Yesterday, it was reported that Ali invested RMB 3.6 billion in Qian Fang Science and Technology, a listed company in the smart city field, becoming its second largest shareholder.
In Ali's commercial market, "smart city" is definitely an important bargaining chip. This "product" full of ambition and hormones has become promising because of the blurred boundaries.
Then, in the face of Nuoda's smart city, where will the best breakthrough point of the business sword be?
An industry rarely allows all practitioners to reach a * * * understanding, and the AI industry is an exception. Almost all practitioners believe that intelligent security and intelligent transportation will be the first AI industries to break out.
If intelligent transportation and intelligent security are the only stops for players from all walks of life, then why did Ali throw hydrangea to the experts in the industry circle?
The story begins two years ago.
2017165438+10, Qian Fang science and technology successfully married Shi Yu science and technology to Beijing with a dowry of 4.7 billion yuan.
As a leading domestic security enterprise, Shi Yu market ranks sixth in the world in 20 18. Products are sold to 145 countries around the world; More than 330 intelligent transportation projects; And launched artificial intelligence products "six mountains and two customs" and artificial intelligence program "AI Ready".
As a player in the field of intelligent transportation system integration, Qian Fang's entry surprised many people who ate melons, but surprised the whole rail transit market.
As a listed company, Yu Qian Fang has been focusing on the field of transportation integration for a long time, and can quickly extend its business scope to the field of security manufacturing, jump out of the bottom of intelligent transportation and extend its business tentacles to the new big investment strategy of smart cities.
At the same time, we can use Shi Yu's resources in public security, medical care, education, energy, enterprises, retail and other fields to expand our integrated products in the transportation field.
Not surprisingly, 20 18, Qian Fang made great progress in science and technology.
First of all, it is reflected in the securities market. In 20 18, the A-share Shanghai Composite Index fell by nearly 1000 points, and many "star stocks" fell one after another. Qian Fang Science and Technology has been very tough in the A-share market, and its market value has remained at the original level, unlike the price drop.
Secondly, from the product level, in the field of vehicle-road coordination, the product research and development scale of Qian Fang Science and Technology based on LTE-V standard has entered the stage of mass production and serialization, and the vehicle-mounted unit and roadside unit have passed the interconnection test organized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the model approval without commission, which will become an absolute barrier for Qian Fang Science and Technology to compete in the intelligent transportation track.
In terms of strategic layout, Qian Fang has launched a development strategy of "one body and two wings". "Integration" is to maintain the advantages of big data and artificial intelligence around smart cities. "Two wings" are two major business sectors, namely intelligent transportation and intelligent security, which can also be understood as Qian Fang and Shi Yu.
This layout "just" coincides with Ali's future strategic layout. From this perspective, Ali's shareholding is unexpected, but it is also reasonable.
Ali's "fame" in the security industry mainly benefits from the rapid replication of the urban brain.
In the eyes of Wang Jian, chairman of Ali Technical Committee, the "urban brain" is as important as human landing on the moon. It is like a gift from Hangzhou to the whole world, like Rome to the world sewer, London to the world subway, and new york to the world power grid.
At present, Ali has sent gifts to dozens of cities at home and abroad, such as Xiong 'an, Macau and Kuala Lumpur.
At the same time, with the landing of the project, there are also some voices. Many people in the industry believe that Ali is doing safety, and the meaning of drunkenness is not in wine. Behind the urban brain is actually a desperate struggle for urban "data".
For example, on 20 17, the Quzhou municipal government allocated 437 million yuan to join Ali to build an "urban brain" for this ancient city.
437 million yuan is actually "not much".
According to the project owner, Quzhou's "urban brain" will be built in multiple phases, and this fund is mainly used for the construction of urban big data platform and software layer.
Usually in a third-and fourth-tier city, the total number of cameras is estimated to be around 2000 to 10000. The construction of a big data center needs to consider the margin, which means it is easier to build tens of thousands of hardware. Take Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province as an example. If all cameras are built, it should reach about 6,543,800 roads.
According to the calculation of 10000 channels, the average price of video analysis servers is 300,000 yuan/set, and the data analysis of 100 channels is supported at the same time, so the required server may be 30 million yuan (the number of channels only represents the original data volume, but the actual price is often strongly related to the calculation cost of analysis, with great individual differences), and other types of data analysis assumptions are similar, considering the configuration of the whole computer room.
If other costs such as labor are finally excluded, Ali can earn a certain income from the "urban brain" project in each city, but the profit is dwarfed by its main channel business. (Previously, Ali also won the bid for the construction of Haikou's "urban brain" at a price of 455 million yuan, and the specific amount was not much different. )
Even so, we can find that besides Ali, Internet giants include Tencent, JD.COM and Baidu. Everyone stepped up their horsepower and rushed to enter the track. Behind the unattractive input-output ratio, why do these internet companies spend so much energy to build smart cities?
An industry executive told Lei Feng. The foreseeable future trend is that hardware will serve software instead of software serving hardware. The intention of internet companies that are fully committed to security is already very obvious: to be a big data operator in the Internet of Things era.
According to relevant statistics, by 2025, the global data circle will increase to 175 ZB( 1ZB is about 1 trillion GB), and China is expected to become the largest data circle in the world with a data volume of 48.6ZB.
At the same time, the problem of "data realization" has also greatly troubled traditional data holding enterprises. In contrast, Internet companies have studied customer demand and consumption behavior far more than traditional companies, and they are more handy in the layout of traffic realization.
In the past, Internet vendors including Ali knew more about users' online data, and the offline data was basically blank.
This means that in the data war, whoever has more video surveillance channels can build more accurate user portraits, so as to better understand and satisfy users' demands and gain greater voice in the era of big data.
Innovation is not the birth of a brand-new product, but the existing product is given new uses. It is foreseeable that the opening of online data and offline data will open a window of the world that all companies have never set foot in.
For example, in the new retail market in the future, through the laying of video surveillance, a set of solutions covering all aspects of "front", "in-store" and "cashier" can be formed for offline mass stores.
The equipment in front of the store is responsible for passenger flow analysis. When the consumer walked to the front of the store, the camera began to capture and analyze whether it was a new customer, an old customer or a VIP.
In addition, in the checkout scene, the camera can also clearly record the customer attributes of the buyer, such as age and gender. Analyzing the people who buy goods will help the store to promote the goods to the target customers more accurately in the later stage.
Storefront, shopping and cashier correspond to the life cycle of consumers in the retail industry.
Visitors pass by the door, become customers after entering the store, and then enter the cashier as users. With this service, relevant internet companies can help offline stores better understand the passenger flow and sales transformation of stores. By obtaining and analyzing user data, we can fully empower from site selection to marketing, and finally turn "tourists" into "users".
Data realization is a big and interesting topic, because it has no boundaries and no direction, and it is a complete black box, waiting for everyone to explore.
Liu Wei, chairman of Du Jia Group, even believes that for enterprises, the data is 2 1 century oil; For individuals, data is the reproduction of their lives; For the government, data is a basic strategic resource.
Ali, with a clear goal, started a little late in the smart security market, but he is playing with small steps. Internet giants are also unambiguous. Under the blessing of the huge business ecology, Ali holds several good cards.
From the product level, Alibaba Cloud has previously released the cloud Internet of Things video service Link Vision 1.0.
"Ali's move is very embarrassing. If it goes well, they can realize the video Internet of Things and truly realize the urban brain. " For this product, Fu Jianhui, CEO of Huatai Jack, said.
Link Vision 1.0 includes an open platform for Internet of Things video and an AI solution for Internet of Things video, which can help traditional camera manufacturers and security engineers better realize digital and intelligent transformation.
In other words, it can technically solve the practical problems of small and medium-sized enterprises, such as single profit model, poor image quality, poor experience, or unresolved security.
In fact, Alibaba Cloud's move is similar to the networked controller made by NetPower when converting analog to digital.
Its purpose is to connect all kinds of analog cameras, DVR, DVS, analog matrix, IPC, NVR and network matrix with a gateway device, so its core is the multimedia and data gateway discussed today.
This marginalized product proposed by Ali can be deployed to every node in every city; Secondly, based on the video structuring operation of edge cloud, many consumer security cameras can be connected to the Alibaba Cloud platform, and the data can be structured through the edge cloud computing server.
In this way, Ali obtained the data of city video through the video Internet of Things, which Ali could not do before.
Today, Huawei is also building a Zhang Yun, and Haikang is also weaving a Zhang Yun. Whoever can get more videos and more data in the later stage will be more competitive in the later stage.
From the point of view of strategic layout, this time's shareholding in Qian Fang is also a good card.
If industrial management is' addition', then investment mergers and acquisitions are' multiplication'. In the future, the competition for market share will be more enthusiastic and enterprising, and individual heroism alone has become a thing of the past.
In a sense, M&A behavior of enterprises is not simply to pursue the promotion of economies of scale, but to lay a good foundation for future coordinated development.
Ali shares in Qian Fang, whether in smart city industry, or in smart transportation, smart security and other sub-sectors, are greater odds.
Security and transportation are very heavy industries. Many large enterprises have been dormant for a long time before, but they all failed in the end, mainly because the product richness is not enough; In addition, without the advantages of supply chain, some devices related to traditional video images, such as lenses, have insufficient supply capacity and insufficient accumulation in electromechanical control.
Ali's advantage lies in the cloud. For the marginal party, if a single city goes to strike hard, do heavy work and be thankless, joining hands with Shi Yu is undoubtedly the best way to enter the company.
As early as the Warring States period, the princes merged with each other, resulting in the Seven Heroes of the Warring States. After the King of Qin unified Lian Heng, he finally swept Liuhe and unified the whole country.
After more than two thousand years, under the trend of global integration, all the factors that promote economic growth, such as trade, technology, service, management, resources, capital and intelligence, are irreversibly smoothing the economic boundaries of all countries.
In this process, investing in M&A means resource integration, border cleaning and reshuffle. Similarly, this figure also applies to the security industry.
For example, Hikvision acquired the British company SHL to further explore overseas markets; Dahua also acquired FLIR's Lorex brand for $29 million, expanding its sales network in North America, and so on.
This industry needs eye-catching people.
183 years ago, a British ship carrying 500 Maori with guns, clubs and tomahawks landed in the islands. Subsequently, the Moriori people on the island were massacred and the survivors were driven into slaves.
You know, Maori are also powerful Polynesian eagles, and this time, compared with aggressive Maori, they are seriously degraded.
History and business have always been strikingly similar and have the same laws.
From the hegemony of foreign companies to Haidayu, and then to the entry of heroes, the battlefield of security front-end AI and cloud AI business has entered the situation where security companies, technology giants and AI companies stand on the balance from the struggle of two forces.
The three types of companies have different tactics and different strategies.
Horizontally, Haikang and Dahua are "defensive schools"; Shang Tang and Kuang Shu are "innovators"; Ali and Huawei are "offensive".
Traditional security giants such as Haikang and Dahua focus on the "edge" and maintain the advantages of soft and hard integration from top to bottom;
Strategies of AI unicorns such as Shang Tang, Defiance and Horizon. Attack the cloud from the outside to the inside through the algorithm, and focus on IPC through the chip, so as to lay out the central control system and provide services based on top-level design;
Ali, Huawei and other industrial giants have a clear idea of entering security, build their own platforms with deep industry channels, attract more partners, and create a larger pan-security ecosystem.
Today, Ali's smart city map has two more high-quality partners, Qian Fang and Shi Yu. Leifeng net Leifeng net Leifeng net