China Securities Network News (Wang Luo) started from the printing industry. Lingyun Guang has been deeply involved in the industrial machine vision industry for 20 years, and has expanded its applications to consumer electronics, new displays, new energy and other fields. Head enterprises in industries such as Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Foxconn, BOE and () are all important customers of Lingyun Guang.
On June 15th, Ling Yunguang (stock code: 688400) officially launched the inquiry offering, and will soon land in science and technology innovation board. The science and technology innovation board listing, Lingyun Guang plans to raise 1.5 billion yuan, and the fundraising direction is centered on the company’s vision planning. From industrial manufacturing to industrial intelligent manufacturing, machine vision is promising. The company will increase investment in technology research and development, continuously improve its platform-based capabilities, empower intelligent manufacturing, and help more industries achieve automation and intelligent development. The company’s development vision is to implant "eyes" and "brains" into machines and become a global leader in the fields of visual artificial intelligence and photoelectric information.
From agency to self-research, mastering the underlying core technology
According to the prospectus, Ling Yunguang was established in 2002, and started from the banknote printing industry, and carried out independent research and development through projects such as online detection of RMB gravure printing and large sheet detection; On the other hand, the agency business of foreign high-end visual devices is carried out. Since 2006, the company has successively entered the fields of printing and packaging, new display and consumer electronics, and further improved its independent research and development capabilities. At present, it has the research and development capabilities of advanced imaging, intelligent algorithms, intelligent software and automatic precision control, and independently developed core devices such as industrial cameras and light sources, which are applied to many industries.
The domestic machine vision started in the late 1990s. When Ling Yunguang entered this field 20 years ago, the domestic development and application were basically blank. The company started from scratch and gradually embarked on the road of independent research and development in the field of machine vision.
Ling Yunguang attached great importance to self-research of core technologies at the early stage of business development. During the period from 2002 to 2006, the company initially built a 100-person team with independent research and development capabilities of optical, mechanical, electrical, computing and software technologies, and started the research and development of independent software algorithms of VisionWARE. The technical accumulation in this period has created an insurmountable moat for the company’s competitors in a short period of time. Now the machine VisionWARE algorithm platform independently developed by the company has been iterated to version 5.0. Ling Yunguang is the first machine vision manufacturer in China to launch a purely independent bottom-level core algorithm library. The investment cycle of the bottom-level algorithm is quite long. It takes a lot of time and experience to optimize the core algorithm from the bottom, which makes it ahead of competitors in the same industry for about three to five years.
In addition, Ling Yunguang’s AI algorithm development based on deep learning, machine learning and knowledge map has also been at the forefront of the industry, forming an independent F.Brain intelligent algorithm platform, supporting factory-side and edge intelligence through edge computing, and supporting factory cloud intelligence through big data cloud computing technology. From the application point of view, the machine vision +AI technology is deeply combined to support industrial scenes.
It is understood that the algorithm library of the machine vision industry consists of open source vision algorithm libraries such as OpenCV, and third-party commercial payment algorithm libraries such as Vision Pro (cognex, USA), Halcon (German MVTec) and VisionWare (Ling Yunguang). Due to the long development cycle and large investment of algorithm library, companies in the industry usually develop their own application algorithms based on open source algorithm library, or independently develop and integrate with third parties, and few companies develop the underlying algorithms completely independently.
In addition to algorithms, Lingyun Guang has always been at the forefront of optical imaging technology, and has independently developed a series of visual core devices such as smart cameras and high-brightness special light sources. It has more than 70 patents in the optical field, and many solutions are the first to benchmark international and domestic machine vision friends, creating a brighter industrial "eye" competitiveness. At the same time, by investing in domestic CMOS sensor design company Changguang Chenxin and industrial lens professional company Hunan Changdao Optoelectronics, we will optimize the allocation of core resources and lay out the localization and autonomy of core technologies.
Form platform capability from system to equipment
After all, the banknote printing industry belongs to a special industry. After 2006, Ling Yunguang gradually expanded its business to printing and packaging, display screens, consumer electronics and other industries, and further integrated its research and development capabilities into platform-based capabilities of products and technologies, thus effectively supporting the company to achieve cross-industry development. In addition, the company began to expand its automation capability in 2016, and it took three years to gradually build automatic control technologies such as automatic assembly line and multi-axis precision manipulator.
Up to now, Lingyun Guang has four technical platforms, including advanced imaging, intelligent algorithm, intelligent software and intelligent automation, and comprehensive overall scheme design capability. It has 418 domestic patents and 208 software copyrights, which supports the company’s rapid expansion of downstream industries from printing to other fields, such as consumer electronics and new energy, and is also a technical base to support the company’s continuous leap-forward development in the future.
According to Ling Yunguang’s prospectus, up to now, the company has developed diversified intelligent visual equipment and innovative process solutions based on independent research and development of visual algorithms and AI algorithms for new display, consumer electronics, printing and packaging, new energy and other fields. Specific to the display field, the new display intelligent vision equipment products provided by Ling Yunguang can realize automatic and semi-automatic optical detection of small screen defects in TFT-LCD/OLED, covering the Cell process section and module process section, and support lighting detection when the screen is powered on and appearance detection when it is not powered on. The detection efficiency of the LCD lighting quality detector provided by it is more than 3 times that of manual work, which solves the problem of 2% low contrast stain defect detection, approaches the limit of human eyes, realizes high dynamic range detection, and has been popularized and applied in hundreds of sets in the industry.
Entering Apple’s industrial chain is a key milestone for Ling Yunguang, and it is also the inevitable result of technical capacity building. Five years ago, the company broke the situation that the high-end market of consumer electronic vision inspection was monopolized by foreign manufacturers such as cognex and Kearns for a long time, and became the Preferred Supplier in the field of machine vision certified by Apple, and began to provide configurable vision systems in batches.
"Hand", "Eye" and "Brain" cooperate to empower intelligent industrial production.
If configurable vision system products, such as machine vision algorithm platform developed by Ling Yunguang, can equip industrial machines with eyes and brains, then intelligent vision equipment is to implant muscles and limbs controlled by brains into the machines, thus realizing the precise control and execution of detection and production technology, and finally forming an intelligent production robot with the cooperation of hands, eyes and brains.
As the largest manufacturing country in the world, the penetration rate of domestic machine vision application is low, and there is still much room for growth, especially the aging population and the increase in labor costs, which also bring great demand to the machine vision industry.
From the demand of downstream customers, the epidemic situation in COVID-19 is complicated in recent years. Instead of reducing the budget for technology investment, downstream manufacturers have been further forced by the epidemic to strengthen their investment in industrial automation, digitalization and intelligence, and the cost reduction effect is very remarkable. In the future, the demand of downstream manufacturers for automation and intelligence is rigid and inevitable.
China market has become one of the fastest growing markets in the global machine vision market. According to the statistics of China Machine Vision Industry Alliance, the sales of machine vision industry in China increased from 10.18 billion yuan in 2018 to 14.42 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound growth rate of 19.02%. Thanks to the promotion of manufacturing automation and other factors, it is estimated that the sales of machine vision industry in China will increase at a compound growth rate of 27.15% from 2020 to 2023, and the sales will reach 29.6 billion yuan by 2023.
Under such opportunities, Lingyun Guang will continue to promote technological innovation in advanced optical imaging, software and algorithms, automation and other fields, and actively explore new application fields of industrial machine vision. At present, Ling Yunguang’s machine vision +AI products and services have achieved a high market share in consumer electronics, display panels, printing and packaging applications. According to the statistics of China Machine Vision Industry Alliance, in 2020, among the enterprises participating in the statistics (enterprises within the alliance), Lingyun Guang ranked first in the sales of machine vision industry in China.
According to the disclosure in the prospectus, the company is expanding its business to the field of new energy battery diaphragm detection, and has cooperated with customers such as Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited. Focusing on the field of industrial manufacturing for 20 years, Lingyun Guang is expected to become the leader of industrial artificial intelligence, truly helping factories to improve quality, increase efficiency, reduce costs and reduce storage.