In April of this year, Nanobox, which was scheduled to be listed on NASDAQ in the United States, updated its prospectus. It has been over a year since it secretly submitted its prospectus to NASDAQ on March 27, 2023.
In 2023, the revenue was 380 million yuan, and competition in China's early childhood education industry intensified
Since its establishment, as of December 31, 2023, the application of the nanobox has been downloaded more than 79 million times, with over 39 million registered users. The number of paying users has increased for three consecutive years, from 1.39 million in 2021 to 1.46 million in 2023.
From financial data, from 2021 to 2023, the revenue of nanoboxes was 248 million yuan, 236 million yuan, and 380 million yuan, respectively. On the basis of turning losses into profits in 2022, the net profit of Nanobox in 2023 further increased from 55.08 million yuan in 2022 to 83.49 million yuan. Among them, the revenue and net profit of nanoboxes increased by 61.0% and 51.6% year-on-year in 2023, respectively. Nanoboxes stated that this was mainly due to the increase in revenue from content aggregators and distributors, as well as hardware distributors.
It is worth noting that as a digital textbook platform and K9 student digital education content provider, Nanobox collaborates with Chinese textbook publishers to provide digital versions of mainstream textbooks for primary and secondary schools. Its digital textbooks mainly cover Chinese and English subjects used in K9 schools in China. At present, the nanobox has digitized 383 textbooks published by 21 publishing houses.
In the prospectus, Nanobox analyzed the Chinese K9 market. It is expected that the revenue of China's K9 digital education content service market will continue to rise, reaching RMB 23.7 billion in revenue by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.8% starting from 2022.
However, in the prospectus, Nanobox also mentioned the development risks of the K9 track, stating that the copyright of most textbooks in the K9 stage is controlled by textbook publishing institutions, and communicating with large publishing houses for digital copyright authorization will increase the cost of content acquisition. In addition, the continued and intensified competition in China's early childhood education industry may also become an obstacle to the development of nanoboxes.
Provide digital services, with R&D expenses accounting for over 40%
Nanobox, as an innovative digital content service provider, mainly relies on advanced AI/AR/VR/digital human technology driven powerful digital content generation engines, committed to providing users with high-quality digital content services through its own platform and strong partner content distribution channels.
According to the financial report, in terms of expenses, the research and development expenses for nanoboxes in 2022 and 2023 were 26.355 million yuan and 35.333 million yuan, respectively, accounting for 49.3% and 44.3% of the total expenses, exceeding sales and marketing expenses as well as general and administrative expenses.
In terms of policies, in March 2024, the government work report clearly stated the tasks related to education for the next 24 years, with a focus on carrying out actions to expand and improve basic education, as well as promoting the inclusive development of preschool education. On the other hand, the report also mentions the vigorous development of digital education content.