BlueFocus CEO Fei Pan: "We Aim to Become a True Global AI Marketing Technology Company"

BEIJING, April 28, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, BlueFocus released its 2024 Annual Report, recording a total revenue of RMB 60.797 billion for the year, marking a 15.55% year-on-year increase and making it the first marketing company in China to surpass the RMB 60 billion milestone. Below are selected highlights from "A Letter to Our Investors" by BlueFocus CEO Fei Pan.

Dear Investors,

This year marks the 15th anniversary of BlueFocus's public listing, and the forthcoming 30th anniversary of our founding. From our origins as a modest local company, we have steadily grown into one of the world's top ten Marketing and Communications Groups—a transformation made possible by your enduring support, trust, and encouragement. On behalf of the entire BlueFocus Group, I extend my deepest gratitude.

China's marketing industry has reached a scale of over RMB 1 trillion, and the global outbound market is of comparable size. Together, these two trillion-RMB arenas now stand at the cusp of a historic transformation, one that will be fundamentally reshaped by Artificial Intelligence (AI). What does a reimagined BlueFocus look like? It means transforming ourselves into a true AI-powered Marketing Technology company, breaking away from the traditional logic and business models that have defined marketing since its inception. It means becoming a global company, rooted in China and built to thrive on the world stage. It means growing into an enterprise of RMB 100 billion scale, one that combines technological DNA with global imagination. This is not merely a vision, but a clear and deliberate pursuit.

Next, I would like to share our current position and outlook, centered around two key questions that may be top of mind for many of you.

First question: At a time when everyone is declaring they're "All in AI", what is the real value behind BlueFocus's All in AI strategy? And more importantly, what does it truly mean to be All in AI?

Today, AI has deeply integrated into more than 95% of BlueFocus's operational scenarios, driving efficiency gains across integrated marketing, intelligent advertising, and our global outbound business, with improvements ranging from 60% to 1000%. Our goal is clear: to fundamentally restructure everything through an "AI Native" approach and logic, reimagining business scenarios, redefining and inventing new business models, reshaping the talent-to-business structure, and rebuilding our organizational structure and culture. For BlueFocus at this stage, these are elements far more important than the raw numbers behind cost reduction and efficiency gains:

It starts with real, sustainable business scenarios. These are environments where AI capabilities are continuously iterated through practical application, and where both process and outcome data can be labeled and refined. Today, BlueFocus uses AI to generate nearly 80,000 pieces of content each week across data analysis, content creation (text, images, video, and multimodal formats), and code generation. Our AI tools currently support around 600 clients, and in the past year alone, we executed over 1,500 AI-driven cases. On the revenue side, AI-enabled revenue has grown more than tenfold, reaching RMB 1.2 billion. We expect to achieve RMB 3 to 5 billion in AI-driven revenue by 2025.

It requires a truly self-developed AI platform and model. BlueAI is fast becoming the new engine that powers AI-driven applications across BlueFocus. It is our proprietary AI platform, our own "multimodal AI model for marketing," purpose-built to meet BlueFocus's strategic needs. BlueAI now supports more than half of BlueFocus's project cases across both global and domestic marketing scenarios. Internally, we have incubated approximately 100 AI agents to scale and deepen our capabilities. Looking ahead, we aim to build on our growing base of content-scale data to power a self-reinforcing data flywheel, from factual data annotation, to content creation and delivery, to continuous deep learning. Our ambition is for BlueAI to become the most competitive model in the marketing industry and the next strategic engine of BlueFocus.

It builds on true AI infrastructure and robust data systems. By the end of this year, BlueFocus is projected to label over 200 million data records across marketing scenarios, with API token usage approaching hundreds of billions in scale. Coupled with the growing pool of process, operational, and media performance data accumulated across our business middleware systems, we are laying the groundwork for "emergent intelligence" under the new AI paradigm.

It takes deep organizational transformation and a bold talent strategy shift. At the organizational level, AI has become a hard-coded standard embedded in recruitment, promotion, and incentive structures. "No AI, No Bonus, No Promotion" is not just a slogan, but a decision-making principle that guides how we operate. Today, BlueFocus already has nearly 300 product and technology professionals and 200 AI Native seed talents. They are our strategic safeguard in becoming AI Native, and the foundation of our innovation.

With real scenarios, datasets, technology platforms, and a fundamental shift in organizational paradigms, we are methodically constructing durable vertical moats, barriers that differentiate us not only from general-purpose foundation models but also from competitors within our own industry.

Second question: Amid ongoing trade tensions, how should we think about and respond to the challenges facing our large-scale global outbound business?

Based on in-depth conversations with multiple clients, the broader industry is proactively embracing market diversification, accelerating expansion into high-average-order-value markets in Europe, high-growth regions like Southeast Asia, and fast-emerging opportunities in Latin America. Market volatility, while challenging, often reveals strategic openings for those positioned to move with agility. We remain confident in both the long-term trajectory of global e-commerce and the continued expansion of BlueFocus's outbound business in 2025.

In 2024, we officially launched our Global Outbound Business 2.0 strategy. So, what does 2.0 signify for us? In short, it marks a shift away from a traditional agency-driven model toward one that is powered by technology, AI, and localized operations, ushering in a new era of proprietary traffic development and self-built competitive infrastructure. We see tremendous opportunities in both traffic structure and customer base. So far, our outbound team has built a customer base of nearly 100,000. Across this vast client pool, we are seeing growing marketing budgets and increasingly diversified demands, indicating that any partner capable of offering new capabilities stands a real chance of capturing new budget streams. Finally, in a global landscape shaped by diverse cultural and socio-economic contexts, resource and information barriers remain high. This is precisely why we continue to invest in building local offices.

As we look to the future, powered by the synergy of our AI strategy and Globalization 2.0, BlueFocus will continue to unlock new, high-quality incremental markets—breaking through the valuation limits that have long defined traditional marketing. Our ambition is to evolve into a Marketing Technology company rooted in technological DNA and guided by global vision—ultimately serving as a defining Chinese example in the evolution of the global marketing industry.