Xinhua Net Co., Ltd. (603888) announced on June 4 that it will redirect the remaining proceeds from four original projects, totaling approximately RMB 740 million, which had been designated since its 2016 IPO, combined with its own funds of RMB 381 million, for a total of about RMB 1.122 billion (approximately USD 162 million), to build an AI agent for political news called “Xinhua Yudian”. The project will be led by Xinhua News Agency and its development and operation will be handled by Xinhua Net. It is scheduled to launch in July 2026, with an implementation period of 4.5 years until the end of 2030. The expected internal rate of return is 20.35%, and the static payback period is approximately 4.17 years.
According to a Shanghai Stock Exchange filing, “Xinhua Yudian” is positioned as an AI agent for learning, researching, and disseminating Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. It relies on Xinhua’s “clean corpus” and authoritative sources, and is mainly aimed at Party and government agencies, state-owned enterprises and institutions, research institutes, and higher education institutions. Product functions include helping users deal with “information overload” and the difficulty of distinguishing truth from falsehood, assisting in drafting official documents while ensuring “absolute accuracy” in quotations from Xi Jinping’s speeches, and aiding in policy interpretation and dissemination. The announcement also acknowledged that the industrial disruption triggered by AI has made the original projects planned at the time of the 2016 IPO “lagging behind at the technological level”, and that the marginal benefits of continued investment are diminishing, necessitating a new project to create a “second growth curve”. Xinhua Net currently has over 20,000 government clients, over 10,000 enterprise clients, and partnerships with over 1,500 higher education institutions, forming the main target paying user base for “Xinhua Yudian”.