2.81% and 91.60%, mainly from the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia and other places. Currently, Foxit Software has established multiple subsidiaries in Asia, America, Europe and Australia, and plans to gradually expand into emerging markets such as Russia, Brazil, and India in the future.
In the past three years, the percentage of Foxit’s main business revenue by region, source: prospectus
The prospectus shows that from 2017 to 2019, Foxit Software’s operating income was 220 million yuan, 280 million yuan and 360 million yuan, respectively, with an average annual compound growth rate of 29.31%; the company’s net profit was 26.03 million yuan, 39.23 million yuan and 75.31 million yuan, with an average annual compound growth rate of 70.07%.
However, Foxit Software is highly dependent on single product revenue. The prospectus shows that Foxit Software’s main income comes from PDF editor and reader products, development platforms and tools, and independent PDF-related products in the cloud. Among them, the proportion of sales revenue of PDF editors and readers has increased year by year, reaching 77.7% in 2019, which is 7 times that of the development platform and tool service products that account for the second largest revenue contribution.
In the past three years, Foxit software product operating income, source: prospectus
It is worth noting that as a software development company, Foxit Software’s sales and management expenses are much higher than R&D expenses.Comparing the salary per capita of R&D personnel with comparable listed companies in the same industry, source: prospectus
In this regard, Foxit Software’s explanation is that the per capita salary level of overseas managers is higher due to the higher local salary levels in the country where they are located, and some of the company’s senior executives are paid overseas. Most of the R&D personnel are located in second-tier cities such as Fuzhou, Hefei, and Nanjing. Due to differences in the level of regional economic development, there is a certain difference in salary from Beijing and Shenzhen where comparable companies in the same industry are located.
Second, the world needs to be “small and beautiful”
Xiong Yuqian, founder of Foxit Software, entered the Junior Class of the University of Science and Technology of China to study computer science at the age of 15. After graduation, he worked at the National Astronomical Observatory of Beijing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and then went to the “Silicon Valley” of the United States for further studies as the technical director of Bexcom Pte. Ltd.. In 2001, 31-year-old Xiong Yuqian returned to China to start his own business and founded Foxit Software in Fuzhou.
At the time, Adobe was the dominant player in the field of PDF documents. After returning to China, Xiong Yuqian led a team to develop proprietary software for other companies and needed to seek technical authorization from Adobe. However, Adobe’s commercial terms were relatively harsh, so they were forced to choose independent research and development. After more than a year of development, Foxit Reader 1.0 version came out at the end of 2004 and soon became one of the most popular free software that year.
At that time, the Adobe software was large and comprehensive, and the reading experience was very poor. Reading a page of a document often took several minutes to load. Foxit Software chooses to use the C language at the bottom layer and C++ language at the upper layer to ensure the efficiency of software operation, make the software run faster and consume less CPU resources. On the other hand, it can also cater to market development trends and cover mainstream mobile platforms such as iOS and Android.
For the following nearly two decades, Foxit Software has been focusing on the specific field of PDF, constantly refactoring its products, and continuously investing in technology.
It is precisely because of being “small and beautiful” that Foxit PDF is favored by Amazon and Google.
In 2009, Amazon Kindle was praised by the market shortly after it came out, but because about 80% of the world’s electronic documents are in PDF file format, support for reading PDF documents has become a very important function of Kindle. At first, the Adobe Reader selected by Amazon did not perform well on the Kindle, and encountered problems such as slow experience, frequent crashes, and some files often not opening.
= “Text-remarks”> InfoQ , Author: Chuxing Juan, Tina