Yuanta Securities Korea analyzed on the 2nd that Saltlux is expected to benefit from the government's expansion of the artificial intelligence (AI) transformation project.
Baek Jong-min, a researcher at Yuanta Securities Korea, noted, "Saltlux's government project revenue accounted for 64.6% on a separate basis last year," and added, "Considering that it has already secured references in the AI business, an improvement in performance is expected due to an increase in government-to-business (B2G) project contracts."
The government plans to expand the AX project to disseminate AI services across the country. In fact, the budget for the public AI development project led by the government has increased approximately threefold from 96.6 billion won last year to 284.9 billion won this year. The plan is to raise the public AI adoption rate from 23.7% last year to 95% by 2030.
The researcher analyzed, "If selected as a national representative for AI, the existing system integration (SI)-centric business model could expand into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or royalty-based model," and added, "Profits are also expected to improve significantly."
The government is set to select five AI national representative corporations. Selected corporations will receive resources such as GPUs, data, and talent from the government for up to three years. The national representative developed AI models are expected to be primarily utilized in public projects that are leading the initial growth of the AI industry.
Saltlux released its self-developed foundation model, Lucia 1.0, in September 2023, and subsequently disclosed Lucia 2.0 (May 2024) and Lucia 2.5 (February 2025). It is currently preparing for the launch of Lucia 3.0 (May 2025). According to Saltlux, the operating cost of Lucia 2.5 is one-twentieth of OpenAI's GPT-4o and one-tenth of the DeepSeek model. The company has successfully carried out a project to build an AI-based big data platform for marine spatial information, led by a local government, utilizing Lucia.