MINIMAX-W fell over 5% in regular trading, dropping to HK$256.2 per share, extending a multi-day selloff that has seen the stock decline sharply since early September.

The continued weakness is primarily driven by the competitive shock from DeepSeek's release of its V4.1-Flash model, a high-cost-efficiency model that has significantly undercut rivals on pricing. DeepSeek's peak-hour input and output prices per million tokens stand at just RMB 2 and RMB 8 respectively — 78% to 92% cheaper than comparable offerings from Kimi-K3 and GLM-5.3. The model also achieved hardware efficiency breakthroughs, reducing HBM and SSD usage to one-quarter and one-eighth of prior models respectively. Industry analysts noted that the V4.1-Flash outperformed flagship models including DeepSeek V4 Pro, Anthropic Opus 5, and OpenAI GPT5.6 Sol on third-party benchmarks.

The pricing pressure has weighed broadly on independent AI model companies. MINIMAX-W has now retreated over 22% in September, amid growing market concerns that intensifying competition and narrowing pricing power could challenge the profitability outlook for standalone AI labs versus full-stack cloud platform giants.