Text | Yang Xiaohe
In 2022, Internet companies collectively encountered multiple unfavorable factors such as idle growth, cost reduction and stock strangulation.
The financial report released by Ali on May 26th can be regarded as some good news in the market. Among them, the profit of Alibaba Cloud EBITA improved from a loss of 22.5 1 billion yuan in fiscal year 2022 to a profit of 65.438+0.10.46 billion yuan in fiscal year 2022. This is the first annual profit of Alibaba Cloud 65.438+03 since its establishment, and it is also the only cloud service provider in China to achieve profit.
For a long time, technologies such as cloud computing, AI and chips have become the growth engines of the Internet in the second half. Now, 10 years have passed, and the head of the company, Ali, has finally proved that this road is feasible.
Moreover, this achievement comes at the right time. As we all know, the domestic Internet dividend is tending to disappear. In the case of weak growth of users and business, the market value of Internet companies is rapidly declining due to the capital's concern about the uncertainty of Internet companies. According to the data of China Information and Communication Research Institute, by the end of March 2022, the total market value of listed Internet companies in China was 9.9 trillion yuan, down 20.2% from the end of last year. In the fourth quarter of 2002/kloc-0, the revenue of Internet listed companies in China was 986.3 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate of 12.9%, which was 8.3 percentage points lower than the same period of last year.
Twenty years ago, Nasdaq fell from the highest point of 5048 to 1 1 14, shrinking by 78%. In two years, its market value * * * evaporated by $5 trillion. Netscape, Yahoo, WorldCom and other companies suffered heavy losses, but they also exercised the ability of companies such as Microsoft and Amazon to cross the cycle.
Nowadays, domestic Internet companies enjoy the huge flow dividend brought by the transformation of production relations, but they also realize the necessity of improving the hard power of science and technology earlier. Through the recent earnings season, it is meaningful to see which companies have the ability to cross the "middle income trap" of the Internet.
By roughly calculating the financial report data released by Internet protection companies recently, Science and Technology Planet found that although the current development environment is still full of chill, the total R&D investment of domestic Internet company Top 10 in 20021is still close to 300 billion yuan, and the R&D investment has basically maintained an increase of more than 30%. Among them, Alibaba reached a maximum of 654.38+02 billion yuan, ranking first in China.
Can these hundreds of billions of R&D investments become the supporting force for the development of Internet companies after kinetic energy conversion?
Undeniably, the Internet is entering a more normal development speed.
According to the data of China ICT Institute, the total revenue of listed Internet companies in China in the fourth quarter of 2002/KLOC-0 was 986.3 billion yuan, up by 12.9% year-on-year, and down by 8.3 percentage points compared with the same period of last year.
Although the growth rate of revenue is declining, everyone is increasing investment in order to achieve a higher leap after "squatting".
Specifically, in fiscal year 2022, Alibaba's total revenue was RMB 853.062 billion and its net profit was RMB 654.38+036.388 billion, which was not calculated according to US GAAP. In the conference call, Ali revealed that in the past year, Alibaba's technology investment exceeded 654.38+02 billion yuan, and R&D investment accounted for 654.38+04% of revenue.
Tencent Q 1 financial report data hit a new low in revenue and net profit growth in the past decade. However, Tencent's R&D investment is still growing, reaching 6543.8+05383 billion yuan. Baidu 202 1 annual revenue124.5 billion yuan, core R&D expenses 22 1 100 million yuan; Netease reported in the first quarter of 2022, and invested 3.4 billion in research and development.
Internet giants have greatly increased the proportion of R&D investment, and the deep meaning behind it is to change the revenue model based on traffic advertising and truly establish a diversified and healthy revenue system. From the revenue of "Cloud Computing and Internet Infrastructure" and "Cloud Computing" in Ali, they only account for 12. 1% and 7.68% respectively. But from Amazon's point of view, AWS cloud services contributed more than 30% of the profits, and the revenue share was about 15%. Alibaba Cloud, which has just started to make a profit, will also become Ali's profit in the future.
Consistent with Alibaba's transformation thinking, Internet companies burn the most money 1000 billion and the lowest money1000 billion, focusing on cloud computing, AI, quantum computing, chips, 5G, autonomous driving, robotics and other fields, all in order to establish a new growth curve in the second half of the Internet.
However, the investment period of technology research and development is long, the investment is heavy and the return is slow, which requires firm confidence.
As early as 2009, Alibaba Cloud was questioned internally that he burned too much money and could not see the future. Ma Yun stood up and supported Alibaba Cloud, saying that he would invest 65.438 billion yuan every year in 654.38+00 years, until then. 20 17 When the Dharma Institute was established, Ali also promised to invest10 billion yuan for long-term construction for three years, and his firm commitment to technology was unprecedented.
Judging from the data at this stage, after years of high-intensity investment, Ali has indeed completed a relatively comprehensive and in-depth technical layout. At present, Ali has set up seven research centers around the world, with the underlying technology field exceeding 16 and 3000 open source technology projects, which is second to none among domestic Internet companies. Ali has also obtained more than 10000 global invention patents in strategic emerging industries. In the past three years, more than 60% of patent investment has been concentrated in hard-core fields such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and chips.
From the perspective of the whole industry, the growth of burning money for technology is also considerable.
As early as 2000, there were only nine China enterprises in Fortune Global 500. At that time, the number of listed companies in the United States and Japan ranked first and second, with 179 and 107 respectively. China Petrochemical ranks the highest in China, ranking only 58th.
Statistics show that in the Fortune Global 500 of 202 1, China * * has 143 companies on the list, an increase of 1 1 over the previous year, making it the country with the largest number of companies on the list, and the United States * * has 122.
Since 20 15, Internet companies have collectively laid out digital productivity such as cloud and AI, and their investment in R&D has increased year by year. It has been roughly 1 trillion, and now it is time to test the results in stages.
Ali's R&D investment path is relatively clear, and the road of digital economy has been determined, and a development model of soft and hard integration has been built in the fields of cloud, terminal and bottom. Let the business go to the cloud, let AI improve the intelligence of the cloud, and run in the self-developed chip. To realize these dreams, we mainly rely on the technical triangle of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent, Dharma Institute and Pingtou Ge Semiconductor Company.
Ali's huge investment has also brought great progress. Gartner, an industry research institute, released the global IaaS market share data of 202 1. Alibaba Cloud, relying on the independently developed Tian Fei operating system, ranked third in the world in market share, and achieved share growth for six consecutive years. Meanwhile, Alibaba Cloud ranks first in the Asia-Pacific market with a market share of 25.53%.
Dharma Institute has gradually made achievements in the fields of autonomous driving, quantum computing and AI big model. For example, Little Man Donkey is a L4 self-driving product developed by Ali for the "last three kilometers". At present, more than10,000 orders have been delivered, setting a new record for domestic terminal logistics. It is reported that Dharma Institute has started the research and development project of self-driving truck "Big Donkey" to explore the open road automatic driving technology. These technical products will have a great impact on the development of logistics.
Last year, Pingtou Ge released the 5nm general-purpose CPU chip Eternal 7 10, which is the world's top ARM server chip, representing Pingtou Ge's leap from special-purpose chip to general-purpose chip and becoming one of the first-class chip companies. In addition, Pingtou Ge has successively released the most powerful RISC-V processor Tie Xuan 9 10, the one-stop chip design platform "No Sword", and opened the source code of Tie Xuan RISC-V series processors and basic software. More than 2.5 billion domestic chips have adopted Tie Xuan processors, making it the largest domestic CPU in China.
Ali's own e-commerce, logistics and financial services are large enough. It is a very solid strategy for reptiles to extend the internal application of these technical products to the whole industry.
Tencent's R&D focuses on digital cultural creativity and digital economy, which belong to two development strategies.
Digital Wenchuang focuses on innovative business departments such as Tencent AI Lab, Multimedia Lab and Magic Core. For example, the coding and decoding technology independently developed by Tencent has more than 100 international coding and decoding patents, and the research and development of VR live broadcast technology is being promoted in the future.
Tencent's digital economy has also begun to take shape. In 20021year, Tencent released Aochi, a distributed cloud operating system, with a single cluster supporting 65438+ 10,000 servers. Tencent Cloud distributed database TDSQL helps more than 20 financial institutions to localize their core systems.
Although the synergy effect is not obvious, spanning the two major markets can also ensure that Tencent's basic disk is large enough.
Baidu is betting that AI is the next scene of the Internet, with layouts in the fields of autonomous driving, intelligent cloud and AI open platform. Among them, Baidu AI cloud business revenue increased by 45% year-on-year. In the first quarter, Radish Run provided1960,000 rides. At the same time, there are 4.77 million developers in the propeller developer community, serving 6.5438+0.8 million enterprises.
In the past, Baidu was deeply troubled by the decline in the growth rate of search and information flow advertising, and has been waiting for the large-scale commercialization of AI. Judging from the current data, AI has gradually become the second curve trend, and businesses such as autonomous driving are gradually generating commercial income.
Others, such as JD.COM, have invested nearly 80 billion yuan in research and development in the past five years, and continue to focus on artificial intelligence hot innovation fields and application scenarios; Netease, which experienced the first Internet bubble, is also increasing the proportion of R&D investment.
In the eyes of mass consumers, big manufacturers often do nothing, Ali is doing quantum computing, Baidu is doing cars, and Tencent is doing virtual idols. But in fact, with trillions of investment in technology research and development, the core of the digital economy has quietly changed.
The Internet, which is famous for its speed, has now learned to be slow.
Ali began to do research and development related to cloud computing in 2009, and it was not until FY22 that Alibaba Cloud achieved its first full-year profit since 13. It took Huawei nearly 30 years from the establishment of a chip design center in the 1990s to the level of playing the same card table as Qualcomm.
How do internet companies balance their investment in many unknown and huge fields with the core technologies that need to be broken through urgently?
At an internal business meeting in Ali, Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent and president of Dharma Institute, discussed strategies with his subordinates, trying to answer what to do and what not to do. He said, "What is strategy? The strategy is to let you have a problem of fear, such as quantum computing. " The scene that scared him was, "One day, no matter how many servers and chips Alibaba buys, it won't be a quantum computer."
Therefore, dharma institute is committed to the field of quantum computing with great exploration significance. In 20 18, Taizhang, a quantum circuit simulator, was successfully developed and became a pioneer in challenging quantum hegemony. The evolution of Taizhang 2.0 can greatly reduce resource consumption. Two months ago, Dharma Institute announced that the new quantum bit chip has achieved 99.72% control accuracy of two-gate and reached the best level of such bits in the world.
For the pain points of the current scene, Ali has solved many practical problems through new products created by technology.
For example, in the industrial field where the old master is badly needed, Ali AI has entered many super-large steel enterprises, increasing the detection rate of surface defects of steel plates from 90% to 98% manually; Alibaba Cloud's artificial intelligence technology has been used in 65,438+000 garbage incinerators in nearly 30 cities across the country to increase power generation. In the meteorological field that requires complex calculation, AI Earth of Dharma Institute has been put into use in the Ministry of Water Resources, National Meteorological Center, Ministry of Ecology and Environment and other institutions.
Shi, director of the quantum laboratory of Dharma Institute, once described this state as a "pragmatic idealist". In fact, it focuses on the vision of the future and then stays focused. In other words, technology often starts with difficulties, and landing begins with sinking scenes.
This is obviously different from the style of some foreign Internet giants. Google has a famous X lab. This lab-led project is very creative and forward-looking, and some projects are called "Moonshot" internally. These unconstrained projects include space elevators and internet hot air.
In contrast, domestic Internet companies' R&D investment is relatively more focused and their applications are more grounded. They started with the IT security of IOE, and then invested in the reform of digital economy.
Of course, we should also see that there is still a gap between China Internet companies and international giants. Compared with the R&D expenditure of Google and other companies, the R&D investment of large domestic companies generally rises in the range of10 billion, and China Internet companies need more efforts.