The financial year of 2020/21 is a challenging year for Finet. The outbreak of Covid-19 has brought a tremendous impact on the customer consumption behavior as customers tend to postpone the usage of our products and services or have tightened the relevant consumption budget. After 3 years of continuous revenue growth, our revenue for current year recorded a downturn of about 31%. However, as contributed by our continuous improvement in operation cost control and enhancement of operation effectiveness, the loss has been reduced by 35%.
We are an integrated platform hosting news media, public relationship, and social networking services for listed companies and investors. With the competitive edge and strength arising from our integrated multiple platforms in our three vertical websites (Finet.hk, FinTV.hk and Finet.com.cn) and two mobile Apps (FinTV APP and Finet Finance Pro APP), we have established Multi-Channel Network (“MCN”) by supporting the distribution of professionally generated content (“PGC”) in the digital media industry in the mainland, China and Hong Kong with a solid client base. The major source of our revenue are generated from our principle business of: (1) Total Solutions for Public Relation Service (Digital Marketing, Public Relationship, Events Management); and (2) Total Solutions for Advertising Service (Digital Advertisement, Financial News Contents Distribution on different portals in the mainland, China and Hong Kong).
With the established partnerships with the most popular and highest number of user portals and media platforms, such as Tencent Portfolio, TouTiao, Sina Finance, NetEase, SnowBall and Futu, we have gained a significant popularity in the market of the mainland, China and Hong Kong and gained the highest reception by local financial public relations agencies and become their main agent for public relations for clients’ contents distribution into the market of the mainland, China. Besides, we reach to all the listed companies in Hong Kong through our Ranking Event for “The Top 100 Hong Kong Listed Companies Selection”. Through the distribution of high quality contents we have obtained a general recognition of our services in the media market.
We did not reduce our spending in building up of professional team in our Company in the days during the spread of Covid-19, and on enhancing our hardware and software infrastructures for the delivery of our services. During the year, we have constructed the CBS for the management of content production and distribution flow as well as monitoring of the content viewing rates; employed artificial intelligence in effective monitoring of clients’ branding exposures and developed new technologies enabling the visualisation of the marketing effect of our clients; as well as continuous improvement in the functionality and contents of our Apps. Due to the social distancing restrictions under Covid-19, event management has shifted from traditional offline mode to mostly in online mode or dual modes of online and offline modes. The events managed include best performing stocks awards, salon activities, roadshows and listed companies press conferences. As a digital media market player, we keep continuous investment in IT development, PGC development and MCN development so as to maintain our competitiveness in the industry which is full of ompetition and challenge. Through adoption of new technology and an array of digital media facilities, we have been successful in cutting down our human resources cost and expenses to a contained level.
Looking ahead, the Group will continue to implement different business strategies in order to broaden our revenue stream and enhance our competitiveness. We aim to broaden our customer base to include companies listed in the US and the PRC. We also plan to implement new ERP and management systems so as the streamline our business flow and increase the automation of certain procedures.
The global economy is gradually recovering from the impact of Covid-19. We believe the demand for the financial public relationship of listed companies, online advertising placements and financial services delivery will resume growth in the near future. The Group will continue to focus its resources for capital investments on the area of software, hardware and information technologies, and will bring in a new impetus to our products and sales solutions. We hope the future plan will help us to maximize the value of the Group for our shareholders.
LO Yuk Yee
Chairman
