Like Qi Mobility's 2025 revenue doubles, profit improvement relies on cutting costs.

On March 31, Qichuxing (9680.HK) released its 2025 full-year results.

In 2025, when ride-hailing capacity saturation warnings were frequently issued across many parts of the country and the industry fell into an especially brutal price war, Qichuxing posted a year-over-year revenue growth rate of 114.6%, with total annual revenue reaching RMB 5.286 billion. At the same time, its gross margin doubled from single digits to 11.9%, and key profitability indicators improved by 48.1%.

But when you peel away high-growth labels like “doubling” and “surging,” and look through the revenue structure behind those RMB 5.286 billion, this mobility platform—sitting in Hong Kong stocks under the halo of “the first Robotaxi stock”—is facing a dual challenge: struggling to generate thin profits from its traditional capacity-based transportation business, while also making heavy capital-intensive investments in cutting-edge technology.

The financial report shows that in 2025, including Robotaxi, revenue from mobility services grew 131.8% year over year to RMB 5.097 billion. This means that traditional transportation business accounts for as much as 96.4% of the total.

With the industry’s big picture peaking in incremental growth, for Qichuxing to achieve more than 130% scale expansion, its core momentum is not driven by endogenous growth in first-tier cities, but instead relies on the “rippling model,” shifting the operating system of the Greater Bay Area to lower-tier markets and surrounding cities.

While this strategy of trading space for growth boosts the revenue scale, it also puts natural pressure on the average revenue per customer in lower-tier markets, meaning the platform often needs to pay hidden costs offline for compliance and for driver recruitment.

So why did gross margin jump from single digits to 11.9%, and why did profits improve by 48.1%? The answer lies on the other side of the coin: extreme cost control.

The financial report clearly points out that during the year, expenses such as finance costs and general and administrative expenses both declined by double digits. This indicates that Qichuxing’s financial turning point was, to a large extent, “squeezed out” by cutting back on back- and middle-office spending and reducing non-essential operating costs.

On the front end, it reduces deadhead rates by optimizing dispatching algorithms; on the back end, it strictly controls all kinds of fixed expenditures. This defensive counterattack-style financial strategy does stabilize cash flow, but it also means the profit ceiling of its traditional transportation business is extremely clear—this is a hard business that highly depends on scale effects, with profit margins even thinner than a razor blade.

Of roughly RMB 5.3 billion in total revenue, the portion that truly has high gross-margin characteristics and room for imagination is the “technical services revenue,” which accounts for only about 3%. In 2025, revenue from this segment surged 487.4% year over year to RMB 160 million.

This is where Qichuxing differentiates itself, and it is also the core support it is trying to use to stabilize the valuation of its technology-stock shares in Hong Kong.

Currently, the entire automotive industrial chain is in a push phase for high-level intelligent driving and end-to-end large-model R&D. Original equipment manufacturers and algorithm companies are in a state of extreme thirst for high-quality real-world test-drive data that includes complex long-tail scenarios.

In reality, Qichuxing is reusing hundreds of thousands of ride-hailing vehicles on the road and repurposing them as high-frequency data-collection terminals. By offering AI data service products (such as labeled data and high-precision mapping), it is also trying to enter automakers’ B2B SaaS services and the data Tier-1 supply-chain.

From a financial logic perspective, the marginal cost of this RMB 160 million in revenue is very low, making it the most likely growth driver to contribute net profit in the future. But from a business reality standpoint, a 3% revenue share is still too weak.

In the short and medium term, this “second growth curve” mostly exists as a valuation bargaining chip for the capital market, and is not yet sufficient to fully cover losses from the core business on the income statement.

As another piece of the puzzle that forms its technical foundation, the commercialization progress of Robotaxi appears somewhat delicate in the financial report. According to official data, this year Qichuxing’s Robotaxi fleet expanded to about 600 vehicles in the first quarter, doubling the scale compared with the end of 2025.

In a dispatching ecosystem with a mix of “human + no human,” Qichuxing plays the role of a commercialized operating venue. However, viewed from a financial perspective, these 600 Robotaxis are absolutely not profit-generating “cash cows” at this stage—they are unequivocally “cash-eaters.”

Although the cost of core hardware such as LiDAR is declining, forming a fleet of several hundred Robotaxis, early customized development, labor costs for safety personnel, computing power support from data centers, and long-term vehicle-road coordinated operations and maintenance—all require substantial capital expenditures to support.

This makes up the most core contradiction in Qichuxing’s financial report. Its traditional transportation business is working to reduce costs and improve efficiency, and to enhance profit-and-loss performance; meanwhile, the doubling of Robotaxi fleet capacity expansion could, at any moment, rip open again the loss gap that has only been narrowed with great effort.

How to keep the cash flow of the core business from drying up while controlling the pace of capital-intensive investment in Robotaxi will be the key test of management’s tightrope-walking capability.

Overall, Qichuxing’s 2025 performance report shows a company in a red-ocean mobility market—one that is trying to stop the bleeding through fine-grained operations, and using technology business as a snapshot of its attempted transformation into the future.

Its 114.6% revenue growth and improved gross margin demonstrate its resilience to survive in a brutal market. But the capital market’s pricing logic is cold: the story of traditional ride-hailing lacks explosive momentum, and the Robotaxi—still unprofitable despite the RMB 160 million in technology revenue—is not enough to completely reshape its fundamentals.

Before it fully crosses the break-even point, Qichuxing’s “technology quality” still needs to pass a long and expensive commercialization test.

Risk Disclaimer and Terms of Exemption

        There are risks in the market; invest with caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it take into account any specific investment objectives, financial conditions, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, viewpoints, or conclusions in this article align with their specific circumstances. Invest accordingly at your own risk, and responsibility rests with you.