant transit would be an earthquake for the entire industry.
Traditional OA manufacturers are now facing competition from enterprises and microenterprises, staples, flybooks, WeLink and other products. Because the technology giants have great advantages in cloud computing, security services and other underlying technologies, can provide high level services such as instant messaging and video conferencing, and have obvious synergy advantages, some people in the industry can't help predicting that the three OA manufacturers (Fanwei/Zhiyuan/Lanling) will be swept into history.
However, at this stage, the two have not formed a "life and death" situation. It can be seen that the old OA manufacturers have already started to stand in line.
On September 26, 2018, Nail announced its strategic investment in Lanling, bringing 7 million small and medium-sized micro customers into the large and medium-sized mobile office market; The next day, Fanwei launched a new generation of OA product, e-colory9.0, and announced the formation of a strategic alliance with Tencent Enterprise WeChat, Shanghai CA Certification Center, and Contract Lock.
How the relationship between the two will evolve in the future will be ignored. However, as a special existence, the most difficult thing is Zhiyuan Internet, which has not yet stood in the queue. The latter will face the competition situation where its main rivals have successively turned to Internet giants.
In addition to the attack of Internet manufacturers, Zhiyuan Internet also needs to face the cross-border of ERP manufacturers.
The reason is that OA and ERP are mutually complementary. At present, customers tend to integrate the two systems. In the overseas market, there is no platform with OA function as the selling point. ERP systems of Oracle and SAP mostly integrate process approval, task management and other modules. Kingdee, a domestic ERP manufacturer, includes its own OA brand and is integrated into Kingdee Cloud Home.
Previously, Zhiyuan could be integrated in the ERP system as a functional module, because the rigid demand attribute of the OA system was weaker than that of ERP. However, in recent years, the strategy of constantly expanding business boundaries has even begun to erode the territory of ERP, that is, the concept of "COP collaborative operation platform" proposed by Zhiyuan Internet. The relationship between the two is also unstable.
In a word, the future of Zhiyuan Internet not only urgently needs to consider the difficulty of cloud, but also faces the erosion of major Internet giants and ERP giants. Between left thrusting and right thrusting, the concept is hot in the short term, with limited benefits.
(Statement: This article only represents the author's view, not Sina.com's position.)
