iFlytek

Sector

Speech and AI

Chinese name

科大讯飞

Programme

Day 5 · 15 Oct 2026 · Hefei

iFlytek (科大讯飞) is China's best-known specialist in speech technology, and today it also builds its own large language model, trained entirely on Chinese chips. The Hefei-based company reported revenue of 27.1 billion yuan in 2025, but keeps little of it: almost a fifth of revenue goes into research. For Europe, iFlytek matters mainly as a maker of translation and meeting devices, and as an example of a Chinese AI company that keeps building without American chips. iFlytek was on day 5 of the China Business Mission 2026, in Hefei.

From speech lab to listed AI group

Liu Qingfeng founded iFlytek in 1999 while still a PhD student at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei. The 科大 in the Chinese name refers to that university. The team of eighteen set out to teach machines to listen and speak in Chinese, a market where foreign players were setting the pace at the time. The first software flopped and ate up almost all the capital. In 2001 Lenovo founder Liu Chuanzhi invested, in 2004 the company made its first profit and in 2008 it listed in Shenzhen.

The mission has not changed since the start: machines that listen and speak, understand and think. Around the company grew China Speech Valley, a cluster of speech and AI firms backed by the city and the province. How Hefei actively helps build such companies is covered in our article on Hefei.

A language model without Nvidia

The turning point came in October 2019. The United States put iFlytek on the Entity List over the role of its technology in surveillance in Xinjiang. Since then the company cannot buy American chips without a licence. iFlytek turned to Huawei: its Spark models (星火, 'spark') are trained on Huawei's Ascend chips. That takes more optimisation work than Nvidia hardware, but it makes iFlytek important to Beijing, which wants technological self-reliance.

On 22 October 2026, a week after the delegation's visit, Liu presented Spark X2.6 at the annual 1024 developer conference in Beijing. The model runs on the device itself, in the cloud or in a combination of both. A small on-device model decides whether a task stays local or goes to the cloud, based partly on how sensitive the data are. A version with 4 billion parameters is open source. Liu put the principle this way: only a company that truly trains its model on domestic computing power controls the technology itself. The performance claims come from iFlytek; independent comparisons have yet to follow.

Where the money comes from

iFlytek sells AI built into devices and sectors rather than a stand-alone chatbot. Education is the biggest customer, with a third of revenue: smart classrooms, digital testing and learning devices for the home. The developer platform and consumer products such as the smart notepads bring in more than a fifth. Automotive, healthcare and enterprise AI grew by 24 to 34% in 2025, but together they are still small. A large part of the rest comes from governments, including smart-city projects, and iFlytek is deliberately scaling that down.

Revenue has grown every year since 2021, but net profit stayed modest at 839 million yuan in 2025, a margin of about 3%. In the first nine months of 2026 revenue rose 7% to 18.2 billion yuan, with a small net profit of 22 million yuan, according to the quarterly results of October 2026. Education and healthcare each grew by more than 20% in the third quarter, while government revenue fell. The company lives with a fixed seasonal pattern: schools and governments pay mostly in the second half of the year.

How iFlytek approaches Europe

Outside China, iFlytek is still small. According to China Daily, overseas revenue passed 1 billion yuan for the first time in 2025, less than 4% of the total, and came mainly from Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In Europe iFlytek works from Hungary, where it cooperates with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and it shows its products at MWC in Barcelona and IFA in Berlin. What it sells here is mostly devices for work:

• AINOTE 2: a 4.2 mm e-ink notepad that transcribes meetings, translates them and turns them into action points.
• AI glasses: glasses of about 40 grams with subtitles and live translation, launched at MWC 2026. Rokid from Hangzhou is also targeting this market.
• AI Interpret Mic: a table microphone that interprets multilingual meetings simultaneously.

Privacy is the selling point. According to iFlytek, European cloud data from the notepads are processed on servers in Frankfurt and the core functions work offline. Companies and public bodies can also run the language model entirely on their own servers. That is no luxury: under the GDPR a voice recording is personal data and a voiceprint is biometric data, and since February 2025 the AI Act has banned emotion recognition at work and in schools.

What else you should know

iFlytek is close to the state. State-owned China Mobile is the largest shareholder, Liu Qingfeng sits in the National People's Congress and governments are major customers. In 2017 Human Rights Watch reported that Chinese police were collecting voice samples for use with iFlytek technology, and in 2020 MIT ended a partnership for that reason (overview on Wikipedia). The American sanctions do not apply in the EU. A European partner that passes on American technology or operates in the US should still factor them into its risk assessment. How Chinese tech companies make the move to Europe, and where they run into trouble, is covered on our page on Chinese companies in Europe.

Speech is no longer an edge, trust is

iFlytek's old trump card is becoming a standard feature. The large language models of Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek are also learning to listen and speak, often for free. So iFlytek is betting on what is harder to copy: its own hardware, deep knowledge of education and healthcare, and models that run on the customer's own servers. For a European buyer, that last point is the real test. In a demo the technology convinces quickly. The question that makes the difference is where the voice of your customer or employee ends up, and who has access to it.