China Artificial Intelligence: Open-weight commercialization playbook: winner takes more; Raise Zhipu to HK$2,000 (OW), cut MiniMax to HK$300 (Neutral)

Research evidence excerpt

China Artificial Intelligence: Open-weight commercialization playbook: winner takes more; Raise Zhipu to HK$2,000 (OW), cut MiniMax to HK$300 (Neutral)

Olivia Xu Asia Pacific Equity Research

(86-21) 6106 6138 07 July 2026

olivia.w.xu@jpmorgan.com

Equity Ratings and Price Targets

Mkt Cap Price Rating Price Target

Company Ticker ($ mn) CCY Price Cur Prev Cur End Prev End Date

Date

Zhipu AI 2513 HK 45,431 HKD 1,610.00 OW n/c 2,000.00 Dec-26 1,800.00 n/c

MiniMax Group Inc - H 100 HK 9,419 HKD 323.80 N n/c 300.00 Dec-26 400.00 n/c

Source: Company data, Bloomberg Finance L.P., J.P. Morgan estimates. n/c = no change. All prices as of 07 Jul 26.

Open-weight strategy: distribution upside, model-access

pressure and a more flexible monetization playbook

Open-weight strategy has been an important part of the China large language model

(LLM) market, and we believe the debate for investors is more focused on how these

LLM providers use open distribution to build monetizable channels. We believe the

commercial logic is to use open access to reach developers, cloud platforms,

application programming interface (API) aggregators and overseas users faster, then

monetize through official API, cloud partnerships, enterprise deployments and

workflow products.

The cost of such open-source strategy is also visible: once a model is open-weight,

cloud service providers (CSP), API aggregators and technically capable enterprises can

deploy it on their own infrastructure. This creates competition for part of the traffic that

may otherwise have gone to the LLM provider’s first-party API. The pressure is most

visible in simple workloads such as chat, summarization, translation, basic Q&A and

other low service-level agreement (SLA) text tasks, where users mainly compare price

and basic functionality.