Collate | Hua Wei

Recently, according to the "new intelligent driving" report, the intelligent driving star enterprise vertical Mu technology, which is optimistic about Xiaomi, caused the capital chain to be tight due to the business operation not meeting expectations, and then made the decision to stop paying salaries. In February this year, people familiar with the matter revealed that Longitudinal Mu Technology had suffered a financing rupture last year, first cutting 20% of the salary of fresh graduates, and then cutting all the interns.

Three years of losses of nearly 1.4 billion

Founded in 2013, Zongmu Technology is an ADAS solution provider, providing solutions covering comprehensive autonomous driving functions, and has established mass production cooperation with a number of domestic mainstream host manufacturers such as FAW Hongqi and Changan Automobile. Prospectus data show that as of 2023, the top five customers of Longmo technology are ideal, Salis, Changan, Lantu and China FAW, contributing 93% of the total revenue.

In terms of 2022 sales revenue, the company ranks fifth among domestic suppliers in the China passenger car ADAS solution market, with a market share of 1.0%. In the market for automatic parking solutions for passenger cars in China, Zenmu Technology ranks second among domestic suppliers with a market share of 4.9%. In the APA parking solution market for passenger cars in China, Longmu Technology ranks first among domestic suppliers with a market share of 5.6%.

However, in recent years, although the revenue of longitudinal vision technology has shown an overall growth trend, the growth rate has slowed down, and the amount of losses has continued to increase. Among them, 2023 only increased by 6.15% compared with 2022, while 2022 increased by 108.34% compared with 2021, with a total loss of about 1.4 billion yuan in the last three years. According to the prospectus, in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the operating income of Longmu Technology is 225 million yuan, 469 million yuan and 498 million yuan, and the net loss is 434 million yuan, 588 million yuan and 564 million yuan, respectively. Adjusted net losses were 382 million yuan, 477 million yuan and 516 million yuan, respectively.

From 2021 to 2023, its current ratio, quick ratio and cash ratio will decline by 199.6, 171.2 and 152.7 percentage points, respectively. During the reporting period, the vertical technology liquidity ratio was 316.5%, 196.5% and 116.9%, the quick ratio was 262.0%, 150.6% and 90.8%, and the cash ratio was 199.8%, 113.2% and 47.1%, respectively.

The company said in its prospectus that it was mainly caused by the following factors: the purchase of raw materials and hardware components for intelligent driving products and solutions generated a large number of sales costs; During the track record period, the company incurred significant research and development expenses to establish and maintain market leadership, increase revenue and achieve profitability.

The new business has been exposed as having many drawbacks

Former longitudinal employees revealed that the longitudinal performance in the first half of 2023 is really not good, and the performance in the second half of the year came up, because it got the high-level intelligent driving business of a head car factory. However, due to unreasonable software architecture, personnel redundancy, political struggles and other factors, there has been no major breakthrough in driving products and high-level intelligent driving technology, and the project development and delivery progress is slow, resulting in the delivery delay of star models of cooperative car companies.

It is reported that in 2023, the company also experienced turbulence in the switching of major customer parking product suppliers, and the main income parking business was once imminent, and the revenue growth rate fell sharply in 2023.

In the context of many ups and downs in 2023, we chose to explore new business. "Because the tier1 orders have been bad, the final high-quality orders are less and less, and the more they are done, the more money they lose." I wanted to be the client myself."

In January this year, Tang Rui, founder and CEO of Longmu Technology and Silkworm cluster robot, announced the establishment of Silkworm cluster robot, a new subsidiary of Longmu Technology, and launched its new product, low-speed fully automatic driving charging robot FlashBot Lightning Treasure. According to its introduction, FlashBot is a level 4 unmanned energy robot, which can provide intelligent charging services for new energy vehicles in parks, parking lots and other scenes, and is the first robot to realize commercial application of autonomous valet parking in closed parks.

In April this year, FlashBot Lightning Treasure officially rolled off the production line for mass production, and Silkworm cluster robot deployed 100 lightning treasure to provide charging services for tens of thousands of new energy vehicles parked in Shanghai Disney Resort. Tang Rui stressed that by combining autonomous driving and energy storage technology, Silkworm cluster robot is building a highly resilient mobile energy network to promote energy trading in a larger space and time range, and its goal is to achieve mobile charging services in 5,000 large parking lots in first-tier cities next year.

However, an investor who has been in contact with silkworm cluster robots said that the design of the mobile charging car can not go through, there are many drawbacks such as the use of the scene is not humanized, the robot arm space problem, and the customer will not pay for this product.

The IPO failed three times, and the core executives basically left

The capital market also once favored Longmu technology, which was once valued at more than 9 billion yuan with a number of large financing. From 2015 to 2022, Longmu Technology successfully completed A round of financing from A to E, and investors included Lenovo, Xiaomi Group, Jun Liancheng Industry and other capital.

Especially in March 2021, when it became the first industrial chain enterprise invested in Xiaomi's official propaganda car, it added a layer of halo to the technology. According to public information, millet industry fund holds 4.73%, which is the fifth largest shareholder of longitudinal vision technology and the largest shareholder of the main engine factory.

However, as we enter 2023, things begin to take a sharp turn for the worse. Not only did the last round of financing stay in 2022, in addition to business revenue, Longitudinal vision also experienced three consecutive listing failures and the loss of core executives.

On March 28 this year, Longitudinal Mu Technology submitted its IPO to the Hong Kong stock market. As the prospectus failed to pass the review after six months, the listing application for the Hong Kong stock market was lapsed on September 28, 2024. Although millet SU7 was launched on the market, this time it failed to take advantage of millet's east wind.

This is the third time that the IPO of longitudinal Mu technology has failed. In 2017, the company listed on the New Third Board for the first time, but announced its delisting only a few months later. After a lapse of five years, Longmu Technology moved to the science and Technology innovation board in November 2022, but withdrew its IPO application again in September 2023.

According to the "new intelligent Driving" previously reported that in the second half of 2023, longitudinal Mu CTO Wang Fan left, and Jiang Weiping took over the relevant work, and Longitudinal Mu did not appoint a new CTO at that time. At the beginning of this year, Xu Yiliang, former chief architect of Heduo 3D Vision, has joined Longitudinal Vision Technology as a CTO. People close to Longitudinal eyes have revealed that, "In addition to Wang Fan, the other two vice presidents of longitudinal eyes, Zhu Guangwei and Li Xuyang, have also left, and the senior executives have basically gone last year, leaving only Tang Rui."

Conclusion

Autonomous driving is a money-burning industry, and huge research and development investment has high requirements for capital and hematopoietic ability. For longitudinal vision Technology, how to overcome the current dilemma is an urgent problem to be solved, and this incident also sounded the alarm for the entire intelligent driving industry.

Reference link:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cqgGa9cjwLMIs30p3O_d0A

https://www.zongmutech.com/about.html#/