Waterdrop Inc. (NYSE:WDH) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Waterdrop Inc. (NYSE:WDH) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript March 25, 2026

Waterdrop Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.00572 EPS, expectations were $0.0386.

Tracy Lee: Good morning, everyone. This is Tracy Lee from Waterdrop Investor Relations. It’s my pleasure to welcome everyone to Waterdrop’s Fourth Quarter and Facial Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, today’s conference call is being recorded. Please note that discussion today will come from 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 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 and 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. [indiscernible], Chairman and CEO; Mr. [indiscernible] GM of Insurance Business; Mr. [indiscernible], Head of Finance Department; and Ms. [indiscernible], Board Secretary. We’ll be happy to take some assessments in the [indiscernible] conference call. Now [indiscernible] our CEO, [indiscernible].

Peng Shen: Dear investor analyst, 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 [indiscernible] insurance energy, delivering tangible progress in both AI application and business growth. Our financial performance were robust. We saw significant top line and bottom line expansion, further solidify our core fundamentals. For the fiscal year 2025, our revenue reached CNY 3.98 billion, up 43.5%, net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders reached CNY 570 million, registering a year-on-year growth of 54.8%. Notably, we met our guidance to the market and have now delivered GAAP profitability for 16 consecutive quarters. Our Intertek segment was as announced with revenue surging 51.3% and an operating margin of roughly 18%.

Furthermore, our LLM integration significantly category. the value of our medical performance platform, our platform has response for 3.68 million patients which is watched and 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 our safe cash dividend of CNY 0.03 per ADS, totaling $10.8 million, this will be paid in later — late April to early May to shareholders a record as of April 24, 2026 U.S. ET time. Meanwhile, our share repurchase and remains on track with 60.7 million ADS repurchase for about $118 million for [indiscernible]. On technology plans, we are valuing our shift to become an native company. As of the end of year-end 2025, we filed a 72 LLM related patent applications.

including [indiscernible] international ones. Throughout the year, we deployed the [indiscernible] and virtual interactions across all core workflows. From acquisition and conversation [indiscernible] and customer service through quality control and R&D. Every stage is now production-ready delivering [indiscernible] operating gains. This capability is unified from under the [indiscernible] AI, our [indiscernible] platform for the [indiscernible] specific agents now also open to the industry partners. Beyond the [indiscernible], we are pioneering open collaboration infractors what is Guardian AI corporate, which is called Cloud [indiscernible] built on a distributed at design our cloud leader enables a different AI agent to autonomously communicate and collaborate.

Q&A Session

[indiscernible] demos have already validated its core workflow seamless the multi-round dialog and automate to cover between the AI agents. In terms of ESG, we acquired with 19 organizations to launch over 15,500 products earning global recognition forward policy reduction efforts and upgrading our ESG rating to A+. As we enter our 10th anniversary in 2026, our goal is to move beyond using [indiscernible] to becoming truly AI enabled company. We aim to [indiscernible] reconstruct our entire value chain, embedding AI as a several competitive advantage. We expect me to depend the momentum this year with moderately higher [indiscernible] marketing and AI, targeting double-digit growth in both revenue and profit. Now I will pass to [indiscernible] to introduce the development of insurance business.

Xiaoying Xu: Thanks, [indiscernible]. In the fourth quarter, our insurance continued its strong momentum, ensuring related income surged to 125% year-on-year to CNY 1.31 billion, while operating profit grew 42% year-over-year to [indiscernible]. On the traffic side, we have sharpened our real-time user amentization leveraging our sales deployed [indiscernible] we can now capture potential user attributes with nearly second profession in high concurrency traffic. This allows for [indiscernible] update and [indiscernible], which has significantly improved the accuracy of our high-quality traffic for future and made a solid condition for our FYP growth. Regarding product supply, our market first [indiscernible] version 2.0 this quarter new 0 deductible features now colored a long-term medical cost and routing the medial centers.

Additionally, our pre-existing condition product gained strong action with FY at 7%. While our disability insurance contributed about $100 million app validating our long-term strategy. And most importantly, AI is now invented in every node of [indiscernible] on the user side, our AI Pro insurance engine on the mini-program drove 33% of sequential increase in premium, while our AI medial insurance experts generated over 50 million [indiscernible] 145% quarter-over-quarter. We have also expanded the facility to standard health products, we can generate incremental most premiums of over 1 million. For human agent empowerment, our large banner copilot has cumulated site in over 370,000 [indiscernible] this quarter end. [indiscernible] perform in our fully operational and having completed the fourth quarter without the core module like local agents, batch testing and proactively past figures.

This infrastructure powers our [indiscernible] planner deployers, both the share of facial accounts and many programs to handle the product recommendations, business facilitation and user [indiscernible] agent matching, we have even owned this platform to our current insurers to uplist the industry-wide efficiency. In [indiscernible] our AI customer service agent handled over [indiscernible] and our coloscopilot [indiscernible] efficiency to 2.5 that of the many only business. This concludes the insurance business update for the fourth quarter. Now I will pass to Board of Secretary [indiscernible] to introduce the progress of our metering and health services.

Jieru Li: Thank you, [indiscernible]. As of the annual of approximately 490 million people have [indiscernible] a total of $72.3 million to [indiscernible] medical profound platform. In this quarter, while maintaining robust platform governance and user experience with strengthen risk control in 2 key areas: to protect our user privacy, we have fully upgraded our system with large language models total of identifying specific data and applying dynamic [indiscernible] in real time. So critical information, frequently see in their components that either IP members, bank accounts and the medical record IT. We have moved [indiscernible] reduction to automate protection and marketing. And this [indiscernible] leads end-to-end securities for user debt better across our type platform, fundamentally preventing any reason of information staff.

Secondly, our simplicity, we deployed a new model combining medical [indiscernible] with a credential validation. This system and cost reference the clinical logic to precisely identify the fabric, ensuring every donation we reached those patients [indiscernible]. On the user service front, we launched a standardized [indiscernible] to our service goal of fee structures and retaining guidelines, these initiatives reinforce our commitment to concurrency and ensure our uses are fully involved. And moving to the Healthcare business, our [indiscernible] platform is in high-quality growth tuner with 224 pharmaceutical companies and [indiscernible] and are enrolled in a record of [indiscernible] patients. initiative 131 new programs. Once again, we set up setting a new quarterly enrollment with record.

This quarter, we achieved a major milestone that was proprietary [indiscernible] patient matching technology, the first of this time in China was officially granted a national invention pattern. By combining deep neural networks with major [indiscernible] processing, our technology achieved end-to-end protection matching [indiscernible] and clinical trials [indiscernible] filtering for [indiscernible] results, well analyzing and trusted medical records against that helped criteria to uncover the heating match. The due engine approach [indiscernible] between the weeks of the manually screen workflows down 2 minutes, strongly a [indiscernible] process. And building on this, we significantly expand our accounts. We’ll continue to grow our patient base in complex and rare [indiscernible] revenue digital clinical trial revenue related to [indiscernible] 30% this quarter compared to the previous 3 average [indiscernible] ability to pool release and earnings and have made a solid foundation for our sustainable volume growth.

And now I will [indiscernible] our Head of Finance to discuss our financial performance in this quarter.

Xiaoying Xu: Thanks, [indiscernible]. Hello, everyone. I will now walk you through our financial highlights for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025. Before I go into details, please be reminded that all numbers quoted here will be RMB and please refer to our earnings release for detailed information on our financial performance and both the year-on-year and quarter-over-quarter basis, respectively. In the fourth quarter, our performance of [indiscernible] 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 strong note. By second, the insurance business within a stable client with full year insurance really into approximately RMB 3.58 billion, up 51.3% year-on-year.

The other segments are [indiscernible] for about 10.1% of the total revenue with medical performing services at RMB 260 million and [indiscernible] income at RMB 118 million. Operating costs for the quarter reached RMB 680 million. up 109.2% year-on-year, driven by RMB 320 million increase in cost and the referral and service fees and RMB 23.8 million is on S&S, driven by rapid business expansion, opening costs and expenses in the fourth quarter rose to RMB 1.33 billion, up 109.4% year-on-year. For full year operating cost and expenses increased 39.1% from 2024. [indiscernible] the pace of revenue growth. Selling marketing expenses was roughly RMB 510 million at 178.4% year-on-year with significant improvement in customer acquisition efficiency.

The company proactively scaled up investments, resulting roughly [indiscernible] year-on-year in place and marketing expenses for third-party traffic channels. G&A expenses were RMB 77.1 million, a modest year-on-year increase of 4.6%, mainly due to a [indiscernible] in allowance of [indiscernible], partially off setted by RMB 6.5 million reduction in personnel call. Research and development expenses were approximately RMB 66.2 million, up 21.9% year-on-year, primarily driven by a RMB 6.4 million increase in personnel costs and a RMB 5.8 million in cross services. [indiscernible] improved significantly year-on-year. Net profit attributed to the company’s ordinary shareholders for the quarter was RMB 153 million, up 62.7% in the period. For full year, the net profit attributable to the ordinary shareholders reached about RMB 570 million, up 4.8%.

The common maintained ample cash position of about [indiscernible] 2025, providing strong support for our fee growth. And this concludes our financial overview for the fourth quarter and fiscal year conference side. Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we will conclude today’s conference call. We do thank you for joining. Have a good time.