MiniMax Group founder Yan Junjie has suffered a $9.3 billion wealth wipeout as the Hong Kong-listed AI model developer shed $39 billion in market value since its March peak. The mogul may have more to lose, as the imminent expiration of lockup periods on Wednesday puts more selling pressure on a firm that is now struggling to keep pace in the AI race.
The 37-year-old chairman and CEO has seen his net worth shrink to $3.3 billion from a peak of $12.6 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Following the company’s blockbuster $619 million initial public offering in January, its shares have plunged over 70% since reaching a record HK$1,330 ($170) apiece in March.
The stock is still up 1.6% so far this year, but many investors are reversing their bullish bets as disappointment with the company’s progress mounts. The new AI models from MiniMax show improvements in abilities including coding and executing complex agentic tasks like financial analysis, but the market has come to believe rival Hong Kong-listed competitor Zhipu (Z.AI) is leading the pack.
“The market is pessimistic on MiniMax because the company is now at a disadvantage domestically,” says Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst at research firm 86Research. “When compared with the best models globally, Zhipu has been making progress in closing the gap, while MiniMax seems to be stagnating.”
The company didn’t respond to a request for comment. In June, it released the M3 model, touting the flagship product’s “frontier-level performance on specialized tasks such as coding and agentic work.” The company also says M3 shows “significant improvements” over the M2 model that was launched late last year, as its newest product excels at debugging generated code.
However, this hasn’t stopped investors from rotating out of MiniMax to increase their bets on Zhipu, Hong Kong’s other major listed AI developer. This shift has sent Zhipu’s stock soaring almost 1,300% this year, making its cofounder and Chairman Liu Debing the country’s 8th richest man with a net worth of $28.4 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List. Fellow cofounder Tang Jie, a professor of AI at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, is also a billionaire with a fortune of $6.1 billion.
Tang recently took to X (formerly Twitter) to tout Zhipu’s progress. He said “it won’t take that long” for Chinese models to catch up with the best in the U.S., responding to Elon Musk’s prediction that products from China probably can match Anthropic’s Claude Fable in the first quarter of 2027.
The optimism came after Zhipu’s newest GLM 5.2 model, which was also released in June, garnered significant attention in Silicon Valley. Though added to a U.S. trade blacklist last year on national security grounds, the company keeps making strides. Zhipu says GLM 5.2 excels in long-horizon tasks, or tasks such as coding that require AI to flawlessly execute numerous sequential steps before delivering a final result. It says GLM 5.2 is better than OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 in its coding abilities and is only slightly behind Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 in the same area.
“Many smart people/AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises,” U.S. billionaire investor Marc Andreessen wrote in a June 28 post via the X social media platform.
Against this backdrop, investors might keep favoring Zhipu, analysts say. They say MiniMax faces heavy pressure when selling restrictions on a portion of its publicly listed shares are removed on Wednesday, as some cornerstone and pre-IPO investors will see their lock-up periods end. By then, about 153.5 million more MiniMax shares can be sold or bought, boosting its free float to over 50% from 4.1%, according to a June research note from DZT Research.
“We do not yet see MiniMax proving its edge against DeepSeek and GLM,” Ke Yan, Singapore-based head of research at DZT Research, wrote in the note. “With the model still unproven and the lock-up supply ahead, we are bearish on the stock.”
Zhipu, which went public around the same time as MiniMax in January, will also have selling restrictions on about 25.7 million shares lifted this week on Tuesday. But over 90% of the company’s listed shares won’t be freely traded until next January, as many of its pre-IPO investors have a lockup period of 12 months, according to 86Research’s Chai.
Yet it isn’t all bad news for MiniMax. Its key cornerstone investor Alibaba Group Holding has expressed confidence. The company is bullish on MiniMax’s technology, and is willing to work with the firm on areas including cloud computing and enterprise services, according to an article that state media published on June 23. When contacted by Forbes, an Alibaba spokesperson confirmed the company’s view on MiniMax.
In the meantime, BofA Securities analyst Alex Liu wrote in a June note that he sees potential for a MiniMax “catch-up trade.” The valuation gap between the company and Zhipu is too wide, he wrote, as MiniMax trades at 19 times its estimated sales in 2027, while Zhipu trades at a forward sales multiple of 52 times.
MiniMax could potentially be added to the Stock Connect Southbound trading link in early August, which allows mainland Chinese investors to trade Hong Kong, according to the note. “Zhipu’s premium reflects faster ARR growth, stronger talent density/public backing, and its lead in enterprise revenue exposure,” the analyst wrote. “We see scope for a MiniMax catch-up trade post lock-up expiry, supported by potential Southbound inclusion and enterprise revenue catch-up post M3 launch.”
