(Original title: He used to be Baidu Marshal, LeTV No.1 in his eyes, and he just joined A-share company)
The news about LeTV has been exhausting.
But headhunters and venture capitalists are still keeping their nerves sharp, especially when it comes to the dynamics of LeTV. Maybe behind every one, there is a potential opportunity.
When LeTV is hottest, former SAIC General Manager Ding Lei, former SAIC Group Vice President Zhang Hailiang, original Baidu Unmanned Vehicle Manager Ni Kai, former SAIC R&D President Niu Shengfu, former Infiniti China General Manager Lu Zhengyu, and former VW Production Director FRANK STERZER Gao Jingshen, general manager of the former GAC Gonow, joined in one after another.
But now, it may come to a gathering moment again. The difference is only if someone walks early, someone walks too late, or someone leaves for attention, and someone leaves quietly.
But the key figures have all gone.
Ding Lei has already left, and he previously served as the co-founder of LeTV Supercars, the vice chairman of the world, the CEO of China and the Asia-Pacific region, and was the second person of LeTV.
Zhang Hailiang, successor, has also appeared in rumors. He started working as LeTV’s global CEO in March. After two months, he had a rumor of leaving the company. Then he responded himself, “is taking a vacation in the US + business tripâ€, but he recently went to the United States with Jia Yueting. In the picture of the superintendent, he did not appear in his figure.
Ni Kai is now gone.
The qubits learned that the person in charge of LeTV’s smart and automatic driving has already ended its work in Silicon Valley and Jiuxianqiao. The new identity is now the head of NavInfo’s new automated driving business.
In some sense, it was unexpected.
Ni Kaiqi people
Reasonable reason is because of the automatic driving, as the first batch of people engaged in the actual road test of unmanned vehicles, Ni Kai is still in the automatic driving line is not surprising.
In 2013, as a member of Baidu Marshal's plan, Ni Kai was recruited into Baidu by Bai Yu, the founding president of Baidu IDL. His title is Senior Scientist of Deep Learning Institute. He is actually responsible for the technical R&D and drive test of Baidu Unmanned Vehicle.
Earlier, Ni Kai Tsinghua Computer obtained a master degree, received a doctorate in computer science at Georgia Tech (and was a friend of Ctrip founder Liang Jianzhang), and entered Microsoft to participate in the development of three-dimensional maps and HoloLens augmented reality glasses.
However, for Ni Kai, it was mainly because of Baidu's experience that he was widely followed in his career development.
In the two years of Baidu from 2013 to 2015, Ni Kai verified the implementation of the four major modules of Baidu's unmanned vehicles in high-precision maps, positioning, perception, intelligent decision-making and control, and face recognition and other technical aspects. The actual road test completed technical preparation.
Several former Baidu unmanned car team members told the qubits that Ni Kai, with the team of about ten people, had reached this level before the establishment of Baidu's autonomous driving division. Contributions should not be ignored.
However, as far as the outside world is not aware, Ni Kai is leaving when the limelight is going strong. At that time, the news of the Baidu unmanned five-loop road test attracts attention both internally and externally. The establishment of the Autopilot Business Unit is even more advanced. At the press conference of the "three-year commercial production for five years", there was no news of Ni Kai's appointment.
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In March 2016, Ni Kai was announced to join LeTV and was appointed as the vice president of smart driving of LeTV Supercar. The official evaluation given by LeTV is: the first driver in China.
Actually, Nikai in LeTV basically continued the set of unmanned vehicle programs verified in Baidu. The only difference was that the level of autopilot became more extensive from L4.
He elaborated on this at the 2016 World Robot Conference.
Ni Kai said that in Levision’s driverless program, it will be mainly combined with the four dimensions of perception, positioning, planning and control, and human-computer interaction. He hopes to use autonomous driving as a starting point and gradually expand the related areas to other automotive-related technologies. This includes automotive augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing of maps, condition monitoring of drivers and occupants, and autopilot racing.
At that time, LeTV had a layout of autopilot solutions in hardware, software, and operations.
On the hardware, through investment and strategic cooperation, LeTV and FF achieve binding. In software, Ni Kai takes the lead in completing the calculation program based on multi-sensors, high-precision maps and GPUs to realize perception, positioning, route planning and control in automatic driving. In terms of operations, the acquisition is easy, and it begins to demonstrate the adoption of easy-to-call unmanned vehicles.
Have to admit that Jia Yueting did complete the upstream and downstream of the automatic driving industrial chain at the time. If there is no problem with the subsequent capital chain, LeTV may indeed shine on the road to subvert the automobile industry.
But no reality.
After LeTV's capital chain became tight and suffered a supplier run-up crisis, Lele was considered to be suffering from internal and diplomatic difficulties. The talents that had been dug up before were still facing losses. In the worst case, even employee wages will be difficult to maintain.
According to Tencent Finance reported on July 14, that is, this week, LeTV will face the next four months in China to stop the wages of employees - and even worse is whether there is a turning point in the future, and now looks hopeless. The qubit also found that the official microblog of LeTV was stopped after May 30th.
So in this context, the qubits dig into Ni Kai's latest developments.
According to headhunters, the giants including Baidu, the former club owner, all hope to get Ni Kai. The most important thing is to value his young and first-line business experience. However, in terms of positions and equity, there are difficulties for large companies.
There are also several startups in the area of ​​autopilot. The team also splits itself from Baidu, but it is already too late to get involved.
At the end of the day, Ni Kai chose to join NavInfo, a map data service provider, to take the auto driving business of this non-famous Internet company.
NavInfo New
Ni Kai eventually chose NavInfo as a new product. At present, it is difficult for us to know.
But on the whole, the news is unexpected. The core reason is that NavInfo is not a technology Internet company that is often perceived by the masses and the media.
In the past ten years, the most central impression of NavInfo may include the following:
State-owned enterprises background.
Tencent’s shareholding is the second largest shareholder.
The older generation of map navigation vendors, but in recent years the market share has suffered a high degree of pressure on Baidu.
There are still many customers in the car navigation market, including Tesla in China.
However, in the process of exploring Ni Kai, the qubits also discovered that this old generation of digital map manufacturers is revitalizing under the AI ​​wave.
For example, in the 2016 financial report, NavInfo officially announced the start of the transformation and split the business into four parts: navigation, car networking, advanced driver assistance and autopilot, enterprise service, and industrial applications.
According to these four businesses, the revenue was calculated. In the year's total revenue of RMB 1.58 billion, the revenue from the navigation business was RMB 815.2531 million, accounting for 51.42% of the total revenue; the revenue from the vehicle networking business was RMB 526.3333 million, accounting for 33.20%; the business and industry The application business income was RMB 227,704,200, accounting for 13.92% of the total; the new business advanced driver assistance and self-driving business revenue was RMB 24,479,900, accounting for 1.42%, an increase of 21.14% over the same period of last year. The customers covered domestic and foreign mainstream car manufacturers.
Another example is the two major strategic measures disclosed in the financial report. One is to invest in the establishment of merger and acquisition funds, the use of levers to layout the car network, automatic driving industry chain; the second is the strategic alliance, the antenna extends to the field of chips and sensors.
In respect of M&A funds, NavInfo has established a joint venture with Beijing Automotive, Beijing Jinsheng Boji Asset Management Co., Ltd. and Beijing Century Mastery Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership) as GP to establish “Beijing Siwei Jinsheng Investment Management Co., Ltd.†with a scale of RMB 1 billion. Yuan, mainly invests in unlisted companies in the field of car networking and automatic driving.
In terms of strategic alliances, the first is to form an alliance with chipmaker MediaTek, which is an equity purchase and reorganization transaction. NavInfo first acquired 100% of the shares of “Figure Bar†for 158 million yuan, followed by Mediatek’s subsidiary, Xunfa, and then invested 0.97 in the figure. Billion dollars.
After the completion of the transaction, the two parties also signed a strategic cooperation agreement, saying that they would jointly commit themselves to cooperate in the automotive electronics field and provide global industry customers with integrated system solutions that include chip and software services.
Another involves strategic cooperation and the object is Bosch. In April of this year in Suzhou, NavInfo announced a three-year cooperation with Bosch.
According to the agreement, the road characteristics data collected by Bosch hardware sensors will be collected by NavInfo's new cloud computing service platform to meet the national security requirements of NavInfo's new high-precision map server to generate high-precision maps for autopilot.
Of course, when explaining the above-mentioned action intentions to public shareholders, NavInfo also clearly stated its ambition for transformation: to become China’s Mobileye, and to have the core capabilities of “automated driving†such as “high-precision map+chip+algorithm+system platformâ€.
Mobileye is not unfamiliar to the foreign benchmarking companies, except that they previously provided Tesla with an automated driving plan, and also because of Intel’s $15.3 billion purchase of Mobileye in March 2017 (at the time equivalent to 105.6 billion yuan). .
Therefore, the new dimension of NavInfo is such that the current market value of 22.6 billion yuan is also a seemingly unlimited prospect.
It is worth noting that NavInfo is not an ambiguous comparison. In the process of ambitious disclosure of the “Full Autopilot Projectâ€, several layouts were also disclosed in their 2016 annual report:
In January, it reached a cooperation with Neusoft Group to fully develop smart cars;
In May, the acquisition of Jiefa Technology will deepen the industrial layout into the key links of automotive chips;
In August, signed a cooperation agreement with Weilai and Weimar Automobile to complete the cross-border "Internet +" practice;
November to join MediaTek to enter the automotive chip market;
In December, it will invest in HERE, the world's largest photo maker, to deploy overseas markets and look at future-oriented technologies such as high-precision maps and autonomous driving;
In the same month, it announced the signing of a cooperation agreement with Great Wall Motors, cooperating in the areas of automatic driving technology including vehicle automatic control, architecture, intelligent driving decision algorithms, and environment-aware algorithms, and promoting the early commercialization of autopilot technology;
In April 2017, Bosch reached a cooperation with Bosch to carry out in-depth cooperation on the vehicle autopilot project. The core is a high-precision map;
In May 2017, with the wholly-owned subsidiary of HERE, Beijing Tuxi Xinhe Technology Co., Ltd. landed, the main business will be to provide customers using the HERE global location service platform with content including Chinese map data and dynamic information. And server-side solutions. â€
Therefore, it basically involves all aspects of "high-precision map + chip + algorithm + system platform", even including car repair.
The investment market is also optimistic about the new transformation of NavInfo. After the release of the 2016 annual report, the comment given by Minsheng Securities is “the depth of the layout of the future of car networking and artificial intelligence can be expectedâ€.
According to the report of Minsheng Securities, the company's EPS for the 17-19 year is expected to be 0.26, 0.37 and 0.47 respectively. Based on the huge space for the future of the Internet of Things and autopilot, we will give a PE interval range of 85x-90x in 2017, which corresponds to a valuation range of 22.1-23.4 yuan in the next 12 months. The first time coverage will be given as a 'strongly recommended' rating.
△ 犓 犓   钚抡衅 钚抡衅/钚抡衅 
In addition, the new transformation of NavInfo is also reflected in the recruitment. In the latest recruitment information, NavInfo has released a number of posts involving ADAS, autopilot and deep learning, which may be Ni Kai’s needs, or may be Ni Kai’s. It is one of the rings.
However, what is more important is that the AI ​​wave has re-washed and impacted on the established pattern of the industry - technological change will never be easy for enterprises.
With the cooperation with car companies, NavInfo was once the overlord in the field of map navigation. But also because of the missed opportunities in the mobile Internet era, Baidu and Gaode have eaten up resources and share a little bit.
However, at the moment when Baidu and Gao De’s two-point world pattern are tentatively set, the AI ​​wave has brought with it uncertainties, and the good match has been repeated.
In addition to NavInfo, the recently searched Sogou map also uses speech interactive energizing to introduce an updated Sogou map under the driving scene. So you may think that the map navigation competition is over, but now it is still a big deal, but as a user, market competition can always make people have more choices, but also to prevent monopolists from forgetting the initial heart.
All in all, this trend will continue and this trend will take place in more areas.
[Lee radiates from the next qubit report on Margaret Avenue in Los Angeles | Public QbitAI]
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Nanning Goodman Technology Co.,Ltd , https://www.goodmentech.com