① MiniMax's stock price doubled on the first day of listing, Alibaba's large-scale Kwen model achieved explosive growth, and Deep Seek will launch its latest flagship AI model in February. ② Securities companies suggest that China's large-scale model industry is moving from technological catch-up to systematic layout and ecosystem construction, and may take leadership in certain fields by around 2026.
STAR Market Daily reported on January 10 that at the beginning of 2026, there were continuous positive developments in the application of domestic large models.
First, Minimax, which had attracted a lot of attention even before its IPO, was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on the 9th. The company's stock price continued to rise and closed at HK$345 per share, up 109% from the issue price, giving it a market capitalization of over HK$100 billion. Based on its home-grown model, MiniMax has launched a series of AI-native applications such as Conch AI, Xingye, and Talkie. As of September 2025, MiniMax has reached over 212 million individual users in over 200 countries and regions.
On the same day, data released by Hugging Face showed that Alibaba's large model “Qwen” has experienced explosive growth. In December 2025 alone, its number of downloads exceeded that of ranks 2 to 9 combined, including Meta, DeepSeek, and OpenAI. Since surpassing Meta in download volume in the second half of 2025, Qwen has grown the fastest among the world's top 10 open source models and is currently the most adopted open source model by developers worldwide.
It was then announced that DeepSeek will be releasing its latest flagship AI model in February with a focus on robust code generation capabilities.
The three different types of progress indicate to some extent that domestic large models and related applications have moved beyond mere parameter and valuation competition to a stage of development recognized by the capital market, developer ecosystem, and deepening of vertical capabilities.
As large-scale model development becomes deeper, the threshold and cost of innovation for AI applications are gradually decreasing, and the adoption of AI applications at the consumer level is rapidly increasing. We are seeing an acceleration in the adoption of products such as Qwen, Lingguang, and Afu that are tailored to vertical scenarios. According to QuestMobile, in the week from December 8 to 14, 2025, the weekly active user scale of Ant Group's Afu and Lingguang exceeded the tens of millions and 3 million levels, respectively, and successfully ranked in the top two of the new application list during the same period.
At present, the most notable downstream application scenarios for AI technology are the creation and generation of content such as text, images, video, music, programming, and audio. The market is looking for relevant growth models and companies. However, Huajin Securities believes that these application scenarios are mainly used to reduce costs and improve efficiency in areas such as marketing, gaming, and the Internet, and that AI will not significantly increase revenue or profits. By comparison, as short-form videos and self-media content expand and deepen, user profiles on self-media platforms become richer, user portraits and tags are enhanced, and ROI in traffic conversions is significantly improved.
He said that before AI technology directly transforms into new revenue models, it is already driving changes in traditional businesses such as content creation and marketing through cost reduction and efficiency improvements, leading to new investment opportunities in corresponding business and payment scenarios. We recommend paying attention to Kuaishou, Bilibili, Meitu, Tencent Music, Shuidi Company, Dou Shen Education, Blue Focus, Kai Ying Network, Giant Network, Century Huatong.
