BlueFocus’ 2022 annual report was released, with a huge loss of 2.175 billion yuan, of which 2.038 billion losses were caused by impairment of goodwill, intangible assets, and other assets. Metaverse accounted for a large proportion of the actual loss-making businesses.
The layout of BlueFocus in the Metaverse field is mainly implemented through three subsidiaries, namely Blue Universe, Moyin Future, and Dalan Technology. According to the financial report, none of these three companies made a profit, and the total loss for the year exceeded 38.8 million yuan.
From 2021 to chasing the metaverse, BlueFocus has invested a lot of money, but with little effect. Now, chasing the wind and changing to AIGC.
The new strategy of BlueFocus "All in AI" was released together with the financial report. CEO Pan Fei said that "without hesitation, at any cost, we will use all the capabilities of the entire group" to move towards the direction of artificial intelligence.
The effect of adopting AI outlets is first reflected in the stock price, and the stock price of BlueFocus has doubled within this year. In fact, the public relations and marketing giant's deployment of AI took only three months. Judging from the company's stock change announcement last month, the implementation of many plans is still unknown.
In 2022, the Metaverse business will lose more than 38.8 million yuan
After chasing the "Yuan Universe" with all its strength for two years, Blue Cursor chased itself into a pit.
On the evening of April 19, BlueFocus announced its 2022 annual report, which is an "ugly" report card. During the reporting period, the company's annual operating income was 36.683 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 8.47%, and the net profit loss attributable to shareholders of listed companies was as high as 2.175 billion yuan. In 2021, BlueFocus' annual profit will still be 520 million yuan.
Turning from profit to loss, BlueFocus experienced a year of Waterloo. Or worried that the financial report will affect the confidence of the market, BlueFocus CEO Pan Fei wrote a letter to investors at the beginning of this report. Pan Fei emphasized that the huge loss figure cannot fully represent the performance fundamentals of BlueFocus. "This figure is mainly due to the impact of goodwill impairment."
Pan Fei said that BlueFocus has done a lot of mergers and acquisitions over the years, which has brought about the accumulation of goodwill assets. Due to the poor performance of the acquired company, in 2022, BlueFocus will accrue 2.038 billion goodwill, intangible assets and other asset impairments. That is to say, of BlueFocus’ loss of 2.175 billion yuan, goodwill impairment accounted for more than 90%.
If the part of goodwill impairment is not included, the loss of BlueFocus in 2022 will be about 137 million yuan. For this part of the loss, the reasons given in the financial report are that the budgets of customers in the Internet, automobile and real estate industries have decreased, media rebates have been lowered, customer budgets have been postponed, and the pace of cross-border e-commerce industries has been restricted to a certain extent.
What BlueFocus didn’t say clearly is that its metaverse business, which it focuses on, will lose more than 38.8 million yuan in 2022, accounting for 28.32% of the loss excluding goodwill impairment losses.
In terms of business layout in the Metaverse field, BlueFocus is mainly implemented through three newly established subsidiaries, namely, Blue Universe Digital Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Blue Universe") and Beijing Moyin Future Technology Co., Ltd. Moyin Future"), Beijing Dalan Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Dalan Technology"). From the perspective of equity relationship, BlueFocus directly holds 100% of the equity of Blue Universe, and then holds 100% of the equity of Moyin Future and 70% of the equity of Dalan Technology through Blue Universe.
Among them, the main product of Blue Universe is the "Blue Universe" virtual space, which was first launched in March last year with the help of Baidu Xiyang as a carrier; in November last year, Blue Universe's independent App was launched in major application markets. However, like Xiran, Blue Universe has little popularity. Whether it is "Xirang Station" or APP, except for occasional events where users gather, most of the time there is no one there.
On the Apple App Store, Blue Universe has only five ratings, with an average score of 4.2. The version history shows that in more than 5 months, the App version has only been updated 3 times, most of which are "bug fixes" and no major upgrades. According to the Xiaomi App Store, the Blue Universe App has less than 1,000 downloads, and there are currently no user reviews.
In the future, Moyin will mainly operate the digital collection distribution platform MEME. According to the public information released by BlueFocus, the platform was launched in April last year, and has issued a variety of digital artworks, including the commemorative card for the 124th anniversary of Peking University, Zhang Weili's collection of game moments, and the International Museum's blind box. However, MEME, which does not occupy the leading position in the digital platform market, has caught up with the collective cooling of the digital market in the second half of last year. Among the digital user groups, this platform is far less popular than Whale Explorer or even iBox, 18 data Hidden this kind of traffic platform.
The main product of Dalan Technology is xR virtual studio. BlueFocus once declared that Big Blue xR Studio is the only studio in China that not only meets the xR virtual shooting standard of Hollywood movies, but also is backward compatible with advertising TV virtual shooting, xR virtual press conference, xR virtual stage, xR virtual studio and other applications Scenes.
However, the overall business losses of these three subsidiaries that landed in the Metaverse continued to expand. The semi-annual report released by BlueFocus last year showed that in the first half of 2022, Blue Universe had a loss of 4.2974 million yuan, Moyin Future had a loss of 235,700 yuan, and Dalan Technology had a loss of 4.5874 million yuan. By the time the 2022 annual report is announced, the losses of the three companies were 30.4599 million yuan, 1.0968 million yuan, and 7.2554 million yuan, with a total loss of more than 38.8 million yuan. It can be clearly seen that the losses of Blue Universe and Moyinfuture in the second half of last year far exceeded that in the first half of the year.
According to the information disclosed in the BlueFocus financial report, the company will start to deploy the virtual human business in 2021, and enter the stage of centralized implementation in 2022, including the launch of the virtual human Su Xiaomei and the virtual musician K, and the launch of the digital collection distribution platform MEME , launched the digital human-made products "separation skills" and blue universe, etc. In the financial report, BlueFocus introduced “Metaverse” as its main business.
It stands to reason that the blue cursor will start "sowing" in 2021, and 2022 should be the year of "flowering and bearing fruit". But the flowers bloomed, but the fruits were not seen. Instead, the metaverse business became the "oil bottle" of the company's annual performance.
"All in AI" slogan loudly landed unknown
The Metaverse business did not bring positive feedback to BlueFocus in terms of revenue, but Pan Fei seemed unwilling to admit his mistakes. In the "Letter to Investors", he emphasized instead that BlueFocus' layout in Metaverse was neither for Chasing hot spots is not to increase stock prices.
What was it for? He didn’t answer, but insisted, “The Metaverse business has achieved initial results. We are patient and determined. It won’t be too long before it explodes.”
In 2023, will this marketing giant continue to hone patience and determination in the Metaverse under pressure?
Compared with the 2022 semi-annual report, which introduced the layout of the metaverse in full detail, the "painting style" of the blue cursor's annual report has changed, and AI has become the "most favorite boy" of the blue cursor. Pan Fei said that the hottest topic in the market this year is AIGC, "no one", "I have no doubt that AIGC and the larger AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) trend behind it will bring about fundamental changes in productivity, Open the ceiling of growth for the marketing industry."
The blue cursor also coined a new word "AI²". What do you mean?
The blue cursor explained that AI² is All in AI, which has been upgraded to a strategic level. "We have done a lot of things in the past, including mergers and acquisitions, smart marketing transformation, etc., but we have never talked about All in. Now we really see the possibility of this road, so we don't hesitate to take the whole group We will do everything we can to push the company in this direction.”
The metaverse did not bring any sweetness, the blue cursor turned to the AI outlet, and even used AI to revitalize the metaverse business. According to the company, existing virtual people and virtual scenes may be directly empowered by AI in the future.
After the AI² strategy is put forward, what is the specific layout of the blue cursor?
Pan Fei said that first of all, the group will embrace giants. Specifically, in the domestic and overseas marketing business, it cooperates with different giants, such as its cross-border overseas business and Microsoft Advertising reached a strategic cooperation to provide marketing services on the New Bing browser with generative AI capabilities; another example, Cooperate with Baidu Wenxin to develop intelligent marketing solutions.
BlueFocus will also increase AI investment, but Pan Fei said that the company will not repeat the construction of the underlying AI infrastructure and large models, but will focus on industry models and innovation at the application layer, and will build BlueFocus AIGC tools Matrix, to improve marketing scenarios, we must continue to seek the power of capital to build a new team and business puzzle.
AI also needs to be used internally, and BlueFocus will fully apply AIGC tools. From grassroots employees to core management, everyone uses AIGC frequently; the assessment model must also keep up, and the application and mastery of AIGC will become an important promotion assessment standards; the organizational model must also be changed, and each team will set up AIGC-related positions.
All in all, BlueFocus requires all employees to turn on the working mode of "human + AI assistant". On April 12, the company sent an internal letter, announcing that it would stop four outsourcing expenditures related to creative design, program writing, copywriting, and short-term employees indefinitely. These outsourcing tasks will be completed by Blue Label's own employees and AI.
There are mixed opinions on this, and some marketing colleagues directly gave a "unreliable" evaluation. But in any case, BlueFocus has doubled its stock price during the year amid the wave of AI.
BlueFocus stock price trend within the year
In contrast to the brilliant performance of the stock price, the AI implementation of BlueFocus.
The company's earliest product that can be paired with AI is "Sabot", which is a multi-person collaboration tool focusing on marketing planning scenarios. In January last year, Salesbot launched the 2022 "Yuan" version, updating the intelligent planning module , providing simple AI capabilities to assist in production planning drafts.
As for the real opportunity to catch up with the AIGC, it was in February this year. At that time, BlueFocus revealed that it was actively trying out ChatGPT technology, and its own virtual person Su Xiaomei had already participated in multiple rounds of AI dialogues. In March, BlueFocus released the tool "AI Xiao Creation" to provide advertising marketers with marketing creation assistance functions; then announced to cooperate with Microsoft to carry out technical product cooperation based on OpenAI, and subsequently released the "AI Assistant for Advertising Creative Marketing" Assistant Xiao's twin version. In mid-April, BlueFocus stated repeatedly on the interactive platform that it had obtained the official AI call and training license from Microsoft Cloud. After Microsoft deployed GPT-4-related services, BlueFocus could be used synchronously.
Judging from the above actions, Blue Cursor’s time to focus on the layout of AI is only 3 months. At the same time, as a company whose main business is advertising, public relations and marketing, BlueFocus is not a technology-driven company. How can it play AIGC, which requires a lot of technical investment?
BlueFocus made a rough investment plan: one is to train AI trainers internally, the other is to accumulate marketing data and models through its own tool matrix platform, and the third is to iterate. "In the future, our bottom layer will rely on large models, and the upper layer will be connected to more mature AIGC tools," but he also said frankly, "We will not develop these ourselves, we will mainly develop application layer models, and this investment is not bad. .”
It can be seen that, on the technical side, BlueFocus’ investment in AI is relatively limited. At present, it only has the "AI²" strategy, and it is in the concept stage. Those advertising cooperation with giants, AIGC tools, and intelligent marketing solutions are also the future direction. When will it be able to really promote to customers and bring revenue growth? , is still unknown.
It is worth noting that last month, when the stock market was frenzied by the concept of AIGC, BlueFocus issued a stock change announcement: the company has not yet officially connected to GPT-4, and there are still uncertainties in the approval time and approval results; At the same time, the company is one of the first batch of ecological partners of Baidu Wenxin Yiyan, but the company has not yet launched specific marketing products based on Wenxin Yiyan. Related AI technologies such as GPT-4 and AIGC are still in their infancy. The specific application methods and profit models still need to be explored, and there is uncertainty about the company's future revenue from actual business.
Facing the securities regulatory authorities, BlueFocus looks much more at ease.