ZHIPU Rips as the Feared Lock-Up Expiry Gets Bought, Not Sold

Sell the Rumor, Buy the Unlock

ZHIPU is trading around $240.90, up 29.14% over the last four hours, and the timing is the whole story: the leg is printing on July 8, the exact day Zhipu's first post-IPO lock-up expires. The perp tracks a single Hong Kong H-share of Knowledge Atlas Technology (SEHK: 2513) — the listed vehicle for Beijing AI lab Zhipu — converted from HKD to USD near the 7.8 peg. At $240.90 it is marking the underlying near HK$1,880, roughly 15% above Tuesday's HK$1,621 cash close, which means the Hong Kong session opened into strength rather than the washout the whole tape was braced for.

This is the textbook shape of a feared event clearing. For two weeks the only story on this name has been supply — a wall of cornerstone shares coming unlocked into a stock with almost no float. When the day finally arrives and the stock doesn't break, the shorts leaning on the overhang have to cover and the buyers who were waiting for the unlock to clear step off the sidelines. A +29% candle into an expiry is what that scramble looks like.

The Overhang They Spent Two Weeks Pricing

The fear was real and specific. Today's expiry releases 25.68 million cornerstone shares worth roughly HK$26.91 billion (about $3.4 billion), and it lands on a stock whose free float was only about 17.35 million shares — under 4% of total shares outstanding. Put plainly, July 8 roughly triples the tradable supply overnight. The market started pricing that weeks early: Zhipu and peer MiniMax slid through early June as the roughly $50 billion combined lock-up wave came into view, and 2513 dropped about 17% on July 2, pushing its market cap back below HK$800 billion.

Then came the last twist. On July 7, right into the expiry, a rumor circulated that Zhipu had withdrawn its A-share IPO tutoring filing — the kind of headline that could gut sentiment a day before a supply cliff. The company publicly denied it, calling the reports "seriously inconsistent with the facts" and pointing to an A-share issuance plan its shareholders approved on June 22. Knocking that rumor down removed the one fresh negative that could have turned the unlock into a rout. It also reframed the event: HSBC has argued the jump in tradable shares could actually stabilize the name by giving it a real float rather than just dumping supply on it.

What Gives the Bounce Legs

Strip out the float mechanics and there's still a real company here. Zhipu builds the open-weight GLM series, and in early July it shipped ZCode, a harness for GLM-5.2 that lands within about a percentage point of Anthropic's Opus 4.8 on a closely watched agentic benchmark at roughly a fifth of the cost. Adoption is following the price: CNBC reports US developers increasingly routing to Chinese open models as OpenAI and Anthropic pricing climbs, with GLM traffic on OpenRouter building faster than DeepSeek's did after its V4 launch. That is the fundamental reason buyers were positioned under this name rather than fleeing it.

The demand base is stickier than it was a month ago, too. In June, Zhipu became one of the first pure-play AI names added to the Hang Seng Tech Index and the Stock Connect program, opening a channel for southbound passive flows — the kind of structural bid that can absorb freshly unlocked supply. The caveat to keep in front of you: this is a thin, post-IPO instrument. The ZHIPU perp can run a real basis to the cash H-share around the HKEX open and close, and a 29% four-hour move on about $9.3 million of perp volume is as much a liquidity event as a fundamental repricing. The underlying cash session is what has to confirm this leg.