Research Report Interpretation | Dongwu Securities: Ruqi Mobility (9680.HK) shows a trend of "strong growth, narrowed losses, and optimized structure" in its performance, initially rated as "Buy"

On March 15, Dongwu Securities released its first-coverage research report for Ruqi Mobility (9680.HK), assigning the company a “Buy” rating. The firm is optimistic about the company’s advantages in ride-hailing expansion and Robotaxi commercialization, driven by shareholder coordination and a hybrid-operations model.

Dongwu Securities’ analysis holds that Ruqi Mobility’s performance has already shown a clear trend of “strong growth, narrowing losses, and improved structure.” The firm expects the company to achieve profitability in 2027. For 2025–2027, it projects revenue of RMB 5.3 billion, RMB 10.5 billion, and RMB 15.8 billion, respectively. Based on the current market capitalization, the three-year PS ratios are 0.3x, 0.1x, and 0.1x, respectively.

Some market views suggest that Ruqi Mobility’s current PS is significantly lower than the average PS of leading listed companies in China’s mobility services and the Robotaxi sector. Combined with the company’s recent trend of profit improvement, the current valuation offers a certain degree of attractiveness.

Earlier, on March 3, Ruqi Mobility issued a positive earnings forecast, stating that it expects its 2025 full-year profit to improve by more than 43.4% year over year. It also expects total revenue of over RMB 5 billion, representing a more than 100% year-over-year increase.

**　　PS for 2025–2027 is below the average of comparable companies**

Dongwu Securities believes Ruqi Mobility’s performance has already shown a clear trend of “strong growth, narrowing losses, and improved structure.”

The company’s revenue mix has evolved from a single ride-hailing services model to a “Mobility + Technology” dual-wheel-drive approach. Technology services have become the company’s second-largest revenue source; their share increased from 8.5% in 2022 to 10.0% in 2024. In addition, benefiting from scale effects brought by business expansion, as revenue grows rapidly, expense ratios that reflect operating efficiency—such as sales and marketing expenses and general and administrative expenses—have continued to be significantly diluted. These figures fell sharply from 26.1% and 9.9% in 2021 to 8.0% and 5.5% in 2024. By the first half of 2025, they were diluted further to 3.9% and 2.9%, and the gross margin turned positive for the first time in the first half of 2025. The company’s profit structure has continued to improve.

Dongwu Securities’ analysis points out that multiple core financial indicators reflecting operating quality have continued to trend favorably, suggesting the company is accelerating toward breakeven profitability under the dual drivers of scaled expansion and refined operations. The firm expects Ruqi Mobility to achieve profitability in 2027. For 2025–2027, it projects revenue of RMB 5.3 billion, RMB 10.5 billion, and RMB 15.8 billion, respectively.

Based on the PS valuation method, Dongwu Securities calculates that Ruqi Mobility’s current market capitalization corresponds to PS ratios of 0.3x, 0.1x, and 0.1x for 2025–2027, which is significantly below the three-year average PS of comparable companies such as Didi, Cao Cao Mobility, Pony.ai, and WeRide (Pony.ai) of 18.4x, 13.0x, and 6.6x, respectively. With Ruqi Mobility’s ride-hailing business set to expand steadily from the Greater Bay Area to across the country, and with broad room for Robotaxi platform integration with mainstream L4 technology suppliers, the firm gave it a “Buy” rating on initial coverage.

Market analysts believe that, based on the PS average-value analysis of other companies in the research report, Ruqi Mobility’s current valuation is undervalued. Coupled with the company’s future growth potential in Robotaxi, the company’s market capitalization has substantial upside potential.

**　　Ripple-mode execution in the industry is already showing results**

Public information shows that over the past two years, Ruqi Mobility’s mobility services segments—including ride-hailing and Robotaxi—have maintained rapid growth. Corresponding revenue year-over-year growth increased from 21.2% for full-year 2024 to 86% for the first half of 2025. By the end of 2025, its service coverage had reached more than 110 cities nationwide.

On March 3, Ruqi Mobility released its first positive earnings forecast since going public. It expects that in 2025 full-year profits will improve by more than 43.4% year over year, and that total revenue will exceed RMB 5 billion, representing an increase of more than 100% year over year. The company said that the increase in revenue is mainly driven by a significant increase in ride-hailing order volume, which in turn boosts ride-hailing service revenue. The improvement in profits is mainly due to comprehensive factors such as improved operational efficiency in ride-hailing and continued gross margin growth supported by an optimized cost structure.

This growth that balances both scale and efficiency is attributable to Ruqi Mobility’s “ripple mode” expansion from the early stages of its development—first deeply cultivating “high-value markets” in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, optimizing the operating system in core areas, and then starting from surrounding markets to replicate efficiently and gradually expand to multiple cities nationwide. Dongwu Securities believes that the Greater Bay Area, with its extremely high population density, higher consumer spending capacity, and ongoing reinforcement of L4 Robotaxi policies, provides a solid market base for ride-hailing and an ideal testing ground for Robotaxi. This helps the company expand the national market efficiently.

The market broadly believes that, in future competition among travel and mobility platforms, mastering compliant capacity will be the deciding factor. The research report notes that Ruqi Mobility’s ride-hailing service order scale has remained among the top ten nationwide and that it has already established a leading advantage in compliant operations. In the monthly order compliance-rate rankings for ride-hailing issued by the Ministry of Transport, the company is the mobility platform that has earned the #1 ranking the most times. As Robotaxi accelerates deployment, China’s ride-hailing market has moved from “brutal growth” to a new stage of “compliant and intelligent.” Dongwu Securities predicts that by 2030 the market will expand to a size of RMB 850.79 billion. Meanwhile, the rise of aggregation platforms will accelerate the fragmentation of traffic, and Robotaxi will become a new growth engine.

**　　Hybrid operations strengthen the ability to withstand risks during industry reshuffling**

As a disruptive technology in the mobility services sector, Robotaxi is reshaping the value logic of global mobility service platform companies.

Dongwu Securities’ analysis concludes that, driven collectively by factors including improvements in the safety of autonomous driving technology, declines in per-vehicle hardware costs, and the gradual refinement of the policy framework, Robotaxi in China will reach a market turning point in 2027. The firm also expects that the market size will reach RMB 83.1 billion in 2030 and further increase to RMB 709.6 billion by 2035.

As a mobility services platform that rolled out Robotaxi relatively early, Ruqi Mobility—starting in 2022—has adopted “a hybrid operating model of human + no driver” as its core differentiation strategy. It has built an open operational platform and developed along two lines: human-driven ride-hailing plus Robotaxi services.

Dongwu Securities is optimistic that the hybrid-operations strategy will enhance the company’s ability to withstand risks during industry reshuffling. By leveraging complementarity and coordination between human-driven and driverless vehicle fleets, Ruqi Mobility can, while meeting users’ real day-to-day mobility needs and maintaining profitability, gradually increase market acceptance of Robotaxi and the proportion of capacity. This reduces the user-experience and operational risks in the early commercialization stage of Robotaxi, while improving overall asset utilization. It effectively pushes forward the commercialization process of Robotaxi and lays a foundation for future fully driverless operations.

The research report mentions that Ruqi Mobility’s Robotaxi operating network in the Greater Bay Area has already begun to take shape and is in a phase of rapid expansion. As of the end of December 2025, the size of its Robotaxi fleet had exceeded 300 vehicles. Its service coverage has expanded to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and the Hengqin Guangdong-Macao deep cooperation zone. The safety-operated mileage of its own fleet is approaching 6 million kilometers.

In July 2025, Ruqi Mobility launched its “Robotaxi+” strategy. Over the next five years, it plans to invest in the “hundreds of millions”-level of funding to build a three-tier operations and maintenance network covering 100 cities, supporting offline operations and maintenance capabilities equivalent to 100,000 Robotaxi vehicles per year. At the same time, it will build a Robotaxi fleet of over 10,000 vehicles together with its partners.

Dongwu Securities points out that Ruqi Mobility’s “Robotaxi+” model does not develop L4 autonomous driving technology in-house. Instead, it integrates ecosystem resources such as autonomous driving companies through an entirely open operational platform to form full-chain coordination of “R&D–technology–platform.” This is expected to aggregate the advantages of different parts of the industrial chain and efficiently solve common problems in the early stage of Robotaxi industry development, thereby accelerating the large-scale deployment of autonomous driving technology.

Ruqi Mobility’s unique shareholder ecosystem is the foundation of its core competitiveness. The company was launched in 2019 by GAC Group and Tencent. It later introduced shareholders including Pony.ai, WeRide, Didi Autonomous Driving, Hengjian Holdings, Guangzhou Industry Investment and other entities, forming a “vehicle + internet + intelligent driving” “iron triangle” structure. With strong coordination across areas such as traffic, technology, government relations, and the supply chain, the company formed a closed loop for Robotaxi commercialization. At present, Ruqi Mobility has already connected with WeRide and Pony.ai, and it is also advancing the onboarding of third-party Robotaxi fleets such as Luobo Express.

(Editor: Jiao Yue ）

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