MiniMax slides 13.7% as US labs undercut China on price
Two headlines out of Hong Kong today — one from the exchange, one from LegCo: foreign price cuts just landed on the city's AI stocks, and the government answered with fresh money for research at home.
MiniMax sank 13.7% in Hong Kong, closing at HK$207.20, as Anthropic and OpenAI turned the model price war into a global one. The chatbot maker fell as far as HK$208.6 in the afternoon and finished on roughly 14.4 million shares — more than six times the previous session's volume — while Zhipu dropped 8.4% and the Hang Seng Tech Index gave up 2.5%. The trigger was offshore, not corporate: Anthropic's Haiku 5.5 lists at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output, undercutting DeepSeek's off-peak rate and beating Zhipu's GLM-5.3 Flash on input while matching it on output — and it scores above both on Artificial Analysis' intelligence index (43 versus 42 for GLM-5.3 Flash and 39 for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash), while OpenAI's budget GPT-6 Luna tier arrived at half the price of the GPT-5.6 API. Chinese model firms built their listed valuations on being the cheap option in the world's most price-sensitive AI market; when the American labs charge less than the discount players and out-score them on the chart, the moat investors were paying for stops being a moat. MiniMax can still point to first-half revenue up 283% to $116.6 million — against losses of $358 million, and a stock now more than 80% below its March peak, erasing roughly HK$340 billion of value — but the market's discount rate on that story clearly just moved. One caveat before anyone calls a bottom: we measured the sticker price and the actual bill diverging sharply — Deep Dive — Haiku 5.5's fine print: same price, three times the bill.
Hong Kong will inject another HK$1 billion into its Artificial Intelligence Subsidy Scheme. Innovation, Technology and Industry Secretary Sun Dong told LegCo today that the top-up will back frontier research as the territory rolls out its "AI+" action plan under the city's first five-year plan — the same commitment that surfaced in the plan's briefing documents late last month. The original scheme launched in October 2024 with HK$3 billion from the budget to fund work on Cyberport's AI supercomputer, but a year in it had approved only about HK$300 million across roughly ten projects, even as the machine ran above 90% utilization — so the new money reads less like a jackpot than an admission the first tranche moved slowly. It lands alongside a compute buildout that is already under way: the Sha Leng data park is under construction, targeting 180 PFLOPS by 2032 — about 36 times Hong Kong's current capacity — with at least HK$23.8 billion of investment behind it.
What to watch: whether DeepSeek or Zhipu answers with price cuts of their own — and whether MiniMax's long-promised M3Pro model lands before its cash does.
If cheap stopped being the moat, what exactly are investors buying when they buy a Chinese model stock? Tell us in the comments.
