Goldman Sachs sets 1,880 Hong Kong dollar target on Zhipu with neutral rating

Goldman Sachs initiated coverage on Hong Kong-listed Zhipu on Friday with a neutral rating and a price target of 1,880 Hong Kong dollars, or $239.83, Cnbc reported. The target implies nearly 15 percent upside from the stock's closing price that day. Zhipu listed in Hong Kong in January.

Its shares have risen 70 percent over the last 60 trading days. The company's open-sourced GLM-5.2 model is viewed as competitive with Anthropic's Fable 5 on several benchmarks, according to the Goldman report. "With its latest GLM5.2 model reaching near-frontier performance that has seen significant ramp-up in domestic enterprise & global SME adoption, we believe its extensive usage by coders will enable Zhipu to sustain high frequency of further model upgrades, and thereby solidify its leading position in enterprise/coding in China," the analysts said.

Goldman Sachs named two other preferred Chinese AI models from Deepseek and ByteDance. Both companies remain privately held. The analysts evaluated the models on time to market, arena score, valuation and pricing.

ByteDance ranked highest in AI video generation, while Zhipu's GLM and DeepSeek's models outperformed those from Alibaba, Tencent and Minimax in time to market and arena score. "China's AI open-source/open-weight models are reaching a critical point of intelligence performance vs. global proprietary models," the analysts said.

"Agentic AI is driving explosive demand for these value-for-money models at the lower-end.