On the evening of August 16, artificial intelligence company SenseTime Group Inc. (SenseTime-W, 00020.HK) released a positive profit alert on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, revealing a major turning point in its operating performance for the first half of 2026, achieving profitability at the consolidated reporting level for the first time since its listing.
Driven by the better-than-expected positive news, the company’s stock price strengthened on August 17, opening at HKD 1.505 per share, up 7.12%, and quickly surged intraday, with gains briefly exceeding 13%.
According to SenseTime’s profit forecast, based on management’s preliminary assessment of first-half operating data, the Group expects its profit for the six months ending June 30 to be in the range of RMB 500 million to RMB 700 million. Compared with a loss of RMB 1.489 billion recorded in the first half of 2025, this marks a turnaround from loss to profit, a landmark inflection point in its performance curve.
Meanwhile, the adjusted net loss measured under non-IFRS standards is expected to narrow by 60%-70% year-on-year compared to the first half of 2025. This means that excluding non-operating items such as fair value changes on investments, the loss scale of the company’s core business is also rapidly compressing, with the effects of cost reduction, efficiency enhancement, and commercialization continued to be released.
Regarding the reasons for the turnaround from loss to profit, SenseTime explained in the announcement that, on one hand, the loss scale of the Group’s main business segments has significantly declined compared to the same period last year; on the other hand, the AI ecosystem equity investment portfolio that the company has been continuously building over the past several years contributed corresponding gains from fair value changes of assets. These two factors together resulted in the current book profit.
However, market analysts caution that the adjusted net loss figure is closer to the actual operating conditions of the core business, and when the formal interim report is released later, a detailed breakdown of revenue, costs, expenses, and investment returns will be needed for a more comprehensive assessment of the commercialization stage.
Looking back at its operating trajectory over the past several years, since its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 30, 2021, SenseTime has long been in a loss-making range. How to chart a sustainable profitability path in an industry context of high computing power investment for large models and substantial R&D expenditure has always been the core issue most closely watched by the capital market.
According to SenseTime’s full-year 2025 results announcement released in March this year, the company achieved total annual revenue of RMB 5.015 billion, a year-on-year increase of 32.9%, setting a record high with the fastest growth rate in three years; net loss was RMB 1.782 billion, significantly narrowed by 58.6%; adjusted net loss was RMB 1.956 billion, narrowed by 54.3% year-on-year; and second-half EBITDA was RMB 380 million, turning positive for the first time since listing, already showing an improving operational trend.
The generative AI business has become the main engine driving revenue growth. The large model product “SenseNova” continues to deliver AI solutions to government, education, healthcare, finance, transportation, and other industries. The cabinet utilization rate of the SenseCore computing infrastructure continues to improve, driving overall business gross margin improvements.
At the same time, the company has continuously optimized internal cost controls, tightened non-essential expenditures, and focused R&D investments more sharply on tracks with clear commercialization prospects, gradually alleviating operating cash flow pressure.
At the results conference at that time, SenseTime Chairman and CEO Xu Li, when discussing industry trends for 2026 and the Group’s development direction, said: “Looking ahead to 2026, we see AI truly entering the stage of large-scale explosion. SenseTime is well prepared, and our next focus areas are clear and well-defined.”
Xu Li further elaborated on five major development directions: first, adhering to the native multimodal path; second, deepening industrial intelligence to create the entrance for the Agent-native era; third, drastically compressing unit intelligence costs to push domestic computing power from usable to excellent; fourth, unleashing the scale dividends of CV2.0 visual AI business; and fifth, running dual engines both domestically and internationally to build an AI industry benchmark. He proposed that AI will evolve from an auxiliary tool into true productivity, and SenseTime will seize entry points in tracks such as general office, education, marketing, and smart terminals to achieve dual growth in traffic and commercial value.
SenseTime Group Inc., founded in Beijing in 2014, is a leading domestic AI enterprise and the first company among the AI “Four Little Dragons” to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
According to official website information, since its inception, SenseTime has long been dedicated to R&D in computer vision and deep learning technologies, building its self-developed AI infrastructure, the SenseCore large device, and using this as a foundation to incubate the “SenseNova” multimodal large model system, covering generative AI capabilities such as natural language, image generation, and intelligent agents.
The Group’s current core business is mainly divided into two main lines: generative AI and visual AI, while also laying out innovative tracks such as intelligent vehicles, smart healthcare, and home robots. Its customers span numerous industries including smart cities, commercial retail, education, finance, and smart terminals, with its business footprint extending to more than ten countries and regions overseas.
Worth noting is that SenseTime-incubated vertical track subsidiaries have recently received successive capital market injections, with the ecosystem continuously expanding to form an industrial commercial network covering the entire Chinese AI industry chain.
On July 28 this year, SenseTime Medical completed a B-round financing of over USD 100 million, with a post-investment valuation exceeding RMB 10 billion, becoming the first domestic medical world model company with a valuation exceeding RMB 10 billion. It has now entered the Pre-IPO stage, aiming for the “first stock of medical world models.”
In early 2025, SenseTime Medical completed its first round of financing of over RMB 100 million after the spin-off; in April this year, its A-round financing of over RMB 500 million was officially completed, with valuation surpassing USD 1 billion; then in July’s B-round, post-investment valuation reached RMB 10 billion. Based on publicly disclosed amounts, SenseTime Medical has accumulated over RMB 1 billion in financing within a year and a half.
In addition to the medical sector, Daxiao Robotics, a robot company spun off and incubated by SenseTime, completed its Angel+ round financing in the first half of this year, securing hundreds of millions of dollars in cumulative funding; the computing power segment XiWang has also successively received large strategic investments.
