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Taizhou Zhongfu New Materials, a private company from Taizhou, Zhejiang province, founded by Ku Lun, a former Christmas garland exporter, has managed to break the long-standing Western monopoly on high-performance solid materials for deep-sea buoyancy.

The company was established in May 2012 and spent ten years and over 200 million yuan before achieving full-scale production around 2022. In 2024, a new production base was launched in Taizhou with an annual capacity of 10,000 cubic meters. By the end of 2025, the company captured over 30% of the domestic market and reached the break-even point.

The product is a specialized foam that provides buoyancy at depth. It wraps around cables, subsea equipment, and bathyscaphes to reduce weight, tension, and wear over its service life. The deep-sea grade material is designed to operate at full ocean depths up to 11,000 meters, withstands pressure of 150 megapascals, equivalent to 1,500 standard atmospheres. Its density is half that of seawater, meaning every ton of finished material generates one ton of effective net buoyancy, sufficient to keep a fully loaded SUV afloat.

This technology is particularly in demand in floating offshore wind farm projects. Off the coast of Wannian, Hainan, there is one of the world's largest commercial floating offshore wind energy projects, where turbines weigh thousands of tons and subsea cables exceed 20 kilometers. The solid buoyancy materials support the entire floating structure. Zhongfu's breakthrough is also applied in oil and gas platforms, underwater robots, and deep-sea scientific research.

The path to success was challenging. Early attempts at mass production were accompanied by sharp fluctuations in quality and low productivity. In 2014, Ku traveled with a team to the United States to establish a local R&D department, but around 2017, he faced charges of trade secret theft that lasted seven years before being dropped. This cost the company the best production window and a significant portion of its staff. Ku financed this decade using profits from his Christmas garland manufacturing business, reinvesting over 200 million yuan.

The turning point came in 2017 when a major domestic oil and gas company, aiming to localize deep-sea equipment supply chains, made Zhongfu a partner, setting requirements that met international advanced standards. After many years of refinement, the product passed acceptance, with some metrics surpassing imported counterparts, leading to the start of mass production.

Commercial viability is now clear. Imported high-quality buoyancy material cost approximately 180,000–190,000 yuan per ton with delivery times of nine to twelve months, and foreign suppliers could arbitrarily increase prices or delay shipments. Zhongfu's product costs more than 30% less than imports, and delivery times are reduced to three to four months. For deep-sea projects, where daily construction costs amount to hundreds of thousands of yuan, shorter supply cycles significantly reduce overall timelines. The company forecasts that production volume will reach 500 million yuan within three years. Ku continues to run the Christmas garland manufacturing business in parallel: the old business funds the new one.

Tencent Holdings published its unaudited results for the second quarter of 2026 on August 12, reporting revenue of 204.8 billion yuan. Income from fintech services and corporate services reached 60.3 billion yuan, demonstrating a 9% increase compared to the same period last year.

During the earnings conference call, Chairman and CEO Pony Ma presented a three-tiered artificial intelligence development strategy: intelligence, applications, and infrastructure. The foundational element of the intelligence layer is the recently released and rapidly integrated Hunyuan Hy3 model into products such as Yuanbao. This model is now globally available via API, as well as in Tencent's international version of WorkBuddy.

The release of the Hy4 model is planned in the near future. The applications layer showed the most significant progress. Tencent's AI-powered office efficiency agent, WorkBuddy, demonstrated rapid user growth and stable audience retention across iOS, Windows, Android, and HarmonyOS platforms. The company positions it as a leading office work agent in China, citing engineering capabilities, model selection, and a skills library. The product portfolio has expanded from a strong standalone product to a matrix that includes Marvis and QClaw, while CodeBuddy has achieved significant user growth alongside WorkBuddy.

In terms of the infrastructure layer, Tencent substantially increased its procurement of computing power to monetize the use of models and applications. Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell noted that due to growing demand and rising rental rates, Tencent could almost immediately cover depreciation costs by leasing computing power to third parties. However, the company chose a different path: directing most of the new capacity toward training advanced industry models and implementing proprietary AI applications. Management believes that superior intelligence will eventually transform into a superior economy, including token sales through WorkBuddy.

President Martin Lau elaborated on capital expenditures. Tencent views its business as consisting of two parts: existing business, which provides stable growth thanks to a strong operating leverage, and a new AI-based business, encompassing self-developed models, new applications, and associated computing resources. Capital expenditures on AI represent the initial investment for model training, future inference needs, and Tencent Cloud AI capacity. Lau stated that computing power ordered or prepaid months ago can now be resold with a margin exceeding 30% of the original purchase price, indicating a rapid shift in the economic paradigm of AI computing.

When asked whether WorkBuddy is enterprise software or a new platform, Lau clarified that it is a new platform. He described it as a flexible workspace for agentic AI, designed for all office productivity needs and single-employee companies, featuring a support level that utilizes various models and a growing library of third-party skills. The Hy model will be one of WorkBuddy's offerings, a primary one if it effectively solves problems, but not the only one. Management characterized this quarter as the beginning of the AI-transformed Tencent era, noting the growth in marketing services, the successful performance of several new games, and the rapid increase in video views on WeChat Channels.