Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Stock

Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Limited provides cloud services in strategically selected verticals. The company provides various advanced cloud products primarily comprising unified IaaS infrastructure and, to a lesser extent, Platform as a Service (PaaS) middleware and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications which support a wide range of use cases that enable its customers' diverse business objectives.

The company also offers its solutions in a holistic approach by merging its cloud solutions with dedicated customer services. The company's end-to-end customer services include planning, solution development, fulfillment, and deployment, as well as ongoing maintenance and upgrade.

Cloud Platform

The company is dedicated to providing cloud solutions to businesses and organizations across various sectors. The company has built a cloud platform comprising extensive cloud infrastructure, advanced cloud-native products, industry-specific solutions, and end-to-end services. Cloud infrastructure is the foundation of the company's cloud platform. It consists of hardware, software components and network resources that are needed to support the delivery of cloud products, primarily as public cloud services, to customers. Leveraging the company's cloud infrastructure, it provides various advanced cloud products that can be utilized to design different solutions to meet various business needs. The company has designed various industry-specific solutions which consist of a selection of cloud products to cater to customer demands across different industries.

The company has established extensive cloud infrastructure which is the foundation of its cloud platform. As of December 31, 2022, the company had approximately 110,000 servers, and achieved exabyte-level (which equals to 1,000,000,000 gigabytes) storage capacity.

The company's cloud is architected specifically for customers to run business in an elastic and distributed manner required in disruptive business models. The company, as an early mover in serving internet customers, has cultivated proprietary cloud-native technology and have successfully commercialized its technology capabilities through advanced cloud products.

Based on the variety of cloud products, the company has designed various industry-specific solutions that can unleash the full potential of its infrastructure resources and add value to its customers. Leveraging the company's profound industry insights, it has strategically expanded its footprints into selected verticals and has established market presence through dedicated execution.

The company serves its clients throughout the whole cloud adoption process. At project initiation, the company provides planning services with in-depth industry know-how, setting the overarching route for cloud migration. The company has customized procedures to help customer to smoothly migrate their mission-critical data and applications on to its cloud platform. With the company's in-house fulfillment and deployment professionals, it adheres to consistent high standards at every stage of cloud adoption and commit to quality deployment.

Products and Solutions

Cloud Products

The company provides a suite of cloud products based on its extensive infrastructure and are developed based on the same suite of underlying technology capabilities. Its modularized cloud products, including unified IaaS infrastructure, PaaS middleware and SaaS applications, can be utilized to design different solutions to meet various business needs. The company's cloud products primarily consist of cloud computing, storage, and delivery.

Computing

The company's cloud computing products provide on-demand high-performance computing resources, offering availability, agility, scalability, and flexibility. In addition, the company offers other cloud products, including cloud network, database, data warehouse, big data, and security products.

Cloud Computing

The company's cloud computing products primarily include:

Kingsoft Cloud Elastic Compute (KEC): KEC provides flexible and scalable computing capacity, enabling developers to easily perform large scale computing and deployment in the required server environment. Cloud servers can be deployed at any time on-demand to improve operation and maintenance efficiency. For users with high demands for on-premise resource allocation, security and compliance, the company also offers Kingsoft Cloud Dedicated Host (KDH) to provide an exclusive virtual resource pool.

Kingsoft Cloud Bare Metal Servers Elastic Physical Compute (EPC): EPC provides exclusive physical servers with excellent performance and native cloud network function support. It helps users quickly build and expand application services with high performance requirements. Users can easily manage the EPC server's network configuration, storage configuration, and operating system interface.

Kingsoft Cloud GPU Elastic Physical Compute (GEPC): GEPC provides accelerated computing based on graphics processing units (GPUs). It can be used in scientific computing, deep learning, image rendering, and GPU-based audio and video codec scenarios to provide elastic computing services and unified cloud server management services.

Kingsoft Cloud Edge Node Computing (KENC): KENC is a distributed edge computing resource pool. It provides customers with edge virtual machines, edge dockers, network security groups, load balancing, virtual private cloud, and other functions. It helps users reduce access delay and enables integration of more industry-specific applications.

Kingsoft Cloud Container Engine (KCE): KCE is developed and adapted based on the native Kubernetes to seamlessly integrate containers with other basic computing, storage and, network resources, products and services the company offers. It provides users with reliable and scalable container management services with high performance.

Kingsoft Cloud Container Instance (KCI): KCI provides a server-less container service that helps users to manage the full life-cycle of their containers in the cloud without purchasing or managing the underlying servers.

Cloud Network

The company's cloud network products provide cloud-enabled or cloud-based network resources and services, offering reliable and secure network access and connections, to help users optimize resource allocation. The company's key cloud network products include:

Server Load Balancing (SLB): SLB is a network service that distributes traffic to multiple cloud servers within a computing cluster. Traffic distribution can improve the external service capability of the application system. SLB hides the actual service port, enhances the security of the internal system and improves the availability of the application system by eliminating single point service failures.

Elastic IP (EIP): EIP is an IP address associated with the user account, which can be bound to any cloud server, cloud physical host, or load balancing of the user. With EIP, users can quickly re-map an address to another cloud server, cloud physical host or load balancing in their accounts to shield instance failures.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): VPC helps users build a customized, logically isolated, and proprietary network. Users can use a dedicated connection or VPN connection to build a hybrid cloud network with VPC and their existing data centers. All cloud resources can be connected to a VPC network, which also allows users to establish and manage security policies and network access control policies. The company also provides peering service to connect two VPCs for data synchronization, enable users to reside multiple VPCs across different regions.

Cloud Enterprise Network: Cloud Enterprise Network enable customers to establish connections between different VPC networks, and between VPC networks and local data centers. Cloud Enterprise Network features secured transmission, helping customers build an enterprise-level network.

Cloud Database

The company has a full stack database product portfolio, primarily including relational databases and NoSQL databases, which are used to accommodate a wide variety of data models. The company provides second-level failover capability, low latency cross-cloud synchronization, multi-region disaster recovery capability, and loss less data reliability support capability for important application scenarios, such as financial services, internet, and public service. The company's key cloud database products include:

Kingsoft Cloud Relational Database Service (KRDS): KRDS is an online relational database that can be used at any time. It has multiple security protection features and an optimized performance monitoring system, and provides database backup, recovery and optimization features. The company offers various versions of KRDS at users' choice based on the type of their servers.

Kingsoft Cloud NoSQL Database: In addition to relational databases, the company offers NoSQL databases, which are non-tabular databases built for specific non-relational data models and have flexible schemas for building applications. Based on the types of data, the company offers NoSQL database for Redis for key-value storage, NoSQL database for MongoDB for document storage, and NoSQL database for InfluxDB for time series data.

DragonBase: The company provides distributed database Dragon Base for enterprises and organizations. Featuring distributed deployment, high availability, smooth up-scaling, and enterprise-level security, Dragon Base focuses on solutions to address customer 's needs on massive data storage and high-concurrency operation, and it also provides supportive systems and facilitate automated performance monitoring, operation, maintenance, and security audit.

Data Warehouse

Kingsoft Cloud Data Warehouse (KDW): KDW is data warehouse service deployed on a parallel processing architecture, enabling users to use a large number of computers to simultaneously perform coordinated computations in parallel and thus enhancing computation performance. It is a large-scale PB-level cloud database warehouse solution with upscaling ability that supports the separation of computing and storage, multi-dimensional online data analysis and retrieval, and offline data processing. KDW enables interactive query and analytics of massive relational data and is advantageous in both internet and traditional industries.

Big Data

The company has a comprehensive stack of big data products and compatibilities. All products are empowered by providing elastic scaling and seamless access to cloud storage. The company also provides an interactive query engine for users to easily organize and analyze data on the cloud, which is an important step in utilizing data lake. In response to industry-wide developments in the research on computer vision, automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, it has built the underlying technologies that underpin big data platforms. The company's key big data products include:

Kingsoft Cloud MapReduce (KMR): KMR is a cloud big data platform allowing users to process vast amounts of data quickly. KMR gives users the engine and elasticity to run large-scale analysis at a fraction of the cost of traditional on-premise clusters.

Kingsoft Cloud DataCloud (DataCloud): Based on a cutting-edge data processing framework, DataCloud provides one-stop cloud-based data services, including data consolidation, integration, processing, management, and analysis. DataCloud can be deployed on-premise to enhance control and security. With the help of DataCloud, through advanced data lake architectures, users can manage and process ultra-large-scale structured and unstructured data, build data-lake architecture, and create middleware data platform for enterprise data. It empowers users with full lifecycle data management capability.

Kingsoft Cloud Elasticsearch Service (KES): KES is a cloud-based, fully managed service based on the open source search engine, Elasticsearch. It integrates Kibana, a data visualization dashboard software, and common plug-ins to provide near-real-time storage, search, and analysis features that allow user to manage ultra-large datasets in a visualized, real-time and efficient manner.

KDC: KDC is a cloud-based big data platform that supports 39 data sources for collection and integration. It also supports standard OpenAPI services. KDC help enhances data governance by introducing new data modeling and standard modules for development governance. It also features data exploration that supports scenarios, such as data lake, cross-lake query, query federation, and interactive query.

KDE/KCDE: KDE and KCDE are the company's big data engine products. KDE supports rollout upgrade and restart, and is able to complete cross-availability zone and cross-region disaster recovery plans for ElasticSearch modules. KCDE integrates features of KDE and supports hybrid deployment, providing enhanced control by users.

Cloud Security

The company provides users with a full range of high-quality cloud security products to effectively address cloud service abuse issues and provide users with secure, stable, and reliable cloud services. The company's key cloud security products include:

Kingsoft Cloud Advanced Defense (KAD): KAD is a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards the company's users' applications running on its cloud from attack.

Kingsoft Cloud Host Security (KHS): KHS ensures all-round host security for cloud server and EPC, and is able to quickly identify security problems, monitor security status, and comply with security requirements.

Kingsoft Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF): WAF is a firewall for web applications, ensuring security and reliability of users' websites. Users can seamlessly deploy WAF without altering any system structure.

Cloud Storage

The company has developed different storage products for various application scenarios. Its cloud storage products provide cost-effective digitalized data storage infrastructure with high security, which can be deployed off premises or on premises upon request. The company's key cloud storage products include:

Kingsoft Cloud Standard Storage Service (KS3): KS3 is a massive, low-cost, secure, and highly reliable distributed cloud storage product to address users' pain points, such as storage expansion, data security, and distributed access. KS3 offers exabyte-level storage with high queries per second per single bucket. Users can conveniently store and retrieve various data files such as pictures, audio, video, and text.

Elastic Block Storage (EBS): EBS is a block-level data storage service provided for cloud server instances that can be connected to any running KEC instance in the same data center. EBS features high availability, reliability, flexibility, and ease of use. It also supports advanced features, such as snapshots and mirroring.

Kingsoft Cloud File Storage (KFS): KFS is a file storage service for KEC, EPC and container services. With standard file access protocols, users do not need to modify existing applications. KFS offers users a distributed file system with unlimited capacity, performance scaling, single namespace, multi-party sharing, high reliability, and availability.

Kingsoft Cloud Archive Storage (KArchive): KArchive provides offline storage services that are cost-effective, reliable, and easy to manage. It applies to long-term archive and redundancy backup of a large amount of data.

KingStorage: KingStorage series are enterprise-level hybrid cloud storage products that include distributed blocks, files and objects cloud storage resources. They provide cloud native benefits and address customers' demands for massive data storage, while ensuring high reliability and seamless compatibility with customers' original IT infrastructure.

Cloud Delivery

The company's cloud delivery products have evolved from a simple acceleration tool for one-way static content to a complex application and streaming delivery carrier, enabling its customers to deliver an interactive and immersive user experience. The company's comprehensive end-to-end cloud delivery solutions allow users to build their applications on its cloud platform and utilize additional value-added services offered by it, such as large-scale storage, streaming encode and decode, and high definition video solutions, to further enhance their business operations. The company's large-scale, high-concurrency, low-latency, secure, and reliable cloud delivery services help its users enhance their users' experience.

With 5G deployment and advancement of edge computing, the company continues to upgrade its cloud delivery network with more connected nodes and reiterate the advantages of its cloud delivery products. Streaming content represents a significant portion of the internet traffic, and is a major application scenario of the company's cloud delivery products. Streaming content captures a large share of users' time spent as it becomes the key distribution medium for various industry verticals, such as entertainment, e-commerce, education, traveling, and advertising. Leveraging the relationship the company built with its clients through its cloud delivery products, the company has the natural advantage to cross-sell other cloud products, such as computing, storage and database products.

Kingsoft Cloud Live-video Service (KLS): KLS is a network system based on Kingsoft Cloud's comprehensive IaaS infrastructure. Through industry-leading video-encoding technology and powerful distribution capacities, KSL provides low-latency, high-concurrency, and stable live streaming services. KLS supports live streaming upload and download acceleration, as well as real-time transcoding, recording, watermarking, screenshots, second-level streams status management, delayed playback and many other value-added functions and applications. Meanwhile, KLS can be seamlessly integrated with the Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform of Kingsoft Cloud Video Cloud, and it features fast access, multi-terminal adaptation, multi-protocol support, and easy-to-use.

Kingsoft Cloud Media Transcoder is a distributed system for multi-media processing service. Based on the deep learning of massive multimedia data, Kingsoft Cloud Media Transcoder establishes a scientific video quality evaluation system, combined with powerful encoding/decoding technology, to provide fast, intelligent, and stable media processing service.

Kingsoft Cloud Delivery Network (KCDN): KCDN is a distributed network consisting of server clusters of edge nodes covering different regions, which distributes user content to edge nodes, effectively resolves the congestion of an internet network, and improves the response speed of users to visit the websites and the availability of the websites.

Kingsoft Cloud Image Enhancement (KIE): KIE is an intelligent image enhancement product, which is able to recover and enhance image details by deep learning algorithms. It can also enhance resolution and output high-quality images.

Kingsoft Cloud Smart High Definition (KSHD): KSHD integrates various computer vision and video coding technologies to substantially improve the quality of experience. It uses deep-learning-based denoise and enhance algorithms to reduce compression artifacts, as well as enhance details. Meanwhile, KSHD is capable of analyzing video by way of classification and quality assessment, so as to improve the coding efficiency of video codec.

Galaxy Stack

The company's proprietary Galaxy Stack essentially allows customers to deploy a public cloud architecture within their internal IT infrastructure, so that they can have the same experience as public cloud services within their IT premise, while fulfilling regulatory compliance and retaining control. Galaxy Stack employs a distributed architecture to create an open, unified, and reliable cloud environment for enterprises and organizations. As a result of the company's continuous upgrading and optimization efforts, Galaxy Stack features container services, DevOps, database, big data, security, and other functions to provide more professional, scalable, and mature one-stop cloud solutions.

Galaxy Stack enables large-scale physical node deployment, massive tenant management and customer service capabilities, which support customers' massive business operations. Customers can adjust the physical node deployment based on their real-time demands. Privatized deployment meets the requirements of enterprises and organizations for high-grade information security protection, data security, and business continuity. Galaxy Stack supports customers' autonomous control operation and maintenance.

In 2022, the company launched approximately 80 new features, such as:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Cloud Network - The company introduced a new virtual IP cloud network products with high availability, as well as other key features such as destination network address translation (DNAT) and Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Cloud (SSL VPN).

Cloud Storage - The company's cloud storage supports Quality of Service (QoS) configuration, allowing precise control and management of cloud storage products; its object storage products are upgraded to include features, such as version control and service-end encryption to ensure data security; its file storage products support better management of access control.

PaaS

Cloud Database - The company expanded its product portfolio by introducing three new products, namely DTS with, ClickHouse, and Cassandra.

Big Data - The company expanded its product portfolio by introducing four new products, namely Klog, Elasticsearch, RocketMQ, and ZooKeeper.

Industry-Specific Solutions

The company has designed various industry-specific solutions that can unleash the full potential of its infrastructure resources and add value to its customers. It has designed industry- specific solutions covering a spectrum of industry verticals, including video, public service, healthcare, gaming, and financial service, among others.

Video Cloud Solutions

The company offers video cloud solutions. Its full stack video cloud solutions offer various state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms, including cloud trans-coding, image enhancement, smart high definition, dark image enhancement. The company's holistic intelligent video cloud solutions serve both on-demand video and live streaming companies, offering a high-capacity and elastic cloud delivery network built on its industry-leading containerized edge computing platform. To meet the large-scale and high-quality cloud delivery requirements of these companies, the company's video cloud solutions combine core technologies, such as intelligent video processing algorithms and multi-link optimization to provide enhanced cloud delivery services beyond traditional content delivery services. For on-demand videos, the company offers video upload, distributed encoding, media resource management, and on-demand delivery. For live streaming, the company offers delivery acceleration, real-time encoding, live recording, and storage. The company's video cloud solutions can be accessed through a management system or API/SDK.

The company provides cloud solutions to companies engaged in video business and has amassed a high-profile customer base, including Bilibili and Zhihu. Its video cloud solutions provide a quick and uninterrupted video streaming and archiving experience. The company's video cloud solutions offer high stability and ensure performance. The distributed network eliminates incidents and disruptions, which can effectively lower packet loss rate. The company's video cloud solutions are able to maximize data security by configuring authentication settings for content. Its video cloud solutions provide optimized encoding and decoding solutions that allow 4K-8K ultra high definition video transmission through the internet.

Public Service Cloud Solution

The company's public service cloud solutions are based on the public cloud architecture and can be easily and quickly deployed. The cloud platform adopts high-availability technology and security protection system, which can guarantee the stable and uninterrupted operation of the platform. The company can provide a series of services from the construction of underlying cloud data center, big data management, big data analytics, etc., which meets the public service organizations' requirements for critical aspects of cloud platform product functions.

Healthcare Cloud Solutions

The company's healthcare cloud solutions provide secure resources and technologies, and a full portfolio of applications and services for the healthcare industry. It provides cloud services covering hospital operations, medical supervision, medical insurance payment, medical treatment and eldercare relying on its top-level cloud resources, abundant cloud products, and cloud service. It features big data analysis service for administrators, health management service for residents, cloud infrastructure for large and medium medical institutions and cloud application service for small and medium medical institutions. The company has deployed flagship projects for leading institutions.

Leveraging the company's comprehensive Picture Archiving & Communication System (PACS), the company provides the solutions of medical image storage, sharing, management, quality control, and related applications. It helps healthcare institutions develop a complete medical image ecosystem by leveraging unified data resources, data processing and computing to support unified system construction, deployment, and service solutions. The company helps healthcare institutions and hospitals improve radiology workflow, better manage the storage of images, and realize healthcare interoperability.

The company helps customers build regional healthcare platforms with unified cloud infrastructure, cloud-native technology for the middle office, big data platforms, and medical resource systems. It provides DataOps capability to help the healthcare industry solve data silos, improve collaboration and the automation of data flow, and enhance collaborative synergies among regional healthcare systems. The solution represents a cloud upgrade for grassroots information system to provide private medical services and enhance functions, such as intelligent assistance and remote medical service, which improves private medical service capability. The solution breaks through the information barrier between superior and subordinate medical institutions in the same region, which realizes information interaction and data sharing.

Game Cloud Solutions

The company offers game cloud solutions. It has developed a full-stack platform for game companies to incubate, test, and operate their games in cloud environments. With the company's game cloud solutions, its customers are able to provide a seamless experience and direct playability for gamers across all devices.

The company's game cloud solutions primarily consist of three categories, namely architecture solutions, management solutions, and operation solutions. Architecture solutions focus on addressing the users' needs for computing and storage capabilities. Based on the features of different game genres, the company offers customized architecture solutions, such as cloud migration solutions. Management solutions help game companies to manage the games, covering game updates, maintenance, and security. Operation solutions help users to operate and promote games and deliver experiences to gamers.

The company's game cloud solutions can effectively reduce the system requirements and pressure for game servers through large-scale and simultaneous cloud computation, which in turn allows for a large number of concurrent players. Developed upon its extensive network infrastructure across the world at large scale, the company is able to satisfy game companies' demands for low latency and enable them to deliver high-speed game experiences. The company's game cloud solutions offer various security protections against isolated incidents and security failures to ensure player experience is not affected and to maintain high-availability at all times. By integrating high-quality EBS, Elastic IP and SLB products, the company's game cloud solutions enable game companies to easily recover from failures in application or underlying layers within seconds. The company's game cloud solutions provide multipath BGP and cross-region elastic deployment, eliminating operation risks from failures in any single data center.

Financial Service Cloud Solutions

The company offers financial service cloud solutions. It has pioneered the private deployment of public cloud technologies, which could address the pain points faced by financial institutions amid the regulatory requirements and digital transformation, and allow them to unleash the value of data assets. The company's Data Lakehouse platform has been successfully deployed for a large state-owned bank in China. The company owns Camelot Employee Scheme INC. (Camelot) to further enhance its financial service cloud solutions. Camelot offers comprehensive and digitalized solutions, such as teller or branch systems, anti-money laundering, and fraud prevention software services to the financial services industry.

The company's customized financial service architecture solutions, by providing high-performance cloud computing service at lower costs, enables financial institutions to achieve digital transformation and migrate to cloud. Its financial service cloud native solutions enable financial institutions to enjoy various benefits brought by cloud technologies, including high security, reliability, availability, and flexibility. The company's intelligent financial service solutions equip financial institutions with big data analytics capabilities, enabling them to easily and efficiently realize business innovations.

Other Solutions

The company's cloud solutions also cover various other industries, such as mobility, e-commerce, office automation, and mobile internet in general, among others. The company's market-tested solutions can be rapidly deployed on demand.

Infrastructure and Technologies

The company provides customers with secure and compliant cloud services.

Infrastructure

As of December 31, 2022, the company operated two data centers and more than 110,000 servers primarily throughout China and achieved exabyte-level storage capacity.

Cloud Technologies

The company creates and applies technologies to drive its development of products and solutions. Its core technologies include:

Cloud Native

Leveraging the company's proprietary container architecture, its cloud native technologies are applied using zero-performance loss bare metal servers. The company provides core cloud native capabilities, including microservices engines, service mesh solutions, DevOps systems, and functional computing. Integrated with the company's cloud native security system, its solutions provide customers scalable, reliable, and flexible cloud native infrastructure. The company also developed new serverless cloud function technology that supports programming languages, such as Python, Go, Node.js, etc.

Virtualization

The company has built a complete virtualization technology stack. Technologies, such as x86 virtualization, input/output paravirtualization, high-performance storage and network virtualization, GPU (graphics processing unit) virtualization, with critical features, such as smooth live migration and live patching, are all supported and applied to its cloud products.

Distributed Storage

The company has developed different storage technologies for various application scenarios, including key-value storage, table storage, object storage, elastic block storage, and file storage, providing high-performance storage services with reliability, scalability, and availability.

Software Defined Network

The company's virtualized network architecture, designed on the basis of disaster recovery multi-region construction, supports multi-tenant networks. With petabit-per-second-scale distributed east-west forwarding capabilities and terabit-per-second-scale north-south traffic capabilities, the cloud network provides high-performance interconnect services for computing, storage and various PaaS services.

Cloud Delivery

The company has developed a comprehensive set of cloud delivery systems, including caching system, OTCP (optimized transmission control protocol) stack, user datagram protocol-based transport stack, traffic scheduling system, high-performance domain name system, near-real-time performance analysis system and IPV 4 (internet protocol version 4) and IPV 6 (internet protocol version 6) dual-stack network system.

Data Lake and Data Analytics

The company's data lake technology allows customers to store both structured and unstructured data at any scale as-is, without having to first structure the data. Such data lake serves as a repository for data analytics, enabling customers to uncover insights from business data to guide decisions.

Sales and Marketing

To promote its cloud products and solutions, the company mainly directly reaches out to its customers and in certain cases it cooperates with third-party agents. Its in-house sales team works with its engineering team to ensure that they can propose and integrate the suitable solutions to address the pain points faced by participants in the relevant industry verticals.

On the other hand, the company's in-house sales department works with the sales partners and leverages their understanding of end user demands, thereby developing tailored marketing strategies.

Research and Development

The company incurred RMB971.2 million (US$140.8 million) of research and development expenses in 2022.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2022, the company had registered 744 patents, 697 trademarks, 734 copyrights, and 125 domain names in China and overseas. It has obtained the license from Kingsoft to use its 'Kingsoft Cloud' trademark. The company has also obtained the license from Kingsoft Group to use some of its registered patents during their terms of registration.

History

Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Limited was incorporated under the laws of the Cayman Islands in 2012.