These might be the winners from the latest round of Chinese new year AI launches

By Jules Rimmer

Tech companies use the holidays to promote new products to consumers

The release of Seedance 2.0 by ByteDance has garnered much media and user attention Chinese AI and tech companies use the lunar new year holidays as an opportunity to attract consumer eyeballs.

As the holiday period for the lunar new year approaches, Chinese tech companies are lining up product launches to capture consumers' attention.

In 2025, it was the release of DeepSeek which went viral and dominated. This year, there's a crowded pipeline, but the two snatching the most focus are ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 and Zhipu AI's GLM5.0.

JPMorgan thinks investors should buy Zhipu AI (HK:2513) and MiniMax (HK:100), which also was launching a new model this month, it said in a note that published last week.

Seedance 2.0 has attracted a lot of traffic on Tencent's Weixin Index in the last fortnight

China's official holiday period stretches from Feb. 15 to 23 and in a highly-coordinated campaign, platforms and model vendors will be hoping to replicate the success of that DeepSeek launch in January 2025.

DeepSeek may itself potentially release a new model in this window. Reuters carried a story last month that DeepSeek's V4 would be targeted for mid-February.

If this were to happen, JPMorgan analysts suggest the biggest beneficiary of that would most likely be Tencent (HK:700) (TME), followed by the likes of Trip.com (TCOM), Kuaishou (HK:1024) and Beke.

The effect on Alibaba (BABA) and Baidu (BIDU), according to the note's authors Olivia Xu, Alex Yau and Daniel Chen, would probably be mixed. Alibaba is attempting a big user-acquisition push for its Qwen app.

The key to success for the developers stands in their ability to embed their models into high-frequency consumer products rather than as standalone chatbots. Xu and team argue that any systems breakthrough or efficiency gains are diffused quickly across the ecosystem.

They find value in stocks where capability improvements flow directly into API, or application programming interface, monetization. They highlight Zhipu AI and MiniMax as the best pure-play developers in this instance. MiniMax is launching its M2.2 around the holiday period also.

The bullish long-term investment case the JPMorgan note makes is that these short-term "release catalysts" are helpful in generating market feedback and real-world usage and it helps reduce the perception gap with the established, global frontier models from the likes of Google (GOOG), OpenAI and Anthropic.

Success over the next week or so would be for these Chinese AI pioneers to demonstrate that the Chinese model is "close enough" in the analysts' view to be a default choice for production use in high-value tasks.

-Jules Rimmer

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02-16-26 0928ET