A former Huawei employee does cross-border business and sells 2 billion yuan a year

It is obvious to the naked eye that this year's listing boom in the cross-border circle has subsided compared with previous years.

Small and medium-sized sellers have long suffered from declining orders and rising costs, and large unlisted sellers have gradually stopped disclosing performance information such as revenue. The financial reports of listed large sellers can more intuitively feel that the development of the cross-border overseas industry is now slower than in previous years.

Some people say that "the era of making money across borders is over."

Really? Maybe not. More and more cross-border people are starting to build brands, and even use this to open the door to financing and IPOs. A steady stream of employees from large companies leave and start going overseas, turning from " involution " to " exvolution " .

Focusing on vertical track, annual revenue of 2 billion

In June 2022, Shenzhen Ruilian Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Ruili Technology") submitted IPO application materials to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and was accepted; in January 2023, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Listing Committee meeting approved the application; by December 2023, Ruilian Technology submitted the draft registration application.

With insight into the consumer demand for smart home cameras in the European and American markets, Ruilian Technology has been deeply engaged in the smart security field since its inception.

By selling equipment-end products such as home camera stand-alone units, sets and accessories, and supporting client apps, Ruilian Technology strives to be "end-to-end" to meet consumers' demand for home video surveillance products and continuously enrich its product line during development.

From the product level, the revenue contributed by the camera has always accounted for the highest proportion of the total revenue . From 2020 to the first half of 2023, the revenue of the camera reached 568 million yuan, 848 million yuan, 1.127 billion yuan and 615 million yuan, accounting for 59.13%, 62.01%, 68.20% and 69.61% respectively.

Compared with the same period, its camera package revenue was RMB 338 million, RMB 436 million, RMB 399 million and RMB 183 million respectively, accounting for 35.18%, 31.92%, 24.12% and 20.67% respectively.

The revenue and proportion of accessories are relatively low. The revenue in the same period was RMB 51 million, RMB 77 million, RMB 120 million and RMB 80 million, respectively, accounting for 5.28%, 5.59%, 7.25% and 9%.

In fact, Reolink did not set out to build a brand from the beginning. In the six years since its establishment, its main identity has always been an ODM factory , serving many overseas brands. It was not until 2015 that Reolink realized that ODM was not a long-term solution , so it launched its own smart security brand - Reolink .

With online platforms as the main sales channel, including Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, and its own website, Reolink has continued to expand its overseas market share after its launch. Like most cross-border companies, Amazon is the platform it relies on the most.

On Amazon, Reolink's products are priced from less than a hundred dollars to nearly a thousand dollars , and many of its products are regularly on Amazon's B S list in the camera category , and a large number of products are at the top of Amazon's best-seller list .

From 2020 to the first half of 2023, Reolink's revenue on Amazon reached 649 million yuan, 868 million yuan, 1.087 billion yuan and 566 million yuan, respectively, accounting for 67.90% , 63.80%, 66.05% and 64.47% respectively .

Statistics show that Reolink has 145 ASINs on the Amazon.com and achieved sales of more than 500,000 US dollars.

At the same time, Reolink 's independent website has become the "right arm" of revenue contribution.

The prospectus shows that from 2020 to the first half of 2023, reolink.com contributed revenues of 144 million yuan, 272 million yuan, 311 million yuan and 186 million yuan, respectively, accounting for 15.05%, 20.02%, 18.88% and 21.17% .

Similarweb data shows that in February this year, the monthly visits to reolink.com reached 2.6 million, and the average monthly visits in the past three months reached 3 million, so the traffic scale is not small.

In addition to Amazon and independent websites, online channels such as eBay and AliExpress also bring Reolink a total revenue of approximately 60 million yuan each year .

In recent years, Ruilian Technology's revenue has grown steadily, with increases of 42.41% and 20.86% in 2021 and 2022 respectively, and net profit increases of 33.83% and 14.28%.

In 2023, Ruilian Technology expects to achieve revenue of 2.011 billion yuan to 2.061 billion yuan, an increase of 21.72% to 24.75% over 2022, and net profit of 398 million yuan to 435 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 40.21% to 53.13% , and non-net profit of 393 million yuan to 430 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 40.04% to 53.11%.

Huawei employee starts overseas business with 100,000 yuan

Through the sales of smart security products, Ruilian Technology has captured a group of consumers overseas and its market share is increasing day by day. With excellent performance and stable revenue growth trend, Ruilian Technology is confident to be listed on the GEM .

It is worth noting that this is a cross-border enterprise founded by two former technical employees of Huawei HiSilicon, which means that Ruilian Technology already had technological genes when it was born.

In 2009, Liu Xiaoyu, who was still a product manager at Huawei HiSilicon, decided to leave the company to start his own business. After observing the mainstream consumption in the European and American markets , Liu Xiaoyu brought together Wang Aijun, another employee of Huawei HiSilicon, to enter the smart home camera market.

In fact, in the early days of the business, Ruilian Technology had another partner - Liu Xing. The three of them pooled 100,000 yuan in start-up capital, and their shareholding ratios were 35%, 35%, and 30% respectively based on their investment amounts .

But after only three months of working together, Liu Xing transferred his equity to Liu Xiaoyu and Wang Aijun , and the two technical men from Huawei HiSilicon became the leaders of the business.

A closer look reveals that Liu Xiaoyu and Wang Aijun both had worked in large technology companies before joining Huawei HiSilicon.

For example, Liu Xiaoyu's first job was as a software engineer at Nokia, and he later worked for UTStarcom and Texas Semiconductor. In 2006, he joined Huawei HiSilicon Semiconductor as a product manager . Wang Aijun worked for TCL Communications and ZTE Corporation , and later became the development manager of Huawei HiSilicon Semiconductor.

In the overseas market, it is not uncommon for brand founders to be employees of large companies.

Zhou Jingjin, a veteran of ByteDance, founded the cross-border fast fashion brand - Commense ; Ren Lifeng, former vice president of ByteDance 's virtual reality business PICO , received investment from Sequoia China and IDG in his overseas project before it was officially launched , and the valuation after financing will exceed 50 million US dollars .

Rokid , an overseas AR glasses brand founded by Zhu Mingming, the former head of Alibaba Studio, has received 12 rounds of financing in 9 years, with each round of financing reaching hundreds of millions of yuan. In 2022 alone, it received 4 rounds of financing totaling more than 1.3 billion yuan . Now Rokid's market value has reached 1 billion US dollars, making it one of the "unicorns".

Chen Hang, the former CEO of DingTalk , launched the digital optical overseas brand HHOGene ; Yao Li, the former global vice president of Lenovo and general manager of the smart connected devices business unit, founded the overseas smart home brand Cozyla.

In the same race as Reolink is Zhiling Technology , which was founded by Ding Zhen, the former general manager of smart cameras at Qihoo 360 IoT division . Its brands DEKCO and AOSU have always had good sales performance on Amazon .

In the smart security market, the market demand is very high. Due to the high crime rate, a Strategy Analytics research report pointed out that nearly one-third of households in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France are equipped with home cameras, and even 60% of these households have two or more home cameras .

High demand brings a large market. iResearch Consulting data predicts that the global home camera market will have an annual compound growth rate of 19.3% from 2020 to 2025. By 2025, global home camera shipments will exceed 200 million units, and the market size will exceed 70 billion yuan .

Even the well-known super-selling Anker Innovations has launched the smart security brand Eufy, and has also invested in a smart home brand Govee that mainly sells security products .

Huawei

Cross-border