Zhihu Inc.

The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under the actual law. Additionally, the discussion today will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures for a compilation purpose only. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings release issued earlier today. A webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our IR website at ir.jufu.com. This quarter, Victor Zhou, Zhou Yun's AI agent, will once again deliver the prepared remarks in English on his behalf. Victor is due in training, so we appreciate your patience as he continues to improve. Victor, please go ahead.

Thank you, Yolanda.

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining Zhihu third quarter 2025 earnings call. I am Victor Zhou, and I am pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Zhou Yuan, founder, chairman, and CEO of Zhihu. The third quarter marked another meaningful step toward our goal of achieving non-gap breakeven on a full year basis. As our structural optimization initiatives continue to take effect, we further refined our service offerings and balanced commercialization with community health. We also maintained disciplined cost control and improved operating efficiency. As a result, our non-gap operating loss narrowed by 16.3% year-over-year in the third quarter. At the same time, our community ecosystem continues to strengthen user mix and engagement improved, while MAUs increased modestly from the second quarter. Daily time spent continued to trend higher year over year and quarter over quarter. Our users and creators remain highly active, supporting improved core user retention and a steady stream of reliable, high-quality content on the platform. With our high-quality content, expert network and AI capabilities working greater synergy, we are accelerating our agentic AI upgrades to deliver trusted and differentiated experiences to users both within and beyond the community. As the AI industry enters a new phase of real-world integration and accelerated deployment, Zhihu as a trusted source of high-quality content and data upstream of Chinese LLMs and AI applications is gaining prominence creating expanding opportunities for collaboration. With rising high-quality content, a highly active base of professional creators, and accelerating AI integration, our community ecosystem radiates vitality. Our competitive mode of trusted content continues to strengthen. In the third quarter, daily creation of high-quality content increased by over 25% year over year, with professional AI-focused content up by more than 30%. compared to the same period last year. As AI technologies and applications rapidly advance in China, Zhihu remains a go-to platform for frontline engineers and researchers for sharing and lively discussions. AI-focused content covers a range of subjects, including deep technical analysis, innovative product applications, emerging industry trends, personal growth, career development, and a growing array of emerging topics driven by rapid AI adoption. From the technical debates between Minimax and Moonshot AI over efficient attention, which sparks heated discussions on Zhihu and highlighted China's diverse approaches to LLM innovation, to the in-depth engineering analyzes of new models shared by leading companies, Zhihu has become a trusted source for authentic first-hand exchanges. These discussions have made our platform a place where AI innovations are first interpreted, validated, and shared. Meanwhile, we continue to strengthen our trustworthy content ecosystem through ongoing improvements to content governance mechanisms and recommendation algorithms. Professional creators are a vital force in our community. In the third quarter, daily active high-tier creators increased significantly on both year-over-year and sequential basis. The number of verified honored creators also grew by 29% year over year. Engagement among AI-focused creators also continues to strengthen. Zhihu now brings together more than 16 million continuous learners and 3.56 million proficient creators in science and AI, and 150,000 ecosystem builders. These contributors not only add consistent, high-quality input to our AI content ecosystem, but also show significant potential as future service providers for enterprises. Beyond science and AI, creator activity in humanities and social sciences also remains strong across the platform. In September, we launched the co-benefit, co-creation initiative, Gong Yi Gong Chuang Ji Hua, in collaboration with leading institutions such as Alibaba Foundation, Tencent Charity Foundation, One Foundation, and Greenpeace, alongside psychologists, medical experts, and the writers. This initiative generated a wide range of high-quality content across disability rights, mental health, environmental protection, and more, drawing over 80 million views. We also hosted the 2025 Zhihu Humanities season, Zhihu Renwenji event, which brought creators together through a blend of online and offline engagement. The campaign attracted nearly 30 influential creators driving a 7.5% quarter-over-quarter increase in creator activity in the humanities category and generating 5.82 million topic views, reinforcing Zhihu's professional influence and cultural relevance. To better support professional creators, we continue to enhance the content creation and distribution experience. Our ideas and products support knowledge-based expression from high-tier creators, and enables more diverse short-form content creation among mid-tier creators. As a result, average daily content volume and interactions increased by 21%, 7%, and 33.1%, quarter over quarter, respectively. Our Circles product also continues to serve as a focused space for users with shared interests to gather and interact with average daily views more than tripling sequentially during the quarter, We also continue to advance our agentic AI upgrades across the community. From a product perspective, Zhihu Zhida evolved into the agentic mode at the end of September, delivering more accurate and smarter search results. Most notably, Zhihu Zhida now serves as a helpful partner for deep thinking and creativity, capable of understanding user intent, performing multi-step reasoning, and synthesizing information across research, learning, and content creation. Our advancements in agentic AI are also amplifying the value of our creators. By strengthening the attribution of content to trusted creators across the knowledge base and the search, AI generated responses. Now sites verify the knowledge during the reasoning stage, significantly reducing hallucination and improving trust. This strengthens creator influence within the generative AI landscape and gives Zhihu a distinct advantage as a trusted content provider in an emerging AI ecosystem. Now moving on to commercialization. In the third quarter, our commercialization continued to recover on a healthier base with total revenues reaching RMB 6589 million in the third quarter. We also made a notable progress in exploring new monetization avenues by leveraging our core strengths. Let's take a closer look at our performance by business unit. In the third quarter, marketing services revenue was RMB 1894 million. Notably, the year-over-year decrease narrowed, indicating the bottoming out of our adjustment cycle. We expect marketing services revenue to begin growing on a sequential basis in the fourth quarter. During the quarter, we made a solid progress in both optimizing our client mix and upgrading our advertising products. We continue to optimize client mix by deepening our focus on high value accounts with our brand power and expanding commercial IP, driving strong uptake from enterprise clients, particularly in technology and other high value verticals. In late September, we hosted the Tech Club Conference, bringing together AI experts and some of the most influential tech creators from the Zhihu community to explore the latest developments and future applications of AI. The event showcased the technology's transforming role in everyday life and our unique ability to connect professional content with meaningful brand engagement, further expanding our high-value client base. Through the Zhihu platform, Leading companies such as Gray, China Mobile, Huawei, and iFlytech further strengthened their brand positioning in technological innovation and product excellence. Backed by the credibility of our brand and strong commercial efficiency created by professional discussions across our community, we made a solid progress in acquiring new clients across diverse sectors such as automotive, consumer, and healthcare. This quarter, we also further upgraded a wide range of our commercial products by integrating AI more deeply across our portfolio. Our dual ecosystem optimization and product efficiency engines drove a significant increase in positive feedback from clients. For example, we launched the upgraded CCS for idea scenarios and introduced the product to more clients. By offering this short content plus precise scenarios format, It bridges authentic experiences and purchase decisions for brands and merchants. At the same time, it makes content consumption and the decision-making for users substantially more efficient. We're also seeing rising demand from clients to improve brand and product presentation in AI generated answers. Leveraging our trusted content and the high citation rate across the internet, we launched our new GEM marketing solution in early November. This new solution provides core insights such as visibility across AI platforms and citation analytics. Leading technology clients we have worked with include Lenovo, iFlytech, Vivo, and Proya. We have received a positive endorsement as we help enhance both their SEO and geo performance for brands and new products, looking ahead with a healthier ecosystem, stronger client base, and more robust service offerings. we will continue to leverage AI to drive a steady recovery and a long-term growth in our marketing services business. And now for our paid membership business. In the third quarter, average monthly paid members increased by 8.1% sequentially to 14.3 million, with revenue reaching RMB 386 million. Our efforts to boost member retention and ARPU through diversified initiatives continue to generate positive feedback from both creators and users. The Yanyan Story long-form writing marathon came to a successful close in late October after a six-month campaign, generating tens of thousands of submissions in the third quarter alone. This initiative opened up new development pathways for aspiring creators and provided a steady pipeline of content for our library and future IP development. At the same time, Voice live streaming saw a further improvement in paid conversion rates. We also unlocked further commercial potential for our IP adaptations in China and overseas. During the quarter, revenue from IP licensing maintained its triple digit growth rate year over year and generated high double digit growth quarter over quarter. Year to date, revenue has nearly doubled compared with the same period last year. In mid-October, Yanyan Story debuted at the Frankfurt Book Fair, showcasing Chinese digital literature on a global stage for the first time. It also drew coverage from the UK magazine, The Bookseller, which noted the new growth path for Chinese short-form digital literature in the international markets. By the end of October, Yanyan Story licensed more than 100 titles for publication across major Asian markets, including Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. A number of works have also been adapted into short dramas for overseas markets and performed well, reflecting the growing popularity of Chinese short-form content abroad. Meanwhile, Yanyan Story has established partnerships with international platforms such as Mobile Reader and Good Novel to translate works into English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Indonesian, and other languages, further expanding its international reach. Going forward, we will pursue a diversified set of initiatives to improve member retention and our pool. By enhancing content supply, membership benefits, and personalized experiences, we aim to strengthen long-term member value. As AI enables more efficient content creation, the potential for IP development and commercialization will expand, unlocking new growth opportunities for our membership business. Starting this quarter, We are simplifying our revenue breakdown and will begin reclassifying vocational training revenue into other revenues to align with our overall strategy. Other revenues were RMB $83.9 million, of which we will continue to adjust our vocational training business with a focus on improving operational efficiency and prioritization. Although our vocational training business has been reclassified we continue to build on its creator-driven foundation with the development of our column product. Designed primarily to serve Zihu creators, column is intended to enhance the creator ecosystem rather than act as a new commercial growth driver. During the quarter, we enhanced the product by rolling out a PC version and AI tools that help creators generate column descriptions and cover designs. This enhancement drove sequential growth in both the number of leading column creators and the creator user engagement. Monetization models for column creators is also becoming more diversified, with overall GMV more than doubling compared with last quarter. Going forward, we will continue to operate with discipline, maintaining stability while investing prudently for sustainable growth. With the ongoing enhancements in efficiency and steady cost optimization, we are confident in achieving our full-year profitability target. Building on this foundation, we will continue to invest with a long-term view to strengthen our AI capabilities and improve the efficiency of our core operations. Deeper AI integrations will drive greater synergies across content creation, distribution, and monetized on Zihu. Meanwhile, We will further refine our product and marketing strategies to capitalize on new growth opportunities from high quality users and enterprise clients. With a healthier operating structure and ongoing innovation, we are well positioned to thrive in this next stage of high quality growth. With that, I will hand the call over to our CFO, Wang Han.