HK market off to a roaring start; BIDU's Kunlun Chip gears up for HK IPO | Daily News Recap

0102 ｜Dolphin Research Focus

🐬 Macro/Industry

1. At the start of the year, major NEV makers released Dec 2025 delivery prints, wrapping up the year. BYD sold 420.4k units in Dec and over 4.6mn for the full year, maintaining clear industry leadership.

Leapmotor delivered 60.4k units in Dec (+42% YoY). Full-year sales neared 600k, roughly doubling YoY. Xiaomi deliveries topped 50k for the first time, with the YU7 model standing out.

Nio delivered 48.1k units, a monthly record. Li Auto delivered 44.2k in Dec, with cumulative deliveries surpassing 1.54mn, the first among new EV entrants to hit the milestone. Overall, top players diverged, new entrants grew fast, and competition continued to intensify.

🐬 Single Stocks

1.$BIDU-SW(09888.HK)

On Jan 1, BIDU announced that its AI chip unit Kunlun Chip filed a confidential IPO application with HKEx, targeting a 1H26 listing. Kunlun Chip is valued at RMB 21bn, focuses on AI training and inference, and serves customers across sectors, with BIDU owning over 59%. The spin-off should enable independent financing, speed up R&D and expansion, and strengthen BIDU's full-stack 'AI foundation model + chip' strategy; BIDU rose over 9% today.

2.$Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US)

TSMC confirmed it received an annual U.S. export license, allowing controlled tools and parts to be imported to its Nanjing fab, ensuring stable operations of existing lines. The license only covers maintenance of current capacity, not expansion or tech upgrades, and is reviewed annually, leaving geopolitics a risk. The restrictions on upgrades are also not supportive of domestic semiconductor equipment substitution over the long run.

3.$NTES-S(09999.HK)

NetEase shares rose today. On Dec 27, 2025, NetEase launched the anniversary version of '燕云十六声', which topped the iOS China game grossing chart and became a key growth driver for its gaming biz. Continued outperformance of hit titles underscores NetEase's content development strength, lifting near-term results and market confidence and supporting the stock move.

4.$BABA-W(09988.HK)

Alibaba's Qwen-Image-2512 image-generation model was open-sourced, showing breakthroughs in human rendering, natural textures, and text generation, outperforming most open-source peers in blind tests. It supports multiple commercial use cases. The open-source push should accelerate adoption, lower enterprise deployment costs, and bolster Alibaba's influence in multimodal AI.

🐬 Top Gainers by Sector

A-shares: Closed.

HK: Silver, heavy electrical equipment, semiconductor makers.

US: Marine ports - operators, footwear, textiles.

🐬 Watchlist for Tomorrow

1. None.

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