On February 21, Hikvision, the leading surveillance camera provider in China, released its preliminary financial report for the year 2024, showing that the net profit attributable to the company’s shareholders fell short of expectations.
According to the financial report, in 2024, Hikvision achieved a net profit of 11.959 billion yuan, a 15.23% decrease compared to the previous year. The basic earnings per share were 1.295 yuan, a 14.8% decrease year-on-year.
Breaking down the performance by quarters, Hikvision saw a slight year-on-year increase in net profit only in the first quarter, while the second, third, and fourth quarters all experienced declines of 10.73%, 13.37%, and 26.74% respectively.
On the secondary market, Hikvision closed at 32.69 yuan per share on February 21, with a total market value of 301.8 billion yuan. This represents a decrease of approximately 340 billion yuan from its historical high market value of 645 billion yuan at the beginning of 2021.
Founded on surveillance cameras, Hikvision has been a key player in China’s construction of the “Sky Net” monitoring system and has grown to become a global leader in the security industry over the past 20 years. However, in recent years, its profits have been continuously declining, and its public service revenue showed a deficit in the first half of the year.
In August of the previous year, during a performance briefing, Hikvision had announced a preliminary target of 14 billion yuan for the full-year net profit in 2024. Unfortunately, the company was unable to meet this target.
Two months later, news of “Hikvision’s large-scale layoffs” began trending on Weibo. Employees of Hikvision revealed that the company was undergoing a major organizational restructuring, reducing the number of research and development areas from 32 to 12, with plans to optimize nearly one thousand employees and retain only a few core areas.
Numerous individuals identified as “Hikvision employees” on the job recruitment site “Maimai” disclosed that they had received notices of being laid off, with the research and development department being hit the hardest, especially in regions like Hunan where operations have ceased, while headquarters areas like Hangzhou have not been affected yet.
This is the first time that reports of mass layoffs at Hikvision have surfaced, quickly becoming a hot topic on Chinese social media. Many netizens believe that the main reasons behind this move are the government and state-owned enterprises facing financial difficulties and lack of projects, as well as the ubiquity of surveillance cameras making replacements unnecessary.