Internet brokerage tables encounter dark horses: the "Three Musketeers" lineup changes to the "Four Strong" competition

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With the sequential release of 2025 annual reports, the latest “battle records” of the “Top Four” internet brokerages—Eastmoney, i.e., East Money, THS, Dazhi, and Compass—are now all on display.

With the market heating up, all four companies achieved positive revenue growth, but the gap in profitability is still widening. The “Top Four” take the stage together, yet they are already in different development quadrants.

One “dominant player” leading the pack: Eastmoney, with attributable net profit of 3.2B yuan, is far ahead of the others—equivalent to net cash inflows of over 33.10 million yuan per day. One “high-profit sprinter”: THS has driven accelerated growth with a profit growth rate of 75.79%; under an asset-light model, it achieved net profit of 44M yuan.

One “dark-horse breakout”: Compass’s net profit surged 118.74% year over year; its growth rate ranks first among the four. Its expansion in securities business helped it make the crucial leap from a software company to an internet brokerage. As for Dazhi, one of the former “three swordsmen,” it is still struggling near the break-even line. It recorded a full-year loss of 0.44 billion yuan, but the loss has narrowed by nearly 80%, as it works to get out of its predicament.

With performance diverging, the business logic of the four companies also differs. In the contest between “brokerage-style” and “platform-style,” the “pursuers” have entered one after another, and the battle among internet brokerages is in full swing.

And as AI becomes a new competitive variable in the industry, who can be the first to secure the next “decisive factor” has also become a key focus of market attention.

Performance insights: Eastmoney leads; Compass breaks through

In 2025, China’s A-share market saw both rising volume and price. On the one hand, the SSE Composite Index hit a ten-year high; on the other, the average daily trading value across both markets exceeded 1.7 trillion yuan, up as much as 62% year over year. With the market running hot, investors’ enthusiasm for entering the market surged, and the number of new A-share accounts opened throughout the year reached 27.44 million.

The increase in market activity directly translated into strong demand for services such as trading tools and market information, driving significant performance growth among internet brokerages.

Focusing on the performance of the “Top Four” internet brokerages—Eastmoney, THS, Dazhi, and Compass—in 2025, overall results show that all four companies seized market opportunities and delivered positive revenue growth. However, there are striking differences in their profitability.

Specifically, Eastmoney holds the top spot solidly thanks to its scale advantage. THS, through an asset-light model, shows strong profit elasticity. Compass, driven by the integration breakthrough in its securities business, has delivered “double acceleration” in both revenue and net profit. And while Dazhi has made some progress in cutting losses, it is still hard to avoid the gap versus the first three continuing to widen.

In terms of operating revenue, the four companies’ scale shows clear tiering. Eastmoney ranks first with full-year revenue of 17k yuan. This figure is 2.6 times THS (16.07B yuan), 7.5 times Compass (6.03B yuan), and more than 19 times Dazhi (2.15B yuan).

In revenue growth rate, THS leads with 44% growth. Compass follows closely with 40.39% growth. Eastmoney’s growth rate is slightly lower than the first two, but with a revenue base in the hundreds of billions, it still achieved 38.46% growth. Dazhi, meanwhile, recorded only 7.23% growth, and the gap with the other three has kept widening.

With revenue broadly growing, the four companies’ profitability performance each has its own highlights.

Eastmoney leads by a wide margin with attributable net profit of 827M yuan. This exceeds the combined net profits of the other three by 3 times, and it grew 25.75% year over year. Its scale advantage is strong. THS shows the typical traits of “small but beautiful,” with attributable net profit of 3.2B yuan. However, its 75.79% year-over-year growth far outpaces its revenue growth. The profit elasticity of the asset-light model has been fully released. Compass is also noteworthy: it achieved attributable net profit of 228M yuan for the full year, soaring 118.74% year over year, becoming the fastest-growing profit company among the four.

By comparison, Dazhi is still struggling near the break-even line, with a full-year loss of 0.44 billion yuan. But the loss narrowed by 78.13% versus the same period last year, showing a clear effect in cutting losses.

Looking at average daily profitability may be even more intuitive. In 2025, the four internet brokerages combined achieved net profit of 44M yuan, equivalent to earning about 42.39 million yuan per day. Of this, Eastmoney, THS, and Compass respectively pulled in about 33.10 million yuan, 8.78 million yuan, and 0.62 million yuan per day on average, while Dazhi lost about 0.12 million yuan per day on average.

Head-to-head showdown: divergence in the paths of “brokerage-style” vs “platform-style”

Behind the divergent performance in scale and growth, differences in revenue structure reflect the underlying business-logic distinctions among the four companies.

For these two industry giants—Eastmoney and THS—this difference is most evident. Both started out as financial information service platforms, but the two have now taken distinct routes with different characteristics: “brokerage-style” and “platform-style.”

With full securities licenses in hand, Eastmoney’s business model has a distinct brokerage quality. In 2025, its securities services business contributed revenue of 15.47B yuan, accounting for 78.02% of total revenue. That means that for every 100 yuan the company earns, 78 yuan comes from its securities business. From this perspective, it is essentially closer to a brokerage that uses the internet as its channel.

Breaking it down, brokerage business is its absolute “mainstay.” In 2025, Eastmoney’s net revenue from securities brokerage business was 12.54B yuan, up 50.30% year over year; net interest income such as margin financing and securities lending interest was 7.72B yuan, up 44.27%. These two businesses are highly correlated with market trading volume, forming the “stabilizer” for Eastmoney’s revenue under a bull market.

Asset fund distribution is Eastmoney’s second-largest business. Worth noting is that against the backdrop of reduced fund sales fee rates, the “gold content” of this business is facing weakening in the short term. In 2025, Eastmoney’s financial e-commerce services (fund distribution) generated revenue of 3.44B yuan, accounting for 19.80% of total revenue, up 11.99% year over year, but clearly lagging the 38.51% growth in fund sales value in the same period. At the same time, competition in fund distribution channels is also intensifying. According to calculations by analyst Sun Ting of Soochow Securities (non-banking), the market share of equity holdings for Eastmoney’s Tian Tian Fund fell in the second half of 2025, while in the same period the market shares of Ant Fund and China Merchants Bank rose.

In comparison, its financial data services business, though still smaller in scale, has solid growth. In 2025, Eastmoney’s financial data services generated revenue of 3.18B yuan; the revenue share is below 1.50% of total revenue, yet it achieved growth of 25.18%. This business mainly uses data from intelligent financial data terminals such as Choice data to provide data services to institutional and individual users.

Different from Eastmoney’s “brokerage-style” path, as the number-one traffic powerhouse, THS has even more prominent “platform-style” attributes, showing clear asset-light and high-gross-margin characteristics.

Advertising and internet promotion services are THS’s largest source of revenue. In 2025, this business generated revenue of 240M yuan, up 70.98% year over year, accounting for 57.43% of total revenue, with a gross margin as high as 96.09%.

Meanwhile, its value-added telecommunications services and software sales segments generated revenue of 3.46B yuan and 1.95B yuan respectively, with growth rates of 20.71% and 12.12%, respectively; both segments’ gross margins exceeded 85%, providing stable support for profitability. These two lines of business are fairly similar to Eastmoney’s “financial data services.” Their revenues mainly include paid tools such as selling Level-2 quotes, and financial information terminals such as iFind.

Behind the “high gross margin” is THS’s business logic of “making a living on technology and monetizing traffic.” In 2025, THS’s average monthly active users on its app were 35.4991 million, maintaining the top position among securities-category apps. It widened the scale gap versus the second and third places—Eastmoney (17.4277 million) and Dazhi (12.0955 million). With such a massive user base, financial institutions are willing to pay THS for promotion to capture user attention. And to keep users staying and using it for longer, the platform needs to continuously build a “moat” of technology.

The “pursuers” contest: who is the “next Eastmoney”?

If Eastmoney and THS each represent the fork between “brokerage-style” and “platform-style,” then on the “brokerage-style” track, Compass and Dazhi are also entering one after another with the posture of “pursuers.” But the former has already stepped on the accelerator, while the latter is still waiting for the green light.

After acquiring McGow Securities in 2022, Compass completed the acquisition of Pioneer Fund in 2025, further improving its financial ecosystem. Judging from the revenue structure, Compass’s business is still “70% software, 30% securities.” But as McGow Securities continues to operate and expand, its transition from a software company to an internet brokerage is stepping onto the fast track.

“Software” remains the company’s basic earnings base. In 2025, Compass’s financial information services business (formerly software sales) generated revenue of 1.51B yuan, up 27.50% year over year, accounting for about 70.32% of total revenue. This segment maintains a high gross margin of 87.22%. It is both the revenue pillar and an important source of traffic for other businesses.

Securities services are the fastest-growing business segment for Compass. In 2025, Compass’s securities services revenue was 607M yuan, surging 91.19% year over year, accounting for 28.27% of total revenue. Focusing on its subsidiary McGow Securities, full-year revenue was 757M yuan, up 55.61%. By the end of 2025, McGow Securities’ customer custody assets (client funds for trading—brokerage and agency securities transaction funds) exceeded 10 billion, reaching 122M yuan, up 52.72% from the end of the previous year. The customer assets scale is accumulating rapidly.

Unlike Compass’s “smooth pivot,” Dazhi, formerly listed among the “three swordsmen of internet brokerages,” is still exploring and repairing its business model.

In terms of revenue structure, Dazhi’s core business remains a financial information and data PC terminal service system. In 2025, it generated revenue of 1.07B yuan, accounting for over half of revenue, up 7.71% year over year, and with a gross margin of 59.86%.

The most profitable business is advertising and internet promotion services. Full-year revenue was 1.15B yuan, up 14.7% year over year, with a gross margin as high as 98.97%, but the revenue share is below 15%.

The fastest-growing segment is its mobile business. In 2025, revenue from the financial information and data mobile terminal service system was 35.4151 million yuan, up 38.57% year over year, but the scale is still small and insufficient to drive overall growth.

In fact, behind Dazhi’s narrowing losses is more “spending cuts” rather than “revenue expansion.” In 2025, its operating expenses decreased 8.55% year over year, and the cost reduction and efficiency improvement effects were fairly clear. However, revenue growth was still not enough to fully cover costs.

With growth lacking momentum, the market is pinning hopes on an acquisition and merger of Dazhi by Xiangcai Co., expecting this to connect the loop from information to trading and move onto a similar path to Eastmoney and Compass. However, the “marriage” between the two has been said to be fraught with bad luck. In March this year, due to the valuation data in the application documents being beyond the valid period, the deal was halted. It will wait until updated data is submitted before being restarted.

In addition, even after a merger is completed, Dazhi and Compass will face a common issue: during Eastmoney’s transformation, its traffic entry points were already quite mature; whereas Dazhi and Compass currently still have a significant gap versus Eastmoney in terms of traffic base and monetization capabilities. Therefore, how the “pursuers” can find and stick to their own pace remains the core challenge.

AI race: solving for the “next decisive factor”

Despite differences in their business models, as internet brokerages, technical capability is always the shared underlying foundation.

From R&D spending, Eastmoney and THS have relatively similar investment scales. In 2025, both spent more than 1 billion yuan on R&D—10.67 billion yuan and 11.45 billion yuan, respectively. However, in terms of R&D expense ratio, THS’s R&D expense ratio was 18.99%, far higher than Eastmoney’s 6.64% in the same period, indicating THS is tilting more of its expenditure toward technology.

Compass and Dazhi’s R&D spending scales are both below 0.2 billion yuan, at 164M yuan and 185M yuan, respectively. It is worth noting that Compass is the only one among the four whose R&D expense is still increasing, up 1.17% year over year, and its R&D expense ratio is 7.66%. Dazhi, in its efforts to cut losses, reduced R&D spending by 16.20%, but its R&D expense ratio remains as high as 22.40%.

And in terms of the intended uses of R&D investment, AI is the undeniable “greatest common denominator.” In the AI wave, how to empower investment research and decision-making is the question internet brokerages must answer. Yet the four companies have different ways of solving it.

THS, which is most willing to bet big on technology, was the earliest to begin exploring “All in AI,” and in recent years it has continuously increased investment in related initiatives. In 2025, THS upgraded its “Wen Cai HithinkGPT” large model into an agent, achieving an evolution from a single inference model toward an autonomous planning-and-inference agent. Entering 2026, THS also launched the “Tongce HiAlpha platform,” further supporting “agent-based stock trading.”

The reporter also noticed that in THS’s recently opened recruitment positions, there are roles such as “robot mechanical design engineer” and “algorithm engineer—embodied intelligence direction.” The job responsibilities explicitly state “working closely with teams including mechanical, perception, AI, etc., participating in optimization of robot whole-machine performance and productization implementation, and promoting efficient deployment of algorithms in real-world scenarios.” Although THS has not yet released robot-related products, the recruitment updates may still reflect its “next step” exploration posture.

Eastmoney’s AI strategy, meanwhile, is tightly centered on its “information—community—trading—wealth management” ecosystem closed loop. In AI product development and deployment, it places greater emphasis on deep integration with scenarios from its main business. In 2025, Eastmoney officially opened the “Miaoxiang” large model to all users, while empowering its own businesses—for example, embedding Eastmoney Network and Tian Tian Fund and other platforms for C-end with functions such as intelligent investment advisory; and for the B-end, launching the “Miaoxiang investment research assistant” service for research and investment institutions’ needs.

When answering questions from investors about the impact of “Miaoxiang AI investment,” Eastmoney stated that the capabilities of Miaoxiang AI are comprehensively integrated into enabling all products and business lines of the company. It quickly builds and improves an intelligent internet wealth management ecosystem, feeding Miaoxiang AI capabilities into the entire Eastmoney ecosystem and continuously improving internet wealth management ecosystem development.

Compared with the “deep pockets” of the two major “giants,” Compass and Dazhi’s current AI deployment is still mainly focused on breaking through with “small entry points,” using AI more as an auxiliary tool to enhance existing product functions and improve operating efficiency, while it is still exploring R&D at the ecosystem-level product level.

In 2025, Dazhi rolled out an AI quant strategy feature called “Hiiwen.” Its morning star AI investment research system is also continuously being updated. Compass, on the other hand, launched a “smart customer service system” that supports intelligent investment research.

In the competition among internet brokerages, AI is becoming the core variable in the next round of competition and is increasingly becoming a shared industry consensus.

Under this consensus, industry insiders point out that the outcome of this race depends not only on the amount of technological investment, but more importantly on whether AI can resonate with each company’s underlying business logic. Whichever company can turn AI capabilities into tangible user stickiness and revenue growth first will be the one that takes the initiative in the next cycle.

(Author: Liu Xiafei; Editor: Jiang Shiqiang, Wu Yanling)

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