MINIMAX Reverses the Relief Bounce as Cornerstone Shares Actually List

Buy the Pledge, Sell the Listing

On July 8, MiniMax's cornerstone lock-up formally expired and the stock did the opposite of what the bears feared. More than 80% of cornerstone and pre-IPO holders — Aspex, Boyu Capital, IDG Capital and China Life among the institutions, with early backers Alibaba and miHoYo alongside — publicly pledged to keep holding, and the Hong Kong line ran nearly 20% intraday to HK$389.8. That pledge bounce is exactly what the perp caught yesterday.

Today, July 9, is when the shares actually list. The first batch of previously restricted stock becomes tradable, and roughly 45% of the float comes unrestricted in a single step — founder and employee holdings are separately under a voluntary 12-month self-lock, so this tranche is strategic-investor stock. The cornerstone slice alone is about 16.5 million shares, worth roughly HK$5.7 billion at last week's price.

A verbal promise to hold is not a contractual lock, and the tape is pricing the difference. The perp is down 20.82% to $38.69, erasing most of the relief and heading back toward the levels it was flushed to before the event. This is buy-the-rumor, sell-the-news, except the 'news' is simply the supply becoming real.

The Fundamental Under the Float

The unlock is landing on a name the sell side had already marked down hard. JPMorgan cut MiniMax to Neutral from Overweight and took its target to HK$400 from HK$1,100, arguing that since the M2 model the company has not shipped a domestic state-of-the-art release and remains in catch-up mode.

The trigger was pricing. MiniMax launched flagship M3 at roughly double M2.7's price, then reversed within about a week with a permanent 50% cut back toward the prior tier — which JPMorgan read as the market rejecting the premium, widening its 2026–2028 loss forecasts in the process. Days earlier, Citi had cut its own target by 60% to HK$533 over the same M3 pricing dispute.

Zoom out and the drawdown is severe: from a March peak near HK$1,330 and a market cap above HK$410 billion, MiniMax has bled to roughly HK$109 billion. When the fundamental is already this contested, freeing ~45% of the float is a supply shock into thin demand, not a routine calendar tick.

The Perp Cuts Both Ways

This is the same amplification that produced yesterday's bounce, running in reverse. The HIP-3 MINIMAX market is thin — about $9.04 million in 24h volume at up to 10x — so a modest cash move on 0100.HK maps to an outsized perp print. Yesterday that leverage turned a ~2.7% cash bounce into an 18.88% perp rip; today it turns unlock-day selling into a 20.82% drop, back below the July 8 relief highs.

The setup flagged in the last MINIMAX note — a relief bounce borrowed from rival Zhipu's smooth lock-up clearing, with MiniMax's own unlock still ahead — has now resolved in the direction that borrowed bid always implied. Nothing about the business improved between the pledge and the listing. The only thing that changed is that the shares can finally be sold, and the strongest supporting evidence for how that goes is Zhipu and MiniMax's contrasting AI lock-up experiences this week.