The font value of Hanyi shares, the concept stock of font library, has a huge market space.
On August 31st, Beijing Hanyi Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Hanyi Shares") was listed on the Growth Enterprise Market of Shenzhen Stock Exchange. As of the close of the day, Hanyi Shares rose by 53.86% to close at 39.51 yuan/share, with a market value exceeding 3.9 billion yuan. As a company specializing in font design and font authorization, the listing of Hanyi shares has not only become the "top spot" of the concept of A-share font, but also demonstrated the rich value of font as a creative product through the capital market.
Hanyi’s revenue in 2021 was 220 million yuan, of which the font software licensing business accounted for about 67%, mainly to license the copyright of the font designed by the company to commercial users for various scenarios; Internet platform authorization business accounts for about 25%, mainly cooperating with Internet and terminal equipment companies to meet their customers’ personalized font visual needs. Hanyi’s clients include Tencent, Taobao, JD.COM, Baidu, Huawei, Midea, Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Jinshan Office, Reading Group and many other well-known enterprises at home and abroad.
In recent years, with the application scenarios of fonts gradually expanding from the traditional publishing and printing field to digital printing, film and television advertising, e-commerce websites, games, mobile terminal operating systems, APP applications and other directions, the commercial value of fonts has been significantly improved. At the same time, with the improvement of the domestic copyright environment, Chinese people’s awareness and ability to pay for intellectual property rights have improved, and the comprehensive value of the future font will continue to be released.
Font "originality" meets diversified needs
Founded in 1993, Hanyi Co., Ltd. has a history of nearly 30 years of font design and font product development. In the past, the company designed a number of classic Chinese fonts such as Hanyi Lingxin, which were all temporary choices in the industry. With the advent of the era of digital intelligence, Hanyi shares, which keep up with the market demand, further release the commercial value of fonts.
The two business segments with the highest proportion in Hanyi’s revenue are font software licensing business and Internet platform licensing business. In short, the former is mainly used by authorized enterprises to publicize and display brands and products, and to embed them into the mobile phone tablet operating system; The latter is mainly used to provide font value-added services for Internet users.
Insiders pointed out that fonts embodies the creative efforts and intellectual labor of the creators. According to the Copyright Law, fonts belong to works of art and are protected by law as well as copyrights of software, novels, film and television dramas and music. "Originality" is an important feature of designing fonts, and it is also the value of fonts as a creative product.
"From the creative process and use value, a font usually needs to go through many processes from creativity, font design, scanning and curve synthesis, extended creation, symbol creation, font validation, format conversion, test proofreading and so on, which condenses a lot of intellectual labor, time and cost of the creator. A font with originality, aesthetic significance and practicality can complete the corresponding visual presentation in different use occasions, thus promoting the publicity effect and promoting the brand image and product promotion. " The aforementioned insiders talked about it.
In recent years, the font products of Hanyi Co., Ltd. have been widely used in various downstream market segments such as corporate propaganda, printing and publishing, commercial advertisements, Internet platforms, embedded businesses, etc., such as Hanyi Banner Black, Hanyi Wheat Body, Hanyi Yakuhei and other fonts. Authorized enterprises have widely used these fonts in various industries. In 2013, Hanyi Co., Ltd. also took the lead in opening up Internet platform authorization business in the industry, and further expanded its business model through cooperation with companies such as Tencent and Huawei.
For example, Hanyi cooperates with Tencent to provide interactive fonts on Tencent mobile platforms such as mobile QQ and QQ space. When users use related fonts, they and their interactive objects can see dazzling fonts, hilarious fonts, artists’ handwritten fonts and entertainment IP fonts, etc., which meets users’ personalized chat social needs. In the cooperation between Hanyi and Huawei, OPPO, VIVO, Xiaomi and other intelligent terminal manufacturers, end users can pay, download and install Hanyi fonts directly through the personalized theme platform in the mobile phone system, and use them for the interface dressing of mobile phones.
At the same time, Hanyi also uses its rich technical reserves and research and development capabilities to provide customers with solutions based on font technology. In 2020, the company created a HarmonyOS customized variable font for Huawei HarmonyOS operating system and ecology, which can adapt to multiple devices, be used in all scenes, support simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic, and cover more than 100 languages, and achieved a balanced and unified style in multilingual situations, making the font have a good multilingual mixed layout effect. In the same year, Hanyi Co., Ltd. also reached a cooperation with JD.COM Mall to provide brand-new genuine font services to hundreds of thousands of merchants in JD.COM and platform experts in JD.COM through the JD.COM Copyright Material Center.
As of December 31st, 2021, Hanyi Company has launched more than 700 B-side fonts with copyright, and developed and formed more than 1,700 fonts. Under the good development momentum of various business segments, Hanyi’s revenue and net profit showed an overall upward trend. From 2019 to 2021, Hanyi’s revenue was 212 million yuan, 197 million yuan and 220 million yuan respectively, and its net profit for the same period was 61.3 million yuan, 47.59 million yuan and 66.69 million yuan respectively.
In the first half of 2022, thanks to the continuous growth of the authorized business scale of font software and the completion and acceptance of some font customization projects, the overall operation and profitability of Hanyi Co., Ltd. were stable and good, achieving an operating income of 98.085 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.63%, and a net profit of 26.113 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.71%.
Font library as the core "creativity+technology+mode" to broaden the growth space
Hanyi Co., Ltd. has always focused on the licensing business of font software, and through continuous attempts and accumulation in the font industry, it has gradually explored a set of business system with the core of Chinese cultural creativity, highlighting the sense of design, fashion and aesthetic value, and expanded its business to the fields of font technical services, visual design services and IP productization services.
Among them, such as "brand font" fully embodies the creative value of font design, but also has great market potential. An exclusive font that accurately conveys the brand concept can not only strengthen the uniqueness of the brand and leave a deep impression on users, but also further shape the brand image and enhance the brand value by optimizing product functions, enriching product experience. In this field, Hanyi Co., Ltd. has designed customized fonts such as Alibaba Pratt & Whitney, OPPO Sans, VIVO customized digital, Cadillac Hanyijun bold, Xiaomi black and so on according to customer needs in recent years.
For example, Alibaba’s universal style is a family font tailored by Hanyi font library for Alibaba brand upgrade. The font takes modernity as the core design concept, reliability and lightness as the design breakthrough point, and incorporates Ali spirit into the font. It is a font with modernity and can match the whole scene.
Hanyi has also had many classic cases in recent years in terms of fonts helping brand marketing and highlighting cultural and public welfare values. Hanyi has independently created the "Guofeng Meteorological Bureau" with Chinese characters as the theme element. Through cross-border cooperation with brands such as Xicha, Chaowenheyou and Li Ning, and through the design of Chinese character cultural and creative products, it has expressed the national wind cognition of Z generation young people and helped the brand image to be deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
The Fading Font, which won the Silver Lion Award for Health in Cannes International Creative Festival in 2018, is a Hanyi font for Alzheimer’s disease jointly created by Hanyi font library and Miley Bowen. It integrates fragmented creativity into the font style, intuitively reflects the cognitive decline and memory loss of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and arouses users’ resonance and care for patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Since 2017, Hanyi has also begun to explore the sinking of the market and the layout of designers, and developed a "Ziyou" client, which integrates all the functions of traditional font downloading, installation, preview and calling in design software into the client, greatly improving the user’s operation efficiency and word experience. In 2019, it launched a new mode of font authorization with membership subscription, and achieved rapid growth in related income.
In addition, Hanyi Co., Ltd. independently developed the technology of text detection and recognition system based on deep network, which can achieve more than 99% recognition accuracy for words in paper forms under complex conditions, and ranks among the top in many text detection and text line recognition competitions. This will further expand the application of fonts, and the related technologies of Hanyi will gradually play a major role in the large-scale electronic processing of tickets, documents and forms.
Hanyi shares landed in the capital market, which made more people understand the rich value of the font that combines creativity and technology. In terms of policy, market potential, copyright environment and business model, the huge market derived from design fonts will continue to expand. The Outline of Building a Powerful Intellectual Property Country (2021-2035) and the National Plan for the Protection and Application of Intellectual Property Rights in the Tenth Five-Year Plan issued by the State Council will further curb the infringement phenomenon; The increasing demand for fonts by enterprises and netizens and the increasing awareness of copyright payment by enterprises and individuals have provided a guarantee for the benign development of the font industry; Large font enterprises, including Hanyi, actively explore new business models for different needs, and also greatly expand their business map.
Looking to the future, Hanyi will continue to base itself on the font industry, actively grasp the trend and opportunity of intellectual property development in China, intensify the development of font copyright, improve the resources and product reserves of font, strengthen the brand and marketing channel strategy, and at the same time increase the research and development of artificial intelligence, enhance the research and development capability and accelerate the transformation of research and development results, so as to become a leading high-tech company with cultural creativity and artificial intelligence innovation ability based on font products in China.
Du Yuan/Wen