China Securities Co., Ltd.: Which AI applications are expected to seize the golden promotion period of the Spring Festival?

China Securities Co., Ltd. published a research report stating that the Spring Festival is a battleground for breaking through the marketing barriers of C-end products, and they are looking forward to the expansion of AI products during this year's Spring Festival. In 2015, WeChat's red envelope feature drove the number of WeChat payment users from less than 8 million before the Spring Festival to 300 million in May 2015, rapidly increasing WeChat's market share. Starting from 2016, Alipay's Five Blessings campaign became a national-level activity during the Spring Festival every year, and in 2018, Douyin achieved rapid growth and breakthroughs in Daily Active Users (DAU) through Spring Festival red envelope and New Year greeting video activities. China Securities Co., Ltd. predicts that this year, products from the ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent ecosystems are expected to break through marketing barriers through Spring Festival promotions and product iterations. Key points for this year: 1. ByteDance: Multiple apps from the ByteDance ecosystem rank in the Top 10 of the Chinese iOS App Store, and Douyin is expected to increase marketing efforts and enhance emotional connections through real-time conversation models. Douyin has become the number one C-end AI helper in terms of monthly active users in China, and it is expected to break through marketing barriers further during the Spring Festival through its own promotions and continued traffic redirection from other ByteDance apps. Douyin launched the "Douyin Chinese New Year" feature on January 15, integrating AI-generated New Year greetings and other innovative gameplay. In addition, Douyin has fully launched real-time conversation features, significantly improving emotional connections and voice effects, being able to express emotions like "joy, anger, sorrow, pleasure" and even coughing, sighing, laughing, or whispering, indicating promising prospects for AI companions hardware development. 2. Alibaba: Quark has become a key promotion tool for the Alibaba ecosystem, and Alibaba Cloud sponsors the Spring Festival Gala. Alibaba Cloud has become the exclusive partner for cloud computing AI in the Spring Festival Gala, helping global viewers watch the Gala online. Alibaba's various teams have deployed around 20 AI application products, which are expected to increase their visibility through the Spring Festival platform. Quark AI has a monthly active users of over 710 million, offering AI search, homework help, document search, and other functions, expected to become another focus point for Alibaba's C-end applications. 3. Tencent: WeChat's gifting feature is expected to break through, and the Call Kit grey testing will enhance the calling experience. WeChat's gift feature has become a basic component of WeChat and has recently seen significant sales growth in stores such as Luckin Coffee and Three Squirrels Inc. Through Spring Festival operations, it is expected to gradually change user habits and develop social habits similar to sending red envelopes, transferring money, and posting on Moments. In addition, the new Call Kit grey testing feature is expected to improve user calling experience. 4. Xiaohongshu (RED): Tapping into global traffic, AI translation is expected to increase daily active users and activity. Xiaohongshu has seen rapid growth in active users since January this year, and the recent introduction of AI translation is expected to further increase activity. China Securities Co., Ltd. believes that similar to Reddit launching an AI translation feature in 2023, countries with AI translation capabilities like France and Spain saw a 4x increase in DAU compared to 2023 and a 47% year-on-year growth in DAU for Reddit in 3Q of 2024. 5. Domestic real-time voice and O-series models are emerging intensively, leading to breakthroughs in C-end hot products. Both Douyin and Minimax have introduced real-time voice or AI-generated speech capabilities, with Chinese semantic understanding and dialectical expression superior to GPT-4o; Kimi and DeepSeek's new models have performance on par with the official version of the O1 model. These new models are fully open and publicly available, and real-time voice models are expected to enhance AI's emotional companion capabilities, benefiting applications such as AI virtual characters like Xingye and AI companions like Siasun Robot & Automation Rope; the O-series model excels in mathematics, coding, and logical reasoning, with the O1 model having already been integrated into Microsoft Copilot.