Hikvision 71 European City AI Roadshow 2018

JH
John Honovich
Feb 13, 2018
IPVM

This is the largest industry roadshow I can recall. 3 trucks, 71 cites, all AI:

Including 10 cities in both France and Italy, 8 in Spain, 7 in Germany and more, excerpt:

Picture of one of the trucks at its first stop in Spain:

Registration page here.

Thoughts? I'll share mine inside.

(2)
JH
John Honovich
Feb 13, 2018
IPVM
JH
John Honovich
Feb 13, 2018
IPVM

This definitely shows Hikvision's willingness to invest in local sales and marketing spending. And that's quite critical to growing revenue since regardless of the cost or quality of one's products, it is hard to get many dealers to commit without local touch and interaction.

And because AI is new to them and since most dealers do not use much video analytics today, it is going to take a push to get them to adopt these products. Getting in front of them in each of their local areas will help greatly to this end.

One more neutral point is simply observing how much such roadshows cost. 3 trucks, rent, furnish, drive, meals, staff, etc., it has to be easily over $100,000, probably more after factoring in how many people need to be dedicated across the trucks. And those are expenses that are just for one region, not lower cost centralized Chinese expenses.

Three potential concerns:

  • The cost per city. Many of the cities are fairly small so there can only be so many potential customers per city. The question is whether they can recoup their expense over the smaller cities.
  • The applicability to dealers: Most dealers are unlikely to be able to use AI in smaller to mid size systems, so even if they are strong Hikvision proponents, the question is how much can they sell of this type of product (which, by contrast, is clearly hot inside the Chinese smart city / skynet market).
  • How well it works? Does it really work well? Lots of analytics worked poorly. We are finishing up a test of DeepInMind NVR and will have feedback on that shortly.
(2)
UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Feb 14, 2018

Im curious what are you comparing the Hikvision NVR DeepinMind unit too? 

JH
John Honovich
Feb 14, 2018
IPVM

To reality. I mean that seriously. It's an analytic system. It claims to be able to detect intrusions while filtering out false alarms. It claims to be able to categorize gender and age.

So we are analyzing to see how well it does versus reality - i.e., how often does it detect valid intrusions? how often does it miss valid intrusions? how accurate is it in categorizing gender, etc.

(1)
JH
John Honovich
Mar 05, 2018
IPVM

Here is a video from Hikvision Europe showing more of the truck - quite big:

JH
John Honovich
Mar 10, 2018
IPVM

Update: Hikvision has a new video and we have been able to get pricing information on the truck / trailer. It is going to cost $300,000 USD easy just for the trucks, excluding Hikvision's own staff and food/drink for visitors costs. All in, costs will be a half million USD or more.

Here is Hikvision's video:

The truck / trailer shown in the video was rented from LCR Events.

Some pricing details found:

  • At least 1,800 euros per day for a car and trailer
  • 300 euros for the driver per day
  • Living costs of 130 euros per day
  • 1.50 euros per kilometer traveled (estimate 150km a day traveled, that's 225 euros)

Together that's ~2,500 Euros / $3,000 USD per day. Apply that across 71 cities over a number of months.

Additional costs per truck:

  • A onetime fee from 4,000 to 12,000 euros per truck to cover the exterior of the trailer in ads
  • Plus interior design costs per truck that are highly variable

That is an incredible amount of money for this industry. It's definitely going to help win over dealers. The main question is how many dealers will they get and will it be worth given how high the cost is.

JH
John Honovich
Mar 16, 2018
IPVM

A new marketing video showcasing the truck / tour:

JH
John Honovich
Apr 09, 2018
IPVM

New marketing video of the truck in France:

JH
John Honovich
Apr 19, 2018
IPVM

Giveaways from the truck show - pretty clever:

JH
John Honovich
Apr 20, 2018
IPVM

Video clip from a France stop - looks to be about 30 - 50 attendees:

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #2
Apr 20, 2018

For 30-50 people, that seems like a "enorme" customer acquisition cost, even assuming everyone in the room is a new customer.

(1)
JH
John Honovich
Apr 20, 2018
IPVM

The Twitter text says 800 customers for 10 cities, which would be an average of 80 per city, which seems feasible to me.

Based on that date of that tweet, the closest stop was Nantes France which has ~300,000 population, so 30 - 50 attendees sounds reasonable. By contrast, Paris could easily be hundreds.

800 customers (even assuming only 1 person per customer) across all of France for the cost of running that truck for a month (first France event March 22th, last April 19th) and the facilities, food, staff, etc. is a lot a money.

JH
John Honovich
Jun 28, 2018
IPVM

The roadshow is over and Hikvision Europe posted:

The truck show saw upwards of 6,000 customers in more than 70 cities throughout Europe. 

 

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