New stock preview | With policy dividends, can Hi-Learn Network tell a new story of vocational education?

In the third quarter of 2025, the Hong Kong IPO market continued to be active. The total fundraising in the first three quarters reached HK$182.9 billion, an increase of approximately 230% compared to the same period in 2024; the number of IPOs reached 67, an increase of about 50% year-on-year, reflecting the increasing investor confidence and the continuous improvement of the capital market's vitality. Against this backdrop, vocational education, as one of the policy-supported areas, continues to attract capital attention. In 2025, as the critical juncture of the conclusion of the "14th Five-Year Plan" and the planning of the "15th Five-Year Plan", the reform of the education system is continuously deepening, and vocational education is being given higher expectations in building a skilled society and promoting the integration of production and education. Recently, Beijing Haixue Network Education Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Haixue Network") officially submitted an application for listing on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with CMB International as the sole sponsor, becoming another important IPO case in the vocational education field this year. Gross profit margin shows improvement trend, B-end business is still in the initial stage According to the prospectus, Haixue Network is the fourth largest online vocational skills training service provider in China, serving a total of 4.3 million paid students. The company's core management team has been deeply involved in the industry for more than ten years and has established a product matrix centered on the three major brands of "Haixue", "Jingjin", and "Shupei Tong". It covers multiple vocational categories such as construction, emergency safety, finance and accounting, law, and healthcare, dedicated to creating a one-stop service platform and lifelong learning ecology for career development professionals. Despite the company's revenue maintaining steady growth, it has not yet escaped from the loss-making state. From 2022 to 2024, the company's revenue was RMB 400 million, RMB 472 million, and RMB 511 million, respectively, with revenue of RMB 232 million in the first half of 2025. During the same period, the company's attributable net losses were RMB 186 million, RMB 175 million, RMB 90.69 million, and the loss expanded to RMB 158 million in the first half of 2025, indicating significant profitability pressure still exists. It is worth noting that the company's gross profit margin has shown a steady upward trend, increasing from 78.6% in 2022 to 81.6% in 2024, and further increasing to 85.8% in the first half of 2025, reflecting the optimization effects in curriculum content and operational efficiency. Based on individual student needs for teaching and services, the company has established two major product and service systems - "Haixue Classroom" and "Jingjin School". The "Haixue Classroom" provides recorded and live courses for students, as well as post-course practice questions, AI learning tools to help students master key points; while the "Jingjin School" focuses more on efficient exam-oriented learning, providing customized learning plans, one-on-one teaching by in-house teachers, and real-time communication with teachers to meet the needs of students who want higher-end products and services. It is understood that the company's business highly depends on individual users, with consumer services accounting for as high as 98.2% of revenue in the first half of 2025. In terms of enterprise services, the company serves enterprises and institutions through the Shupei Tong platform, building a comprehensive and efficient talent development solution covering various scenarios. As of June 30, 2025, the company has served more than 130 enterprises and institutions. However, the current revenue of the enterprise service brand "Shupei Tong" is only RMB 4.12 million, indicating a small scale. How to expand enterprise customers and achieve breakthroughs in the B-end will be one of the key challenges for the company's future growth. According to the prospectus, based on customer acquisition and teaching methods, the company is able to grasp the user's entire service life cycle in an efficient and scalable manner. The average marketing return on investment reached about 8.9 in 2024, placing it at a leading level in the industry. The company's progress in AI is also a highlight. The prospectus shows that the company started exploring AI large model application scenarios in 2024, and in 2025, it established an independent AI innovation team to advance overall AI application scenario design and intelligent body research and development. Currently, it has completed over 30 AI intelligent body applications in the production process. The company's AI technology is mainly applied in three major scenes of "assisting learning, assisting teaching, and assisting sales". Among them, the AI study assistant has functions such as organizing class notes, personalized course recommendations, and intelligent brushing questions. Since its launch, users have used it over a million times, and the AI question and answer function has been used over 1.2 million times since its introduction in February 2025, leading to a 32.3% decline in manual answer volume in the second quarter; The AI academic assistant covers two core modules of teaching content production and teaching services, assisting teachers in generating course outlines, teaching plans and exercises to improve content production efficiency. The AI-assisted grading function has processed over 13,000 assignments since its launch in September 2024; The AI sales assistant covers four major scenes of user analysis, quality judgment, script recommendations, and self-service marketing, assisting in analyzing business opportunities over 100,000 times since its launch on August 1, 2025, facilitating precise customer acquisition. Despite the initial effectiveness of AI applications, the company's research and development investment scale is relatively limited. Research and development expenses in 2022-2024 were RMB 24.5 million, RMB 20 million, and RMB 23.7 million, respectively, accounting for less than 5% of revenue. Research and development spending in the first half of 2025 fell by 23.3% year-on-year, mainly due to the optimization of team structure leading to a reduction in employee costs. Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce AI competition, lower research and development investment may restrict its technology iteration and product innovation capabilities, and also raise concerns in the market about its long-term competitiveness in AI strategy. Policy dividends released, vocational education track welcomes development opportunities In recent years, the country continues to increase its efforts in vocational education reform, with policy orientation gradually shifting from scale expansion to quality improvement. The "National Education Strong Country Construction Plan Outline (2024-2035)" issued in January 2025 clearly proposes to accelerate the construction of a modern vocational education system, cultivate skilled workers, skilled craftsmen, and high-level skill talents; in April of the same year, the Ministry of Education and other nine departments jointly issued an opinion on accelerating the promotion of education digitization, promoting seamless integration of academic and non-academic education, exploring new mechanisms for online non-academic, academic credit certification, and degree granting, and promoting the construction of a ubiquitous and accessible lifelong education system. Under the national strategic layout, vocational education's enrollment in the college entrance examination has achieved a significant increase. In 2021, there were only 41,400 vocational undergraduate enrollments, reaching nearly 500,000 in 2025, with a 14-fold increase in four years, successfully achieving the policy goal of accounting for 10% of higher vocational education enrollments. At the same time, the skills talent gap continues to widen, bringing strong demand to the vocational education market. According to the "Manufacturing Talent Development Planning Guide," the talent gap in key areas of the national manufacturing industry is expected to reach 30 million by 2025, with a gap rate of up to 48%, resulting in a scenario of supply shortage of skilled talents. According to the Frost & Sullivan report, in 2024 Haixue Network ranked fourth in the Chinese online vocational skills training market. In the field of construction vocational training, it ranks first, and in the emergency safety field, it ranks second. The company's products cover fields such as construction, emergency safety, finance and accounting, law, and healthcare. However, the company's revenue structure still highly relies on construction-related qualification exam courses. From 2022 to the first half of 2025, the proportion of revenue generated by construction-related vocational qualification exam courses has remained at around 60%, showing a slow pace of diversification. Against the background of policy encouraging cross-disciplinary and compound talent training, how to accelerate the expansion of non-construction courses and penetrate the market will be an important subject for achieving sustainable growth. Overall, Haixue Network, with its leading position in the field of construction vocational training, continuously optimized gross profit margin, and preliminary application of AI technology, demonstrates a certain market competitiveness and operational efficiency. However, challenges such as profitability, insufficient research and development investment, and excessive reliance on a single course category remain on its path to listing. Looking ahead, if successfully listed on the Hong Kong stock market, how the company can overcome the challenges of a single revenue structure, find a second growth curve, and truly internalize AI as a competitive advantage for long-term technological barriers will be the focus of market attention.