China’s recent wave of interest in OpenClaw has increased the willingness of price-sensitive locals to spend on artificial intelligence tools, and could boost AI players seeking avenues for monetization. In particular, Tencent shares traded in Hong Kong have been on a downward trend since the beginning of the year. But last week, news that the company was integrating its own version of its popular AI agent across its apps helped the stock recover from a nine-month low. OpenClaw is an AI agent that can assist with personal computing tasks, and despite its security risks, it has quickly become one of the most popular AI tools that people around the world can download and try. “Tencent’s AI outlook has been a source of recent investor concern and is a contributing factor to its recent poor performance,” BNP Paribas analyst William Packer said in a report on Tuesday. “Tencent’s chatbot download numbers lag far behind ByteDance, compounding concerns about its AI positioning alongside concerns about underlying model quality, chip availability and spending,” he said. “We are Agentic We expect the AI news flow to provide support and signal strong upside potential for Tencent in the next stage of its AI development. Tencent shares are up more than 50% over the last week, compared with Alibaba’s rise of about 1.4% in Hong Kong trading over the period. Earlier this year, Alibaba released an AI model and integrated several functions from food delivery to navigation into its Qwen chatbot. In contrast, while Tencent’s AI promotion focused on sending hongbaos during the Lunar New Year, Tencent offered free OpenClaw setup sessions that attracted hundreds of people, and a few days later, Tencent started integrating several OpenClaw-based tools and apps to help users with AI. Although we have made agent functionality easier to access, running an AI agent still requires connectivity to an AI model, both of which are costly. “It’s also about bringing the agent closer to the end user,” Goldman Sachs analysts said in a March 12 report, adding, “We believe Tencent is better positioned to capture consumer traffic in this competition given WeChat/QQ/WeCom’s touchpoints across its user base compared to the productivity-focused Messenger of Feixu (ByteDance) and DingTalk (Alibaba).” Analysts expect adjusted profits to rise 16% and fourth-quarter sales to rise 13% year-on-year to 69 billion yuan (about $10 billion).Chinese companies have rushed to capitalize on the OpenClaw craze over the past week, holding in-person workshops and educational livestreams, while some local governments are offering subsidies to entrepreneurs who build businesses using OpenClaw. The main version of Tencent’s AI agent is a standalone desktop app called WorkBuddy. “Due to Tencent’s focus on security, WorkBuddy also features enterprise-grade security and management. We believe this development provides a valuable live scenario to evaluate the future integration and role of AI agents within the WeChat mini-program ecosystem,” Citi analysts noted in a March 9 report. The target price for Tencent shares is HK$783. CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
