Looking back from the starting point of 2026, the year 2025 was a pivotal one for Gaotu (NYSE: GOTU) in its "journey towards high-quality growth." This year, the company not only achieved robust financial improvement but also delivered a comprehensive performance marked by strategic resilience, technological innovation, and a strong sense of social responsibility.
As Gaotu's founder, Larry Chen, stated in his 2026 New Year address, "True wealth is not short-term gain, but the compound interest effect formed through continuous accumulation." Gaotu is building a sustainable, replicable, and trustworthy long-term development path, firmly rooted in education, powered by technology, and driven by a philanthropic spirit.
Gaotu's diversified business portfolio flourished comprehensively in 2025, forming a full-lifecycle education ecosystem. The company established a multi-faceted business matrix covering K-12 quality and literacy education, high school learning planning, university student and adult learning, international test preparation and study abroad consulting, and book publishing. This ecosystem leverages intelligent technology to provide personalized learning experiences catering to users across all age groups.
Notably, the youth quality and literacy business achieved profitability in the online segment for the first time in a single quarter, while the K-9 segment maintained triple-digit high growth. Revenue from the university student and adult education business increased by nearly 50% year-over-year, with profits achieving high double-digit growth. Sub-brands like Gaotu Civil Service Exam, Gaotu Postgraduate Entrance Exam, and Gaotu Postgraduate Recommendation excelled in their respective tracks, with the latter achieving a remarkable 98.3% comprehensive success rate for recommended postgraduates in 2025.
Simultaneously, Gaotu Coding, a core brand for AI literacy education, served over 2 million students. Its unique "Eleven Levels, Eight Stages" curriculum deeply integrates computational thinking and creativity training, consistently achieving industry-leading award rates in authoritative competitions like AICE, Blue Bridge Cup, and Informatics Olympiad. Gaotu Psychology, through its "Three-Teacher Model" and AI practice rooms, cumulatively trained over 2 million individuals and cultivated more than 50,000 professional psychological counselors. This synergistic, online-offline integrated business ecosystem has built a solid moat for Gaotu to navigate economic cycles.
2025 marked the full implementation of Gaotu's "All with AI, Always AI" strategy. Having invested over $100 million in AI since 2023, the company established an AI Education R&D Center in Shanghai and partnered with Renmin University and Fudan University to build joint labs. AI technology is now deeply embedded across the entire teaching, service, and operational workflow: from high-frequency interaction in the "Mao Dou Loves Learning AI Classroom" to predictive models in the "Smart Exam Pass System"; from contextual vocabulary memorization in "Whale Loves Context" to "human-like" AI diagnostics for handwritten test papers and multi-modal explanations.
Crucially, Gaotu consistently emphasizes that "AI is not meant to replace teachers, but to empower human-AI collaborative intelligence." Through its trinity model of "Lead Teacher + Assistant Teacher + AI Companion Learning," Gaotu combines the expertise of master teachers with the efficiency of AI, ensuring both scalable delivery and a personalized experience, truly realizing the goal of "making great teachers sit beside children like friends."
Gaotu's philanthropic commitment remained steadfast in 2025, as its charitable efforts entered a new, professionalized stage with the official establishment of the Beijing Gaotu Foundation.
Throughout the year, Gaotu's philanthropic initiatives focused on holistic education encompassing "moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and labor education": providing disaster relief for the Tibet earthquake and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei floods; launching the "Cloud Ladder" university student employment program across numerous national universities; collaborating with the China Youth Development Foundation to initiate the "I, AI Science Class" rural education project, whose first online teacher training attracted 18,000 rural educators; and donating 90,000 books and winter uniforms to regions like Gansu, Yunnan, and Inner Mongolia through the "Long Wind Student Aid" project.
These actions embody Larry Chen's conviction: "Charity and education are the world's most worthwhile long-term investments." Gaotu is driving forward with its dual engines of "Technology + Philanthropy," striving to deliver quality educational resources across barriers to every mind eager to grow.
The end of 2025 brought a "harvest season of awards" for Gaotu: it was honored as an "Influential Education Brand" and "Influential Education Technology Innovation Brand" by Forbes China, while esteemed Gaotu teachers like Sun He and Wang Minghuan were recognized as "Influential Education Figures." The company also won eight awards at the China National Radio Education Ceremony, covering areas such as comprehensive strength, postgraduate entrance exams, postgraduate recommendation, psychology, and career planning. Gaotu Coding further received the "High-Performance Resilient Team Award" from the Harvard Business Review.
These accolades are not only recognition of Gaotu's product strength and innovation but also a collective tribute to its core educational philosophy of being "learner-rooted."
Looking ahead to 2026, Gaotu will continue to deepen its internal innovation mechanisms, forge a management team capable of securing victories, and thoroughly integrate its five core values—"Customer First, Integrity, Responsibility, Collaboration, Innovation"—into the organizational fabric.
On the business front, Gaotu will continue to prioritize "profitability" as a core objective, driving all segments—including youth literacy, university education, and public sector training—towards comprehensive profitability. Technologically, it will accelerate the integration of large AI models into educational scenarios to develop more immersive and adaptive learning products. In philanthropy, it will expand the reach of projects like "Cloud Ladder" and "I, AI Science Class," helping educational equity evolve from mere "transfusion" of aid to sustainable "blood-making" capabilities.
In 2026, Gaotu aims to evolve into a comprehensive ecosystem integrating educational services, technological innovation, youth development, and social responsibility. It will use the upgrade of thinking as its vessel and creativity as its sail, accompanying tens of millions of learners on their journey towards their own stars and oceans.
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