WeRide Inc.

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Rewrite's third quarter 2025 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The company will be hosting a question-and-answer session after management preparation. Based on today's event, it's being recorded. The company's unaudited financial and operating results were released by the Newswire earlier today and are currently available online. Joining us today are WeWrite's founder, chairman, and CEO, Dr. Tony Han, and CFO and head of international, Ms. Jennifer Lee. Before we continue, I would like to refer you to the safe harbor statement in the company's earnings press release, which also applies to this call as today's call will include four working statements, including WeWrite strategies and future plans. These forward-looking statements are made under the same other provisions of the U.S. Private Security Certification Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. The company's actual results could differ naturally from those stated or implied by this forwarding statement as a result of their important factors, and please refer to these factor sections of the company's Form 20F found with the SEC and announcements on the website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the full disclosure of these risk factors. The company does not assume any obligations to update any following statements except as required under applicable law. Please note that all numbers stated in management prepared remarks are in R&B terms and we will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more truly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. With that, I'll now turn the call over to the company's founder, chairman, and CEO, Dr. Tony Han. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I would like to begin by highlighting some of the key milestones we achieved this past quarter. Q3 was a period of extraordinary progress while we were right. Most notably, we made history in Abu Dhabi by securing the world's first city-level fully driverless robot taxi commercial permit outside the United States. We have already started the driverless operation through Uber, which I'm going to detail in the later slides this week. With our recent expansion to Belgium, and our inaugural driverless robot taxi license in Switzerland, V-Ride has become the only company with autonomous driving permits for eight countries. By October, we have developed L4 fleets in 11 countries and more than 30 cities with over 1,600 L4-level autonomous driving vehicles in operation worldwide. let's take a look at our third quarter accomplishments so uh let's let's let's let's turn into uh let's turn into a of derby slides okay next slide please So, as mentioned earlier, WeRide has been officially approved to provide full driverless commercial robot taxi service in the UAE's capital of Derby. This landmark authorization removes the requirements for in-car safety officer and demonstrates the regulator's strong confidence in our technology. Following this approval, WeRide and Uber directly launched the region's first fully driverless wire charging robot taxi service this week, starting from Yas Island and with a city-wide rollout underway. And next page. Our commercial operation at Abu Dhabi has begun in last December. Our service now covers roughly 50% of the city's core area. In half of 12 hours, our single vehicle can complete up to 20 trips per day. I think this is a quite exciting progress. In the mid-term, we aim to extend our service hours to 24-7, increase vehicle utilization to more than 25 trips per day, and improve human-to-vehicle ratio to 1 to 10. will lead us to a very healthy unit economics. We believe Abu Dhabi will set a global benchmark for large-scale and commercially viable robot taxi operation. And with all of these numbers, I think our unit economics is very, very healthy and can be profitable. So I just want to emphasize, you know, this kind of breakthrough is quite exciting, and we worked so hard for a whole year to achieve this full driverless robot taxi operation in Abu Dhabi, and this is the first city level outside of the United States who are capable of first city level robot taxi service out of the United States, and it is actually provided through Uber platform. So with all of these important factors, this is unparalleled, and we are so excited that we are making history. Now let's talk about our current operation in Dubai. In September, we secured a self-driving vehicle trial permit from Dubai's roads and transport authority and have begun road testing for our driverless operation in Dubai. Our goal is to launch supervised trial on Uber this year and the driverless commercial operation in the year of 2026. I mean, next year we are going to provide driverless robot tech service in Dubai. Next page, please. Then we are going to talk about our current operation in Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, we began offering robo-taxi rides through Uber in October, making our robo-taxi service first and only publicly accessible robo-taxi service in the kingdom. With our development in the three largest cities in Mideast, that is Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, We have more than 100 robo-taxi vehicles in the Mideast region. The launch of driverless operation of Derby is paving the way to scale the fleet to more than 500 vehicles by next year and to tens of thousands by 2030. So we are very excited and very confident and very optimistic about our full driverless robo-taxi operation in Mideast. But that's not only our operation region, and I want to talk about East Asia and Europe. First, in Singapore, together with Grab, we received approval from the Land Transport Authority for both robo-taxi and the robo-bus in the area called the Punggol District. We plan to increase our AV test volume by four times by the end of this year. integrating our technology into Grab speed management and the routing system so that in future we can provide driverless robot taxi through Grab in Singapore, just what we have done in Abu Dhabi through Uber. Actually, all of these efforts will pay the groundwork for commercial service in the next phase. And then let's talk about Switzerland. In Europe, the expansion in Switzerland continues to lead our robo-taxi deployment. We received the country's first driverless robo-taxi license, enabling our autonomous operation in the fertile region. A full driverless public service is expected to be launched in the first half of 2021. That is our current operation in Europe and in East Asia and Singapore. And now let's talk about China. In our China market, we continue to expand and innovate. As we scale our commercial fleets, we also launched a 24-7 driverless commercial service in the Huangpu district at Guangzhou. This is an area of 150 square kilometers. As of October, we have deployed more than 300 robo-taxi in Guangzhou and over 100 in Beijing. For all of these services, you can hail a driverless robo-taxi in this region through our WeRideGo app. User value is kept very close to our heart, and we recently introduced China's first free pickup and drop-off feature for RoboTaxi service, we call it to-do service, allowing our system to intelligently recommend optimal boarding locations. This greatly improved both operational flexibility and user experience, which is well captured by our operational data. In November, each RoboTaxi completed up to 25 They did trips in Guangzhou and the 23 in Beijing, which is clear evidence of accelerated adoption. And then, you know, this is all our current exciting progress about RoboTaxi. Next, let's talk about our other applications. First, RoboBus. Okay, next page. Our RoboBus obtained Belgium's first level four test permit, and we launched our operation in Leuven, making Belgium the 11th country covered by our service. In Guangzhou, after serving more than one million passengers since 2021, we received an offer, received an order for another, for additional 100 midsize local buses. This is a very exciting achievement. Actually, this is a newly developed RoboBus. In Hong Kong, we established a partnership with Guangchong Bus Holding to deploy more than 500 Level 4 vehicles over the next three years. And for our L2 Plus Level 8 ASUS system, WeRide and Bosch achieved a major milestone in November with the start of production of vPilot 3.0. This is an end-to-end system. It's just like what Tesla has achieved through their FSD system. Our vPilot is totally comparable to what Tesla can do with FSD. The vPilot 3.0 will debut with the refreshed Cheryx CDS and ET model. and existing owners will receive OTA upgrades. With this kind of new feature, every owner of Chery Exceed ES and ET can enjoy the experience of Tesla's FSD. With this exceptional end-to-end system, WePilot has also been selected as the major add-on system provider by Guangzhou Automotive Group, GAC, for several of their passenger car models. That part is actually a very exciting progress, demonstrating V-Ride are not only capable of doing L4 level robotaxi, but also are capable of doing L2++ level add-ons for a massive production car. And this page actually shows, summarizes our footprint in the global. Actually, V-Ride's strategy prioritizes a balanced development in a global market. I want to explain this slide a little bit. You can see in these 11 countries, we have different levels of operation. We have tested or we can operate it without the driver. They are showing in the legend. product offering has maximized the value of our strategy, making us the only company whose technology is available in the 11 countries shown here. So we actually have a wide spectrum of applications and service available for the global market. Next, let me discuss about the backbone of our technology. This is called We Run One Universal Platform. By starting from supporting L4 applications alone in the early days, WeRise 1 has gradually grown into a more powerful platform that empowers the full spectrum from L2 to L4 while continuously breeding new tools and systems. One of the most prominent is our world model, WeRise Genesis. In our Genesys model, you can see Genesys is a new platform and will allow autonomous vehicles to be tested in a digital twin of the real world, safely, efficiently, and at a large scale. It features the data loop, algorithm loop, and the simulation validation loop that are essential for scalable autonomy. This is our world model, and it's seemingly technology advantage. Our world model can be seamlessly integrated into an end-to-end system, and our L4 system can leverage on the data we collected from our L2-level data. So this genesis form as the core flywheel, actually, we call it a double flywheel. We can actually leverage on L2-plus plus-plus level massive production car data to improve our robo taxi. In turn, our robo taxi data with redundancy can help us to boost the performance I want to emphasize, in this world, there's only one company, WeWrite, can do so. On one hand side, we have a large-scale robo-taxi fleet, make WeWrite capable of doing leading robo-taxi service like Waymo and other companies like they can do in the U.S. so that we can actually capture all the characteristics of food driverless operations. At the same time, we write supply 3.0 and very advanced data system comparable to the FSD of Tesla, and we can leverage on mass production car data and collect all this kind of data in a very broad sense in all kinds of scenarios to help us to improve the performance of global taxi. We believe we can combine the benefits of L4 and L2+. This hybrid architecture enhances adaptability, reliability, safety, and transparency, ultimately enabling robust commercial deployment. We look forward to sharing more about this advantage soon. In summary, Q3 was a quarter of exceptional execution. We expand our global leadership and we translated technology innovation into commercial reality. With that, I will handle the call over to our CFO, Jennifer, to discuss our financial performance. Jennifer, please go ahead to discuss about the financial numbers.

Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Before we dive into the third quarter financials, I want to highlight that all figures are in RMB and comparisons are year-over-year unless otherwise stated. Now let's discuss our third quarter financial performance. We delivered a total revenue of 171 million with a year-over-year growth of 144%, driven by our continued fleet expansion and increasing service penetration. The revenue growth also reflects a significant milestone we have achieved during this quarter. supported by our advanced technology, robust deployment, and operational capabilities. Our revenue came from both product revenue and service revenue. Product revenue delivered strong growth of 428% to 79 million in this quarter, an encouraging result driven by the increased sale of our robo-taxi and robo-buses. Service revenue grew 67% to 92 million in Q3. supported by an increase of $29 million from intelligent data service and an increase of $8 million in autonomous driving-related operational and technical services. Service revenue has surpassed product revenue in this quarter, demonstrating a continual growth, momentum, and healthy business structure. Among our product lines, what really stood out in Q3, same as in the last two quarters, was our robo-taxid businesses. Robo-taxid revenue increased 761% year-over-year to $35 million in Q3, accounting for 21% of total revenue in this quarter. With our new federal permit in UAE, we are the first and only robo-taxi company that have begun food driverless robo-taxi operation in UAE. Removing in-car safety officer is a critical milestone from a financial perspective. which will enable our RoboTaxi service to achieve uneconomic breakeven. The quality of our growth is also compelling. Group-level growth profit increased 1,124% to $56 million for the third quarter, with a group-level growth margin of 33%, demonstrating our industry-leading growth margin as our business continues to grow. We aim to keep delivering business value along with our global strategy. Operating expense decreased 51% to $436 million, with R&D expense accounting for 73% of the total operating expenses. To break down further, R&D expense increased by 24% to $316 million in the third quarter of 2025, compared to the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation, R&D expense grew 39% to $288 million as we further strengthened our global data compliance and advanced R&D efforts for our pre-installed Robotaxi. The increase in R&D expense was primarily due to an increase of $31 million in service fee for R&D projects, an increase of $21 million in personnel-related expense from headcount increase, and an increase of $23 million in material consumption and depreciation and amortization expenses. Administrative expense decreased by 84% to $100 million in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Excluding share-based compensation, administrative expense increased by 23% to $74 million The increase was primarily due to an increase of $6 million in professional service fee, mainly related to legal compliance service, and an increase of $4 million in personnel costs as we continue to build necessary supporting functions to grow our business. Selling expenses increased 23% to $19 million in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation, selling expense increased by a third 36% to 19 million, which was well below the sales increase. Our commitment to R&D is the backbone of our strategy. We will continue to direct our resource there to pioneer the industry innovation and keep building our competitive advantage. Alongside this, we will strategically grow our global team. It's a clear focus on a region that has an accelerating adoption of L4 solutions. This ensures that we have a world-class talent needed to support our business expansion. Our net loss narrowed by 71% to $307 million in the third quarter of 2025. On a non-IFRS basis, adjusted net loss increased 15% to $276 million. largely due to an ongoing R&D investment and broader operational support required for the expansion of our business. As of September 30, 2025, we had $4.5 billion in cash and cash equivalent and time deposit, $926 million in investment in wealth management products, and $18 million in restricted cash. We had short-term bank borrowing of $245 million, Our current liquidity reserve, along with the proceeds from our recent Hong Kong due primary listing in November, have enabled us with a resilient position for our R&D-focused strategy and our globalization deployment process progress. Our fully driverless robotaxi commercial permit in Abu Dhabi is not just a local milestone. It's a scalable blueprint for the global industry, It demonstrates a viable path for city-level food driverless cooperation outside the U.S., along with the potential for profitable unit economic and major international markets. Our strategy is to scale this model globally. We have the complete package, the technology, the operational experience, a proven city record, and regulatory trust. In the next five years, we will achieve large-scale L4 deployments, creating a sustainable business and delivering tremendous value of autonomous driving to the shareholders. With that, operator, we're now ready to take on some questions.