Citibank: Maintains MiniMax-W (00100) “Buy/High Risk” Rating; ARR Exceeds US$800 Million in August

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Citi released a research report stating that it maintains the MiniMax-W (00100) “buy/high risk” rating, and the target price of HK$576 remains unchanged. MiniMax management revealed at an investor event a few days ago that the annual recurring revenue (ARR) in August this year exceeded 800 million US dollars, a significant increase from 150 million US dollars in February. It was mainly driven by strong adoption after the release of the M3 model and the H3 model. Among them, skits/comics and individual users showed outstanding performance.

Management emphasized that the company has a strict definition of ARR and only recognizes recurring revenue, not including one-time authorized revenue. In August, corporate customers contributed about 80% of ARR, a significant increase from 30% last year. Citi believes that strong growth in corporate customers validates the usability of the model and management's strategic decision to expand experienced sales teams.

Management said that training and iterations for M3.1, M3 Pro (with parameters exceeding 3 trillion yuan) and H3.1 are ongoing, and there is an opportunity to launch them in the second half of this year. M3.1 aims to comprehensively verify infrastructure pipelines, provide a wide range of usable models with high quality and inference efficiency, and is expected to drive growth in word element (LLM) consumption with greater intelligence and cost advantages. Management also acknowledged that after the M3 was released, the pace of model iteration was slower than that of the M2 series, but it is expected that after M3.1 is released later this year, the new model iteration will return to a faster pace. As the market's expectations for the upcoming model are low, the bank believes any better-than-expected feedback can be a positive catalyst for stock prices.