(Yicai) July 8 -- IFlytek’s shares dived after the Chinese artificial intelligence trailblazer said it probably lost as much as CNY460 million (USD63.3 million) in the first half of the year as a result of big investments in AI.

IFlytek [SHE: 002230] closed 6.1 percent down at CNY38.70 (USD5.30) a share in Shenzhen today, extending the stock’s decline to 16.6 percent since the end of last year.

In the six months ended June 30, iFlytek expects a net loss of CNY380 million (USD52.3 million) to CNY460 million, versus a net profit of CNY73.6 million a year ago, it said on July 6. Revenue likely rose 15 percent to 20 percent, while gross profit increased by roughly the same, or about CNY600 million.

The Hefei-based company spent more than CNY650 million (USD89.4 million) on its AI model during the period, after launching iFlytek Spark in May last year. 

The investments have laid a solid foundation for further consolidating the iFlytek’s leading position in AI, the company pointed out.

Another factor that contributed to the first-half loss was lower income from financial assets such as digital marketing firm Three's Company Media Group and chipmaker Cambricon Technologies, iFlytek said.

The company released iFlytek Spark 4.0 on June 27, which is benchmarked against GPT-4 Turbo. It also launched a series of software and hardware products for use in education, healthcare, and the auto industry, as well as AIs for corporate use. IFlytek has partnered on AI projects with several major enterprises, including Midea Group and Volkswagen. Additionally, it has introduced speech and image-text large language models.

The company recently led a multilingual intelligent speech project that won the top prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award. It can translate the six official languages of the United Nations, including Arabic, Russian, and Spanish, 63 other languages, including Norwegian and Danish, as well as over 20 Chinese dialects.

Editor: Emmi Laine