How to see hard technology industry opportunities 2 to 3 years before the market?
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “IDA Jazzyear” .
Author | Bai Zongyi
Organization | Nange
The epidemic black swan superimposes a series of recent hard-line measures in the United States, which poses many challenges for hard technology entrepreneurship and investment represented by semiconductors.
Semiconductors are the foundation of the ICT industry. The strength of semiconductors will affect the situation of various countries in the technological competition of the new generation of information industry.
How to make domestic semiconductors grow rapidly under the opportunity of “import substitution”; how to capitalize the money on the blade of the capital side, and efficiently promote the landing of new technology industries has become an important issue in China’s technology industry.
Import substitution is not behind closed doors. In today’s globalization of supply chains and competition, technology venture capital must have a global perspective, comprehensive judgment of industry trends, and an understanding of existing supply chains.
Under the wave of “import substitution” of semiconductors, technology companies and investment institutions also need to guard against the traps of “copying the tuyere” and “low-end industries”.
The above views come from Yaotu Capital, an investment institution that is active in China and Israel and has invested in more than 40 cutting-edge Internet of Things and artificial intelligence companies at home and abroad.
On May 15, Bai Zongyi, the founding partner of Yaotu Capital, visited “Jiazi Live Room” to share his deep insight into hard technology and investment methodology from an international perspective.
The main points of this sharing are summarized as follows:
1. What opportunities exist for infrastructure investment;
2. Certain risks that require vigilance in investing in “import substitution”;
3. Investment methodology that saw opportunities in the hard technology industry two to three years before the market;
4. How to make good use of industry chain logic in hard technology investment.
1. The new wave of technology brought by IoT + AI + Cloud + 5G
Yaotu Capital mainly focuses on two areas, informatization and intelligence. The former focuses on infrastructure, focusing on semiconductors and integrated circuits, and the latter focuses on enterprise-level services at the application level.
Whether it is informatization or intelligence, the main line behind is data (data), including data collection, Transmission, storage, processing and enabling industry applications.
In the field of information infrastructure, Yaotu Capital focuses on innovative sensor, wireless communication, storage and computing to lay out semiconductors, integrated circuits and underlying software.
In terms of data collection, many new-generation sensors will replace human eyes, ears, and touch. After you have data, you need to transmit it. Whether it is between devices, narrowband or broadband, short-distance or long-distance, there are many new opportunities for wireless communication.
Large amounts of data need to be processed, partly on the side and partly on the cloud. How to do efficient storage and calculation around cloud-side and end-side data? The AI chip that everyone sees today is responsible for a new generation of data processing.
Data collection, storage and basic processing are informatization issues and are universal infrastructures.
In addition to investing 50% ~ 60% of the energy on the above infrastructure, we also put 40 ~ 50% of the energy on the application layer-with data, how to empower vertical industries. This is a problem of intelligence. The Chinese market is very large, and traditional industries have relatively high room for improving efficiency.
Today, we mainly share the observation from the perspective of infrastructure. In this field, the investment opportunities we see are divided into two parts:
The first is the new functions that mobile phones, automobiles and other IoT devices will produce in the next 3 to 5 years. They represent disruptive and innovative technologies from 0 to 1.
Second, under the Sino-US trade friction, the existing supply chain has become an alternative to the basic standard function, that is, the domestic supply chain reconstruction opportunity.
Today, the world has seen the largest wave of informatization, intelligent upgrades and changes in the past decade. At the same time, the Chinese market imports more than 300 billion US dollars of underlying technology every year, and there are opportunities for independent control and import substitution. With these two effects superimposed, we believe that the next two decades will be the best time to invest in the underlying technology and hard technology of all time in the past.
Every decade there will be major infrastructure changes. This year will probably build 800,000 to 1 million 5G base stations, which represents the advent of the 5G era.
5G means higher transmission rate and lower latency, which may bring new applications such as unmanned driving, VR / AR, telemedicine, and industrial Internet of Things, as well as data perception, transmission, storage, New changes in underlying technologies such as processing. There are many investment opportunities in this area.
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