Tech firms post business growth, eye AI opportunities

Chinese tech firms, including the top three telecommunications carriers, posted business growth in the first half of the year, revealing investment plans or business expansion on generative artificial intelligence.

Fueled by popular services such as ChatGPT, Chinese tech firms are speeding up investment on AI infrastructure and large language models (LLMs) construction, regarding AI as a future growth engine.

Credit: Ti Gong

On Friday, China Mobile posted a revenue of 530.7 billion yuan (US$73.7 billion) in the first six months, a 6.8 percent increase year on year, with a net profit growth of 8.4 percent. The world's top mobile carrier had 985 million users by June.

AI-powered digitalization business is becoming a rapid growth engine for China Mobile. The carrier has invested to offer and upgrade customized and industrial LLMs for generative AI, chairman Yang Jie said.

Smaller carriers China Unicom and China Telecom on Thursday posted a revenue growth of 8.8 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively. They are developing AI models used for smart city and telecommunications value-added services, the carriers said.

By 2040, more than 40 percent of digital applications are expected to be generative AI applications. By 2026, more than 100 million people globally will have personal AI assistants,according to researcher Gartner.

Credit: Ti Gong

In addition to carriers, generative AI has penetrated into other industries.

China Literature, the country's biggest online reading platform, on Friday posted net profit growth of 64.8 percent or 380 million yuan, with revenue of 3.28 billion yuan in the first half.

The Shanghai-based China Literature has put generative AI into various business scopes, covering AI characters, animation creation, and AI-powered translation used to publish Chinese stories into overseas markets quickly.

With AIGC adoption, the overseas publishing process will be greatly shortened and improved, said Hou Xiaonan, China Literature's chief executive and president.

Finance software company Kindee and picture optimization developer Meitu also released classified generative AI models recently.