A dance routine that would take a small studio a week to animate now renders in minutes from a single sentence. A creator in São Paulo and one in Jakarta are using the same Chinese-made video tool, and neither needed to read a line of Mandarin to do it.
That tool is Hailuo AI (海螺AI), the video product of MiniMax, a Shanghai-founded company that walked onto the Hong Kong exchange on January 9, 2026. The listing is a clean data point in a noisy market: a Chinese generative-video app that found its audience abroad before it found the spotlight at home.
From a 2022 startup to a listing
MiniMax was founded in early 2022 by Yan Junjie (闫俊杰). Its Hailuo AI visual-generation platform launched in the third quarter of 2024 and became the anchor of the company's consumer story. On the HKEX it trades under stock code 0100 and raised about US$711 million at listing, according to exchange data.
The numbers behind the debut are unusual for a Chinese large-model (大模型) company, because most of the money came from outside China.
The user and revenue shape
As of September 30, 2025, MiniMax reported that Hailuo AI alone had about 42.35 million users. Across its full product set — Hailuo, the Talkie/星野 companion apps, MiniMax Audio and the open platform — it said it had served more than 212 million individual users across 200-plus countries and regions, with Talkie/星野 at roughly 147 million users.
Revenue tells the overseas story most clearly. The company's 2025 full-year revenue was US$79.0 million, up 158.9% year on year. Of that, about 73% came from outside mainland China. Hailuo AI specifically booked US$17.46 million in 2025 revenue with 311,100 paying users, an average of about US$56 per paying user.
Pricing on the Chinese side runs from a roughly 68-yuan (about US$9.5) basic monthly membership to a 1,399-yuan (about US$197) premium tier — a spread that shows the company is selling capability tiers, not just access.
Why video, and why it travels
Hailuo's stated differentiator is motion: creators interviewed by domestic media singled out its handling of large limb movement — dance, fights, physically expressive scenes — as better than many peers. That is the kind of visible, demo-friendly strength that travels across language barriers, which helps explain why three-quarters of revenue is overseas.
The company pairs video with a full multimodal stack: speech synthesis, music, and the Talkie/星野 roleplay apps. The bet is that a single account can move from writing, to voice, to video, to a virtual character without leaving the ecosystem — a vertical integration that Western creative tools usually assemble from separate vendors.
MiniMax's debut also marked a milestone for the exchange itself. Hong Kong welcomed MiniMax and Zhipu (智谱) on January 8–9, 2026 as the first mainland generative-AI platforms to list there, part of a December–January wave of more than a dozen AI-value-chain companies. For international investors, the listing was a rare way to hold a Chinese consumer-AI brand without betting on a "concept stock."
The copyright cloud
No overseas generative-video story is complete without the rights question. In September 2025, a group of 12 Hollywood studios — including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros — sued MiniMax over Hailuo AI, alleging more than 500 infringed works and seeking up to US$75 million in statutory damages. The company has said the claims lack merit, arguing that Hailuo is a general creative tool that generates from user prompts and does not directly infringe. The outcome is unresolved and is the single largest external risk to the overseas thesis.
What the overseas traction really signals
The fact that roughly three-quarters of MiniMax revenue came from outside mainland China is the part global readers should sit with, because it inverts the usual assumption that Chinese consumer apps win at home first. Hailuo's strength in large-limb motion — dance, fights, expressive scenes — is the kind of visible output that needs no translation, which is why a creator in São Paulo and one in Jakarta can share the same tool without touching Mandarin. Compared with Western creative suites that bolt video onto a writing or editing product, MiniMax's bet is a single account spanning text, voice, music and a virtual character, so the switching cost is the ecosystem rather than any one model. For a solo creator, that means a dance clip can move from prompt to voiced narration to finished video in one place. The risk is that this convenience sits on unresolved rights questions, so the overseas thesis rests as much on courts as on code.
Honest limitations
- User and revenue figures here come from the company's own prospectus and annual-report disclosures; they are primary filings but remain self-reported and should be read as such.
- The 73% overseas share makes MiniMax sensitive to foreign copyright and regulatory actions; the pending lawsuit, if it goes badly, could force product or market changes.
- Paid-user and ARPPU numbers reflect a narrow subscription base (311,100 payers against 42 million users), so revenue quality depends on converting free users at scale.
- Listing-day fundraising (~US$711 million) is a snapshot; the company has historically run at a loss, and cash burn in model training remains high.
What readers can do now
- If you produce short video, test Hailuo against your hardest motion brief — dance or action shots — where its stated edge is, and compare export rights and regional availability before paying for a premium tier.
- Watch the copyright case as a signal for the whole China-exported video category; a ruling against MiniMax would likely reshape licensing terms across the sector.
- For teams, treat Hailuo as one node in a multimodal pipeline rather than a full studio; pair it with your own editing and rights-clearance step so a takedown risk never stalls a shipped project.