Flight Manager Faces IPO Challenge: The "Ticket Grabbing Tool" Struggles to Turn a Profit
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During the years when OTAs enjoyed the feast of industry recovery, the ticket agency segment, situated between upstream resources in the industry chain and downstream traffic, only gained limited benefits.
Recently, Vigor Group, parent company of "Flight Manager" and "High-Speed Rail Manager," updated its prospectus, making a third push for a Hong Kong listing.
As an early participant in the online ticketing market, Vigor Group ranks as the fifth-largest third-party platform in China’s air ticket booking sector, with a market share of about 1.9%. In the train ticket booking market, it is the third-largest platform, with a share of around 2.4%.
The company’s recent performance has been aligned with the travel industry’s recovery trend.
From 2022 to 2024, revenue grew from 280 million yuan to 650 million yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 52%; ninety percent of the revenue comes from travel-related services.
However, the growth momentum noticeably slowed in 2024: revenue growth fell from 79% to 29%, and net profit dropped 13.8% year-on-year to 51.2 million yuan.
In terms of user scale, as of June 30, 2025, all of its platforms have accumulated more than 217 million registered users, nearly doubling from three years ago.
Vigor Group's path to capitalization has seen several changes.
The company was listed on the New Third Board in September 2017, and delisted in February 2021.
Afterward, it turned to the Hong Kong stock market, submitting prospectuses in October 2024, April 2025, and this time, for a total of three times; the first two attempts failed to pass the listing hearing within six months.
In this IPO, Vigor Group plans to use raised funds to strengthen R&D and expand the global market. Amid increasingly fierce competition in China’s online travel "Red Sea," expanding overseas and developing To B business have become the key growth stories it presents to the capital market.
The market's core concern is whether its vertical domain technology and data capabilities, upon which it relies, can truly build a sufficiently wide moat to compete against the industry giants’ ecosystem barriers and ongoing pressure.
Intermediary Status
Today, real-time flight information has become the "standard" in the eyes of travelers, but in the early days of mobile internet, this service was actually a groundbreaking innovation.
In 2009, Vigor Group launched "Flight Manager," China’s first product to provide real-time flight status information. Around the same time, competing products such as Feichangzhun and Umetrip also entered the market.
Li Hanming, general manager of Guangzhou Travel Note Digital Technology Co., Ltd., explained to Xinfeng: "At that time, domestic flight delay rates were very high, and the punctuality of flying was almost metaphysics, which created a pressing market demand for flight information transparency."
Thanks to its first-mover advantage, "Flight Manager" quickly accumulated its initial user base and established market recognition.
Afterward, the company extended its business into the railway sector, launching "High-Speed Rail Manager" and optimizing travel experiences with functions like "onboard ticket supplement" and cross-station ticket purchase.
Vigor Group’s potential also received early recognition from the capital market, securing a total of $20 million investment from Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, and Greylock in 2011.
But it soon began to face pressure from OTA giants.
Founder Wang Jiang once recalled that around 2012, the company became soberly aware of the severity of competition: Ctrip and Qunar entered with overwhelming user and financial scale, while Umetrip, backed by TravelSky, had data advantages — "it was somewhat of a shell-shock experience."
This difficulty in extension is rooted in differences along the value chain.
For OTAs, extending from the profitable, resource-rich hotel sector to the standardized, low-margin ticketing business is a natural progression; for ticketing platforms trying to move in the opposite direction, entering the hotel sector requires surmounting high resource barriers and supply chain thresholds.
In 2024, over 70% of Vigor Group’s GMV came from transportation ticketing services. In the first half of 2025, air ticket GMV accounted for about 65% of total transactions.
The air ticket business uses commission on face value or margin earned by price difference; train ticket revenue mainly comes from value-added services such as "speed packages" and membership fees.
Li Hanming pointed out to Xinfeng that under this model, there isn’t much difference in the platforms' business conversion capabilities; the key to competition ultimately lies in the scale of the user base and user activity level.
To maintain user scale stability, Vigor Group allocates nearly one-fourth of its revenue to app store promotion, platform marketing, and user subsidies.
Sales and marketing expenses in 2024 accounted for 22.5% of revenue, with growth consistently outpacing revenues.
But this still failed to stop active user attrition: its average monthly active users (MAU) decreased from about 7.2 million in July 2024 to around 6.8 million in July 2025.
Rules of Survival
For Vigor Group, the "middleman" business model determines its weak position in the industry chain: upstream, it relies on suppliers such as airlines and railways; downstream, it faces both C-end users and B-end clients directly.
On one hand, facing the trend among monopolistic or oligopolistic suppliers, such as airlines and railways, to bypass agents in favor of direct sales, the platform may struggle to obtain more favorable prices or policies compared to direct channels, and commission margins are easily squeezed.
Air ticket resources mainly come from agents, while its main competitor, Umetrip, receives official backing from major airlines such as China Southern and China Eastern, and is regarded as an official-level direct sales channel.
On the other hand, for users, switching costs between major OTAs and suppliers’ official channels are extremely low, so platforms must continually invest large marketing expenses to maintain traffic and transactions.
Integrated online travel services in China is a fiercely competitive and highly concentrated business.
In 2024, the top three players accounted for about 88.2% of the total market share. By GMV, Vigor Group’s market share was only 1.4%, ranking eighth in the industry.
To avoid head-on competition with giants across all categories and scenarios, Vigor Group emphasizes its differentiated data capabilities.
Vigor Group claims to be "the first travel platform officially authorized by authoritative data sources in China’s aviation industry."
By cooperating with domestic air traffic control authorities, airports, and international data companies, it integrates multi-dimensional data such as real-time flights, baggage conveyance, historical passenger load factors, and weather, which form the basis of its data services.
Vigor Group believes its data advantage allows "Flight Manager" and "High-Speed Rail Manager" to provide full-chain dynamic information covering pre-trip, in-trip, and post-trip, attracting business travelers who value efficiency.
The company is transforming this capability into B-end services, with customers spanning OTA, TMC, logistics, and more than 30 industries, providing partners such as Tongcheng, Meituan, and JD with solutions for flight status information, cargo route planning, arrival/departure monitoring, and more.
But from the perspective of commercial realization, it has yet to convert these data capabilities into sufficient To B revenue or ecosystem effects.
In the first half of 2025, Vigor Group’s data and technology services contributed 13 million yuan in revenue, accounting for less than 4%.
Aside from boosting data capabilities, the current Hong Kong stock fundraising will be used to expand into global markets.
The company plans to leverage its technology platform by integrating overseas payment systems and transportation networks, and strategically partnering with local service providers to offer differentiated services.
Its overseas logic is to target specific high-value customers and seize growth opportunities through product localization, thereby diversifying revenue sources and enhancing its international brand.
In 2024, an average of 25.2% of Vigor Group’s monthly active users were paying users, higher than the sector average of around 20%.
For Vigor Group, with no explosive overall demand growth for travel, the more pragmatic and urgent strategic focus may be to deepen engagement with and maximize value from existing high-value core users.
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