Any manufacturer will not be able to ignore AI technology, and the future will be the era when the bayonet sees red technology.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “AIDaily” (ID: AIDaily) , author small A, edit small A. The original title “Financial News reveals BAT in the context of artificial intelligence: Ma Yun is stable, Ma Huateng is anxious, and Li Yanhong’s ambition is revealed”
In the second quarter of 2019, various listed companies handed over the answer for the quarter. Cloud computing, AI hardware, and AI technology are still important parts of the financial report. However, several families are happy, even though the acceptance of AI technology is getting higher and higher, and the products and application scenarios are more and more, the benefits brought about by this aspect are not satisfactory.
Of course, except for cloud computing.
Strongly Growing Cloud Computing
On August 15, Alibaba released the last financial report before Ma Yun officially retired. The financial report shows that this quarter, Alibaba Group’s revenue reached 114.924 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 42%. Not based on US GAAP, the net profit was 30.949 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 54%.
E-commerce as its core business is gaining momentum, with revenue reaching 99.544 billion yuan. Tmall’s physical payment GMV increased by 34% year-on-year, but it is still the cloud computing business.
The financial report shows that Alibaba’s cloud computing business’s revenue grew rapidly, up 66% year-on-year to reach RMB7.787 billion. According to analyst analysis Canalys, in the first quarter of 2019, Alibaba Cloud’s market share in China expanded to 47.3%.
In this statistic, the second Tencent cloud only accounted for 15.4%, the third Amazon AWS only accounted for 8.8%, and the fourth Baidu cloud only accounted for 8%.
Among them, although Tencent Cloud ranks second in the domestic cloud market, its pressure is even greater than Alibaba Cloud. In the second quarter and first half of 2019’s performance report released by Tencent, other income sectors dominated by financial technology and cloud computing increased 37% year-on-year to 22.9 billion yuan, accounting for 26% of Tencent’s total revenue. . However, this plate phaseCompared with the growth of 263% in 2016, the growth of 153% in 2017 and the growth of 80% in 2018, it still shows a relatively large downward trend.
In fact, Tencent began to adjust its B-side business since August last year, not only expanding its sales team and product types, but also increasing its penetration of small and medium-sized business customers by working with independent software developers and agents. . Tencent also said that the growth of enterprise services is mainly driven by the number of commercial payment users, the number of merchants, transaction revenue and cloud service revenue growth. But as of now, Tencent Cloud still does not threaten the position of Alibaba Cloud’s domestic cloud market.
However, Baidu, which was gradually stripped of BAT by default, brought some surprises to the domestic cloud market this quarter. According to the statistical report of Canalys, Baidu Intelligent Cloud (hereinafter referred to as “Baidu Cloud”) surpassed Tianyi Cloud for the first time in the domestic cloud market, and the market share of Amazon AWS is only 0.8%. IDC pointed out in a report in May that Baidu Cloud entered the top five in the domestic cloud market for the first time in the second half of last year.
The rise of Baidu Cloud benefited from the combination of cloud computing and artificial intelligence. It hosted CCTV Spring Festival Evening to grab the red envelope activity and won an opportunity to demonstrate its ability and achieved success. In fact, in the fourth quarter of 2018, Baidu Cloud’s revenue reached 1.1 billion yuan, four times the fourth quarter of 2017.
According to IDC’s previous statistical report, the domestic cloud services market reached US$2.46 billion in the first quarter of 2019, up 67.9% year-on-year. Baidu Cloud and Huawei Cloud have shown a strong growth rate, which means that the domestic cloud market structure still has a lot of variables.
Competitive AI hardware
In addition to cloud computing, listed giants also value AI hardware such as smart speakers, and AI hardware is gradually narrowing the gap with Silicon Valley giants.
In the third quarter of 2018, the first time in the Alipay newspaper, the artificial intelligence sector appeared. At that time, the revenue data came from the Tmall Elf, and the sales of the Tmall Elf broke for the first time since the sale. Subsequently, after fierce competition in 2018, the domestic smart speaker pattern was basically confirmed, Ali, Baidu, and Xiaomi were firmly in the top three. After that, Ali and Baidu fell into the data battle of “Who is the first in the country” after entering 2019.
In the first quarter, Baidu announced that the sales of small speakers in the first quarter exceeded the full year of 2018, and surpassed Ali to become the first in China. Ali has classified the Tmall Elf into an innovative business (including Gold and Tmall), and has maintained a growth rate of more than 20% since the first quarter of 2019. Revenue in the second quarter reached 1.281 billion yuan, exceeding the first quarter of 1.207 billion yuan.
Before, data analysis company Strategy Analytics released 2019 Q2 global smart speaker market share report shows that Baidu smart speakers in the second quarter with 4.7 million units of sales topped the domestic smart speaker list, followed by Ali’s 430 3.4 million units of Wantai and Xiaomi.
The above data is from Strategy Analytics
In fact, sales may not be the only concern of these listed giants. Whether it is Baidu or Xiaomi or Ali, they are trying to make smart speakers into the central control and entrance of smart homes. In this respect, Xiaomi’s hardware The advantage is even greater.
In addition to the speakers, the chip has also become a competition point for the giants.
Layout Cloud computing was a very bold and far-sighted decision of Ma Yun. Ali invested in cloud computing core technology research and development 10 years ago, and built a self-developed Feitian cloud operating system and big data platform. Today, this business has become an important source of revenue for Ali. In contrast, the layout chip business is also a very bold decision.
Last year, Ali will merge with Zhongtianwei and Aridama to form a chip company “Pingtou Ge”. Then, in April of this year, the first neural network AI chip was launched, and the fully developed CK902 was launched. Series chips, etc., and plans to build a true quantum chip in the next 23 years, these chips will be used in cloud data scenarios such as Ali data center, urban brain and autopilot.
The chip is the hardware foundation for layout artificial intelligence, except for Ali.Baidu and Huawei are also working on this aspect. Among them, Baidu has released two AI chips, Kunlun and Hongjun, last year and this year. Huawei has been investing heavily in chip research. Now it has begun to plan itself. The ability to research out of reliance on traditional chip vendors.
Industry of AI
Enterprises’ research and development of technology will ultimately apply to specific scenarios. However, although the giants have begun to apply AI technology to their various business modules, they have not done too much in their financial reports. Show, especially in terms of industry landing.
In 2017, Ma Yun announced that he invested 100 billion yuan in basic science and subversive technological innovation research in 3 years. In 2019, the positive effect of this huge investment began to appear.
Alibaba’s latest data shows that its AI smart copywriter helps businesses export 10 million copies a day. But more technology comes from the intelligent consumption of services, including box horse’s robot restaurant, hungry drone distribution, word-of-mouth smart restaurant, flying pig’s face, and paperless entry of barley.
Tencent did not publish any relevant data on the industry, but from the previous actions, Tencent focused on smart cities, travel and medical care.
In terms of smart cities, Tencent launched the WeCity solution, which includes a basic cloud, three central stations (applications in the middle, data in the middle, artificial intelligence in the middle), four areas (digital government, urban governance) , city decision-making, industry interconnection); smart travel is based on Tencent’s intelligent system, car cloud, smart 4S shop, automatic driving, “four horizontal two vertical one middle platform travel strategy”; smart medical integration AI, Blockchain, financial insurance, payment and other capabilities. The three aspects combine Tencent’s capabilities in cloud computing, AI and big data, financial payments, and social platforms.
In contrast, Baidu, which is more high-profile in terms of AI, has achieved good results in the AI industry and AI ecological construction this quarter.
Baidu’s quarterly earnings report shows that its AI open platform developers have increased to 1.3 million. In addition, Baidu has become one of the few manufacturers in China that has achieved commercial success in the field of autonomous driving – the self-driving taxi landing test with FAW. Moreover, the Apollo test fleet currently has a mileage of more than 2 million kilometers, covering 13 cities. As of July, Baidu has won more than 100 copies in China.The driving test drive license is five times that of the second company.
From the initial listing of giants to rush to seize AI talent, until now AI technology, hardware is widely used, any company has been inseparable from AI, deep AI will also mean that a number of manufacturers in the future will be bound to see the red sword technology.