@rohanpaul_ai: MiniMax lifted first-half revenue 283% to $116.6M Gross margin improved from 12.1% to 17.9%, but adjusted net loss more…

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Summary

MiniMax reported a 283% revenue increase to $116.6M in the first half, with gross margin improving to 17.9%, but net loss doubled. It compares unfavorably to competitors like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Anthropic in terms of gross margin.

MiniMax lifted first-half revenue 283% to $116.6M Gross margin improved from 12.1% to 17.9%, but adjusted net loss more than doubled to $293M and R&D spending reached $296.9M. However, MiniMax is well behind all three on gross margin. OpenAI was at about 39% at the end of Q1 2026, up from 33% for 2025, and reportedly wants to reach 52% by year-end. Its biggest direct cost is inference compute. DeepSeek is especially interesting. Its overall gross margin was 44.6%, already about 2.5 times MiniMax's margin, while the specific business of selling model access through its API reached 82.9%. Anthropic reported roughly 40% gross margin for 2025 and is forecasting as much as 63% for 2026. There is one important accounting wrinkle: these figures are not perfectly apples-to-apples. OpenAI includes inference costs associated with its huge population of nonpaying ChatGPT users in its cost base, while Anthropic's reported methodology focuses on inference for paying users. So including free-user inference would considerably reduce Anthropic's margin.
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Cached at: 08/27/26, 11:26 AM

MiniMax lifted first-half revenue 283% to $116.6M

Gross margin improved from 12.1% to 17.9%, but adjusted net loss more than doubled to $293M and R&D spending reached $296.9M.

However, MiniMax is well behind all three on gross margin. OpenAI was at about 39% at the end of Q1 2026, up from 33% for 2025, and reportedly wants to reach 52% by year-end. Its biggest direct cost is inference compute.

DeepSeek is especially interesting. Its overall gross margin was 44.6%, already about 2.5 times MiniMax’s margin, while the specific business of selling model access through its API reached 82.9%.

Anthropic reported roughly 40% gross margin for 2025 and is forecasting as much as 63% for 2026.

There is one important accounting wrinkle: these figures are not perfectly apples-to-apples. OpenAI includes inference costs associated with its huge population of nonpaying ChatGPT users in its cost base, while Anthropic’s reported methodology focuses on inference for paying users. So including free-user inference would considerably reduce Anthropic’s margin.

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