Earnings Call Transcript - WDH Q4 2025

Tracy Lee, Investor Relations

Good morning, everyone. This is Tracy Lee from Waterdrop Investor Relations. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to Waterdrop's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. Please note that discussion today will include forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to those outlined in our public filings with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable law. Also, this call includes discussion of certain non-GAAP measures. Please refer to our earnings release for a reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP. Joining us today on the call are Mr. Chairman and CEO; Mr. GM of Insurance Business; Mr. Head of Finance Department; and Ms. Board Secretary. We'll be happy to take some questions at the end of the conference call. Now, I would like to introduce our CEO.

Unknown CEO, CEO

Dear investor analysts, thank you for joining Waterdrop's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025 earnings conference call. Looking back at 2025, we executed firmly on our AI-driven insurance strategy, delivering tangible progress in both AI application and business growth. Our financial performance was robust, with significant top line and bottom line expansion that further solidified our core fundamentals. For the fiscal year 2025, our revenue reached CNY 3.98 billion, up 43.5%, and net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders reached CNY 570 million, with a year-on-year growth of 54.8%. Notably, we met our market guidance and have now achieved GAAP profitability for 16 consecutive quarters. Our Intertek segment announced revenue growth of 51.3% and an operating margin of roughly 18%. Additionally, our LLM integration significantly enhanced the value of our medical performance platform, which has responded to 3.68 million patients. Our digital team in client solutions enrolled over 4,000 patients this year. Reflecting the strong performance in the second half of 2025, our Board approved a cash dividend of CNY 0.03 per ADS, totaling $10.8 million, to be paid in late April to early May to shareholders of record as of April 24, 2026, U.S. ET time. Our share repurchase program remains on track with 60.7 million ADS repurchased for about $118 million. Regarding technology plans, we are focused on becoming an AI-native company. By the end of 2025, we filed 72 LLM-related patent applications, including international ones. Throughout the year, we deployed AI technologies and virtual interactions across all core workflows, from acquisition and conversation management to customer service, quality control, and R&D, making every stage production-ready for operational gains, unified under our AI platform. Beyond AI integration, we are pioneering open collaboration frameworks with our Guardian AI corporate product, which allows different AI agents to communicate and collaborate autonomously. Initial demos have validated its core workflow, facilitating multi-round dialogues and automation between AI agents. In terms of ESG, we partnered with 19 organizations to launch over 15,500 products, gaining global recognition for our policy reduction efforts and upgrading our ESG rating to A+. As we approach our 10th anniversary in 2026, our goal is to evolve from using AI to becoming a truly AI-enabled company, reconstructing our entire value chain to embed AI as a competitive advantage. We anticipate sustaining momentum this year with moderately higher marketing and AI investments, aiming for double-digit growth in both revenue and profit. Now, I will pass the floor to introduce the development of our insurance business.

Xiaoying Xu, Head of Insurance Business

Thanks. In the fourth quarter, our insurance business maintained strong momentum, with related income increasing by 125% year-on-year to CNY 1.31 billion, and operating profit rising 42% year-over-year. We have improved our real-time user monetization through better sales deployment, enabling us to capture potential user attributes with nearly real-time accuracy during high concurrency traffic. This capability allows for quicker updates, significantly enhancing the precision of our high-quality traffic for future growth and establishing a solid foundation for our first-year premium growth. For product supply, we launched the market’s first insurance version 2.0 this quarter, which includes zero deductible options that cover long-term medical expenses at affiliated medical centers. Additionally, our product for pre-existing conditions experienced robust growth, achieving a first-year premium growth rate of 7%. Our disability insurance brought in approximately $100 million, affirming our long-term strategy. Notably, AI has been integrated into all aspects of our user services. Our AI Pro insurance engine on the mini-program led to a 33% sequential increase in premium, while our AI medical insurance specialists facilitated over 50 million interactions, marking a 145% quarter-over-quarter rise. We have enhanced our standardized health product offerings, generating additional premiums exceeding 1 million. For empowering human agents, our large banner copilot achieved over 370,000 interactions this quarter. AI solutions are now fully operational and completed the fourth quarter without any core module issues. This infrastructure supports our financial planners, integrating the share of facial accounts and multiple programs for product recommendations, business facilitation, and user-agent matching. We have opened this platform to our current insurers to improve efficiency across the industry. Our AI customer service agent handled a significant volume of requests, and our copilot increased efficiency to 2.5 times that of standard manual processes. This concludes the update on our insurance business for the fourth quarter. Now, I will hand it over to the Board Secretary to introduce the advancements in our metering and health services.

Unknown Board Secretary, Board Secretary

Thank you. As of the annual report, approximately 490 million people have utilized our medical platform, resulting in a total of $72.3 million in transactions. This quarter, we maintained strong platform governance and user experience, enhancing risk control in two key areas: to protect user privacy, we upgraded our system using large language models to identify specific data and apply dynamic measures in real-time. Critical information, including user IDs, bank accounts, and medical records, is now secured. We have automated protection and marketing processes to ensure complete security for user data across our platform, effectively preventing any risk of information leaks. Additionally, we combined medical analytics with credential validation to accurately identify the nature of medical interactions, ensuring timely and precise delivery for our patients. On the user service front, we launched a standardized system to improve our service structures and retention guidelines. These initiatives reinforce our commitment to concurrency and ensure full user involvement. Moving to the healthcare business, our platform is experiencing quality growth, with 224 pharmaceutical companies enrolled and a record number of patients participating in various initiatives. This quarter, we reached a significant milestone: our proprietary patient matching technology, the first in China, was granted a national invention patent. By combining deep neural networks with advanced data processing, this technology enabled end-to-end patient matching and clinical trial filtering, greatly streamlining the patient recruitment process. This approach reduced the typical review period to just 2 minutes, greatly improving our processing speed. Furthermore, we significantly expanded our accounts and will continue to grow our patient base in complex and rare conditions. Revenue from digital clinical trials increased by 30% this quarter compared to the previous three, laying a solid foundation for sustainable growth. Now I will pass the floor to our Head of Finance to discuss our financial performance for this quarter.

Unknown Head of Finance, Head of Finance

Thank you. Hello, everyone. I will now walk you through our financial highlights for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025. Before I go into the details, please be reminded that all numbers quoted here will be in RMB, and please refer to our earnings release for detailed information on our financial performance, both on a year-on-year and quarter-over-quarter basis. In the fourth quarter, our performance improved significantly with quarterly revenue more than doubling year-on-year to RMB 1.41 billion, up 105.5%. For the full year 2025, revenue reached RMB 3.98 billion, up 43.5% year-on-year, concluding the year on a strong note. The insurance business generated approximately RMB 3.58 billion, up 51.3% year-on-year. The other segments accounted for about 10.1% of total revenue, with medical performance services generating RMB 260 million and insurance income accounting for RMB 118 million. Operating costs for the quarter reached RMB 680 million, up 109.2% year-on-year, driven by a RMB 320 million increase in referral and service fees. Fourth-quarter operating expenses rose to RMB 1.33 billion, up 109.4% year-on-year. For the full year, operating costs and expenses increased by 39.1%, outpacing the revenue growth. Selling and marketing expenses were approximately RMB 510 million, an increase of 178.4% year-on-year, with significant improvement in customer acquisition efficiency. We proactively scaled up our investments, resulting in considerable year-on-year growth in marketing expenses for third-party traffic channels. General and administrative expenses were RMB 77.1 million, with a modest year-on-year increase of 4.6%, primarily due to adjustments in allowances, partially offset by a reduction in personnel costs of RMB 6.5 million. Research and development expenses were around RMB 66.2 million, up 21.9% year-on-year, driven by an increase in personnel costs and service fees. Profit margins improved significantly year-on-year. Net profit attributed to the company's ordinary shareholders for the quarter was RMB 153 million, up 62.7%. For the full year, net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders reached about RMB 570 million, up 4.8%. The company maintained a strong cash position, supporting our future growth initiatives. This concludes our financial overview for the fourth quarter and fiscal year. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we will conclude today's conference call. We do thank you for joining. Have a good day.