FEBRUARY 28, GOTU. US) released its financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022. According to the financial report, the company's current revenue fell by 50.6% year-on-year; Net profit attributable to the company decreased by 75.3% year-on-year. Judging from the data alone, the figures of this earnings report are "not pretty".
However, after the release of the earnings report, Gaotu's stock price closed up for three consecutive trading days on March 1, 2 and 3, and closed sharply by 26.15% and 17.54% on the 2nd and 3rd, respectively, which also made its stock price stand at the $5 mark again, and on March 3, a year ago, due to a series of reform measures such as the "double reduction" policy, Gaotu's stock price fell to $1.53.
It is worth mentioning that while disclosing the financial report, Gaotu also announced the company's actions in the field of AI, including access to Baidu's "Wen Xin Yiyan" and the introduction of ChatGPT homologous AI intelligent technology, and the launch of the postgraduate planning and Q&A product "Gaotu AICan". In the overseas market where ChatGPT has recently become popular, the new story of "AI + online education" is obviously more attractive to Wall Street.
The performance fell sharply, and the data was good
If you only look at Gaotu's earnings report from financial data such as revenue and profit, it is obviously difficult to read the positive content.
The company's revenue in the fourth quarter was 630 million yuan (RMB, the same below), compared with 1.274 billion yuan in the same period last year, down 50.6% year-on-year; The net profit attributable to the company was 70.613 million yuan, compared with 286 million yuan in the same period of the previous year, a year-on-year decrease of 75.3%.
In fact, the main reason for the company's revenue decline in 2022 is that it will carry out business restructuring in accordance with the requirements of the "double reduction" policy, including the cessation of compulsory education to provide students with academic subject tutoring services. Total actual course sales bills were $997 million, compared to $1,001 million for the same period last year.
In terms of profit, the company's gross profit for the current period was 470 million yuan, compared to 888 million yuan in the same period last year; The operating loss was 13.248 million yuan, compared with an operating income of 258 million yuan in the same period last year. On a non-GAAP basis, the Company's gross profit for the period was $474 million, compared to $908 million for the same period last year; Operating income was 3.531 million yuan, compared with 297 million yuan in the same period last year. In the case of a significant decrease in revenue and gross profit, the net profit attributable to the company for the current period was 87.392 million yuan, compared with 324 million yuan in the same period last year.
But the earnings report also revealed a more positive side. In the Q4 transformation stage, Gaotu still maintained good cost and expense control. The company's current sales expenses decreased from 373 million yuan in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 290 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 22.3%; R&D expenses decreased by 10.9% year-on-year; General and administrative expenses decreased by 14.1% year-on-year to RMB82.4 million from RMB95.9 million in Q4 2021.
In addition, in terms of cash flow, the company's Q4 revenue and cash income increased sequentially: Q4 cash income was approximately 1 billion yuan, a significant increase of 64.3% sequentially. Revenue grew sequentially for three consecutive quarters; Large-scale operating net cash inflow: Q4 operating net cash inflow was 480 million yuan, and the annual operating net cash inflow in 2022 was 54.55 million yuan. Profit-based revenue and cash-flow-based profit were achieved for the full year and profitable growth.
From the perspective of cash reserves, as of December 31, 2022, the company's cash and cash equivalents, restricted funds and short-term investments totaled 3.744 billion yuan, an increase of 73 million yuan from the end of 2021 and an increase of 400 million yuan from the end of the third quarter.
Since the K12 education business is still included in the high-road business in 2021, this has led to a distortion of the year-on-year data for 2022. However, from the perspective of expenses and cash reserves, Gaotu has better implemented the strategy of "tightening the belt and living a life" in the transformation process, and the steady growth in revenue and cash income achieved in 2022Q4 also reflects the effectiveness of its transformation to a certain extent.
According to the company's current forecast data, revenue in the Q1 quarter of 2023 should be between 686 million yuan and 706 million yuan, accelerating from 9.0% to 12.1% from the previous quarter.
Hitching a ride on "AI", valuations are about to take off?
After the double reduction policy, many domestic K12 education and training companies began to transform, and according to Gaotu's performance report in Q1 last year, its transformation plan after K12, university and adult education, vocational education, quality education and intelligent digital products will be an important direction for the company's transformation and development, and adult business will also be the "top priority" of Gaotu's future business development.
From the perspective of revenue structure, in the Q4 results conference call, Gaotu management said that "learning services will remain the largest source of revenue, it will contribute more than 90% of revenue, and the remaining 10% will be contributed by digital products." ”
Management also mentioned that of 90% of the learning services revenue, we expect learning services from university students and adults to contribute about 30% of the total revenue. The rest will come from our non-subject tutoring services and other traditional learning services.
But in fact, from the perspective of Gaotu's business expansion, the direction of its side business is far more than the field of education. Since July 2021, Gaotu has carried out business transformation and exploration in multiple directions, in addition to continuing to deepen adult online education in the field of education, several business teams within Gaotu have conducted in-depth exploration in the field of e-commerce live broadcasting.
After exploration and integration, Beijing Gaotu Jiapin Technology Co., Ltd. was officially established on November 16, 2022, and officially launched the "Gaotu Jiapin" live broadcast room on December 24. Shortly after the launch of Gaotu Jiapin, on January 6, 2023, Chen Xiangdong, the founder of Gaotu, officially entered Douyin to create personal IP. This operation is obviously in line with New Oriental and stepping on the hot education at that time to live broadcast and bring goods.
This statement reflects from the side that the "live streaming goods" business previously explored by Gaotu has not yet generated positive benefits. In addition to stepping on the wind of live streaming goods, Gaotu has also recently caught up with the "AI" wind of the market fire.
According to Zhitong Financial APP, on February 17 this year, Gaotu announced that it became the first batch of ecological partners of Baidu's "Wenxin Yiyan", and Gaotu announced that it will combine its own online education data and experience accumulation for many years to further expand the depth and breadth of AI in teaching and service links such as teaching practice and assessment, and greatly improve user learning experience and learning efficiency.
In addition, the R&D team of Gaotu Kaokan recently announced that it will introduce ChatGPT homologous AI intelligent technology, combined with the data accumulated by Gaotu Kaokan for many years, and launch the postgraduate planning and Q&A product "Gaotu AICan". "Gaotu AICan" can automatically generate highly personalized answers and suggestions for different candidates, greatly improving learning efficiency and the accuracy of information screening and feedback.
Regardless of the scale of investment or research and development, Gaotu obviously cannot independently complete the research and development of educational AI, and it is possible to access existing AI programs to complete the development of application fields. For example, on March 1 of this year, OpenAI announced the official launch of the ChatGPT and Whisper speech-to-text model APIs for business users, through which developers can integrate ChatGPT and Whisper models into their own applications and services, where developers can use OpenAI's open-source Whisper large-v2 model in the API.
It is worth mentioning that Gaotu pays attention to application scenarios in the AI industry, rather than basic theory and technological innovation, which dooms the company to form technical barriers in the field of educational AI, and the stock price fluctuations caused by the "speculation concept" may not have a significant impact on the company's long-term valuation changes.
source:hk.investing
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