China AI firm MiniMax jumps 109% in Hong Kong debut
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MiniMax co-founder and CEO Yan Junjie at the company’s listing ceremony at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Jan 9.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
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HONG KONG – MiniMax Group, one of China’s largest generative artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups, surged as much as 54 per cent in initial trading on Jan 9 in Hong Kong after an initial public offering that raised US$619 million (S$796 million).
The stock was priced at HK$165 apiece in an upsized offering, with retail investors subscribing to more than 1,830 times the shares available. The counter closed at HK$345 on Jan 9, 109 per cent higher than its IPO price.
Backed by Alibaba Group Holding and Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, MiniMax is among the first of China’s post-ChatGPT generative AI firms to go public.
The gains came after rival Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC, known as Zhipu, delivered a more modest debut in the financial hub on Jan 8.
MiniMax’s first-day stock performance will serve as a litmus test for whether investor enthusiasm in China’s AI sector – so far concentrated on hardware makers – can extend to software firms.
Buoyed by localisation demand, chipmakers Moore Threads Technology and MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai surged multifold on their first day of trade, while chip designer Shanghai Biren Technology jumped 76 per cent in Hong Kong.
In contrast, Zhipu closed 13 per cent higher.
“It is still early in the China AI investment cycle compared with global peers, so it may be difficult for investors to identify winners and losers,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Marvin Chen. “Performance may begin to become more differentiated as the cycle matures.”
Founded in early 2022, Shanghai-based MiniMax has its roots in gaming. The start-up is trying to one-up DeepSeek and OpenAI with consumer chatbots at home and abroad.
A devotee of the battle-arena game Dota 2, co-founder and chief executive officer Yan Junjie first noticed OpenAI in 2019, when its bots defeated the world’s top human players. Captivated, he devoured the lab’s research papers, prompting a career pivot from computer vision to natural language processing.
He secured one of his first cheques from Genshin Impact studio Mihoyo, whose founders obsess over using AI to revolutionise gaming. Mihoyo remains a key client.
The IPO prospectus shows the company posted an adjusted loss of about US$186 million in the first nine months of 2025.
MiniMax joins a wave of Chinese AI firms that have rushed to raise funds to accelerate their expansion amid support from Beijing to bolster home-grown champions in the sector.
About half of the 11 companies that have laid out plans to list in Hong Kong in January are AI firms. BLOOMBERG
