Sogou's revenue in 2019 reached 8 billion, a record high

On March 9, Sogou released its unaudited financial report for the fourth quarter and full year of 2019. The financial report shows that in 2019, Sogou's annual operating income exceeded RMB 8 billion, a record high, with a growth rate leading the industry. Under non-GAAP, the net profit attributable to Sogou exceeded RMB 730 million. In the fourth quarter, Sogou's operating income reached RMB 2.1 billion, and under non-GAAP, the net profit attributable to Sogou reached RMB 274 million, a year-on-year increase of 46%. Against the backdrop of a slowdown in global economic growth and continued challenges in the macroeconomic situation, Sogou has achieved healthy and steady development of its overall business by improving and innovating in the fields of search, input method, smart hardware, and AI.

Sogou Search continues to lead the industry in terms of growth rate through differentiated content service ecology and AI intelligent service innovation. In terms of content service ecology construction, Sogou continues to deepen cooperation with WeChat public accounts, improve Sogou account content, supplement content through cooperation with official websites, experts, and academic websites, and explore opportunities for intelligent triage with medical care as the entry point. On this basis, the coverage and accuracy of the first direct answer of intelligent Q&A lead the industry level; in terms of AI intelligent services, Sogou continues to improve user experience with AI technology. During this epidemic, Sogou Search was the first in the industry to launch special features such as "patient co-travel query", "real-time search for protective supplies", and "regional epidemic dynamics" to help users better obtain relevant information. In addition, Sogou Search has also launched "AI anti-epidemic", adding COVID-19 AI self-test and COVID-19 intelligent Q&A robots to the epidemic dynamic aggregation page, improving Sogou Search's service ecology and gaining wide recognition from users.

With the support of AI capabilities, Sogou Input Method continues to innovate for diverse user scenarios, greatly improving the user input experience. Among them, the AI ​​assistant "Smart Wangzai" can recommend a rich variety of emoticons, witty words, replies, comments and other content to users in multiple scenarios such as chatting and shopping. In 2019, Sogou Input Method users used recommended content hundreds of millions of times a day, and the revenue from the input method recommendation system also increased by nearly 90% compared with the same period last year. In addition, Sogou Input Method also uses AI empowerment to launch special features such as voice changing and personalized voice recognition to continuously improve user stickiness. The average daily voice request of Sogou Input Method in Q4 increased by 54% year-on-year, and the annual peak reached 830 million times, a record high.

In terms of AI hardware, while Sogou's own business is growing rapidly, its ability to empower the industry is further highlighted. In March 2019, Sogou, relying on its technological advantages in the field of voice AI, launched the AI ​​voice recorders C1 and C1 Pro in the voice recorder industry, pioneering functions such as voice transcription, simultaneous interpretation, array noise reduction, and multi-terminal synchronous editing. The two voice recorders became the sales champions of mainstream e-commerce platforms in a short period of time. At the same time, Sogou also opened the Sogou dictation service to the industry, and established an AI Innovation Alliance with Sony voice recorders, Patriot, Newman and other voice recorder hardware manufacturers, working with voice recorder manufacturers to redefine the user experience of the new generation of AI products and explore business models based on AI services.

While the core business is growing steadily, Sogou has also made comprehensive breakthroughs in language-centric technologies such as voice, vision, translation, and question-and-answer. On the one hand, Sogou's unique avatar technology has ushered in a major upgrade of real-time conversation virtual people, accelerating the widespread implementation of "AI synthetic anchors", which have been applied in many fields such as media, law, finance, and art. Sogou's own AI synthetic anchor "Yani" has successfully supported industry conferences many times, attracting widespread attention; on the other hand, Sogou's simultaneous interpretation technology has introduced OCR recognition technology, upgrading machine simultaneous interpretation technology to a context engine, allowing Sogou's simultaneous interpretation to not only listen, but also have the ability to see, understand, and reason, and the translation accuracy rate has increased by 40%. Currently, Sogou's simultaneous interpretation has become the designated translator for dozens of large conferences such as the T-EDGE Innovation Conference and the World Internet Conference.

Looking back at 2019, under the language-centric AI strategy, Sogou's overall performance was better than market expectations. Looking ahead to 2020, although the epidemic has brought huge challenges to the Chinese economy, it has also spawned new user and industry needs. During the epidemic, Sogou took a series of measures to innovate services in search, information flow, and AI medical care, and launched more than a dozen network services, which brought immediate results. The total number of visits to these products has now exceeded 560 million. At the same time, Sogou's medical search volume increased by about 100% year-on-year, and the number of online consultations in its own intelligent triage system increased by about 400%. I believe that with the full recovery of economic vitality after the end of the epidemic, Sogou will enter a stage of accelerated development.