Zhipu AI revenue jumps 132% in first post-IPO report, missing estimates

he Zhipu AI booth at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in 2024.

Photo: Handout Chinese artificial intelligence company Zhipu AI posted worse-than-expected annual revenue growth in its first earnings report since its initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong in January.

Revenue rose 131.9 per cent year on year to 724.33 million yuan (US$104.8 million) for the year ended December 2025, the Beijing-based company said on Tuesday, lagging an estimate of 756 million yuan by analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Zhipu, the first foundational AI model start-up in the world to launch an IPO, reported total losses soaring 59.5 per cent to 4.72 billion yuan in 2025, driven by mounting research and development spending, which jumped 44.9 per cent to 3.18 billion yuan.

Adjusted net losses totalled 3.18 billion yuan, a 29.1 per cent increase from the previous year.

In a post-earnings call, CEO Zhang Peng said the company was undergoing a shift from its traditional business of providing on-premises model deployment to cloud-based services. “Many clients that initially tried to deploy our open-source models locally are gradually shifting - at least partially - toward using our cloud-based API (application programming interface),” he said.

Revenue from cloud deployment increased 292.6 per cent year on year to 190.4 million yuan in 2025, expanding the share of total revenue contributed by cloud deployment to 26.3 per cent, up from 15.5 per cent in 2024.

However, this caused gross profit margins to shrink to 41 per cent in 2025 from 56.3 per cent in 2024, as margins for cloud deployment are much lower than on-premises local deployment: 18.9 per cent compared with 48.8 per cent, respectively.

A mobile phone shows a slogan from Zhipu AI, known as Z.ai internationally.

Photo: Shutterstock Images Known as Z.ai internationally, Zhipu’s shares fell 5.45 per cent on Tuesday ahead of the earnings results.

Zhipu and domestic rival MiniMax, which listed in Hong Kong in early January, have become market darlings in recent weeks as investors have sought exposure to the world’s only listed pure-play AI companies.

Their shares have more than quadrupled from their initial offering price, pushing their peak market caps to values higher than established Chinese tech giants such as Kuaishou and Baidu, despite much lower revenues and continued unprofitability.

However, in contrast to Zhipu AI, MiniMax posted better-than-expected annual growth in its first earnings r

原文链接: 南华早报