CMB International: A critical year in the AI era focuses on helping to improve decision-making efficiency and create real value
The Zhitong Finance App learned that CMB International released a research report saying that it believes 2026 will be a key year to compete for the mentality of users in the AI era. Lowering the usage threshold, helping to improve decision-making efficiency, and creating real value are the focus of attention. However, in traditional Internet businesses, companies with stable main business cash flow to support AI-related business investment and exploration, have rich application scenarios to reach users, have outstanding supply chain capabilities, and excellent business operation capabilities to support overseas to open up incremental space may have higher long-term investment value.
CMB International's main views are as follows:
Consumer building: visibility and certainty remain the focus
Looking back at 2025, the e-commerce sector will benefit from “state subsidies” as expected, despite some twists and turns in the process. Competition in the local lifestyle industry has intensified beyond market expectations, and the growth resilience of the OTA sector is better than market expectations. Looking ahead to 2026, in online retail sales, the overall growth rate of experiential consumption (such as travel, games, etc.) may still be superior to physical products, and the online travel and game industry's profit growth or resilience. In the retail sale of physical goods, competition may be showing a trend of normalization in the context of declining national supplements. E-commerce platforms may show a different focus on the investment side of instant retail, putting more emphasis on resources and efficiency, and promoting the improvement of the level of competition in the industry, even though the bank believes that there should be no overly optimistic expectations about the pace of improvement. The instant retail industry as a whole is expected to maintain a high GMV growth rate. The in-store business may have to wait for the macro environment to improve and competition to stabilize. The e-commerce sector as a whole focuses on companies that can maintain steady profit growth, have reasonable valuations, and continue to benefit in the AI era.
Technology breaks the game: AI is booming, and applications and monetization continue to rise
Competition in the big model industry will intensify in 2025, overall model capabilities will continue to improve, and the release and iteration speed of open source big models will accelerate. At the same time, the cost of calling the same model continues to decline, and industry applications are gradually booming. Looking ahead to 2026, the bank believes that fierce competition to improve model capabilities will continue, and the monetization of AI applications in segmented fields is expected to continue. The bank is optimistic about further monetization potential brought about by increased intelligence capabilities, as well as further paid user penetration and monetization brought about by improved image editing and video generation capabilities. Cloud and advertising may still be the main direction for AI to drive the growth of the company's main business. Currently, the bank is not worried about the risk of excessive investment, but it suggests that more attention should be paid to the return on investment cycle.
Sailing at sea: Bringing long-term growth
In 2025, the pace of OTA overseas development exceeded expectations, the efficiency of takeout overseas operations improved better than expected, games developed steadily, and e-commerce overseas slowed marginally due to geopolitical influence. Looking ahead to 2026, going overseas for the cloud business may become an incremental focus. OTA overseas may still maintain rapid revenue growth, and local life and overseas will usher in a period of rapid development. When gaming goes overseas, you can pay attention to the progress of individual stocks. E-commerce going overseas may still maintain a strategy that is superior to improving efficiency over scale expansion. At the same time, the bank believes that companies with better cash flow and hematopoietic capacity, higher profit margins, and sufficient cash reserves can better withstand macroeconomic and market cycles, and may support higher valuation certainty and more steady stock price performance.
Investment advice: It is recommended to adopt a “barbell” investment strategy, while focusing on the certainty of profit growth and the new increase brought about by AI. 1) In terms of AI topics, it is recommended to focus on Tencent (00700), where AI drives continuous rapid growth in advertising and cloud businesses, and is expected to benefit from the return trend of foreign capital; Alibaba (09988), which definitively benefits from AI trends and has rich application scenarios but a lower valuation than the AI industry; and Kuaishou (01024), which has active monetization progress and drives revenue space and valuation improvement; 2) In terms of the determinism of profit growth, it is recommended to focus on NetEase (09999), which is in a reasonable range with steady performance and high profit visibility, Ctrip ( 09961).