"Originally titled 'From Baidu Marshall to LeTV's Top Priority, He Just Joined A-Share Company,' the story of LeTV continues to unfold. The constant stream of updates on LeTV has been exhausting, yet headhunters and venture capitalists remain vigilant, particularly when it comes to the company's shifting dynamics. There might be hidden opportunities behind every corner.
During LeTV's peak, notable figures like Ding Lei, former SAIC General Manager, Zhang Hailiang, former SAIC Group Vice President, Ni Kai, former Baidu Unmanned Vehicle Manager, Niu Shengfu, former SAIC R&D President, Lu Zhengyu, former Infiniti China General Manager, and Frank Sterzer, former VW Production Director, joined one after another.
However, it seems the tide has turned again. Some left early, others too late, while some departed for greater visibility, and others quietly slipped away. The key players have all moved on.
Ding Lei has already exited, previously serving as LeTV Supercars' co-founder, the world's vice chairman, and CEO for China and the Asia-Pacific region, making him the second most important figure at LeTV.
Rumors have swirled around Zhang Hailiang, who started as LeTV's global CEO in March. Two months later, whispers of his departure surfaced. He later clarified, "taking a vacation in the US + business trip," but his recent trip to the US with Jia Yueting saw him absent from photos.
Ni Kai has now departed as well. Sources indicate that the person leading LeTV's smart and automated driving efforts has finished their work in Silicon Valley and Jiuxianqiao. Their new role is as head of NavInfo's new automated driving business.
It came as a surprise to many. Ni Kai, known for being one of the pioneers in real-world testing of unmanned vehicles, remains deeply rooted in the autonomous driving field.
In 2013, as part of Baidu's 'Marshall Plan,' Ni Kai was recruited by Bai Yu, Baidu IDL's founding president, and took on the role of Senior Scientist at the Deep Learning Institute. He was responsible for technical R&D and road tests of Baidu's Unmanned Vehicle.
Before joining Baidu, Ni Kai earned a master’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech (where he befriended Ctrip founder Liang Jianzhang) and worked on developing 3D maps and HoloLens augmented reality glasses at Microsoft.
Ni Kai's career flourished largely due to his experience at Baidu. During his two years there from 2013 to 2015, he validated the implementation of the four major modules—high-precision maps, positioning, perception, intelligent decision-making and control—in Baidu's unmanned vehicles. His contributions included face recognition and other technical aspects, preparing for actual road tests.
Several former Baidu unmanned car team members noted that Ni Kai, along with a team of about ten people, achieved this before the establishment of Baidu's autonomous driving division. His contributions should not be overlooked.
However, as the spotlight intensified, Ni Kai quietly stepped away. The Baidu unmanned five-loop road test drew both internal and external attention, and the creation of the Autopilot Business Unit was even more prominent. Yet, there was no mention of Ni Kai's appointment at the "three-year commercial production for five years" press conference.
In March 2016, Ni Kai was announced to join LeTV as vice president of smart driving for LeTV Supercar. LeTV's official evaluation of him was: the first driver in China.
At LeTV, Ni Kai essentially continued the unmanned vehicle programs he had verified at Baidu. The only difference was that the level of autopilot became more extensive, moving from L4.
He explained this at the 2016 World Robot Conference. Ni Kai mentioned that in LeVision's driverless program, it would mainly combine four dimensions: perception, positioning, planning, and control, as well as human-computer interaction. He hoped to use autonomous driving as a starting point and gradually expand related areas to other automotive technologies, including automotive AR, crowd-sourced maps, driver and occupant condition monitoring, and autopilot racing.
At that time, LeTV had a comprehensive layout of autopilot solutions in hardware, software, and operations.
On the hardware side, through investments and strategic partnerships, LeTV and FF achieved binding. In software, Ni Kai led the development of a computation program based on multi-sensors, high-precision maps, and GPUs to enable perception, positioning, route planning, and control in autonomous driving. In operations, the company began demonstrating the adoption of easy-to-call unmanned vehicles.
It must be admitted that Jia Yueting did manage to create an upstream and downstream industrial chain for autonomous driving at the time. If the subsequent capital chain hadn't faltered, LeTV might have truly shone in the path to disrupt the automobile industry.
But reality didn't align. As LeTV's capital chain tightened and faced a supplier run-up crisis, LeTV struggled with internal and external challenges. Even the talented individuals previously recruited faced losses. In the worst-case scenario, even employee wages became hard to maintain.
According to Tencent Finance, reported on July 14, LeTV will face the next four months in China without paying employee wages—and the outlook for any turnaround seems bleak. The qubit also found that LeTV's official microblog stopped posting after May 30.
Given this context, I dug deeper into Ni Kai's latest developments.
Headhunters revealed that giants like Baidu, along with former club owners, all wanted to secure Ni Kai. The most crucial factor was valuing his youth and frontline business experience. However, in terms of positions and equity, large companies encountered difficulties.
There were also a few startups in the autopilot space. Their teams had split off from Baidu, but it was already too late to get involved.
Ultimately, Ni Kai chose to join NavInfo, a map data service provider, to take on the auto driving business of this relatively lesser-known Internet company.
NavInfo New
Ni Kai eventually chose NavInfo as his new venture. At present, it's challenging to know much.
However, overall, the news was unexpected. The core reason is that NavInfo is not a technology Internet company often perceived by the masses and the media.
Over the past decade, the most central impression of NavInfo may include the following:
State-owned enterprise background.
Tencent’s second-largest shareholder.
An older-generation map navigation vendor, but in recent years, its market share has suffered significant pressure from Baidu.
Still has many customers in the car navigation market, including Tesla in China.
However, during my exploration of Ni Kai, I discovered that this older-generation digital map manufacturer is revitalizing under the AI wave.
For instance, in the 2016 financial report, NavInfo officially announced its transformation and split its business into four parts: navigation, car networking, advanced driver assistance, and autopilot, enterprise services, and industrial applications.
Based on 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, using leverage to lay out the car network, automatic driving industry chain; the second is the strategic alliance, extending to the field of chips and sensors.
Regarding M&A funds, NavInfo 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 expected.â€
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.
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.
[Written by Lee radiates from the next qubit report on Margaret Avenue in Los Angeles | Public QbitAI]"
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