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.