According to Bloomberg Business, Kuaishou Technology’s stock has surged 84% over the past year, fueled by the global success of its Kling AI video generator. The Beijing-based company, long seen as a laggard to ByteDance’s TikTok, set an audacious goal in February 2024 to beat OpenAI’s teased Sora tool to market and debuted Kling that July. The app became the top-grossing graphics and design app on iPhones in South Korea and Russia by January 2nd and hit top-10 status in the US, UK, Japan, Australia, and Turkey. Kuaishou now projects $140 million in annual revenue from AI video for 2025 and has amassed 60 million users for Kling, with over 600 million videos created. Chief Technologist Gai Kun, who masterminded the push, sees only a narrow window to build an AI-native entertainment hub.
The Speed and Timing Play
Here’s the thing about Kuaishou’s story: it’s a classic case of a midsize player using speed and precision timing to outmaneuver giants with deeper pockets. When OpenAI teased Sora, Gai Kun basically shocked his team by demanding they ship a competing, public-ready model within months. He called timing a “resource-constrained game.” Go too early, you burn cash. Too late, you lose. And they nailed it. While OpenAI, Alibaba, and others treat video as part of a massive, cash-incinerating foundation model race, Kling operates like an internal startup with its own P&L. That focus is paying off. They’re not trying to build everything; they’re trying to build the best video tool, fast. You can check out Kling’s global site to see it for yourself.
Monetization and Market Position
So, how good is Kling, really? On the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, it’s the only Chinese model in the top three for both text-to-video and image-to-video. That’s a big deal. Its O1 model, which processes multiple prompts at once, has drawn comparisons from investors to Google’s Nano Banana for its quality. Users are getting creative, combining it with other AI tools to make movie scenes or transforming objects on command. But the real kicker? Monetization. Kling’s subscription plans range from $7 to over $100 monthly, yet it’s showing faster progress here than well-funded U.S. rivals like Runway and Luma AI. About 70% of its revenue comes from user subscriptions, with the rest from over 30,000 enterprise clients. And get this: most of its paid users are overseas, even though American tools like Sora aren’t available in China to compete with it at home.
The AI-Native Entertainment Bet
Now, Gai Kun is looking past just being a tool. He’s predicting a paradigm shift toward an “AI-native entertainment hub.” Think about that. Instead of just adding AI filters to TikTok or YouTube, he envisions a platform built from the ground up where you could be rendered as the protagonist in a drama or a video game. He thinks this shift comes in one to three years. It’s a wildly ambitious vision for a company that was playing catch-up so recently. But that’s the mindset. “If you want to be a real leader in any specific domain of AI, you have to imagine the future,” he said. The question is, does Kuaishou have the runway and brand to build that hub before the OpenAIs and ByteDances of the world decide to focus there? The window is narrow, but they’ve already proven they can move when it counts.
What It Really Means
Look, Kuaishou’s 84% stock surge tells you everything about how hungry investors are for a clear, revenue-generating AI consumer hit. Kling is that. It’s not a research project; it’s a product people and businesses are paying for right now. The Bloomberg Intelligence analyst rightly notes competition in developed markets will be fierce, and IP concerns linger. But Kuaishou has done something incredibly hard: it’s used a focused, fast-follower strategy to carve out a leading position in arguably the hottest sub-sector of AI. They bet the farm on timing, and for now, it’s working. I think the bigger lesson is for all those other “midsized players” out there. You don’t need a bottomless war chest. You need a ruthless focus on one thing, perfect timing, and the guts to ship first.
