Misunderstood Excellence and Innovation: Reassessing Its Position and Value in the AI Field of Higher Education

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Source: Wowei

Recently, after 卓越睿新 (02687.HK) listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, its first “report card” has been released, and the performance is quite impressive. Key financial performance indicators such as revenue, gross margin, and net profit have all reached historical highs: first, revenue and net profit have continued to achieve sustained rapid growth. Revenue reached RMB 969 million, up 14.3% year over year. Net profit reached RMB 130 million, up 23.9% year over year. In particular, net profit growth again exceeded 20% on the basis that net profit increased 29% year over year last year and that R&D expenses saw a large-scale increase in 25; second, the core business knowledge graph achieved revenue of RMB 574 million, up 68.5%. Its share of total revenue increased to 59.2%, up 19.1 percentage points. In addition, benefiting from the company’s self-developed AI large model successfully filed in 25, once its AI agent business was launched, the cumulative delivered projects in that same year had already exceeded 500. Third, the company has continued to insist on a R&D-driven approach; R&D expenditures grew 48.9%, and the revenue contribution ratio has reached 19.5%. Fourth, driven by the continuous expansion in the scale of high-tech products, the company’s gross margin has continued to stay at a high level, reaching 65.5%, up 3.5 percentage points from the prior year.

As an important participant in China’s higher education AI new ecosystem, 卓越睿新, which continues to maintain a relatively high pace of growth, is a scarce investment target in the Hong Kong stock market.

However, because 卓越睿新 is classified by the Hang Seng Index under the software services industry, such a high-quality listed company can easily be misread by the capital market—leading people to think it belongs to the traditional higher education informationization/digitalization track.

In fact, the track in which 卓越睿新 operates differs fundamentally in underlying logic from the traditional tracks mentioned above. Its business model is based on a technical foundation of “self-developed large model × AI capabilities × knowledge graph.” It is an enterprise for new infrastructure that uses AI technology to reconstruct higher education models and cultivate innovative talent, thus belonging to the “AI+” track.

**　　Upgrade in underlying logic: from “empowering education” to “empowering the nation”**

The market’s understanding of 卓越睿新 is prone to bias, stemming from the close connection between its business and education scenarios. But after in-depth analysis, it can be found that the core logic of its technology, products, and services is fundamentally different from that of the traditional education industry and informationization/digitalization services.

If we say that the higher education informationization/digitalization industry is “empowering education,” then the industry where 卓越睿新 is positioned has been upgraded to the level of “empowering the nation.” It has become an important lever for comprehensively and systematically reshaping China’s higher education in terms of positioning, goals, models, and functions, and for enabling and leading the next round of major technological revolution and industrial transformation wave.

To clarify the differences between 卓越睿新 and higher education informationization and digitalization, we must first define what these two concepts mean. Higher education informationization mainly focuses on purchasing hardware equipment, building core infrastructure systems, and network coverage, aiming to make up for shortages in teaching infrastructure. Higher education digitalization, by contrast, places emphasis on widespread networking, platform construction, and online resource digitization—aiming to address issues related to teaching quality, fairness, and efficiency.

By comparison, the core business of 卓越睿新 lies in using technology and data to reconstruct the end-to-end teaching/learning/management operational model. Working with universities, it jointly creates new teaching scenarios, enables information resources to be utilized efficiently and generate real value, and ultimately serves the goal of cultivating high-quality innovative and interdisciplinary talent.

Taking a well-known “985” university as an example: in the information technology era, nearly 100% of students’ time was devoted to knowledge learning toward teaching objectives. But in the AI era, the university launched an education reform, requiring students to spend 30% of their time on knowledge learning and 70% on cultivating research capability and thinking capability. The ultimate goal is to cultivate innovative talent capable of driving major technological breakthroughs and solving real-world problems. This reform has created a large number of new teaching scenarios and application demands, and 卓越睿新’s self-developed AI applications have already been deeply embedded in almost all scenarios throughout the full lifecycle of teaching.

**　　Leapfrog evolution of the track: market scale rising from the trillion-level to the ten-trillion-level**

The biggest change brought by the upgrade in core logic is that the industry the company operates in is a truly “long runway with thick grass” track, with market scale expected to reach the ten-trillion level.

According to publicly available industry materials, the traditional higher education informationization market is mainly driven by hardware procurement, with a scale of around the trillion level. The digitalization market, building on informationization by enabling network connectivity and “cloud migration,” has a scale of several trillion.

The business that 卓越睿新 engages in is AI new infrastructure that supports the strategies of strengthening the country through science and technology and strengthening the country through talent. The core is to make the knowledge and data resources accumulated in research institutions, higher education institutions, and other research entities truly usable and easy to use, and to generate real value. In this process, the company can also co-create scenarios and new applications with partners, and its market scale is considered to have the potential to break through the ten-trillion level.

According to relevant national policies, for the present and for a long period into the future, universities’ AI-related spending will no longer be limited to a single “campus informationization budget,” but will be expanded into multiple channels such as special funds for teaching reform and quality improvement, subject/discipline construction funds, special programs for new engineering/new medicine, funds for training bases, and others. Compared with the scope of prior campus informationization, it represents a major expansion. Based on calculations using China’s GDP scale of RMB 140.19 trillion in 2025, the potential market space in this field has already exceeded the ten-trillion level.

**　　Long-term deep cultivation: 卓越睿新 has three professional advantages that are hard to replace**

Higher education covers hundreds of discipline categories. Each discipline has its own unique teaching principles and knowledge systems. The teaching process involves the full-chain “teaching-management-research-services” workflow. For AI technology to truly empower higher education, it must be deeply integrated with discipline characteristics, teaching principles, and university management processes—not simply transplanted from generic technologies.

卓越睿新 has been deeply focused on this field for nearly 20 years and has gradually built three professional advantages that are difficult to replace: deep industry experience, a large and finely structured knowledge graph system, and deep understanding of teaching scenarios. These three advantages, like “key core technologies” in the hard-tech sector, cannot be obtained through external procurement. They can only be formed through long-term independent accumulation.

In addition, 卓越睿新’s products are not upgrades or overlays of the functions of existing software, nor a simple AI-based transformation of traditional software functions. Instead, they are application outcomes developed natively based on AI technology and deeply integrated with education scenarios. Leveraging core technologies such as its self-developed large model and knowledge graph, 卓越睿新 builds “practical and usable” AI applications that can truly address teaching pain points and improve teaching efficiency and quality. Its hard-core technological attributes and scenario innovation capabilities have formed a clear differentiated competitive advantage in the field of AI applications in higher education.

As the nation continues to advance its science and technology and talent strategies and increases resource investments, 卓越睿新’s technological advantages and scenario accumulation are expected to enable it to fully benefit from industry growth dividends. In the future, whether it can continue to maintain technological leadership and convert ecosystem advantages into commercial value will be the key to its long-term development. For the market, understanding the essence of 卓越睿新 as an “AI operating system for higher education” may be the key to grasping its true value.

Amid the wave of higher education moving toward AI, the positioning and value of 卓越睿新 are worth being re-examined. It is neither a traditional informationization service provider nor an AI company transformed from a traditional informationization service provider. Rather, it is a leader driven by native AI technology, committed to reshaping higher education models and cultivating new scenarios for innovative talent.

Empowering higher education with AI, and using technology to support the national innovation strategy—every step of 卓越睿新 follows the pulse of the era of strengthening the country through science and technology and through talent. As a long-term practitioner in the era of higher-education AI, leveraging its deep technological accumulation and deep focus on scenarios, the company advances steadily in industry development, and also provides a clear benchmark reference for the capital market to capture opportunities in the higher-education AI field.

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