By Greg Gao

(JW Insights) Aug 14 -- iFlytek(科大讯飞), China’s leading listed AI company, posted RMB7.84 billion($1.08 billion) revenue in the first half of 2023 recently, with a net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB73.57 million($10 million).

The announcement indicated that the company turned around its lackluster performance from the previous quarters, achieving operating revenue of RMB4.954 billion($682 million) and a gross profit of RMB1.938 billion($267 million) in the second quarter. This marks a sequential increase of 71.56% and 60.21%, respectively. The company’s net cash flow generated from operating activities reached RMB140 million($19.3 million), an increase of over RMB575 million($80 million) compared to last year.

The announcement also stated that iFlytek will introduce its in-house large language model(LLM) SparkDesk 2.0 version on August 15, bringing significant improvements in coding capabilities and multimodal interaction. 

This includes enhancements in multimodal understanding (including visual question-answering, descriptions, reasoning, etc.) and multimodal generation (text-to-image generation, controlled voice synthesis) capabilities and their corresponding applications. The upgrade will also encompass abilities and achievements in code generation, completion, interpretation, error correction, and unit test generation.

This move aims to further provide leading and controllable private code capability platforms to industry clients, said the company.

As of June 30, 2023, the number of developers on iFlytek’s open platform has reached 4.974 million (an increase of 45% from last year). Following the release of the iFlytek SparkDesk, the number of developers increased by 850,000 within two months, according to iFlytek.