New Stock News | Ruqi Travel goes public: XiaoMa Wenyuan, Didi, and other L4 giants rush to subscribe, aiming to become the first stock in autonomous driving operation technology

The autonomous driving sector has been in the limelight in the Hong Kong stock market this year. On one hand, leading companies in specific subfields have been listing in Hong Kong, such as the first listed company in LiDAR, Speed ​​Surpassing Juchuang (02498), and the first listed company in the autonomous driving domain controller, ZhiXing Auto Technology (01274). On the other hand, high-quality new stocks have all recorded extremely high premiums. The stock prices of the two aforementioned companies have risen by up to 219% and 290% respectively from their issue prices. As of now, ZhiXing Auto Technology still maintains a premium of 155%.

Moreover, Ruqi Travel has also publicly announced its IPO and is expected to become the first listed company in autonomous driving operation technology. Are you ready?

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Ruqi Travel submitted its application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March this year, held a hearing on June 24, started its IPO on June 28, and will officially list on July 10. Ruqi Travel is a leading domestic smart travel service platform and a pioneer in the commercialization of Robotaxi (autonomous driving rental cars). Robotaxi services have been launched in the two major first-tier cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Ruqi Travel, as a leader in Robotaxi, has strong shareholders. It was jointly established by GAC Group and Tencent, and later introduced Xiaoma Zhixing as a strategic shareholder. In this IPO, cornerstone investors include GAC Group, Xiaoma Zhixing, WeRide, and Voyager. The cornerstone investors have agreed to subscribe to a total amount of approximately USD 102 million to USD 105 million (or approximately HKD 799 million to HKD 820 million) at the offer price, with the total number of subscribed shares being 20.6573 million shares.

With the halo of the concepts of "autonomous driving" and "AI" and the backing of strong shareholders, can Ruqi Travel's listing this time become a "dark horse" in the autonomous driving sector?

High Performance Growth, Focusing on the Greater Bay Area

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Ruqi Travel is a leader in smart travel, with businesses including travel services, technology services, and providing a full range of support for drivers and capacity joining merchants in fleet sales and maintenance, serving and connecting various participants in the travel industry, including passengers, drivers, vehicle manufacturers, vehicle service providers, and autonomous driving solution providers. In addition, the company's Robotaxi service has achieved commercial operation.

As of December 2023, the company had a registered user base of 23.8 million, with platform user order volume and transaction volume maintaining a compound growth rate in the mid to high double digits. The total revenue scale in 2023 was 2.161 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 46%.

Ruqi Travel continues to expand its business through the implementation of a regional expansion strategy, focusing on major cities in the Greater Bay Area. According to Frost & Sullivan data, by 2023, the company's user penetration rate in the Greater Bay Area exceeded 45%, ranking second in the region Ruqi Travel Adheres to Compliance, Striving to Build High Safety and High Compliance Standards

According to information released by the Ministry of Transport, as of May 24, 2024, Ruqi Travel ranked first in the Ministry of Transport's monthly order compliance rate 21 times. In addition, the company focuses on providing high-quality travel services and is the only travel service brand in Guangzhou to be rated 4A in travel service quality among travel service platform companies in 2023 and 2020.

Robotaxi Strategy, Transformation Completed in Three Phases

It is worth mentioning that, according to Frost & Sullivan data, in October 2022, Ruqi Travel became the world's first travel platform to commercially operate a mix of human-driven ride-hailing and Robotaxi services. As of December 31, 2023, the company's Robotaxi service has operated for a cumulative total of 20,080 hours, covering 545 sites.

Ruqi Travel is committed to research and development, establishing technological advantages in smart travel. The company has formulated a three-phase corporate development strategy to drive industry transformation in travel services and aims to become a global travel service company.

The first phase aims to achieve a mix of human-driven ride-hailing and Robotaxi services in key areas of China, with ride-hailing as the main focus. The second phase will further promote the mass production of Robotaxi vehicles and drive company and industry partners to achieve large-scale production of Robotaxi vehicles. In the third phase, entering a new development cycle, the percentage of Robotaxi vehicles in the travel service fleet will rapidly increase, helping to significantly increase the company's market share in the Chinese travel service market and explore global markets with scale and technological advantages.

Image Source: Company Prospectus

Looking at the development progress of the company's Robotaxi, in October 2022, a commercial mix of human-driven ride-hailing and Robotaxi services was launched in Guangzhou. In the same year, in December, a Robotaxi model jointly developed with Xiaoma Zhixing based on the Guangqi Group AION LX model was selected for the Guangzhou demonstration operation model catalog.

In April 2023, the company obtained the qualification for intelligent connected vehicle demonstration operation in Nansha District, Guangzhou, becoming the first domestic travel service platform to conduct demonstration operations with a proprietary Robotaxi fleet. In December of the same year, the company's proprietary Robotaxi fleet went online for commercial demonstration operations. In January 2024, it obtained the commercial pilot license for intelligent connected vehicles in Bao'an District, Shenzhen.

The company focuses on the Greater Bay Area market, as the Greater Bay Area is a national pilot area for the development and testing of autonomous driving technology, providing multiple favorable industry policies and has become a frontier for technological innovation and commercialization Taking Guangzhou as an example, it has achieved many national firsts in the field of autonomous driving, such as being the first city to issue autonomous driving passenger test licenses and the first city to conduct mass Robotaxi technology verification.

Qixi Travel has collaborated with autonomous driving solution providers Xiaoma Zhihang and GAC Research Institute to jointly develop research plans and solutions in the field of autonomous driving, promoting industry progress. In addition, the company empowers businesses and partners through technical services, creating artificial intelligence data and model solutions, focusing on providing a one-stop solution for the autonomous driving industry covering data collection, data annotation, data management, and model training.

Qixi Travel's one-stop solution significantly improves the efficiency of data feature extraction, management, and model optimization, and simplifies the fusion of autonomous driving 2D images and 3D point cloud data. According to Frost & Sullivan data, its pre-annotation recall and accuracy rates in 2D/3D object detection, 3D instance segmentation, LiDAR camera fusion, etc., are all above 95%, leading the industry.

Industry with high prospects, favored by long-term capital

From an industry perspective, smart travel includes innovative solutions for ride-hailing, carpooling, ride-hailing taxis, and Robotaxi. According to Frost & Sullivan data, the market size of the industry in 2023 is 319.4 billion yuan. Despite the significant impact of the epidemic on travel from 2020 to 2022, the compound annual growth rate over the past five years remains positive, expected to reach 1.54 trillion yuan by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 17.1%.

In 2023, the Greater Bay Area accounted for 15.25% of the market share, with the growth rate of the smart travel market size expected to be higher than the national average. Currently, Robotaxi is in its early stages, with few commercial participants, including Qixi Travel. Frost & Sullivan data shows that by 2030, the national Robotaxi market size is expected to reach 488.8 billion yuan, with a high compound annual growth rate of 247% from 2024 to 2030, while the Greater Bay Area is expected to reach 67.4 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 196.1%.

Image Source: Company Prospectus

According to Qixi Travel's prospectus, the large-scale commercialization of Robotaxi is expected to be achieved by 2026. It can be seen that the company has a clear first-mover advantage, continuous research and development investment, and a high degree of alignment between the three-stage development strategy of Robotaxi and industry commercialization expectations, making it likely to become the biggest beneficiary of large-scale commercialization.

Approximately 40% of the funds raised from this listing are expected to be used for research and development of autonomous driving and Robotaxi operation services, with 15% allocated to the development of an open Robotaxi operation technology platform developed independently, targeting the development of Vehicle Management System (VMS), Operation Monitoring Platform (OMP), and Robotaxi Data Platform (RDP) according to time goals Iterative and maintenance; 15% will be used for the research and development of highly integrated AI platforms and comprehensive one-stop data solutions, integrating four major platforms: data collection, data management, data labeling, and AI model testing.

Overall, as the leader in smart travel, 如祺出行 focuses on the commercialized mixed operation mode of human-driven ride-hailing Robotaxi services. With its advantages in autonomous driving and AI, the user base (drivers and passengers) continues to expand. Focusing on the Greater Bay Area and radiating to the surrounding areas, as the number of cities opened continues to increase, performance and revenue will also maintain high growth. Currently, the company aims for scale growth, with losses narrowing year by year, and scalability profitability is expected.

Robotaxi has a huge potential market, and the company is the world's first target to achieve commercialization of Robotaxi, making it highly scarce. This listing is likely to receive long-term capital favor