Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Yeahka Limited 2025 Annual Results Announcement Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'll now pass the call to Mr. Vincent Chan, Head of Corporate Development and Capital Markets of Yeahka. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you and hello everyone. Welcome to Yeahka's 2025 Annual Results Conference Call. Before we start, we would like to remind you that this presentation includes forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Information on general market conditions comes from a variety of sources outside of Yeahka's control. Please refer to our disclosure documents on our website's IR section for a detailed discussion of risk factors. Now, let me introduce the management team on today's call.
Luke Liu, our Founder, Chairman, and CEO, will kick off with a short overview. I will then provide a business review. John Yao, our CFO, will conclude with a financial review translated by Derek Lai, our Director of Finance, before we open the floor for questions. Without further ado, I will now turn the call over to Luke.
Thank you, Vincent. Hello, everyone. In 2025, we raised our product line and commercialization to a new level. Core EBITDA rose 52.7% year-over-year. This extended the rise of around 50% in 2024 versus 2023 in core EBITDA. Overseas expansion delivered another year of exponential growth. AI is much more embedded into Yeahka. Organizationally, we have a core competitive advantage in having a full-stack technical architecture over a wide range of products. That provides a structurally flat ground for AI to penetrate and scale up productivity last year, and in turn increase our competitiveness in the long run.
Our products, services, and brand names became more popular to clients globally. All these are testaments to our core advantage in innovation, talents, and our digital ecosystem, adding value based on but beyond payment.
We scaled each of our business with much higher quality. Our technology adoption also continued to raise revenue and break down costs significantly. With this data, we are better positioned to deliver long-term sustainable growth. First of all, we had another big year of success in overseas markets, with GPV over 4x over the last year. The merchant acquiring sector is big globally, with over $30 trillion in volume in 2024, according to industry's report. The market are also fragmented, particularly in that part of the world.
Many bottlenecks are still across verticals not satisfied with existing players. Our dedicated team of experts based locally focused on solving this, adding value with our products and service innovation. We see increasingly large room to grow and expand our propositions overseas.
Therefore, with our current trajectory overseas will be a significant contributor to our earnings in the foreseeable years to come. On top, we continue to obtain more licensed channels and launch more products, services for delivery of extra growth. Our other strategic focus is application of AI externally for customers and internally to enhance our operating efficiencies. For customers, we have launched a wide series of products. In payment, we provide merchant with apps to better monitor fraud on mobiles and serve their inquiries more automatically.
In value-added services, we provide customers with digital humans in live stream marketing, sharing their stories across regions instantly. We provided merchant AI tools to manage their online channels and the traffic flow more efficiently. Lately, we also developed AI Shop to help F&B and retail merchants easily create digital interfaces and serve customers just like a real human waiter or salesperson.
The results are customers more engaged, sales conversion increase for merchants, fewer personnel needed, and costs saved. Internally, with Yeahka, we have also scale up AI usage to drive sales, administration, and R&D efficiencies. Firstly, instead of programming enhancement, we have also launched fully automated AI-driven product development lines, including code generation and end-to-end testing being automated. It's hugely reduced the time of our product development and launch cycle.
Secondly, through development of tools operating in light of open core, we have automated many routine day-to-day operational tasks, from data analysis to customer and operational review. We can address customers' demands more precisely and more easier, good and earlier, and free up personnel for other higher-level strategic work.
Yeahka's full-stack technical architecture lay a great foundation for AI to scale in each of our services and operating practice and share synergies across our organization more effectively. Looking ahead, in our domestic markets, we will continue to maintain market leading position, increasing commercialization. The successful experience accumulated will help our global expansion faster and efficiently. Leveraging our proven operating model and talent team overseas, we will enter more markets and provide more products and strengthen such network effects globally.
As a full-stack technology platform, AI will drive further value-added service to our customers to help increase revenue, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. AI will deeply integrate into the entire business system to deliver tangible value. This strategy will strengthen the company's long-term profitability and continue to create great value for all shareholders. As such, may I pass to Vincent to give you a detailed business review. Thank you.
Thank you, Luke . Yeahka delivered stronger products, better commercialization, and more profit across all business lines last year. First, in one-stop payment services, we find operations delivered 8% year-over-year increase in revenue and 10.1% year-over-year increase in gross profit in 2025. We increased our fee rate to 12.4 basis points, leveraging our market-leading services and data-driven analyses on clients with high potential.
We targeted higher margin businesses, including app marketing services on payment transaction pages, and put more focus on key account customers who are more demanding on service scope and have higher willingness to pay. We introduced new products specifically for different verticals too, like smart checkout scale for wet market industry and sound boxes to taxi drivers. We also won customers from industries relatively new to us, such as education and tourism.
Strategic partnerships expanded, including HSBC, Citi, JP Morgan, and DBS. New merchant acquiring licenses obtained also include Japan and the U.S., in addition to the ones from Singapore, Hong Kong, and China that we already have. These set up a great base for increasing volume, revenue, and margins. In particular, our overseas payment business won more high-profile customers like BYD, OPPO, and Guess. Volume hit CNY 5 billion last year, maintaining another year of month-over-month double-digit growth.
If this current overseas business maintains its current trajectory, even assuming trending down to single digits month-over-month growth forward, it will still be year-over-year growth in terms of multiples. Currently, overseas only contributed 0.2% of overall GPV, but already 3% of profits. As volume scales in multiples, we expect profit contribution scales even faster, with 30% to 50% being our midterm target.
We look to further expand our license footprint and product suite to bring additional growth on top of those numbers mentioned. We focus on major developed economies with large TAM and attractive economics. The industry moat to this business is our merchant acquiring systems globally, comprising licensing, rails, and talent, and our know-how and innovation in addressing each and every industry's pain points with solutions. We are seeing our competitive advantages playing out wider against both local and foreign players.
Our merchant solutions are another profit growth driver. They posted 4.6% increase in revenue and 10.1% increase in gross profit in 2025. Gross margin also expanded to 91.8%. These are largely thanks to the continued penetration of AI into content generation and operations.
In particular, production of AI and digital human marketing videos almost doubled in the H2 of 2025. Our advertising transaction volume hit another record year in 2025. Yeahka's self-developed AI advertising platform enables deep AI involvement throughout the entire process, from initial planning, content production, to placement optimization based on customer needs. For each of these processes, the effect gets fed back into the system and help it plan, produce, and allocate placements more precisely.
Such intelligence model enables us to attract customers more efficiently. For example, it allows us to expand industries coverage to e-commerce, insurance, new finance, and so on to use our products. It helps us attract more large platform-based customers, including Taobao, Ctrip, and DiDi. Our services continued to win industry accolade from sector partners such as ByteDance.
As this business model increases commercialization and our footprint expands into more countries and regions, Merchant Solutions will further drive the company's overall profit growth. Our third business segment, In-Store E-Commerce Services, also delivered better products and commercialization. Our e-commerce platform much more effectively creates and matches merchants' promotions with end customers' demands. AI-generated content accounted for over half of the total in 2025. Furthermore, AI Virtual Employees also enhanced service efficiency.
Together with a business growth model leveraging extensive channels and focus on increasing customers repurchase rate, the GMV of In-Store E-Commerce grew nearly 50% versus 2024. Very importantly, it has also been delivering run rate net profit since 2025. We have accumulated much expertise in the sector, and it allows us to grow in a much more sustainable manner.
In 2025, we won well-known branded customers like Haidilao, Midea, and Shihlin. With trust in our track record and services capabilities, Douyin also selected us to help expand the in-store e-commerce industry in Hong Kong, Macau, and overseas. Notable overseas customers using our services include leading restaurant groups such as LUBUDS, Fulum, and Original Taste Workshop. Synergies increase between our payment services and our e-commerce value-added services.
While in-store e-commerce services bring up transaction hence payment volume for merchants, our foreign currency exchange channels also support local and cross-border merchants in fund collection processes. Such is a full-stack digital services proposition for merchants as a one-stop provider. As we scale our businesses internationally, we look to scale such synergies and profit delivery as well.
The quality growth of all our three businesses globally will be further enhanced by our production capacity expansion, as well as increase in operating efficiencies day to day, much driven by AI. In new product generation, process is already automated by using AI to generate codes, iterate testings, and convert ideas to tangible products from front to end. For example, some of the customer insight AI tools themselves are created by our AI. By bringing AI to the front end, we have made customers more satisfied with faster speed to delivery.
On our day-to-day operations, AI does not just assist a portion but complete tasks front to end as well. For instance, with tools similar to those running under core or open core, some of our business reviews are already actioned through AI, reducing even more manual labor than before.
We are made by the effectiveness and efficiencies produced, and we look forward to more broadly implement our AI initiatives. As such, our technical architecture has also laid a foundation for business growth in volume, revenue, and profit across our product lines and regions. We will continue to focus on increasing commercialization and product enhancements across our businesses going forward. With that, I will now turn the floor over to John, our CFO, to present a review of our business and financial results, with translation provided by Derek, our Director of Finance. Thank you.
Thank you, Vincent. [Non-English content]
Hello everyone. Let me introduce the financial performance of Yeahka for 2025.
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Our revenue increased by 7.3% from CNY 3.1 billion in 2024 to CNY 3.3 billion in 2025, mainly due to the growth of our one-stop payment service revenue.
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The GTV for domestic payment business increased by 0.1% year-on-year to CNY 2.34 trillion in 2025.
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The domestic payment fee rate further increased from 11.5 basis points in 2024 to 12.3 basis points in 2025, driving full-year revenue of one-stop payment services by 8% year-on-year to CNY 2.9 billion.
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The overseas operation continued to demonstrate growth, but growth momentum. In 2025, the group's GTV for its overseas payment business reached approximately RMB 5 billion, representing a substantial year-on-year increase of 323%.
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The overseas payment fee rate and gross profit margin were approximately 60 basis points and 50% respectively, providing significant growth momentum for the group's medium to long-term performance.
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Driven by the growth in transaction volume and revenue, the gross profit margin of both one-stop payment services and value-added services improved accordingly.
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The overall gross profit margins further improved from 23.6% in 2024 to 23.8% in 2025.
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Gross profit for 2025 was RMB 788 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 8.1%.
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Our diversified product portfolio and full-stack technical architecture facilitate deeper integration of AI into business process, enhancing operational efficiency and long-term competitiveness.
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In 2025, the group's selling, administrative and R&D related expenses decreased by 13.2% compared to 2024, demonstrating remarkable cost control effectiveness.
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Through proactive financial cost control, the finance cost in 2025 decreased significantly by 37.8% compared to 2024.
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In terms of profit, our profit for the year attributable to equity holders reached RMB 92 million in 2025, representing an increase of 11.9% compared to 2024.
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In addition, our core EBITDA reached RMB 358.2 million in 2025, representing a year-on-year increase of 52.7%, demonstrating a steady improvement in performance and continued enhancement in profitability.
Thanks John and Derek. Thank you. With that, may we open up the call to any questions from the line? Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one, one again. There may be a short pause as we compile the Q&A roster. Once again, star one, one for questions. We will now take our first question from the line of Vicky Wei of Citi. Please go ahead, Vicky, your line is now open.
[Non-English content] Thanks management for taking my question. Would management share what is the latest macro and offline payment consumption performance? Are they getting better? And how should we think of competition landscape with other payment companies? Thank you.
Thanks a lot, Vicky Wei. It's good to see you. The macro environment in the Chinese mainland is gradually recovering. There are certain areas that have been growing better than the others, particularly in the new consumption areas such as travel, services, entertainment and healthcare products. People are more willing to spend on items that bring well-being, fulfillment, safety, and nice experiences, and we think such consumption patterns should continue to grow going forward.
We are quite well positioned in some of these verticals as we are bringing all rounded industry solutions catered to the IT within these specific sectors. Because of that, we are also able to enjoy better and secure economics growing along with these clients. In terms of competitive landscape, I think large major players in the industry, including ourselves, are gaining market share, especially for larger sized customers who have more sophisticated demands and focus more on service quality, stability, and breadth of services. Larger players are more equipped to address their needs.
These customers also tend to have more needs on value added services outside of payments, which also tend to be more offered by larger service providers. For Yeahka, we are seeing increasing room to expand our market share and to enjoy better economics going forward.
Our ecosystem remains market leading in China, with hundreds of banks, agents and thousands of industry partners forming a very entrenched system that is hard to override. For example, Meituan is also one of our partners where we enable payments for merchants domestically in the Chinese mainland, so we will continue to increase collaboration all across.
Thank you.
Hope that addresses your question.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from Johnny Xie of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead, Johnny, your line is now open.
[Non-English content] I will try throwing my questions. I got three questions. First, we are aware that the TPV has been trending to stabilization. What's the management anticipates the trading volume in 2026? And the take rates, is the take rate reaching the bottom and what are the drivers for the incremental take rates?
The second question is about the merchant solution and the in-store e-commerce. What are the main drivers for the steady growth of these two segments and what's your outlook for the GP margin of these two segments? The third question is about AI development. We want to know what are the major area that company will invest in 2026, and what are the key metrics that management focus on in development AI? Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Johnny. I'll let Arnold take the take rate question and I'll address the merchant solutions and AI question.
Hi, Johnny. Hello, everyone. This is Arnold. For the first question, regarding the GPV outlook and the take rate outlook, we think that in China market, there is a gradual bottoming out of the offline consumption as well as the merchant activities. We are cautiously optimistic about the future outlook.
You know, first off, from the GPV perspective, we try to consolidate more on the channel strategy, bringing more leverage power to ourselves and take on more profits versus traditionally, you know, we've been giving out more commissions to our ecosystem partners. That's one strategy that we're focusing on. That is part of the profitability-driven strategy that we try to focus on in mainland China.
We feel pretty good about this strategy because going forward, we believe the overall payment competition landscape in China is gradually easing up. You know, we don't have the regulatory overhang we traditionally had a couple of years ago. From our perspective, we try to control what we can and gradually move on to more profitability first off by retaining more profitability to ourselves. The second thing about fee rates, I think, in 2026, the outlook is pretty optimistic, I would say, because we've already bottomed out in fee rate for a couple of years ago.
You're seeing a trajectory to gradually increase the fee rates over the last couple of years. In 2025, we got the fee rate up to 12.3 basis points in China. We think in 2026, you know, we're more confident about, you know, raising fee rates. Of course, that would be built into our overall channel strategy, you know, as we cover more channels, more segments, more diversified channel partners such as SaaS partners and the banks that we have. I think in that sense, we're pretty optimistic about that. Yeah. Thank you.
When it comes to merchant solutions, a lot of our AI products for customers lie in our merchant solutions, as well as other value-added services, including in-store e-commerce. Their growth will continue to be charged by AI, be it in the Chinese mainland or overseas. AI-related services will be another important growth driver for the company, along with our very obvious overseas growth initiative. Behind these segments are increasing blue chip customers in value-added services and merchant solutions such as Haidilao, Midea, LUBUDS, foreign names and local names and overseas names.
Our self-developed AI advertising platform enables deeper AI involvement throughout the entire process. As this model expands to overseas strategic partners and our business footprint expands into more countries and regions, they will definitely further drive Yeahka's overall profit growth.
AI is a very important initiatives for the company. We made a lot of progress last year, both on products as well as on operations. The impact on revenue and cost savings will be huge. On products, AI example is our AI Shop, our AI-generated marketing content, and our digital influencers. All these are bringing increased revenue to Yeahka as they bring more convenience, higher quality, and better products within shorter timeframe to our customers. Now, over 40% of our marketing video production is already AI-driven, and we expect that to increase.
The product creation cycle will continue to be shortened with AI, as well as making all these more efficient. In the production processes, we automate code generation and testing iteration using AI as well. That's a significant upgrade from co-piloting or other programming enhancements. Take value-added services as an example again.
The efficiency of human personnel has increased over 60% in content production. Even in our day-to-day operations, we also use AI employees to finish tasks, whether it's data sourcing, compilation, analysis, report generation, or everything from front to end. AI is already automating these work streams for us like real humans do. In the process, we save a lot of manual labor or tedious work that frees up resources on more important human work. Take payments fraud detection as an example.
The accuracy and the intensity of work done by AI 24/7 has enhanced our process efficiency a lot. That's how we save another 13% of cost in our SG&A for yet another year in 2025. As a native tech company, we think we can do more in this regard and continue to innovate.
Our edge is our tech architecture that is proprietary and that goes through each of our product and business lines. In the application of AI, we have much more leverage in scaling up efficiently without the burden of the past or reliance on a particular line. We for sure will continue to produce more AI products and services and bring our efficiencies to the next level this year.
If you look at our core EBITDA, which reflects true status of business operations, it increased over 50% in 2025 after another 50% growth in 2024. We as an organization have been consistent in becoming more effective and efficient, and we will trend towards that direction going forward too. Thank you, Johnny.
Thank you. A reminder before we take our next question. Please press star one if you would like to ask a question now. Next, we have Yining Tang of CICC. Please ask your question, Yining. Your line is now open.
[Non-English content] Okay. I have three questions. First, how do you see the future growth of overseas GPV and its long-term contribution to revenue profits? Secondly, what other growth areas do you see for merchant solution and in-store e-commerce, and how will they contribute to revenue and profit over the long term? Third, what are your plans for overseas payment and stablecoin license? Thank you.
Thanks, Yining. Good to see you over here. For the first question, regarding overseas outlook, we expect overseas GPV to maintain growing in multiples every year for the next five years. We aim to grow the business maintaining overseas markets fee rates as well as margins, and we do so with expenses well kept under our strict ROI evaluation for each sales and project. So that on a net profit basis, it will be a real significant mover to Yeahka's overall bottom line for many years to come.
We are confident about this five-year plan as our existing overseas business already exceeds budgets across GPV, revenue, and profit metrics in January, February, and March. We also haven't incorporated new products, new markets, or geographies for conservative purposes.
Now, besides payment, value-added services outlook, we are also very optimistic, as you mentioned, about AI adoption. It will continue to drive the growth of this business. To give you a sense, our AI video transaction volume more than doubled in the H2 of 2025 versus the H1 of the year already. This year, for example, in-store e-commerce segment, we will also use AI to automate more content production for customers from front to end.
As we grow overseas with both payment and value-added services, we expect synergies between them for customers to increase, to maintain call it 10% target of overseas revenue being value-added services based on our current ratio, also in the Chinese mainland, to be conservative. The margins of these businesses have been high in our operations.
They are currently at over 90%, and we expect them continue to be high going forward given the AI component. Value-added services with the support of both overseas and AI initiatives will be increasingly important growth drivers for our products. When it comes to our overseas expansion licenses and all that, we continue to expand our services and channels coverage to stay at the forefront of innovation and broadening our footprints geographically. We are really expanding in many fronts. We continue to invest in licenses in selected areas.
Progressive work with various regulators and ecosystem players overseas. In terms of geographies, we continue to prefer economically developed markets as they provide very favorable context to grow healthily and sustainably. In terms of product sets, besides stablecoins, online payments is another interesting trend worth following.
The segment is global by nature and the market is huge. I mentioned about over $30 trillion in terms of market size for offline merchant acquiring based on third-party reports. That is offline only, and it doesn't even count the online option, to give you a sense of the market that we are looking at.
Right. This is Arnold. Just to add on to those points, we think the total addressable market that we're looking at right now overseas is tremendous. For the countries that we already have licenses in, we are looking at a $15 trillion market size. That is, to some third-party research, about 3x to 4x of that in China. We're looking at a tremendous size overseas where we already have a head start. Over the next few years, you will see I wouldn't say overly aggressive, but very assertive growth strategy in terms of GPV. We have on-the-ground teams in all locations that we have licenses in. We use asset-light models.
We first cooperate with local banks, and then we also cooperate with local e-wallets and card networks to expand in an asset-light mode. You would expect us to expand our overseas business quite gradually. For the value-add services, just like Vincent just mentioned, we think and our top management already reiterated within our internal meetings that we are going to keep exploring AI-empowered solutions and processes within ourselves.
With that being said, we can unleash 10x , if not 100x , of efficiency boost for each and one of our employees. You know, we've all already seen what AI can do in the last year, especially in 2026. Within ourselves, we think product innovation, research and development, you know, market research, new product trials and all those points are all the things that we can explore, we can empower by AI. I think the future we're at an inflection point where in the future our to-be business nature would empower us to be one of the best or first movers to leverage AI tools, especially, you know, AI agents and so on.
That's something that I want to add. In terms of a stablecoin plan, just as what Vincent mentioned, we are closely monitoring that, and we also have online payments that we try to explore. I think the room to grow is tremendous. You know, coming from a Chinese background, we have the Chinese know-hows that to some point, some of the products and technologies that we have already far exceed what we are seeing in the market in Southeast Asia and beyond. We are very optimistic about what we can do overseas. Thanks.
Thank you. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone keypad. A moment while we wait for attendees to register for questions they may have. That's star one, one for questions. We will now take our next question from Yuxuan Chen of Huatai. Yuxuan, please ask your question. Your line is now open.
[Non-English content] Let me do the translation. Thank you, Vincent, for taking my question. I got one question. I would like to ask about the competitive landscape of the overseas payment business in the local market, and what is the company's advantages are. That's all. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Yuxuan. Great question. Our latest volume growth overseas is also very strong, at about teens% growth month-over-month, continuing to take a lot of market share overseas. Versus competitors, local or foreign. We are quite confident on delivering annual growth in terms of multiples going forward, just based on our existing overseas markets alone. We are doing so with profitability maintaining high, i.e., fee waiver of about 60 basis points and gross profit margin around 50%.
It appears a few times higher than those in the Chinese mainland, as you can see. When multiplied, they are very solid growth drivers. Competitive edge overseas really lies on our service quality and our ability to solve pain points. While they're on price, we think that is a very sustainable game plan, adding value to customers and local partners, including banks, with whom we co-create together, serving clients better. Effectively, we are standing in a sweet spot, more competing within the third-party non-bank provider segment. There's a long tail of smaller players, start-ups, et cetera, in these segments overseas.
Our edge against them is to make good use of our scale, our products, our licenses, our user status, our compliance status, and a wide network of partners that we have built over time overseas that is very hard for smaller players to replicate. On top of which, we also offer value-added services beyond payments. They drive digital payments overseas.
For example, a local restaurant that we serve wants our in-store e-commerce services to attract tourists visiting them, and we can provide foreign payment acceptance methods to help them take payments from these tourists as well. That's what we call a complete solutions. It forms a virtuous, synergistic cycle that reinforces itself, bringing us increased volume overseas.
Once again, to ask a question, please press star one, one on your telephone keypad. Okay, I'm showing no further questions, and that concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the conference back to the management for any additional or closing comments.
Thank you everyone again for joining our results today. We are now ending the call. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us directly. Our contact, together with other information in relation to our results, can be found on our website at www.yeahka.com. Thank you and see you again soon.
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your line.