China's MiniMax sees revenue nearly quadruple in first half as AI demand surges

Chinese AI startup MiniMax (0100) on Wednesday posted a nearly four-fold jump in first-half revenue as demand for its low-cost models and AI platform accelerated, with the company continuing to target cheaper ways to deploy AI at scale.

Revenue for the six months ended June 30 rose 283.1 percent from a year earlier to US$116.6 million (HK$915.8 million), reflecting surging demand for cheaper, open-source-based models from Chinese providers such as MiniMax and DeepSeek, which position themselves as lower-cost alternatives to proprietary U.S. systems.

MiniMax said it will keep pushing to extend the "performance-cost frontier," first getting performance to a level that can handle complex real-world tasks and then improving efficiency to allow capabilities to be rolled out more widely and affordably.

Revenue from its Open Platform and other AI-based enterprise services surged 703.1 percent to US$73.9 million as paying users grew.

The segment contributed 63.4 percent of the startup's total revenue during the period, up from 30.3 percent a year earlier.

Revenue from its AI-native products rose 100.9 percent to US$42.6million.

MiniMax remains a loss-making company, though its half-year loss attributable narrowed to US$358 million from US$402.2 million last year.

MiniMax was one of the "AI tigers" to go public this year, raising HK$4.82billion in its Hong Kong listing before its stock nearly doubled on its first trading
day.

The Chinese tech firm also raised HK$16.04 billion in fresh capital through a share sale and a bond issue last month to fund growth in its AI business.

Reuters

𝗗𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗔𝗽𝗽 ↓