On March 31, CHENQI TECH (09680.HK) released its full-year 2025 financial results. Amid frequent warnings of ride-hailing capacity saturation across many regions in China and a fierce price war within the industry during 2025, the company achieved a 114.6% year-on-year revenue growth, with total annual revenue reaching RMB 5.286 billion. Additionally, gross profit margin doubled from single digits to 11.9%, while overall profit metrics improved by 48.1%.
However, beyond the labels of "doubling" and "surge," a deeper look into the RMB 5.286 billion revenue structure reveals that this Hong Kong-listed platform, known as the "first Robotaxi stock," faces dual challenges: thin margins in its traditional ride-hailing operations and heavy investment in cutting-edge technology businesses.
According to the financial report, revenue from mobility services, including Robotaxi, grew 131.8% year-on-year to RMB 5.097 billion in 2025. This indicates that traditional ride-hailing services still account for as much as 96.4% of total revenue.
In an industry where growth has plateaued, CHENQI TECH’s ability to achieve over 130% expansion was not primarily driven by organic growth in first-tier cities. Instead, it relied on the "ripple model," which involves replicating its operational framework from the Greater Bay Area into lower-tier markets and surrounding cities.
While this strategy of trading space for growth has boosted revenue volume, average order values in these markets are naturally under pressure, often requiring the platform to bear hidden costs related to regulatory compliance and driver recruitment.
So, how did the gross margin jump from single digits to 11.9%, and how did profits improve by 48.1%? The answer lies on the other side of the coin: stringent cost control.
The report clearly states that expenses such as financial costs, general and administrative expenses saw "double-digit declines" during the year. This suggests that CHENQI TECH’s financial turnaround was largely achieved by trimming back-office spending and reducing non-essential operational costs.
On the front end, the company optimized dispatch algorithms to lower idle rates; on the back end, it tightly controlled fixed expenditures. This defensive financial strategy has indeed stabilized cash flow, but it also highlights the clear profit ceiling of its traditional ride-hailing business—a highly scale-dependent, razor-thin margin operation.
Within the nearly RMB 5.3 billion total revenue, the segment with high-margin potential and growth prospects is the "technical service revenue," which accounts for only about 3%. In 2025, this segment surged 487.4% year-on-year to RMB 160 million.
This is CHENQI TECH’s differentiating factor and the core support for maintaining its valuation as a tech stock in Hong Kong.
Currently, the entire automotive industry chain is in a critical phase of advancing high-level autonomous driving and end-to-end AI model development. Automakers and algorithm companies are in urgent need of high-quality, real-world road test data that includes complex edge cases.
CHENQI TECH effectively repurposes its fleet of hundreds of thousands of ride-hailing vehicles as high-frequency data collection terminals. By offering AI data services such as annotated data and high-definition mapping, it is also attempting to enter the B2B SaaS and Tier-1 data supply chain for automotive companies.
Financially, this RMB 160 million revenue stream carries extremely low marginal costs and represents the most promising growth driver for future net profits. However, from a business perspective, its 3% revenue share remains too weak.
In the short to medium term, this "second growth curve" serves more as a valuation tool in capital markets and is not yet sufficient to fully offset losses from the core business.
As another piece of its technological foundation, Robotaxi’s commercialization progress appears nuanced in the financial report. Official data shows that in the first quarter of this year, CHENQI TECH’s Robotaxi fleet expanded to approximately 600 vehicles, doubling from the end of 2025.
In a mixed dispatching ecosystem involving both human-driven and autonomous vehicles, CHENQI TECH acts as a commercial operations platform. However, from a financial standpoint, these 600 Robotaxi vehicles are far from being profit generators at this stage—they are unequivocal cash burners.
Despite declining costs of core hardware such as LiDAR, the establishment of a Robotaxi fleet, early-stage customization, safety operator labor costs, computational power for data centers, and long-term vehicle-infrastructure coordination all require substantial capital investment.
This forms the core contradiction in CHENQI TECH’s financial report: while its traditional ride-hailing business strives to cut costs and improve profitability, the doubling of Robotaxi capacity risks reopening the narrowed loss gap at any time.
Balancing the pace of heavy investment in Robotaxi while ensuring that cash flow from the core business does not dry up will be a critical test of management’s ability to walk a tightrope.
Overall, CHENQI TECH’s 2025 performance report depicts a company navigating a highly competitive market, attempting to stabilize through operational refinement while betting on technology for future transformation.
The 114.6% revenue growth and improved margins demonstrate its resilience in a tough market. However, capital markets operate on a cold logic: the traditional ride-hailing story lacks explosive potential, and the RMB 160 million in tech revenue, along with the yet-unprofitable Robotaxi business, are still insufficient to fundamentally reshape its financial standing.
Until it fully crosses the break-even point, CHENQI TECH’s "tech credibility" will continue to face a long and costly commercialization test.
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