Dear Shareholders, Paths worth embarking on anew are never marked on old maps. By 2025, the pace of change has surpassed most expectations. On one hand, the technology wave represented by AI is accelerating its penetration across entire industrial chains, rewriting competitive rules from computing infrastructure to end-user application scenarios. On the other hand, China's leading industries are integrating into global divisions of labor with unprecedented breadth, evolving from manufacturing capability exports to comprehensive deployment of brands, R&D, and supply chain networks. Against the macroeconomic backdrop of declining interest rate benchmarks and profound transformation of growth models, the fundamental logic of financial services is being rewritten—industrial depth, global perspective, and technological foundation are becoming core capabilities for navigating cycles. This represents our fundamental assessment of the industry's future and serves as the starting point for all strategic choices.
Confronting this transformation, we have chosen to begin anew—not to negate the past but to examine ourselves from a higher vantage point and drive innovation with greater courage. We seek breakthroughs across three dimensions: business logic, service chains, and organizational culture, anchoring long-term direction amid uncertainty and accumulating cycle-navigating capabilities through transformation. In 2025, the company achieved steady operational growth, with comprehensive strength continuing to consolidate its industry leadership position. As of year-end 2025, the Group's total assets reached RMB 1,077.348 billion, with shareholders' equity attributable to listed company owners at RMB 206.939 billion. The Group reported annual revenue of RMB 35.810 billion and net profit attributable to owners of RMB 16.383 billion. The company maintained its MSCI ESG AAA rating, the highest level among global investment banks.
**From Tool to Mindset: Redefining Investment Banking Through AI** We frequently debate internally: What is the most irreplaceable value of an investment bank? Our answer remains the ability to price risk assets. This requires deep understanding of industrial logic, extensive coverage of quality assets, courage to validate valuations with real capital, and capability to transform diverse assets and risks into financial products while efficiently matching them with global investors. Historically, these capabilities heavily relied on individual experience. As industrial transformation accelerates and information density multiplies, human effort alone can no longer cover sufficient depth and breadth. AI-driven transformation isn't merely about adding new layers to existing processes but fundamentally redefining value creation—it enables us to transcend individual limitations by integrating insights and data scattered across different business lines, geographic teams, and timeframes into a unified, continuously evolving intelligent foundation. This achieves qualitative leaps in both the depth and timeliness of asset valuation judgments, as well as the breadth and precision of serving diverse client segments.
In 2025, we accomplished two key initiatives. First, we established an AI-driven intelligent investment research system and a foundational data capability platform across the entire company. Using key sectors like new energy, autonomous driving, and innovative pharmaceuticals as breakthrough points, we systematically integrated industrial data and professional knowledge accumulated from investment research, banking, trading, and risk control. This enables dynamic tracking and deep analysis of entire industrial chains, ensuring that every transaction, research report, and service interaction yields structured, reusable insights. Second, we used client-facing trading tools to drive end-to-end AI integration across all business chains. The October 2025 launch of "AI ZhangLe" APP—the industry's first AI-native financial trading terminal—fundamentally reshaped how investors interact with financial services. Its significance extends beyond service model innovation to driving comprehensive integration of backend data governance, investment research, trading, and risk control systems. AI transformation is no small undertaking, but it's not optional—it's imperative to make data-driven industrial cognition, intelligent client services, and integrated business collaboration our core competitive advantages.
**From Going Global to Taking Root: Integrating into Global Value Chains** Chinese enterprises are undergoing qualitative globalization shifts—evolving from simply going overseas to becoming truly global companies with Chinese origins. Global investors' allocation appetite for Chinese assets is similarly transitioning from cautious observation to active positioning. This process urgently requires investment banks with international capital operation capabilities and deep understanding of Chinese industries to provide comprehensive financial support. Huatai is committed to becoming such a partner—grounded in profound understanding of Chinese industries and supported by global professional capabilities to accompany Chinese enterprises onto the world stage.
Our 2015 H-share listing marked Huatai's internationalization beginning. Over the subsequent decade, we progressively built a global value chain system covering Asian, European, and American markets while accelerating expansion into emerging markets. Throughout this journey, we acknowledged gaps with international peers while developing core capabilities through cross-border transactions. Continuous investments in global trading platforms, cross-border risk control systems, and localized team building—combined with deep understanding of Chinese enterprises and assets—have forged Huatai's distinctive international development path.
By 2025, this path showed clearer footprints. In corporate client services, we capitalized on the Hong Kong IPO market recovery, sponsoring 22 Hong Kong IPO projects (ranking third marketwide) and participating in 8 of the top ten Hong Kong IPOs. We facilitated listings for prominent companies in biopharmaceuticals, smart manufacturing, and new energy vehicles. For institutional clients, we expanded our global business network and asset allocation capabilities, connecting major financial centers including Hong Kong, New York, London, and Singapore. Key businesses like equity derivatives and FICC maintained market leadership, while HKD-RMB dual counter market making achieved full coverage. In wealth management, we advanced integrated cross-border private banking operations while continuously enriching overseas product offerings. Southbound Wealth Management Connect products now encompass multi-currency public funds and bonds, deepening global asset allocation services. Behind these steps lies an emerging global service network—enabling Huatai to deliver trusted financial services in any market and timezone clients require.
**From Convention to Innovation: Reshaping Organizational Culture** Throughout over three decades of development, each of Huatai's transformational leaps has been accompanied by cultural DNA updates. At our current scale, continued progress requires not just business refinement but profound organizational evolution. In 2025, we distilled Huatai's cultural consensus using plain language, returning to fundamental questions: What defines our value? Creating genuine professional value for clients—making client needs the starting point for all businesses. What determines how far we can go? Professionalism—deploying experts for specialized tasks, pursuing top-tier market positions in every business line, and forging differentiated competitiveness through technology and innovation. What is the company's most irreplaceable asset? People. This answer outweighs the previous two—mechanisms that respect expertise and encourage creativity allow talent to flourish, an open culture attracts global excellence, and diverse teams build business resilience and depth.
Culture isn't wall slogans—it's the strategic execution system determining how everyone thinks, decides, and acts. This understanding is particularly crucial in the AI era. As technology handles increasing standardized work, organizational competition ultimately returns to human creativity. We advocate transitioning "from being tool operators to becoming tool users"—not making people machine appendages but enabling focus on truly value-creating work: independent judgments on industry trends, deep understanding of client needs, creative problem-solving for complex challenges, and building interpersonal trust relationships. These are AI-irreplaceable aspects that constitute the essential value of financial services.
Through thirty-five years of journey, tools and technologies continuously evolve, but what remains constant is every Huatai person's初心 to serve the real economy and create long-term client value. New continents aren't found on old maps—reconstructing businesses with AI thinking, expanding boundaries with global vision, and unleashing human creativity through cultural innovation form Huatai's strategic pivots for the next three to five years. True competitiveness lies not in any single year's performance figures but in building future-oriented capability systems. The road ahead holds uncertainties, but uncertainty never justifies standing still—it presents the best window of opportunity for strivers. Huatai Securities will continue embracing innovation pragmatically, serving clients professionally, and approaching markets reverently, jointly creating sustainable long-term value with all stakeholders.
CEO Zhou Yi March 30, 2026
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