Original author: Dong Jing

Original source: Wall Street Journal

The Chinese AI large model sector is showing a counter-trend explosive market performance in the Hong Kong stock market.

Zhihui welcomed the first unlocking of restricted shares since its listing, and the market's usual logic of "stocks must fall after unlocking" completely failed here—on that day, the stock price soared by more than 19%, while MiniMax rose by about 17% simultaneously. Analysts pointed out that the large unlocking did not trigger liquidity panic, and core institutional investors collectively expressed their intention to hold long-term, indicating that Wall Street's mainstream capital is forming a systematic recognition of Chinese AI model companies.

At the same time, an article from Wall Street Journal wrote that JPMorgan raised Zhihui's target price from 1800 HKD to 2000 HKD, maintaining an "overweight" rating; Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup gave "buy" ratings for MiniMax during the same period.

The strong performance of the two giants of large models is a microcosm of the overall outbreak of the technology sector in the Hong Kong stock market. Today, the Hang Seng Index opened high and continued to rise throughout the day, climbing nearly 5%, Alibaba rose over 12%, Huahong Hongli rose over 10%, Lenovo Group rose over 9%, SMIC and Kuaishou rose over 8%, while Tencent Holdings briefly surged over 4%.

According to Broker China, analysts believe that the recent strong performance of the Hong Kong stock market is driven by two factors: first, Hong Kong stocks are undervalued and attractive; second, the global memory chip sector has been severely hit, and funds flowing out of these sectors have moved to the Hong Kong stock market. At the same time, the Governor of the People's Bank of China, Pan Gengsheng, delivered a speech at the "Hong Kong Fixed Income and Currency Summit and Bond Connect Forum," deploying four directions regarding deepening the interconnection of financial markets, supporting the prosperity of Hong Kong's capital market, consolidating the offshore RMB hub position, and maintaining financial stability in Hong Kong, which also provided policy support for market sentiment.

The unlocking curse is ineffective: institutions collectively express, the market completes value reassessment

The market performance of Zhihui during this unlocking broke the long-standing expectation of "stocks must fall after unlocking" in the A-share and Hong Kong stock markets.

The total amount of restricted shares unlocked for Zhihui this time is 25,681,600 shares. International investment funds under Beijing Financial Holdings Group, JSC International Investment Fund SPC, investment institution WT Asset Management, Optimas Capital Limited, as well as early shareholders and cornerstone investors Lingyun Light Technology Co., Ltd. have successively expressed their willingness to hold long-term.

Regarding MiniMax, the largest strategic shareholder Alibaba and Mihayou also clearly expressed their long-term optimism in late June, and the founding team of MiniMax voluntarily set a 12-month lock-up period, exceeding the industry's common 6-month arrangement, with the first unlocking not involving the founding team and employee shares.

From the market perspective, the significant increase that day was not solely driven by short-term trading sentiment but was a concentrated release of the market's reassessment of the company's long-term value and a clear attitude from capital. Multiple core institutional investors publicly stated their intention to continue holding rather than reduce their positions for cashing out before and after the unlocking, effectively easing market concerns about liquidity panic.

JPMorgan's rating upgrade provided important fundamental support for this market trend. An article from Wall Street Journal stated that JPMorgan raised Zhihui's target price from 1800 HKD to 2000 HKD by December 2026, maintaining an "overweight" rating, with the core logic being that GLM-5.2 reinforced the assertion that "open-weight commercialization can create significant optionality value for leading model providers."

JPMorgan also pointed out that based on the current valuation, the market has basically digested Zhihui's guidance of 1 billion USD ARR by the end of the year, and the remaining upside depends on whether strong open-weight models can be scaled through external infrastructure and distribution channels.

For MiniMax, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Citigroup all gave "buy" ratings during the same period, which is rare in the current market environment of increasing differentiation in the AI sector.

Goldman Sachs set a target price of 860 HKD per share, focusing on the changes in the pricing environment of China's AI industry. Goldman Sachs pointed out that DeepSeek V4 will soon introduce differentiated pricing during peak periods, with the API price during peak periods being twice that of non-peak hours, indicating an early signal of rationalization in the aggressive price war in the industry since the end of April 2026. In this context, MiniMax's M3 model, with a higher proportion of self-optimized computing power and a more efficient architecture with smaller activation parameters, has a significantly higher gross margin than its peers.

Bank of America has a target price of 500 HKD per share, disclosing the important shift in MiniMax's revenue structure: the company's revenue has shifted from about 70% of consumer-end products last year to an increased share of enterprise and cloud API business, which has been listed as a higher strategic priority. In terms of profitability, the previous generation model M2.7 eventually achieved over 40% inference profit margin, and Bank of America expects that through continuous improvement of infrastructure efficiency, long-term profit margins will remain stable. In terms of computing power acquisition, MiniMax collaborates with global cloud service providers and new cloud manufacturers to provide local computing power services for overseas users, and it can still stably acquire computing power.

Citigroup set a target price of 533 HKD per share, noting that the current stock price corresponds to a 53.8% expected upside, and expects MiniMax's revenue growth rate to remain high, with the upcoming release of the new generation video model likely to be a key catalyst for reversing market sentiment.

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