AI's 'Windows moment': Hong Kong-listed internet stocks may present a strategic allocation window
Western Securities believes that AI is currently at a critical juncture, transitioning from a 'command-line interface (CLI)' to a 'graphical user interface (GUI).' Due to persistently high hardware costs and insufficient workflow integration, total factor productivity has not yet seen widespread improvement, but China is poised to achieve a breakthrough by leveraging its engineering talent dividend.
At a Glance | Tencent to Report Q2 Earnings on Wednesday! Expected to Show 'Stable Revenue, Pressured Profits' as AI Investment Becomes Key Battleground
Tencent’s second-quarter results are highly likely to reflect a pattern of 'steady revenue but profit under pressure.' For investors, the key focus of this earnings report is not merely the net profit figure, but rather an assessment of whether AI investments represent pure expense consumption or have already generated tangible incremental returns for advertising, cloud, and enterprise services. If the business benefits enabled by AI continue to materialize, the short-term sacrifice in profitability will translate into medium- to long-term value; otherwise, the market will reassess its valuation framework.
Hong Kong Market Midday Review | All three major indices rose, with the Hang Seng Index up 0.72%; tech and internet stocks broadly advanced, Alibaba gaining over 2%; biotech stocks climbed, with Wuxi Apptec rising nearly 3% to hit a new intraday high; Guo
Tech and internet stocks rose, with Alibaba-W up 2.10% and JD.com-SW up 1.80%; coal stocks advanced, with Jinma Energy surging 20.83% and Power Development rising 8.95%; Hong Kong retail stocks gained, with Bonjour Holdings down 8.00% and Chow Sang Sang up 6.69%;
Morgan Stanley raised its target price by nearly 72%, while Zhipu AI rose more than 4%.
A report from a major bank once again sent Zhipu AI's share price soaring. On Thursday, Morgan Stanley released a research report significantly raising Zhipu AI’s target price by nearly 72%, from approximately HK$990 to HK$1,700. The news drove Zhipu AI’s intraday share price up by more than 4%, bringing its cumulative gain over the past five trading days to over 37%. Morgan Stanley noted that Zhipu AI’s ability to secure computing power continues to improve, and this—combined with the successful closing of a new round of financing—provides strong support for the company’s more robust growth trajectory. Without sufficient computing power, neither model training nor inference is feasible. Meanwhile, the new funding addresses the capital requirements during this cash-burning phase. The simultaneous improvement in these two key constraints directly prompted the bank to upgrade its rating.
Express News | Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares rose nearly 3% in early trading after Apple briefly posted a support document titled "Using Qwen with Apple Intelligence on Mac" on its China website last Saturday, only to remove it within less than a day. The company re
Wall Street on 'China Concepts': From 'Powerless' to 'Opportunistically Bullish'
As computing power costs rise and intense price competition intensifies, the economic viability of standalone model-layer offerings is diminishing. The market is gradually converging on a consensus: the technical barrier to catching up in large models is not particularly high, and the ultimate commercial winners will emerge in multi-model ecosystems, AI agent applications, and on-device AI.
Tokenomics in the U.S. and China: Sources of Profit, Premium Allocation, and Realization Sequence
Profits across the large AI model industry chain are being realized sequentially from upstream to midstream to downstream. The upstream computing infrastructure layer has already captured the full benefits of scarce resource premiums, while the midstream model layer is experiencing price deflation due to open-source competition leveling the playing field. In terms of where value accrues, there is a clear divergence between China and the United States: in the U.S., incremental AI value is being absorbed into existing high-priced software subscription models; in China, due to differences in willingness to pay, the low-cost token-based benefits are spilling directly into the downstream application layer. Going forward, whether downstream players can retain profits will depend on the 'switching costs' they establish within their specific business use cases.
Weekend buzz: “Empty deposits, multiple lights”?
Well-known memory sector bull Jukan has turned cautiously bearish in the short term, citing three reasons: First, following the functional breakdown of South Korea's leveraged ETF market, related investors are facing redemption pressures that could exert additional selling pressure on memory stocks. Second, NVIDIA is adjusting the architecture of its next-generation AI systems, with Rubin Ultra potentially reducing HBM configurations per rack and instead using optical interconnects to link multiple racks. Third, market expectations that memory prices will peak over the next two quarters are strengthening. In contrast, prominent investor "White-Haired Oracle" Serenity argues that the fundamentals of the memory sector remain unchanged, asserting that the market is merely rotating "from one bottleneck to another."
AI hardware price hikes ripple through 3C leasing: demand doubles as rental firms dismantle and sell graphics cards and memory modules
① Several equipment leasing providers indicated that compared to the price increases of upstream hardware components such as memory and graphics cards, rental prices for consumer electronics have not risen as significantly, with some products seeing price hikes of approximately 5%. ② Industry insiders revealed that amid rising hardware prices, some suppliers opt to disassemble and directly sell components like graphics cards and memory modules. Many small and medium-sized equipment lessors also sell parts or entire devices to quickly generate cash, planning to repurchase them once prices decline in the future.
Apple finally integrates Alibaba's Qwen into Siri: Apple Intelligence arrives in China
This marks the first time a Chinese AI company has genuinely gained access to Apple's system-level AI entry point. For Qwen, this could be even more significant than being featured on the iPhone.
Major tech firms are 'concentrating their forces' to capture entry points, suddenly crowding the AI-powered office productivity space.
① Major tech firms are concentrating resources to secure entry points, marking the end of fragmented, trial-and-error ‘horse-race’ approaches in AI-powered office solutions; ② The competitive landscape extends beyond major players, with ‘real-world business scenario delivery capability’ emerging as a critical differentiator; ③ AI-driven office applications are accelerating demand across the supply chain, directly benefiting upstream providers of inference chips, servers, and high-speed storage—though compute demand per office task remains limited, resulting in steady, gradual growth rather than an immediate surge.
Chart Preview | Earnings Season Begins for Chinese Tech Stocks! Tencent and JD.com Report First, Facing Dual Challenges of AI and Profitability
In August, with earnings releases from major tech and internet giants such as Tencent, JD.com, Alibaba, and Meituan, market focus on China’s internet leaders has shifted from whether they would continue facing headwinds to whether they could further validate a recovery in profitability. Institutions expect further divergence in performance among large internet platforms, with AI revenue growth, profit margins, and capital expenditures emerging as key focal points.
Market Snapshot | All three major indices rose, with the Hang Seng Tech Index up 0.78%; large-model-related stocks performed strongly, Zhipu AI surged nearly 15%, and MINIMAX gained almost 10%; PCB-related stocks advanced, with T.T. Board Holdings rising
Technology and internet stocks declined across the board, with SenseTime Group down 3.95% and NetEase up 1.08%; pharmaceutical stocks rose collectively, led by Pharmaron advancing 12.07% and Insilico Medicine up 10.88%; semiconductor stocks gained, with GigaDevice rising 6.80% and Tianshu Zhixin up 6.31%;
NVIDIA reportedly tests a downgraded version of the Rubin Ultra GPU—how are chipmakers navigating the HBM shortage?
① NVIDIA is reportedly testing multiple Rubin Ultra GPUs, with some alternative versions featuring less HBM memory than initially planned, and mass production specifications have not yet been finalized; ② Analysts note that due to constraints such as DRAM capacity, HBM supply will remain tight through 2027, allowing upstream memory manufacturers to retain pricing power; ③ Industry sources indicate that NVIDIA is attempting to reallocate budget toward optical interconnects and tiered storage solutions to mitigate memory bottlenecks.
Reuters: Alibaba plans to charge large commercial users of its next-generation open-source AI large language model a revenue share.
Reuters reported that Alibaba plans to introduce a revenue-sharing mechanism for its open-source models next week—a move that has never been previously disclosed. Until now, Alibaba has only charged developers who invoke its models on its own cloud computing platform; most open-source models allow customers to deploy them in their own data centers and use them entirely free of charge.
U.S. Stock Market Close | Markets tread cautiously ahead of nonfarm payrolls data and the U.S.-Iran deal, with major indices ending lower—Dow snaps five-session winning streak; tech stocks diverge, Microsoft rises nearly 3% to hit a new high for the year;
On Thursday, all three major U.S. stock indexes closed lower, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 0.85%, the S&P 500 down 0.18%, and the Nasdaq Composite down 0.06%. Memory chip stocks plunged, with Western Digital falling more than 13%. The Wind Mag 7 Index rose 0.23%, led by Microsoft, which gained over 2%. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield climbed 6.5 basis points, and Brent crude oil futures settled up 3.83%.
Jack Ma's private equity fund makes its first U.S. investment in an AI company with a $30 million commitment.
① Yunfeng Fund, led by Jack Ma, participated in the latest funding round of U.S.-based AI insurance startup Corgi, investing approximately USD 30 million. ② Yunfeng Fund manages assets exceeding RMB 50 billion, has invested in 195 companies across 245 investment rounds, and has completed 15 investments so far in 2026. Historically, its investments have been concentrated in five key sectors: biopharmaceuticals, semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence, and big data.
Tencent and Alibaba's 'Yi Zhongtian' Bet on NPO Commercialization Next Year as Advanced Optical Interconnects Enter a Multi-Path Race
① The industrialization timeline for NPO is becoming increasingly clear, with commercial deployment expected by 2027; ② While the evolutionary path from LPO to NPO and then to CPO appears straightforward, the industry’s choice is not simply a matter of 'new technology replacing old technology'—the technology curve may be steeper than anticipated; ③ Currently, next-generation technology pathways have yet to converge, and advanced interconnects have entered a period of technological 'tug-of-war'.
Unitree Technology set its IPO price at RMB 150.8 per share, with strategic placements allocated to DeepSeek, Tencent, and others.
Unitree Technology's IPO on the STAR Market has entered the offering stage, with an issue price of RMB 150.80 per share, raising approximately RMB 6.1 billion and implying a post-listing market capitalization of around RMB 61 billion. The company forecasts revenue for the first half of 2026 to be between RMB 1.052 billion and RMB 1.128 billion, with net profit expected in the range of RMB 258 million to RMB 306 million. The offering is priced at a P/E ratio of approximately 219x and a price-to-sales ratio of about 36x, valuations that exceed both industry and peer averages, drawing market attention to its commercialization progress.
AI agents have penetrated deep into corporate operations, first excelling at the 'grunt work.'
① Within enterprises, agents are not limited to point-specific efficiency gains; internally, they reshape operational workflows, and externally, they drive product upgrades and even serve as a strategic pivot for transformation. ② Within Xiao Yuzhou, the roles most significantly impacted by the agent era are in operations, content, and marketing. ③ The financial information services sector is currently in a critical window period for deep AI integration; Wind Alice from WIND has already been integrated into WeChat’s ClawBot, with high user acceptance.