In the future, Sogou will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tencent Holdings. The transaction is expected to be completed before the end of this year.
No one thought that Sogou, which used to go around in China's Internet arena, eventually returned to Tencent after it went public.
At present, Sogou's current core business is mainly search, input method and AI hardware. In Sogou's view, the importance of hardware business is getting higher and higher. An example of this is Wang Xiaochuan's approach to Luo Yonghao's live broadcast to bring back his recorder.
And now it is also a period of Sogou's strategic transformation. On August 10, Sogou announced its second quarter 2020 financial report. The company's revenue was $261.2 million, a year-on-year decline of 14%.
Among them, search and search-related businesses contributed US$240.6 million, a year-on-year decrease of 13%. Sogou's other revenue was US$20.6 million, an increase of 25% year-on-year, and its AI-driven hardware business increased by 20% year-on-year.
While the search business is declining, the hardware business can maintain a relatively high growth rate, which has become Sogou's next important growth point.
Of course, the acquisition price of 3.5 billion US dollars, for Sogou, can be regarded as the lowest since its listing. Tencent's acquisition at this time is indeed first-class financial technology.
Tencent has already controlled Sogou.
As early as September 2013, Tencent announced that it would buy Sogou for US$448 million and merge Sogou and QQ input method business with Sogou's corresponding business.
Although Tencent only issued a privatization offer in July this year, in fact Tencent has already controlled Sogou. According to Sogou's latest SEC filings, Tencent holds 39.2% of the equity and is Sogou's largest shareholder.
As Sogou adopts a two-tier shareholding structure, Tencent has a higher voice, and these shares hold 52.3% of the voting rights. Sohu, Sogou's second largest shareholder, only holds 44.1% of the voting rights.
After the completion of the acquisition, Sohu will receive a total of approximately US$1.18 billion in cash. Sohu's current market value is only $789 million.
Why Tencent privatized Sogou.
Now major domestic Internet companies are emphasizing "private domain traffic" while actively developing general search engines. Alibaba and Toutiao's related businesses have already started.
In order to maintain the moat of WeChat, Tencent has always only opened the WeChat port to Sogou, and users can only search the WeChat official account content through Sogou.
Tencent also needs Sogou's search business to help improve its own WeChat search.
Taking advantage of the low stock price of Sogou, it is a good choice to merge Sogou directly.
In addition, in addition to acquiring technology, buying talents may also be another important consideration for Tencent.
In 2005, Tencent bought Foxmail heavily. In addition to acquiring mailbox technology, Zhang Xiaolong, the father of WeChat, also recruited him.
Sogou founder Wang Xiaochuan is a technical background. Sogou has accumulated a large number of talents in AI technology, especially speech recognition and word processing. Among the three BAT companies, Tencent's AI technology is the latest. Incorporating Sogou will also be of great benefit to improving their AI capabilities.
Of course, the premise is that Wang Xiaochuan will stay as long as Zhang Xiaolong after the acquisition.
Stockholders discussed
the privatization price of Sogou this time at 9 US dollars, which is a premium of about 56.5% compared to the previous trading day when the privatization proposal was received, and a premium of 83.0% compared to the volume-weighted average price of the previous 30 trading days.
And the total price of 3.5 billion US dollars is the largest privatization transaction of Chinese concept stocks in recent years.
However, the response from investors is not high.
The privatization price of Sogou seems to be relatively high, but the issue price of Sogou that year was $13. Except for the initial period of listing, Sogou's stock price was below the issue price. In the past two years, Sogou's stock price has fallen by more than half, and even fell below $3 at one time.
Therefore, the privatization price seems to have a high premium, but it is still not a small loss for the investors who "made new" that year. Judging from the distribution of stocks' chips, these investors should have already left the market.
If placed a few years ago, the "low-price" privatization would surely lead to fierce criticism from stocks. This is also an excellent opportunity to "post orders" for investors who have just entered the market and made a fortune through privatization.
But this time, Sogou's privatization was quite peaceful.
There are very few discussions on Sogou in domestic US stock forums. Some investors pointedly pointed out:
because the trading liquidity is too low!
Daohan Tianqiong CiGril Robot API
Daohan Tianqiong CiGril Cognitive Intelligent Robot API users need to follow the steps to obtain basic information:
1. Register an account on the platform
2. Log in to the platform, enter the back-end management page, create an application, and then view the application Related Information.
3. On the application information page, find the appid, appkey secret key and other information, and then write the interface code to access the robot application.
Start access
request address: http://www.weilaitec.com/cigirlrobot.cgr
Request method: post
request parameters:
parameter type default value description
userid String no platform registered account
appid String no platform created application id
key String no platform application The generated secret key
msg String "" Message content
ip String "" The client ip requires uniqueness. If no ip, it can be replaced by QQ account, WeChat account, mobile phone MAC address, etc.
Example of interface connection: http://www.weilaitec.com/cigirlrobot.cgr?key=UTNJK34THXK010T566ZI39VES50BLRBE8R66H5R3FOAO84J3BV&msg=Hello&ip=119.25.36.48&userid=jackli&appid=52454214552
Note: The parameter name must be lowercase, the five parameters must not be omitted, the parameter name must be written correctly, and the value of each parameter cannot be an empty string. Otherwise, the request cannot be successful. The three parameters of userid, appid, and key must be registered on the platform after the application is created, and then you can see the application details. Userid is the platform registered account.
Sample code JAVA:
import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;
public class apitest {
/*
Get请求，获得返回数据
@param urlStr
@return
/
private static String opUrl(String urlStr)
{
URL url = null;
HttpURLConnection conn = null;
InputStream is = null;
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = null;
try
{
url = new URL(urlStr);
conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
conn.setReadTimeout(5 10000);
conn.setConnectTimeout(5 * 10000);
conn.setRequestMethod("POST");
if (conn.getResponseCode() == 200)
{
is = conn.getInputStream();
baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
int len = -1;
byte[] buf = new byte[128];
while ((len = is.read(buf)) != -1)
{
baos.write(buf, 0, len);
}
baos.flush();
String result = baos.toString();
return result;
} else
{
throw new Exception("服务器连接错误！");
}
} catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
} finally
{
try
{
if (is != null)
is.close();
} catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
try
{
if (baos != null)
baos.close();
} catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
conn.disconnect();
}
return "";
}
public static void main(String args [] ){
//The msg parameter is the content of the past conversation.
System.out.println (opUrl ( " http://www.weilaitec.com/cigirlrobot.cgr?key=UTNJK34THXK010T566ZI39VES50BLRBE8R66H5R3FOAO84J3BV&msg= IP = 119.25.36.48 & Hello the userid & jackli & AppID = 52,454,214,552 = "));
}
}