21st Century Business Herald reporter Li Qiang reported from Beijing
In the past few months, AI has "bombed" the visual arts field many times, and it has not only been affected by designers who are under the "dark cloud of unemployment".
“I originally wanted to meet someone from Meitu Xiuxiu in Xiamen, but they said that the company was on the verge of survival because of AI, so I didn’t have time to meet.” In March this year, a screenshot of a WeChat chat about Meitu (01357.HK) attracted attention.
At the second Imaging Festival held by Meitu on June 19, Chen Jianyi, senior vice president and president of the imaging industry group of Meitu, laughed about the incident and admitted that the person mentioned in the screenshot was himself. "In the past six months, the team has been immersed in AI research and devoted itself to it, so many cooperations were not responded to in time."
This time, Meitu launched 7 AI products in one breath, including AI visual creation tool WHEE, oral broadcast video tool Kaimai, desktop AI video editing tool WinkStudio, Meitu Design Studio 2.0, digital human generation tool DreamAvatar, Meitu AI assistant RoboNeo, and Meitu visual large model MiracleVision.
For a long time, due to the user-ready nature, tool application advertising has a low monetization ceiling, and its business model is not optimistic. Meitu, which has strong tool attributes, has also made many attempts. From mobile phones, social networking, and even currency speculation, Meitu can be seen in almost every wave of trends. "After going around, we discovered that what Meitu is best at is actually tools." Wu Xinhong said.
Compared with the previous one, this AI wave may be more suitable for Meitu, which focuses on the imaging field, and the market response has been quite positive. On the day the AI series products were released, Meitu's stock price soared 21%. Subsequently, the optimistic sentiment continued. As of the close of trading on June 21, Meitu's stock price had risen by nearly 40% that week.
Chasing the AI Wave
The highlight of this imaging festival is undoubtedly MiracleVision, a large AI visual model released by Meitu.
"MiracleVision embodies a lot of our thinking about aesthetics and creative scenes." Wu Xinhong said that Meitu has integrated its long-term accumulated aesthetic cognition into the MiracleVision large visual model, and built an aesthetic evaluation system based on machine learning to add "aesthetic scores" to the model generation results, thereby continuously improving the model's understanding of aesthetics. In addition, MiracleVision visual model has a unique aesthetic creator ecology, with artists, designers and other professionals with profound aesthetic backgrounds participating in the construction of visual models.
Wu Xinhong emphasized that after the release of seven products, Meitu has advanced from life scenarios to productivity scenarios, and has gradually formed an AI product ecosystem composed of the bottom layer, middle layer and application layer.
MiracleVision's large visual model serves as the bottom layer, providing AI model capabilities for all Meitu products. In the middle layer, it provides a combination of Meitu AI open platform, Meitu creative platform, and Meitu AI assistant RoboNeo. The application layer innovates and explores in the fields of AI pictures, AI videos, AI design, and AI digital people, and realizes the aggregation of AI imaging services by Meitu Xiuxiu.
Meitu said that unlike other large models on the market, MiracleVision visual large models have strong visual expression and creative power, and reverse technological evolution from visual creation scenarios such as painting, design, film and television, photography, games, 3D, animation, etc., and are good at Asian portrait photography, national style and trend, commercial design and other generation directions.
"We have also accumulated imaging technology for more than ten years, but compared to before the outbreak of AIGC, if we want to create a very amazing function, we need to invest a lot of time and manpower, and the uncertainty is still high. Now the AI technology based on large models allows us to quickly implement the idea and verify it, and it also brings very positive user feedback. Because the user is exposed to these new functions for the first time, he will have enough motivation to use it and even pay for it." Wu Xinhong said.
At the Image Festival, Wu Xinhong announced the latest subscription data. As of June 18, the number of Meitu VIP members reached 7.19 million. It is worth noting that in the 2022 financial report, as of December 2022, the number of Meitu VIP members was 5.6 million, and the number of members is growing rapidly.
In Wu Xinhong's view, a good visual large model needs to be supported by a good "model ecology", and this process is inseparable from the continuous participation of creators and developers. Meitu’s C-end user base is large enough, and the customer acquisition cost of cold start for large models is low, and the success of the product can be verified in a short time. Unlike other manufacturers, Meitu Large Model focuses on aesthetics (picture quality design, etc.). If it has to compete in the future, it will focus on aesthetics.
"For example, the AI animation we launched in March is our world premiere. Users shoot a video of themselves and it can be transformed into an American comic or Japanese comic. Especially when you see the transformation process of your real-life image into animation, I believe it is very amazing at that moment, so innovations like this can greatly boost our subscription and single-purchase revenue." Wu Xinhong added.
productivity ambitions
"Meitu may have served more life scenes before, but now we see huge demand and commercialization opportunities in productivity scenes." Wu Xinhong mentioned it many times at this year's Image Festival.
Since 2020, Meitu’s apps such as Meitu Xiuxiu and Beauty Camera have begun to launch VIP subscription services. Image processing capabilities based on AI technology meet users' advanced needs for services such as picture beautification, photography, and video beautification. At the same time, Meitu has expanded its VIP subscription business from life scenarios to work scenarios to meet various needs such as personal marketing, event promotion, product display, and brand promotion.
Financial report data shows that Meitu's total revenue in 2022 is 2.085 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.2%. As of December 2022, Meitu's monthly active users have reached 243 million, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%. Among them, the VIP subscription business has strong growth momentum, achieving revenue of 782 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 57.4%, surpassing the advertising business for the first time to become the largest source of revenue. In addition, SaaS and related business revenue increased by 1093.2% year-on-year to 463 million yuan, showing a rapid and stable growth trend.
At this year's Image Festival, Wu Xinhong said that in the past 15 years, Meitu's existing C-side market has been almost fully explored, and user growth is basically in a relatively stable state. "Meitu's current subscription penetration rate is about 2%. There is actually quite a lot of room for improvement in this number. So how to find incremental growth among existing users? The opportunity lies in productivity tools."
Chen Jianyi added that in the field of imaging, the underlying technology of the C-side and the B-side is the same. Users on the C-side cut out pictures and change backgrounds for portraits. The same logic is used on the B-side, but the scenes are richer and the processing objects are all kinds of commodities, helping merchants to generate promotional materials with one click. In this case, whether it is the designer's understanding of the effect or the adaptation of the promotional style, it is completely different from the C-side ideas, requiring a lot of refined adaptation work.
"For Meitu, this is a key plan for the next ten years. The space is very large, and the entire team is very excited and motivated." Chen Jianyi also talked about the previous disturbance of foreign software bans on domestic companies, and said that from a longer-term perspective, Meitu will gradually extend its tentacles into the field of professional design software.
In March 2022, the cloud design collaboration tool Figma blocked DJI’s corporate account. This sudden ban shocked the design industry. Figma stated in an email to DJI that since DJI was named in the sanctions list issued by the United States, which prohibits providing software services to the other party, Figma cannot continue to provide it with access to software and has frozen DJI's account.
