CITIC Securities Performance Briefing Transcript (3000 words): Discussing Proprietary Investment, Investment Banking Strategy, and International Expansion

On the afternoon of April 2, the brokerage giant CITIC Securities (CITIC Construction Investment) held a performance briefing.

The 2025 annual report shows that as of December 31, 2025, the company’s total assets reached RMB 676.82B, up 19.49% year over year; operating revenue was RMB 23.32B, up 22.41% year over year; and net profit attributable to shareholders was RMB 9.44B, up 30.68% year over year.

Regarding the above performance, CITIC Construction Investment’s core executives responded to questions of interest to investors from all walks of life via live broadcast. Topics covered a range of issues, including long-term strategy in the investment banking business, overseas business layout, AI deployment, and the positioning of proprietary investment, among others.

Zishitang summarizes the key points of this briefing as follows for readers’ reference.

Proprietary equity investment positioning

In its proprietary business, the company actively serves national strategies and the real economy, achieving solid progress in fixed income, derivatives, equity investments, and equity investments.

The fixed income business continues to strengthen investment capabilities, optimize asset allocation, consolidate the foundation of the domestic bond market, and expand overseas bond investments. The derivatives business expands its market-making service scope, promotes the development of over-the-counter derivatives business, and improves product design capabilities and cross-border business capabilities.

In equity investments, the company adheres to an absolute return orientation, strengthening fundamental research and multi-strategy allocation to control volatility and risk. In equity investments, it focuses on technological innovation and new quality productive forces, laying out in areas including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and advanced manufacturing, while also making forward-looking deployments in directions such as the low-altitude economy, quantum computing, and biotech.

Looking ahead, the company will rely on its research and investment capabilities to continue optimizing investment strategies and asset allocation, serve the needs of domestic and overseas clients, and promote high-quality development of the capital market.

Long-term investment banking strategy

We recognize that the securities industry is undergoing a comprehensive reshaping of development concepts, models, and ecosystems.

To build a value-focused investment bank, three shifts are needed. First, in terms of value orientation, shift from creating a single kind of commercial value to creating diversified value for the country, shareholders, society, and employees. Second, in operating philosophy, shift from focusing too much on short-term performance to aligning short- and long-term horizons more closely, with greater emphasis on long-term value after risk adjustment. Third, in development model, shift from focusing mainly on scale to balancing both quantity and quality to achieve high-quality development. The company will adhere to the unity of functional and profitability objectives, pursue growth driven by deeper internal development, and uphold a long-term mindset.

Building a new-quality investment bank means promoting innovation across the board. In line with requirements for developing new quality productive forces, we will serve the country’s overall development agenda and clarify business and development direction. The core is to achieve three areas: first, innovate to serve new quality productive forces, make breakthroughs in this domain, and become the main force and the vanguard. Second, innovate to serve national strategies, exploring new ways and models in the process of serving national strategies, including integrating into regional development strategies and strengthening cooperation with local governments. Third, in terms of development model, cultivate new drivers through business innovation, product innovation, and service innovation to enhance the capability to serve the real economy.

In this process, we need to discover, cultivate, and achieve new quality productive forces within the development of new quality productive forces, while also transforming ourselves into an investment bank that is even more adaptable to the development of new quality productive forces. Relying on our research strengths, we will increase research efforts on emerging industries and future industries, enhance our ability to understand, and combine investment-banking professional capabilities, investment capabilities, and industry research capabilities to support technology companies in obtaining financial services that match their development stages, providing comprehensive financial services across the full life cycle.

In terms of our own transformation, this also includes building a system and tools that are adapted to new quality productive forces in risk control, products, and other areas. By applying technologies such as AI, we will drive the construction of a digital investment bank, empower employees and management, and improve efficiency and management levels.

Overseas business growth is significant

In 2025, CITIC Construction Investment’s international business with Hong Kong as a hub became an important growth driver.

On the one hand, benefiting from improvements in the capital market environment—including institutional reforms, technological breakthroughs, and the return of global capital—has boosted activity in the Hong Kong stock market. Trading value hit record highs, and IPO financing returned to the number one position globally. On the other hand, the company seized the opportunity of market recovery. CITIC Construction Investment International, as a front-line platform, adheres to integrated management and forward-looking planning, achieving double breakthroughs in both revenue and profit.

In 2025, CITIC Construction Investment International’s operating revenue increased 103% year over year, and net profit increased 177% year over year, which is clearly higher than the industry average. According to data from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, the industry’s net profit growth rate was 62%, and the company’s performance was significantly above the industry average. Meanwhile, the company completed a capital increase of HKD 1.5 billion into CITIC Construction Investment International, raising registered capital to HKD 5.5 billion, providing support for business development.

In recent years, the company has continued to advance its international layout, including conducting research along the Belt and Road routes, expanding overseas investment and research coverage, strengthening cooperation with overseas regulators, exchanges, and financial institutions, and exploring opportunities for long-term cooperation. In terms of licenses, it has promoted a full-license layout, obtained business qualifications in Southeast Asia, and secured derivative trading qualifications from the Singapore Exchange as well as relevant business qualifications from the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing.

In 2026, the company will focus on its goal of becoming an international first-class investment bank, increase resource input, and advance its international development.

First, strengthen the Hong Kong platform. As an internationalization bridgehead, we will strengthen overall coordination of resources from within and outside the mainland in terms of clients, products, channels, and collaboration. We will deepen the layout, establish a mechanism for serving key strategic clients across business lines, and enhance our comprehensive service capabilities.

Second, expand the global layout. Based on Hong Kong, gradually extend into regions such as Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, forming a phased development pattern, while prudently responding to geopolitical and market risks.

Third, strengthen the middle-and-back offices and talent reserves, improve a compliance and risk control system, reinforce technology empowerment, enhance risk management capabilities, and solidify the foundation for international development.

Overall, the company will seize the opportunities of the country’s high-level opening-up, advance the implementation of its internationalization strategy, and improve cross-border financial service capabilities.

Comprehensive computing infrastructure layout

In recent years, CITIC Construction Investment Securities has tightly aligned with the digital finance strategy, treating the construction of digital capabilities as an important lever for strengthening core competitiveness, and driving deep integration between technology and business. The company has made a series of progress in building technological capabilities, mainly reflected in two aspects: the construction of its capability system and application deployment.

In terms of capability system construction, the company has completed a systematic layout from comprehensive computing infrastructure to application ecosystems, building a relatively complete digital foundation. In the infrastructure layer, it has built its own large model computing resource pool, with the share of domestic computing capacity exceeding 40%, and achieves refined management through a computing scheduling platform. In the technology foundation layer, it has formed a hybrid architecture that combines large models with professional smaller models, and continuously optimizes model performance in combination with existing data.

At the platform layer, it has built an AI capability middle platform and an intelligent agent development platform to support hundreds of work processes running. In the knowledge system, it has built an enterprise-level large model knowledge management platform to enable multi-business-line knowledge accumulation and sharing.

In terms of security, it has established a multi-modal large model security protection system to ensure that model applications are compliant, controlled, and manageable. Overall, it has formed an integrated AI capability system covering computing, platforms, knowledge, and security.

How AI is applied to a brokerage’s core business

On this basis, in 2025, the company’s AI applications upgraded from single-point breakthroughs to end-to-end empowerment, with full implementation across investment banking, marketing, investment and research, investment, investment advisory, fixed income, customer service, data R&D, and other areas.

In investment banking, focusing on the “gatekeeper” responsibilities, it builds an intelligent platform covering the full project life cycle. In the risk control domain, it builds a financial fraud attribution analysis system to achieve risk identification and quantitative assessment. In the due diligence process, by combining image recognition with large models, it enables automatic parsing of fund transaction flows, identification of abnormal trades, and verification of suspicious points, significantly improving efficiency.

In marketing, focusing on serving long-tail clients and uncovering opportunities among listed companies, it builds an intelligent marketing platform. Inclusive services cover millions of clients. Through AI outbound calling, intelligent coaching, and customer service platforms, it improves outreach efficiency and conversion rates. Activity levels on the related platforms and the scale of customers both increased, while also reducing labor costs.

In investment and research, it builds a large-category asset allocation platform covering the entire workflow from macro analysis to portfolio management. It integrates a factor library, strategy research, and intelligent stock selection capabilities, closes the loop between research, investment, and management, and serves a large number of institutional clients. It establishes a digital investment and research foundation to achieve integrated data processing, content generation, and compliance monitoring, improving research efficiency and knowledge reuse capabilities.

In the investment business, the company lays out for two types of clients: individual and institutional. For individual clients, it launches an AI investment platform that generates strategy code in natural language, forming a pre-investment, during-investment, and post-investment closed loop. For institutional clients, it builds an intelligent investment trading engine that enables millisecond-level inference and real-time risk control, serving tens of thousands of institutional clients.

In investment advisory, it builds an investment advisory large model and a multi-agent platform to cover the full workflow of stock analysis, strategy recommendations, and post-investment services. It supports 7×24-hour services, with an accuracy rate for Q&A exceeding 97%, improving customer service efficiency and lowering costs.

In trading and platform operations, it builds an intelligent platform covering both primary and secondary markets, supporting functions such as recommendations, trading, Q&A, and data queries. The accuracy rate of data queries reaches 93%. At the same time, it builds a multi-agent collaboration system to enable collaborative applications in high-frequency scenarios. Relevant results were selected for international top academic conferences for two consecutive years.

In customer service, it builds an intelligent service system covering pre-event, during-event, and post-event stages. Annual service volume reaches several million calls, the problem resolution rate improves to 95%, customer satisfaction reaches 99%, and it significantly reduces manual input.

In data management, it launches an intelligent question-and-data retrieval platform, enabling data extraction in natural language. Efficiency improves from day-level to minute-level, and analysis efficiency increases by more than 80%.

In R&D, it builds an engineering-grade AI programmer agent to automatically generate, complete, and answer questions about code. The share of automatically generated code exceeds 30%, effectively shortening the development cycle.

Overall, the company has already formed an AI development framework characterized by an independently controllable technology foundation, comprehensive penetration of application scenarios, and continuous release of business value. In the future, the company will continue to advance its artificial intelligence strategy, build AI-native systems around core business scenarios, continuously release the dividends of digitization, and create long-term, steady value for investors.

The company’s cumulative total cash dividends have reached RMB 20.48B

When formulating its profit distribution policy, the company adheres to the principles of continuity, stability, and reasonableness, and coordinates its long-term development with the overall interests of shareholders, without blindly pursuing large-scale dividends in the short term, while fully safeguarding shareholders’ legitimate rights and interests. The formulation and implementation of the profit distribution policy—especially the cash dividend—strictly follow the company’s articles of association and related approval procedures. The dividend standards are clear, the payout ratio is explicit, and the decision-making mechanism is well established and compliant.

After first implementing interim dividends in 2024, the company has continued to improve its interim dividend mechanism. In 2025, it implemented interim dividends again and has already completed them. According to the plan reviewed by the Board of Directors and to be submitted for approval at the shareholders’ meeting, the 2025 final cash dividend is proposed to be RMB 1.36B. The total dividends for the full year will be RMB 2.64B, up 33% year over year. Since the H-share listing in 2016, including the final dividend this time, the company’s cumulative total dividends have reached RMB 20.48B.

Looking ahead, the company will continue to improve the stability and sustainability of its dividend policy. Based on overall development plans, the cash flow situation, and shareholders’ demand for returns, it will continue to fulfill the responsibilities of a listed company and promote positive interaction between the company and shareholders.

Regarding market value management, the company formulated a market value management system in 2025 and promoted related work in an orderly manner. Based on improving its own quality, the company creates ongoing value by clarifying its development strategy, improving corporate governance, enhancing operating and management capabilities, and cultivating core competitiveness. It also enables its value to be reasonably reflected in the capital market through means such as capital market operations, information disclosure, and investor relations management.

Disclaimer: The contents and data in this article are for reference only and do not constitute investment advice. Before using this information, please verify it. Any actions taken are at your own risk.