Author: Think AI, Aaron
Less than six months after its IPO, the Minimax wealth-creation myth began to crumble. (Related reading:MiniMax: A young man from a county in Henan and his 300 billion yuan fortune )
In January of this year, MiniMax and Zhipu jointly listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the world's first listed large-scale model native companies, and were once called the twin stars of AI in Hong Kong stocks.
However, MiniMax's stock price has already plummeted by 70% from its peak, and its market value has fallen from over 400 billion to over 130 billion.
This means that in just five months, MiniMax's market value has evaporated by more than 300 billion yuan, equivalent to the value of Baidu.
However, the most affected may not be ordinary investors, but rather the company's internal employees.
MiniMax is most famous for its story of making everyone rich. The company has 385 full-time employees, but 392 of them hold shares, including interns and former employees. It is a true company-wide shareholding scheme and is currently the most aggressive stock incentive plan in China.
The average value of shares held by employees peaked at over 42 million yuan when MiniMax surged in March . However, with the sharp drop in stock price, the value has now fallen to over 12 million yuan, meaning that employees have suffered an average paper loss of 30 million yuan.
How do Minimax employees view the significant devaluation of their shares? As one of the six leading AI companies in China, with the earliest commercialization, highest overseas revenue, and the most willing investment from the capital market, how will Minimax overcome its predicament after the stock price plummeted?
The sudden wealth and subsequent drawdown of employee stock ownership
It has to be said that worrying about MiniMax employees losing an average of 30 million yuan is a bit unnecessary, since their shares are still worth more than 12 million yuan.
Many people who see this number may wonder if I made a typo. Don't worry, here's a brief explanation.
MiniMax's employee stock ownership plan has always been a benchmark in China's AI industry.
Unlike most tech companies that only issue stock options to core employees, MiniMax has achieved near-universal coverage.
According to 36Kr, MiniMax's employee stock ownership plan involves 392 people, including former employees. Among them, 363 ordinary MiniMax employees hold shares, representing approximately 3.41% of the total issued share capital after the IPO, currently valued at nearly HK$4.7 billion.
The key to being able to allocate resources to all employees lies in two factors: firstly, the company itself has a small number of employees; secondly, there is a severe shortage of AI talent, and the incentives are insufficient, so employees are quickly poached by competitors.
In terms of allocation rules, stock options are biased towards technical and core personnel, but junior employees can also receive a considerable share. The minimum exercise price is only $0.002 per share, which is almost free, making the binding force among the strongest in large domestic model companies.
MiniMax's stock price reached a high of HK$1,330, but is currently trading at HK$435, a drop of 67.3%, nearly 70%; the book value has indeed suffered a significant loss.
However, all employee shares are currently locked up and will not be gradually released until January 2027. It is still too early to say how much of this wealth rollercoaster will ultimately be realized.
Minimax's Dilemma
Having discussed employee benefits, let's return to the company itself.
Many people may be familiar with Doubao and Deepseeek, but are relatively unfamiliar with MiniMax. This is not surprising, as 70% of MiniMax's market comes from overseas, and its user base in China is not large.
MiniMax already has a well-known product overseas with a high degree of commercialization. Its consumer applications such as Alkie have reached 210 million users worldwide, especially among young customers overseas.
Conch's video generation model is also among the top tier. MiniMax Audio's speech synthesis and MiniMax Agent services have received positive feedback from enterprises and developers.
Furthermore, overseas developers frequently topped the Openrouter rankings in terms of usage. Yet, this company still experienced a sharp decline in stock price. Why?
First, there's the upcoming wave of restricted shares becoming tradable.
After listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January this year, most of MiniMax's shares were subject to a 6-month lock-up period, and a large-scale unlocking will take place in July, accounting for more than 65% of the total share capital.
Early investors such as Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, and miHoYo have already seen returns of 4-5 times their initial investment. The expectation of selling off their shares after the lock-up period expires has become the core incentive for funds to flee in advance.
While many model APIs announced price reductions, MiniMax raised its interface prices, causing some small and medium-sized developers to switch to competitors such as DeepSeek, raising direct questions about its commercial stability in the market.
A more subtle predicament is that despite MiniMax's vast presence in the Chinese market, it hasn't secured a significant market share in either the B2B or B2C sectors. This lack of a strong domestic market base to hedge against overseas risks means its valuation narrative consistently lacks the consensus and support of domestic users.
As the capital market and AI applications begin to shift towards Vibe Coding, Agents, and enterprise automation, large-scale model companies with stronger B2B capabilities are gaining favor with investors. However, MiniMax has long been biased towards the C2C market, and its profitability and growth potential have been questioned.
Furthermore, Deepseek has now completed a massive funding round, and OpenAI and Anthropic are about to go public. There are more and more AI investment targets globally, and funds are being withdrawn from MiniMax.
How do I use Minimax?
Compared to other large-scale mahjong tables in China, MiniMax 's position is actually quite subtle.
Compared to Doubao, MiniMax lacks a super entry point.
Doubao is backed by ByteDance, which has access to national-level traffic portals such as Douyin, CapCut, and Toutiao, allowing it to directly push AI functions to hundreds of millions of users. While MiniMax has Xingye and Hailuo AI, these are more vertical products and it's difficult for them to achieve the same level of widespread public recognition as Doubao.
Compared to DeepSeek, MiniMax lacks the label of "breaking out of its niche with its technology".
DeepSeek has successfully positioned itself as a focal point in the global AI industry thanks to its low cost, open-source nature, and inference capabilities. MiniMax also emphasizes open source, long context, multimodality, and agents, but currently lacks sufficient consensus among B2B users.
MiniMax's strengths lie in its overseas user base, multimodal products, and early-stage commercialization capabilities. However, investors are currently eager to see MiniMax's enhanced monetization potential.
MiniMax needs to improve in three aspects to get out of its predicament.
First and foremost is rebuilding developer trust. While API price increases have been criticized, it's even more crucial to prevent users from feeling that the rules are subject to change. In the future, large model companies will compete not only on parameters and leaderboards, but also on their ecosystem, reputation, and developer engagement.
Furthermore, the M3 needs to be truly marketed as a B2B product.
Finally, MiniMax must increase the proportion of revenue from B2B and platform-based businesses to make its revenue structure more stable.
MiniMax's 70% plunge wasn't because the AI story is over, but because the market is no longer FOMO-driven, focusing only on imagination and moving towards more realistic implementations.
But for the early employees, they have already achieved financial freedom regardless of the circumstances.
