From Beauty Apps to AI Agents: Meitu’s CFO Gary Ngan on the Future of Visual AI

In this episode, I spoke with Gary Ngan, CFO of Meitu, about how the company is evolving from its roots in consumer photo editing into a broader AI-native visual creation platform across photo, video, design, and agents. For many investors, Meitu is still associated with beauty editing and selfie apps, but Gary frames the company today as an AI application company serving both leisure use cases and productivity workflows.

We spent a lot of time on Meitu’s business edge: why visual AI is not just a foundation-model race, and why aesthetic judgment, controllability, and vertical context matter. Gary argues that visual creation is highly subjective. The same prompt can mean very different things across countries, cultures, product categories, and commercial goals. That is why Meitu is building verticalized products such as Picchi, DesignKit, Kaipai, Vmake, and RoboNeo, instead of relying only on one general-purpose AI model.

We also discussed the business model. Consumer subscriptions have become Meitu’s main revenue engine, while advertising is no longer the strategic growth driver it once was. Gary explained the shift in Chinese consumer willingness to pay for apps, the higher ARPU potential in overseas markets, and how new AI-native products like Picchi could introduce additional monetization through personalized models and AI credits. He also addressed AI compute cost, why more than 90% of Meitu’s AI outputs come from its own models, and why the company sees AI as a TAM-expanding opportunity rather than simply a margin risk.

Finally, we covered competition and globalization. Gary explained how Meitu thinks about competing with ByteDance, Kuaishou, Canva, Adobe, Shopify, Alibaba, and other AI-native visual tools, and why Meitu’s approach is more vertical-driven than general design-platform driven. Lastly, we touched localization, from different beauty preferences across markets to why true globalization requires understanding culture at a much deeper level than translation or marketing campaigns.

CHECK OUT THIS CONVERSATION. Gary’s so cool.

To find the previous episodes of Differentiated Understanding, see here.

Every episode, I bring in a guest with a unique point of view on a critical matter, phenomenon, or business trend—someone who can help us see things differently.

Season two will host a series of guests from analysts, VC investors, builders, researchers, founders, and product managers. For more information on the podcast series, see here.

Chapters:

00:00 What is Meitu today? Mapping Meitu’s product portfolio04:14 Why vertical focus still matters in the age of AI agents06:36 Aesthetic standards, subjective prompts, and visual AI nuance11:31 How AI changes art and creative expression15:02 MeituHub and MiracleVision as visual AI infrastructure17:01 Why Meitu needs its own models20:55 How Meitu chooses models and the role of designers25:09 Meitu’s AI legacy and generative AI strategy28:27 AI compute cost, ROI, and gross margin38:22 Subscription growth and advertising dependence40:47 Partnerships with consumer chatbots and platforms43:27 Competition with ByteDance, Kuaishou, Canva, Adobe, and others49:49 Deepfakes, misuse, and AI safety safeguards52:42 Globalization, localization, and cultural differences59:16 The biggest investor misconception about Meitu

Transcript (AI-generated, for reference only)

Grace Shao:Gary, thank you so much for joining us today.

Gary Ngan:Hi Grace. Good to be here.

Grace Shao:I’m really excited to have this conversation. To start, tell us what Meitu is up to these days. For a lot of investors and users, when they think of Meitu, they still think of the selfie and beauty-editing app. How would you define Meitu today? Is it still simply a consumer AI company, or is it much more than that now?

Gary Ngan:Meitu is no longer just a selfie or beauty-editing company. I would define Meitu today as an AI application company specializing in photo, video, and design.

We focus on very high-value verticals where we can leverage AI to deliver high-quality results to users. We often refer to these users as prosumers: people who have strong design needs, but no prior formal design training.

So that is how I would define Meitu today.

Grace Shao:That makes sense. Tell us about the products, because you have quite an array of them. Some are more consumer-facing, some are more prosumer-facing, and some may even be a bit more enterprise-facing. There is Meitu, BeautyCam, Wink, Picchi, DesignKit, Kaipai, Vmake, RoboNeo. Help us map out the ecosystem.

Gary Ngan:We think about Meitu’s product portfolio in two main categories: applications for leisure and applications for productivity.

Applications for leisure include the Meitu app, BeautyCam, Wink, and Picchi. They serve use cases such as photo-taking, photo editing, and video editing, usually for sharing on social media.

The Meitu app and BeautyCam are our core consumer applications. Wink extends our capability from photo to video editing. Picchi is our latest portrait-retouching agent, focused on personalizing editing styles.

The second bucket is applications for productivity, which includes DesignKit, Kaipai, Vmake, and RoboNeo. These products serve professional and commercial content creation needs.

DesignKit focuses on e-commerce product-listing design. It helps merchants and creators produce product images, model images, and marketing materials much more efficiently.

Kaipai and Vmake focus on talking-video and marketing-video creation. Kaipai is more focused on the domestic Chinese market in verticals such as insurance and real estate, while Vmake is seeing strong traction in the U.S. fitness and wellness market.

To give you a sense, as of May this year, Kaipai had about three million monthly active creators, and cumulative content creation exceeded 400 million pieces. For Vmake, ARR in the first quarter of 2026 was about US$4 million.

Then there is RoboNeo, our AI-native agent product launched in July 2025. It is currently targeting the AI short-drama vertical. Its agent workflows can support scriptwriting, characters, storyboards, visual generation, and asset management.

So that gives you a rough idea of the different vertical products. But the ecosystem logic is very important, because many new products come from user insights we observe in existing products.

For example, DesignKit came from the poster-design function within the Meitu app. Kaipai came from the AI teleprompter feature in BeautyCam. Picchi came from new user behaviors we observed in the Meitu app.

So our portfolio is not a random collection of apps. It is a structured expansion from consumer imaging into AI-native workflows across photo, video, and design.

Grace Shao:That makes a lot of sense. But in the age of AI agents, would it make sense for Meitu to consolidate a lot of these apps? Or do you still think it is better to keep them separate for different types of users and workflows?

Gary Ngan:In the age of agents, we still believe we should focus on high-value verticals, because different verticals have many differences.

First of all, aesthetic standards are very different. I’ll give you an example. The phrase “handsome guy” would be interpreted very differently in an application serving the U.S. market versus an Asian market.

Even within the Asian market, if you are addressing e-commerce merchants selling gym products versus formal apparel, the word “handsome” will also be interpreted very differently across those verticals.

So being able to separate these different verticals gives you a very good head start in focusing on the aesthetic standards that each vertical needs.

Also, users in different verticals have very different behaviors and workflows. It is very important to build those workflows and that know-how into each vertical in order to create the right products.

With agents, you can cover a slightly bigger boundary. But I still think you want to focus on different verticals to maximize the output for the user, and also make it more efficie…

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