On the evening of July 18, Kingsoft Office disclosed an announcement that the company and its subsidiary were involved in a lawsuit, saying that the company recently received a notice from the Beijing Intellectual Property Court. On June 7 this year, Beijing Guanqun Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Guanqun Company or Plaintiff”) sued the company and its subsidiary Beijing Shuke Wangwei Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Shuke Company”) for infringement of computer software copyright dispute, and the case has been accepted and has not yet been heard.

According to Qichacha APP, Shuke Company was established in 2006 and was acquired by Kingsoft Office in 2020. It is a leading provider of professional layout document processing products and technical services in China. The Shuke OFD series software products independently developed by the company cover electronic documents, digital archives, electronic certificates, electronic bills and other fields, and have been widely used in party and government, state-owned enterprises, finance, medical and other industries.

It is understood that in May 2020, Shuke Company signed a “Shuke OFD Document Processing Software Agency Cooperation Agreement” with Guanqun Company, stipulating that Shuke OFD Document Processing Software in the four industries of finance, securities, insurance and trust, Guanqun Company is the exclusive national general agent, with a validity period from May 1, 2019 to December 31, 2025.

At the beginning of 2021, Guanqun Company’s potential customers requested to provide authorization documents for exclusive agency sales of Shuke OFD. The plaintiff asked Shuke Company for authorization documents, but Shuke Company did not deliver them on time. And Guanqun Company found that as Shuke Company’s controlling shareholder-Kingsoft Company sold Shuke OFD products in the financial industry.

In this regard, Guanqun Company believes that Kingsoft’s sales of Shuke OFD products in the financial industry constitute copyright infringement and unfair competition. Kingsoft is the controlling shareholder of Shuke Company, and Shuke Company’s licensing of Kingsoft’s sales behavior in the financial industry should be regarded as the joint sales behavior of the two defendants. They should be held liable for punitive damages according to twice the sales price agreed in the agency cooperation agreement, that is, to jointly compensate Guanqun Company for a loss of 150 million yuan, and immediately stop the infringement.

In response to this case, Kingsoft Office also responded in the announcement. Kingsoft Office said that the company does not recognize the plaintiff’s claim and will actively respond to the lawsuit and clarify the truth. The litigation matter announced this time has not yet been heard. The final judgment result is uncertain. It is currently impossible to estimate the impact on the company’s current and future earnings. The company will closely monitor and take effective measures to actively respond to the lawsuit and effectively safeguard the interests of the company and shareholders.

It is worth mentioning that driven by Microsoft’s disclosure that its AI tool Office 365 Copilot will be uniformly priced at $30 per user per month, on July 19th, A-share AIGC, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT concept stocks rose sharply. Weston rose by 20%, Foxit Software hit a daily limit , Aofei Entertainment , Yalian Development daily limit , Kingsoft Office as an AI concept stock , office software stock , rose more than 10% in early trading . As of midday close , Kingsoft Office stock price has fallen back to 4.74% , latest stock price 453.51 yuan / share , total market value of 2093 billion yuan , year-to-date , Kingsoft Office stock price overall rose about 72% .

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference held on July 6th , Kingsoft Office officially unveiled its intelligent office assistant WPS AI based on large language models , and simultaneously launched WPS AI official website . According to Kingsoft Office CEO Zhang Qingyuan , WPS AI is built on MiniMax , Baidu Wenxin , Zhigu AI and other large models . It is positioned as an application party of large language models . In future , it will anchor AIGC ( content creation ) , Copilot ( smart assistant ) , Insight ( knowledge insight ) Three strategic directions for development .

In terms of performance , from 2020 to now , Kingsoft Office’s performance has continued to be stable . In 2020 , 2021 , and 2022 , Kingsoft Office’s revenue was 2.261 billion yuan , 3.28 billion yuan , and 3.885 billion yuan respectively , and net profit was 878 million yuan , 1.041 billion yuan , and 1.118 billion yuan respectively . In the first quarter of this year , Kingsoft Office’s revenue increased by 21.11% year-on-year to 1.051 billion yuan , and net profit increased by 6.58% year-on-year to 267 million yuan .

However , as one of the representative enterprises of domestic office software , Kingsoft Office has been involved in copyright infringement lawsuits many times in recent years . On May 7 this year , Foxit Software sued Kingsoft Software for infringing Foxit PDF software copyright case was pronounced in the first instance , ruling that Beijing Kingsoft and Zhuhai Kingsoft immediately stop the infringement , apologize to Foxit Software , and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses incurred to stop the infringement totaling 10 million yuan .