Midea Group's performance soars with 87 mentions of AI in its annual report, and it plans to invest 60 billion yuan over the next three years to develop four major scenarios.

Yangtze Business Daily news ●Yangtze Business Daily reporter Shen Yourong

With the arrival of the AI era, home appliance giant Midea Group has fully embraced it.

In its most recent annual report, Midea Group said that, leveraging its “AI+” core strategy and breakthrough achievements in the smart manufacturing sector, the company has topped the “2025 Forbes China Artificial Intelligence Technology Enterprise TOP 50” list.

In 2025, Midea Group achieved operating revenue of 458.502 billion yuan, up 12.08% year over year; and realized attributable net profit of 43.945 billion yuan, up 14.03% year over year.

Both operating revenue and attributable net profit grew by double digits, and each reached record highs. In this regard, Midea Group said that it benefited from its AI deployment. In its 2025 annual report, the company mentioned AI 87 times.

Midea Group is advancing industrial transformation and upgrading, laying out “AI+” comprehensively, and opening a new growth curve. Over the next three years, the company plans to invest 60 billion yuan, focusing on cutting-edge areas such as new energy, embodied intelligence, healthcare, and artificial intelligence, and to gain strategic initiative for future industrial development through technological leadership.

In 2025, Midea Group’s R&D investment was 17.788 billion yuan, up nearly 10% year over year.

While actively advancing industrial transformation and upgrading, Midea Group has not forgotten to reward shareholders. For the full year of 2025, the company will distribute a total of 32.361 billion yuan in cash dividends, with a dividend payout ratio of more than 70%. Moreover, the company will spend no less than 6.5 billion yuan and no more than 13 billion yuan to repurchase the company’s shares in the secondary market.

In the secondary market, on March 31, Midea Group’s A- and H-share prices surged by 5.89% and 6.82%, respectively.

Attributable net profit of 43.9 billion yuan rises for 13 consecutive years

Midea Group has achieved the best operating performance in its history.

On the evening of March 30, Midea Group disclosed its annual report, showing that in 2025, the company achieved operating revenue of 458.502 billion yuan, up 12.08% year over year; attributable net profit of 43.945 billion yuan, up 14.03% year over year; and net profit excluding non-recurring items of 41.267 billion yuan, up 15.46% year over year.

In 2025, Midea Group’s performance hit historic highs. Operating revenue returned to double-digit growth for the first time in three years, while attributable net profit has recorded double-digit growth for three consecutive years, with year-over-year growth rates remaining stable at more than 14%.

In 2025, Midea Group earned the equivalent of 120 million yuan per day. This profitability capability far outpaces others in China’s home appliance industry.

Yangtze Business Daily reporter found that Midea Group has strong growth potential: its attributable net profit has grown for 13 consecutive years.

In 2013, the company’s attributable net profit was 5.317 billion yuan. After 10 consecutive years of growth, it reached 29.554 billion yuan in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, it saw rapid growth in succession, and by 2025 it directly broke through the 40 billion yuan mark.

Over the past 13 years, the company’s operating revenue has also grown rapidly, rising from 121.265 billion yuan in 2013 to 345.709 billion yuan in 2022. It surpassed the 400 billion yuan mark in 2024, and accelerated growth in 2025.

In the home appliance market, which is in a stock competition phase, why has Midea Group been able to keep setting record highs in its operating performance?

From Midea Group’s business segments, its ToB business has become a new engine for growth. In 2025, the company’s ToB business revenue was 122.8 billion yuan, up 17.5%, with growth significantly higher than the ToC business at 13.3%. Among them, smart building technology performed most prominently: in the first half of 2025, its gross margin was 29.33%, the highest among all business segments, exceeding smart home’s 28.52%. In the new energy and industrial technology segment, Kangqon New Energy’s attributable net profit rose 502.28% year over year; its profit growth rate far outpaced revenue growth. The robotics and automation business also maintained steady growth. By contrast, although the ToC business remains the basic platform and contributes over 60% of revenue, its growth slowed somewhat due to industry price fluctuations.

Based on strong operating performance, in full-year 2025, Midea Group will distribute a total of 32.361 billion yuan in cash dividends, with a dividend payout ratio of 73.64%; both figures are record highs.

In addition, Midea Group is also making sizable share buybacks. The company plans to use no less than 6.5 billion yuan and no more than 13 billion yuan to repurchase the company’s shares through the secondary market. The repurchased shares will be used to implement equity incentive plans and/or employee stock ownership plans.

Embracing AI to broaden the industrial moat

Midea Group, whose operating performance has kept setting new records, faces challenges from a stock-competition environment in the home appliance sector—where will its future growth drivers come from? “AI+”!

In its 2025 annual report, Midea Group mentioned AI 87 times. By embracing AI, the company has already achieved some results.

According to the annual report, in 2025 Midea Group comprehensively deepened the integration and application of AIGC across all value-chain operation stages, by having employees independently build 13,500 smart agents; across the year, productivity improvement exceeded 15 million hours, while cost reduction reached 700 million yuan.

On the manufacturing side, Midea Group continues to empower operations through AI innovative applications, promoting the rollout of Factory Agent. It continuously expands scenario coverage of 14 core smart agents such as those for the supply chain, production management, quality, and process. It has also integrated more embodied-intelligence endpoints such as humanoid robots and AI glasses, completing traditional human tasks at a second-level response rather than hour-level work, continuously advancing the iteration and evolution of the factory brain, and quickly replicating it to other manufacturing bases. In manufacturing, the company saved 1.85 million work hours over the year. On the supply-chain side, it achieves online visualization of core metrics for 20 overseas factories and end-to-end visibility for KD supply chains across 18 overseas factories. Through AI, it realizes risk early-warning for KD matching, helping reduce KD cycle times by 20%.

AI has empowered Midea Group across all areas, and its user numbers are also growing. By empowering user experience across energy saving, service, and intelligent control, among other dimensions, the company launched its AI ECOMASTER smart energy solution and AI Diag intelligent service solution. In 2025, the overseas cumulative registered user count for Midea’s smart home applications exceeded 11 million, and the average monthly active user count increased by more than 60% year over year.

By embracing AI, Midea Group’s R&D investment continues to grow. From 2023 to 2025, the company’s R&D investment was 14.583 billion yuan, 16.233 billion yuan, and 17.788 billion yuan, respectively; in 2025, R&D investment increased by about 9.6% compared with the prior year.

Of particular attention is that the proportion of the company’s R&D spending related to AI has continued to rise. In full-year 2025, the company invested over 5 billion yuan. At present, Midea has assembled an AI R&D team of more than 400 people, with more than 13,000 smart agents operating across multiple scenarios each day, such as in residences, offices, manufacturing, and healthcare.

In its annual report, Midea Group officially announced its transformation into a “AI+” global technology group. Over the next three years, it plans to invest more than 60 billion yuan in frontier research, focusing on two major hubs—“the home brain” and “the factory brain”—and deepening AI applications in four major scenarios: smart home, smart manufacturing, smart office, and industry empowerment.

With AI enabling it, in the future, Midea Group’s industrial moat is expected to become broader and deeper.

Editors: ZB

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