SenseTime’s AI growth surges, as China advances nationwide initiative
The company attributes the results to ‘tremendous growth’ in demand for training, fine-tuning and inference of generative AI models
The Hong Kong-listed company on Thursday posted revenue of 2.36 billion yuan (US$330 million) for the six months ended June 30, marking a 35.6 per cent increase from a year earlier. Gross profit rose 18.4 per cent year on year to 907.8 million yuan, although gross margin declined to 38.5 per cent from 44.1 per cent owing to rising hardware and data centre infrastructure costs.
The company’s adjusted net loss was halved to 1.16 billion yuan, down 50 per cent from 2.33 billion yuan a year earlier.
Revenue from the generative AI division surged 72.7 per cent to 1.82 billion yuan, increasing its share of total sales to 77 per cent, up from 60.4 per cent a year earlier. SenseTime attributed this to a “tremendous growth” in demand for training, fine-tuning and inference of generative AI models.
SenseTime’s shares edged up 0.48 per cent to HK$2.09 ahead of the announcement. The stock has risen 48.2 per cent so far this year.
“The industry’s main theme in the first half of this year was multimodal [and] reasoning, combined with AI agents facilitating large-scale adoption,” said CEO Xu Li on the earnings call.