The capital market launches a combination of dividend payouts and buybacks; Midea aims to break the ceiling of home appliance market value through AI.

Ask AI · How will AI technology reshape Midea’s growth logic?

Our newspaper (chinatimes.net.cn) reporter Lu Xiao Beijing report

In recent days, home appliance giant Midea Group (hereinafter “Midea”) has achieved two consecutive increases in the capital market. On April 1, Midea closed at 76.84 yuan on the A-share market, up 0.64%, while the day before, Midea’s stock price closed at 76.35 yuan, up 5.89%.

The immediate trigger for the market rally was this home appliance giant, with a market value exceeding 580 billion yuan, releasing a generous annual dividend and stock repurchase plan on the evening of March 30. From a longer-term perspective, although it has always ranked at the top in home appliance industry market value, the 2025 annual report released on March 30 clearly signals Midea’s intention to reshape its industry and capital market growth logic through diversification, especially AI.

Capital Market Combination Strategy

On the evening of March 30, Midea disclosed its latest buyback plan: it intends to repurchase A-shares within one year, with an amount not less than 6.5 billion yuan and not more than 13 billion yuan, through centralized bidding, with a maximum purchase price of 100 yuan per share, expecting to buy back 65 million to 130 million shares, accounting for 0.85% to 1.71% of total share capital. According to the “Huaxia Times” reporter’s review, Midea’s 13 billion yuan buyback cap is only second to Gree Electric Appliances’ single buyback amount of 15 billion yuan in 2021.

The day after the buyback plan was announced, Midea acted. On March 31, Midea announced that through a dedicated securities account for buybacks, it repurchased about 1.31M A-shares, accounting for 0.0172% of the company’s current total share capital, with a highest transaction price of 77.19 yuan per share and a lowest of 76.20 yuan per share, paying a total of about 100 million yuan.

Midea’s larger move is the 2025 dividend.

According to Midea’s 2025 annual report, it plans to distribute 43 yuan in cash (including tax) for every 10 shares to all shareholders, with 5 yuan already paid mid-term and 38 yuan to be paid at year-end, totaling 32.4 billion yuan in cash dividends for the year. This amount is more than 20% higher than the 26.7 billion yuan dividend distributed in 2024.

Midea also told the “Huaxia Times” reporter that last year, 100% of its net profit attributable to the parent was used to reward shareholders, with cash dividends and share repurchases totaling 44 billion yuan. According to statistics, Midea has paid out more than 150 billion yuan in dividends over the past 10 years.

Raising stock prices is usually a direct reason for a company’s active share repurchase. According to the reporter’s review, Midea’s highest stock price in the past 52 weeks was 83.17 yuan in December last year, and the lowest in the past 52 weeks was 62.58 yuan in April last year. Looking back further, Midea’s stock once hit a record high of 108 yuan in February 2021.

Attracting investors, especially overseas investors, is also considered an important reason for Midea’s continued buybacks and high stable dividends in recent years. It is worth mentioning that 2025 is also Midea’s first full year after its IPO in Hong Kong. In September 2024, Midea listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, but its market value there is less than one-tenth of its total market value.

Qiang Yuqing, founder of Lens Research, told the “Huaxia Times” that the current relative position of A-share prices is not low, and Midea’s main purpose of buybacks and dividends is to build confidence in long-term shareholder returns. He believes that for Midea to go international, it needs to attract international investment institutions, especially long-term investors. However, for a large, mature company like Midea, it is impossible to expect it to suddenly explode like DeepSeek, so stable cash dividends and returns to shareholders are particularly important.

Breaking the Valuation Ceiling of Home Appliances

If high dividends and share repurchases are the “dessert” that attracts investors to Midea, then the newly released 2025 financial report signals that this giant, often defined as “the largest home appliance company by market value,” hopes to break the valuation ceiling of the home appliance industry in the market.

The 2025 annual report shows that Midea achieved a total operating revenue of 458.5 billion yuan last year, up 12.1% year-on-year, with net profit attributable to the parent of 43.95 billion yuan, up 14%. Among them, Midea’s overseas revenue was 195.9 billion yuan, up 16%, and domestic revenue was 260.5 billion yuan, up 9.4%.

From specific business segments, smart home business remains Midea’s largest revenue source, with about 299.9 billion yuan last year, up 11.3%, nearly 66% of Midea’s total revenue. But diversified businesses such as robotics, new energy, building technology, industrial parts, medical, and logistics are also building a second growth curve for Midea.

The financial report shows that last year’s Midea’s commercial and industrial solutions segment revenue was 122.8 billion yuan, up 17.5%, approaching 27% of Midea’s total revenue: including building technology, robotics and automation, industrial technology, and other innovative businesses, with revenues of 35.8 billion yuan, 31 billion yuan, 27.2 billion yuan, and 28.7 billion yuan, respectively, with growth rates of 25.7%, 8%, 10.2%, and 26.94%. Notably, Midea’s subsidiary KUKA is one of the “Big Four” global industrial robot companies. The financial report indicates that KUKA’s revenue will recover and grow in 2025, with KUKA China contributing nearly 30% of its revenue during the same period.

It is worth mentioning that, along with China’s comprehensive implementation of the “Artificial Intelligence+” initiative, Midea is also transforming into an “AI+” technology company.

Midea told the “Huaxia Times” that it has formed an AI R&D team of over 400 people, with more than 13,000 intelligent agents operating daily across residential, office, manufacturing, medical, warehousing, and logistics scenarios. Additionally, Midea has announced five humanoid robots and is gradually applying them in factories for tasks such as product inspection and equipment patrols. It is reported that Midea has also identified three major R&D directions: humanoid, full humanoid, and super humanoid robots, focusing short-term on industrial scenarios to replace repetitive labor and perform complex tasks like precise assembly, addressing manufacturing efficiency bottlenecks; medium- and long-term, aiming to enter home and medical scenarios.

In smart home, on March 10, Midea announced its self-evolving home intelligent agent MevoX and the “Three-in-One” whole-house smart strategy. Midea stated that over 500 million appliances across all categories are connected, with more than 140 million smart appliances connected globally, over 150 million smart users, and more than 150 categories of appliances AI-enabled. Midea also announced that it will continue to invest 60 billion yuan over the next three years, focusing on AI, embodied intelligence, new energy, and other frontier fields.

Can AI become a new growth story for Midea in the capital and industry markets? This not only concerns the reconstruction of this giant company’s valuation logic but also hides the deeper path of how a traditional manufacturing giant transforms into a global tech company.

Editor: Huang Xingli Chief Editor: Han Feng