00:00China's AI drive is also translating into strong momentum for Chinese tech firms.
00:05Lenovo shares jumped after the company reported record earnings.
00:09The group reported record annual revenue of more than $83 billion, up by a fifth on last year.
00:16Fourth quarter net income was $521 million, nearly six times higher than the same period in 2025.
00:25AI-related business emerged as the biggest driver, with revenue nearly doubling from a year ago
00:31and accounting for 38% of the group's total revenue in the fourth quarter.
00:36Musang Zhewei is president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.
00:42It's not just Lenovo. We've seen many, many other examples that in the equity market
00:48that shows up in these quarterly earnings, also appreciated by investors and the government.
00:53China's 15th five-year plan makes clear that Beijing wants leadership in AI.
00:59So where else is that already happening?
01:03Well, I think the AI, this competition in the longer term requires actually competition on many fronts,
01:14including energy, including fundamental research, including application.
01:19So the current strategy, as I read through this five-year plan, is very comprehensive.
01:25It covers many grounds.
01:27Just take one example of energy that in the longer term, China needs to build a lot of new data
01:33centers,
01:34and eventually they want to achieve 80% of the power supply for those data centers to be green energy.
01:40I found that quite interesting.
01:42Similar kind of very specific policies have been mentioned in recent policy announcements.
01:48So would you say that China is competing less on cost now and more on industrial depth and speed?
01:56Yeah, I would say that's right.
01:58I think cost is obviously still a pretty big factor in competition.
02:04But I think the advantage of supply chain, the sort of the complete supply chain from upstream,
02:13from energy supply to, say, digital manufacturing, cheap manufacturing,
02:20then to engineering, and then to application along, you know, there are many, many different sectors involved.
02:28And I think what China is trying to do is to organize all these sectors to move in the same
02:35direction
02:35and providing resources financially and also other resources for those sectors to work together.
02:43Now, China's AI plus strategy is very different from the consumer AI race we're seeing in Silicon Valley.
02:50And is China taking a more commercially practical approach to AI, would you say?
02:57Yeah, it's a bit different.
02:58It's quite an interesting point you made.
03:00I think in the U.S., you've seen, you know, very aggressive investment in capexing, say, hardware investment
03:10and in, say, the large language model development.
03:16In China, I think the focus is more on application.
03:20It's more about how to utilize this AI technology in manufacturing business, in service sector,
03:27in education, in healthcare, and on daily basis, we already started to see some quite interesting applications.
03:36So the focus is a bit different.
03:39I think China is probably more pragmatic and more tied to real-life applications.
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