Goldman Sachs has initiated coverage on Zhipu, a Hong Kong-listed AI company, with a price target of 1,880 Hong Kong dollars ($239.83), indicating nearly 15% upside from its recent closing price. Zhipu has gained prominence since its January listing, particularly with its GLM-5.2 model, which is seen as a strong competitor to Anthropic's Fable 5.
Analysts believe that Zhipu's model, which has achieved near-frontier performance, will continue to see increased adoption among domestic enterprises and global SMEs, particularly among coders. While Goldman Sachs has assigned a neutral rating to Zhipu, it also favors two other Chinese AI companies, Deepseek and ByteDance, which are privately held.
The report highlights that Zhipu and Deepseek's models outperform those from Alibaba, Tencent, and Minimax in terms of time to market and arena score. In the past 60 trading days, Zhipu shares have surged 70%, contrasting sharply with Minimax's decline of over 70%.
The analysts note that China's AI models are reaching a critical performance level compared to global proprietary models, driven by increasing demand for cost-effective solutions. They emphasize that access to computing resources will be crucial, influenced by regulatory environments in the US and China, as well as companies' financial health and efficiency in inference