iFlytek (科大讯飞)

iFlytek is the control group. It is the oldest AI-native listed company in this file, it built a two-decade speech-recognition moat, and it has published audited financials straight through the LLM transition - which makes it the only place to see what that transition did to a real P&L over time. The answer is: nothing, to the margin. Gross margin sat between 40.69% and 42.59% every year from FY2021 to TTM June 2026, with the Spark LLM launching in the middle of that window. That is the strongest single argument that Zhipu’s 26.4% and MiniMax’s 17.9% are the economics of a young pure-play scaling API volume, not the economics of serving models. What the LLM era did hit is growth and the underlying loss: H1 2026 revenue grew 6.52%, the slowest here, while the non-GAAP loss widened 65-85% even as the reported loss narrowed. The competitive read is the sharpest datapoint iFlytek offers - rivals did not out-build the speech moat, they routed around it. A team fine-tuning an open-weight foundation for a few million yuan reaches roughly 80% of the capability, and ByteDance’s Doubao input method took 50 million downloads in a week by competing on semantic understanding instead of recognition accuracy. The wall still stands; the enemy stopped crossing the moat.