SenseTime (0020) slightly narrowed its net loss by 1.1 percent to 3.12 billion yuan (HK$3.36 billion) in the first six months of this year from a year earlier, bringing the total loss since 2018 to 46.8 billion yuan.
The Chinese artificial intelligence company's revenue grew by 1.3 percent to 1.43 billion yuan in the period, of which, sales from the smart business segment jumped by 50.2 percent to 853.6 million yuan, driven by the generative AI-related business, the firm said in a filing yesterday.
The number of the segment's customers dropped by 6.1 percent to 481 but the average revenue per client soared by 60 percent, it said.
Revenue from smart life business climbed by 6.7 percent to 311.8 million yuan but that of smart city plunged by 57.7 percent to 183.8 million yuan as it "shifted its focus to top tier customers with strong credit profiles." Sales from smart auto also fell by 30.5 percent to 83.9 million yuan.
Before the results announcement, Caixin reported that SenseTime has been cutting up to 15 percent of the headcounts in the smart city business since last month. In response, the firm said the layoff was a strategic adjustment based on changes in the market environment and its own development needs, with an aim to optimize the organization and talent structure.
SenseTime had 5,016 employees by June, down from 5,098 in December and 5,943 from a year ago.
The group's gross profit margin in the six months, meanwhile, sank by 20.7 percentage points to 45.3 percent, mainly due to higher hardware and AI data center-related costs.
Its research and development expenses reached 1.78 billion yuan, despite having declined by 12.4 percent from a year ago. It attributed the drop to decreases in employee benefit expenses, as well as in server operation and cloud-based service fees.
Its cash and cash equivalents were 7.15 billion yuan and term deposits were 4.69 billion yuan as of the end of June.
The firm said its AI chatbot called SenseChat will be upgraded to version 3.0 next month.
This came as selfie app maker Meitu (1357) swung to an interim net profit of 227.6 million yuan from a loss of 226.2 million yuan a year ago, partly due to a 185.6 million yuan reversal of impairment losses on cryptocurrencies as prices rebounded. It incurred an impairment loss of 305.5 million yuan on cryptos in the same period of last year.
Its revenue increased by nearly 30 percent to 1.26 billion yuan, partly driven by AI-generated content-powered photo, video and design products.
