China Internet & New Media: Expert insights across the internet economy

Research evidence excerpt

China Internet & New Media: Expert insights across the internet economy

Nomura | China Internet & New Media 14 July 2026

LLM expert: open source is not an open playbook

The expert noted that persistent supply tightness and price inflation for high-end Nvidia

(NVDA US, Not rated) chips are making domestic AI accelerators increasingly attractive.

While Chinese model providers are broadly reducing token prices, the expert highlighted a

clear bifurcation between basic and advanced models. Providers are aggressively cutting

prices for basic models – which process commoditized tasks – to acquire customers,

while maintaining premium pricing for their advanced models. The expert thinks that

model providers can enhance enterprise customer loyalty by embedding their models

deeply into corporate workflows. This integration makes switching models highly time-

consuming and financially burdensome, effectively deterring customer churn.

The expert believes DeepSeek (unlisted) possesses a distinct cost advantage driven by

superior operational efficiency during inference workloads. This efficiency is highly difficult

for other platforms hosting the same open-source DeepSeek model to replicate. The

expert views financial services, office productivity, coding, manufacturing, legal, and

healthcare as the most likely primary adopters of large language models (LLMs).

Consequently, these sectors are expected to be the core future revenue contributors for

LLM providers, according to the expert.

TakeawaysfromanLLMexpertcall

Soda Music: resorting to AI music for market share gains

Soda Music, a music-streaming platform owned by ByteDance (unlisted), has reached

approximately 50mn DAU and 150mn MAU as of May 2026, with DAU expected to hit