WeRide Inc. (NASDAQ:WRD) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

WeRide Inc. (NASDAQ:WRD) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript May 13, 2026

WeRide Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.05507, expectations were $-0.10647.

Operator: Good morning, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to WeRide’s First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today’s event is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Please note that the Chinese interpretation is for convenience purposes only. In the case of any discrepancy, management statements in their original language will prevail. Joining us today, WeRide’s Founder, Chairman and CEO; Dr. Tony Han; and CFO and Head of International, Ms. Jennifer Li. 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 forward-looking statements including WeRide’s strategy and future plans.

These forward-looking statements are made under the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities Legislation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. The company’s actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, and please refer to the Risk Factors section of the company’s Form 20-F filed with the SEC and announcement on the website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for a full disclosure of these risk factors. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable law. Please note that all numbers stated in the management’s prepared remarks are in RMB terms and we will discussed in non-IFRS measures today, which are more thoroughly 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.

The company’s unaudited financial and operating results are released earlier today via Newswire and can be found on the company’s IR website. With that, I will now begin the company’s video presentation. [Presentation]

Operator: Now I would like to pass the floor to the company’s founder, Chairman and CEO, Dr. Tony Han. Please go ahead, sir.

Xu Han: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We started 2026 with strong momentum as a global leader in autonomous driving. In the first quarter, the total revenue of WeRide reached RMB 114 million, 58% up year-over-year. These results are driven by our accelerating global tax deployment, growth across our broader autonomous driving business and the great success of our L2++ level ADAS solution. By the end of April, our global robotaxi fleet grew to around 1,300 vehicles, representing one of the largest global taxi fleets globally. At the same time, our Level 4 autonomous driving fleet, including robovan and the robobus has grown to around 2,800 units. That — they have been deployed to or tested in 12 countries and over 40 cities worldwide.

We believe the study and significant progress this quarter reflects not only the maturity of our technology, but also the growing operational experience for [indiscernible] level fleet in multiple cities. First of all, I want to point out that we have made a major technical breakthrough through GENESIS, our closed-loop world model-based simulation engine, which boosted our model evolution pace by several folds. We can now train AI model for autonomous driving with synthesized [ corner ] cases, which may be very rare or even imaginary. With a compact AI model leveraged on our GENESIS, we have achieved 4 consecutive championships in China urban intelligent driving competition. This is unprecedented. The best previous record is held by Huawei ADAS system, which got 2 consecutive championships.

Today, many companies talk about work model and simulation platforms. But WeRide is one of very few companies that have publicly demonstrated footage of a highly realistic autonomous driving world model at scale. We have already released GENESIS demonstration video on YouTube where viewers can check the model’s ability to reconstruct and simulate visually realistic driving environment, strictly following physical [ loss ] as well. GENESIS can generate holistic virtual driving environment consistent to the desired locations, including traffic laws, pedestrians, weather conditions and complex interactions between vehicles and the surrounding objects. More importantly, we can add this environment component to simulate highly challenging scenarios such as aggressive driving behavior, [ bad ] traffic, extreme weather, [ our ] euro road conditions and many other long-tail [ corner ] cases that are very difficult and extremely expensive to replicate in the real world.

By leveraging on synthetic data and large-scale simulation, GENESIS improved training and validation efficiency by thousands of times compared to traditional road testing. It also significantly reduces the crucial dependence on large-scale testing fleet and accelerate deployment process in new operational regions globally. GENESIS is not just a capability. It is a unified simulation and AI training platform supporting applications from L2 ADAS to L4 robotaxi. And it is very same [indiscernible] back that makes us the only company in the world to have already achieved the skilled commercialization of both L4 and the mass production L2 vehicles. The newly developed GENESIS now has paved the way of WeRide to the physical AI world. With Genesis, the ADAS system developed by WeRide is comparable to the performance of FSD 14.3 in California.

I personally own two Tesla and I drive with FSD 14.3 every day. I look forward to entering our global urban intelligent driving competition directly facing FSD 14.3 from Tesla, how one day we can meet in U.S. or Europe and give our consumers a head to head comparison. Today, we are seeing our technology leadership translate into real global commercial scale. Let me talk — let me walk you through the key operational and commercialization milestones we have achieved this quarter. First, in China, our robotaxi business continued to make strong progress in scale, operational efficiency and commercialization depth. First, in China, our robotaxi business continued to make strong progress in scale and operational efficiency. By the end of April, our domestic global taxi fleet expanded to about 1,000 vehicles, while our service area in Guangzhou increased by 97% compared to the end of 2025, including additional downtown districts.

On the demand side, average daily order per vehicle domestically reached 17 trips during Q1 with peak periods reaching 28 trips per vehicle. Registered robotaxi users also doubled almost every year. We believe these metrics continue to demonstrate growing user adoption and improving unit economics as robotaxi commercialization scales. In this quarter, we also continued to deepen our partner ecosystem. In April, we expanded our collaboration with Lenovo in autonomous driving computing platforms with a joint target to deploy 200,000 autonomous driving vehicles globally over the next 5 years. Together with Geely Farizon, we plan to deliver 2,000 upgraded, purposely built robotaxi GXRs in 2026. We believe this partnership further strengthened our manufacturing scalability and the deployment capability globally.

Now turning into international markets. We also continue to see strong momentum in both new market launches and commercialization progress. In Singapore, we launched the country’s first public autonomous driving service together with Grab. Since the initial development — I’m sorry, since the initial deployment plan began in the second half of last year, the fleet has built a trustworthy operational track record in a highly regulated international market. In the Mid East, we have launched fully driverless commercial robotaxi operation in Dubai together with Uber and Dubai’s RTA. This is the city’s first fully driverless commercial robotaxi service Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi service coverage expanded to around 70% of the city’s core area. Across the Mid East.

Together with Uber, we remain on track to deploy at least 1,200 robotaxi across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Riyadh by 2027. In Europe, we entered Slovakia in March, our fourth European market and continued progressing towards fully driverless commercial operation in Zurich. Overall, we continue to believe WeRide remains the most globally deployed autonomous driving company today with deployments across 12 countries and permits in 8 markets. This global footprint not only diversifies our revenue but also demonstrates operational and regulatory capabilities that are hard for followers to replicate. It also keeps us on track towards our long-term vision of deploying tens of thousands of global taxi globally by 2030. Beyond Global Taxi, our ADAS business is also seeing growing commercial traction.

Our current version of ADAS system WRD 3.0 has been adopted by nearly 30 vehicle models, including vehicles from leading OEMs, such as GAC and Chery. In April, GAC Aion launched presales for the Aion N60, the first mass production vehicle with WeRide’s solution, leveraging the generalization capability of GENESIS, our WRD 3.0 solution is now supporting 3 major chip platforms, NVIDIA DRIVE, Qualcomm Snapdragon and SiEngine StarLight. We believe this level of multichip compatibility is crucial because it enables faster mass production, greater cost optimization and broader OEM adoption. At the same time, we continue expanding internationally with partners, including [indiscernible] bringing WeRide powered ADAS solution to consumer globally. Finally, for robobus, we also continue making progress globally.

We are collaborating with the Geneva public transport operator, TPG, our autonomous bus deployment. Meanwhile, we are preparing for the robobus operation with [indiscernible] branch open for the third consecutive year. To summarize, the first quarter of 2026 was about substantiating technology leadership of WeRide into commercial scalability through growing robotaxi operations, expansion into new international markets, growing deployment pipelines or continued unrivaled winning momentum in ADAS. We believe we are executing well with our global strategy, and we continue to see a clear path toward long-term growth. With that, let me turn the call over to our CFO, Jennifer Li, for a deeper view of the financial results this quarter. Thank you.

Xuan Li: Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Before we dive into the financials, I want to highlight that all figures are in RMB, comparisons are year-over-year, unless stated otherwise. And we will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more solely explained and reconciled to the most comparable matters reported in the company’s earnings release and filings with the SEC and Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Now let’s discuss our first quarter financial performance. We delivered total revenue of RMB 114 million in the first quarter, representing an increase of [ 38% ]. Product revenue increased 116% to RMB 20 million, mainly driven by increased deployment of robotaxi and other L4 vehicles. Service revenue increased 49% to RMB 94 million.

This revenue growth mirrors the solid commercial progress we made in this quarter, together with our proven track record in execution and deployment. Considering the seasonal impact of Chinese New Year and Ramadan in Middle East, our business performance surpassed our original internal targets. Group level gross profit increased 56% to RMB 40 million in the first quarter, with the group level gross margin of approximately 35%. We maintained top line expansion without sacrificing margin discipline and scoring the inherent profitability of our autonomous driving business as we further scale. This was also supported by the increased exposure of our ex-China market where we continue to see the structural stronger margin profile as we expand into new additional international territories.

Operating expense were at RMB 459 million with R&D expense accounting for 77% of the total operating expense. Our operating expense are stable in absolute dollar amount compared to the same period in 2025. To break down further, R&D expense increased by 12% to [ RMB 353 million’s ] in Q1 2026. Excluding share-based compensation, R&D expense grew 16% to RMB 322 million. This consistent investment in R&D underpins our technology road map and ensure we stay at the forefront of autonomous driving innovation. Administrative expense decreased by 33% to RMB 83 million in the first quarter. Excluding share-based compensation, administrative expense decreased by 17% to RMB 51 million. The decrease was primarily driven by lower professional services fees, mainly related to audit and legal compliance services and partially offset by increased personnel costs for the expansion of our team as a [ growing ] business.

Selling expense increased by 63% to RMB 23 million in Q1 2026. Excluding share-based compensation, selling expense increased by 81% to RMB 22 million. The increase corresponding to ongoing expansion for our business and scoring our commitment to support growth appropriately. Our net loss cap table at RMB 359 million in the first quarter. On an on-IFRS basis, the net loss increased slightly by 11% to RMB 326 million in the first quarter. The slight uptick was largely driven by ongoing R&D spending and as we continue to invest ahead of scale in our long-term technology leadership. As of March 31, 2026, we had total capital reserve of RMB 6.22 billion, comprising RMB 6.18 billion in cash and cash equivalents and time deposits, RMB 29 million in investment and wealth management products and RMB 18 million in restricted cash.

We maintained short-term bank loans of RMB 294 million to support daily operations. We have well positioned our capital base to match our cash deployment need with headroom to support ongoing growth and strategic initiatives. Under the USD 100 million share repurchase program authorized by our Board of Directors on March 23, 2026. We have repurchased approximately 24.4 million Class A ordinary share, including in the form of American depository shares as of market close on May 12 for a total consideration of approximately USD 61.4 million. This reflects our firm billing in company’s long-term value and growth potential. Moving forward, we proceed with confidence and a well-defined focus. By end of 2026, we remain on track to deploy 2,000 [ robotaxi ] worldwide, marking the first milestone in our journey towards hundreds of thousands by 2030.

As we continue to scale, our approach is to enter new regions and studies which have proven which has proven effective and replicable. Supported by strong technological leadership, operational know-how and increasingly robust global rollout, we’re prepared to lead the next phase of autonomous driving. With that, operator, we are now ready to take on to take some questions.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] First question comes from [ Stanley Wan ] from Morgan Stanley.

Q&A Session

Unknown Analyst: This is [ Stanley ] from Morgan Stanley. I have two questions. So first one is on your robotaxi expansion, are you on track to meet your expansion road map in 2026? And could you update us on the latest expansion progress in China, the Middle East and the rest of the world? And my second question is on WeRide’s overseas business. with the company’s core advantage being its possession of overseas operating licenses in 8 countries and in light of the global expansion of players like Waymo and Zoox and also the accelerating regulatory approvals how do you view the key growth drivers, profitability path and time line for tangible contributions from your overseas operations in 2026 to 2027?

Xu Han: Okay. So I will take the first question, and then I will let Jennifer to answer the second question about the profitability, okay? So first question is about on track, whether we are on track with our robotaxi expansion. I think overall, we are very optimistic and confident in our global robotaxi expansion. And we have been making steady progress all the time. At the — I will share some numbers I have already told to the market that is — at the end of April, our, global robotaxi fleet reached approximately 1,300 vehicles. That is to my best knowledge, one of the biggest robotaxi fleets globally. In China, our robotaxi fleet has grown to approximately 1,000 vehicles with solid demand, healthy daily order volume and a growing user base.

And I want to share you a number, our average daily order per vehicle exceeded 17 trips during the first quarter. That is an amazing number. And our overseas robotaxi fleet has expanded to approximately 300 vehicles across multiple markets. In the Middle East, we recently launched our full driverless commercial operation in Dubai and on Uber platform. Today, if you really want to have a full driver, it’s robotaxi. To my best knowledge, I look at our competitors. Outside of U.S. and China, if you want to hire a full driverless robotaxi, the only way is through Uber hiding WeRide’s robotaxi in Abu Dhabi or Dubai, okay? That’s our current stage. With regional tensions created from — I know regional tension creates some short-term softness in utilization.

But we remain very confident. More important, we remain firmly committed to the Middle East, and our long-term investment and operational presents are well received by local governments. We remain on track toward our committed commitments to deploy 1,200 vehicles across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh as additional driver is [ ODD ] to be added. In Europe, we are expanding our footprint. In Switzerland, we obtained regional’s first driverless commercial permit and continue progressing towards public operations in Zurich. We also recently launched our national autonomous driving program in Slovakia, making our entry into another new European market. More broadly, we believe WeRide has established a meaningful advantage, first-mover advantage through years of global expansion.

And overall, I think this global operation and regulatory footprint is becoming an increasing important differentiator as autonomous driving commercialization accelerates worldwide. So that’s overall conclude my answer to your questions. Our global road map and our plan, okay? About profitability, would you pick up the question, Jennifer?

Xuan Li: Yes, I’ll answer the second one. Yes. So just know, Stanley also mentioned the [indiscernible] advantage is having like operating license in 8 countries. Actually, now when comparing the total number of robotaxi taxi deployed and driverless permit hold by any autonomous vehicle, autonomous driving company outside China and the U.S., WeRide ranks first across — among all the different companies, 4 companies. We are very encouraged by the momentum of our international expansion so far. And as we can recall from the last earnings release, international revenue already accounts for approximately 1/3 of the total group revenue last year. And our Middle East subsidiary was already profitable at the net level. And — also Tony just discussed, just already talked through our key developments in some of the regions of China this year and we will announce some more exciting announcements in global tax deployment in due course.

So this year, we expect international revenue to grow even faster and contribute an even larger share of group revenue supported by the positive economics. And maybe I would like to just also to elaborate a little bit more about our city selection criteria here. Now people always ask us, you guys already have like presence in like 40 cities, so how — do you want to expand to more cities or focusing on the current ones. So our strategy is to focusing on scale in existing city as well as entering additional cities and there are more selective criteria. So we really need to — we really consider whether the market has the potential to support scalable and commercially attractive operations over long term. And especially on the monetization potential side, we pay close attention to the overall gross booking opportunities as well as the gross bookings per mile because both scale and unit price matter significantly for long-term global taxi unit economics.

And besides, we focus heavily on whether there’s a realistic path to scale for all the cities we are currently deploying. We do see potential for each city to deploy thousands of autonomous driving vehicles, yes. And something more to mention here, Europe remains to be a key focus for us this year. We will share our exciting news in more deployment in more cities in Europe hopefully soon. Yes, that concludes my answer for this question.

Operator: Next, we have Ming-Hsun Lee from Bank of America.

Ming-Hsun Lee: I also have two questions. So the first one, how do the recent report about the China holding new self-driving approvals to impact WeRide. And a second question, it’s about the technology difference. So I think since the past, there has been a consistent and industry-wide debate over the LIDAR and the [ HD Map ] approach that Waymo adopts under the camera-only solution by Tesla, what is WeRide’s view?

Xu Han: Questions. I think I will take them one by one, okay? I did take some notes. So let’s see, the first question. I think everybody have already realized the recent hot about the recent halting about the new self-driving approvals. We all noticed this kind of accident of Baidu in Wuhan. And we have seen the reports. So first of all, our view is that it is — we view this as more of a short-term regulatory adjustment rather than a structural change to the industry because from our discussion with the central government and local government and through this kind of communication and the careful investigation First of all, WeRide, if you check our record, WeRide has a very good safety and operational record and both central government and local government, just like give us very strong support.

And through our discussion, we were assured that the central government and local governments are supporting support to the autonomous driving remains very, very strong. That is what we have learned and we talk with the local regulators, legislators and officials. This remains very supportive. It is a short-term adjustment. They’re basically hot in the new approvals for the added autonomous driving vehicles. But the current autonomous driving vehicles remain actively operational for WeRide and our orders are increasing, as I have already mentioned to you. And as autonomous driving moves from early pilots towards larger scale commercialization, I think it is natural for regulators to place great focus on safety, and we really think this is a very responsible attitude we actually — we think this is definitely a very responsible action and we fully support this.

From our perspective, this is ultimately positive for the long-term development for the industry, a company with a very good safety record should be rewarded. A company with [ lowly ] safety record should be punished. That is definitely, I think — just think about airlines. It’s the same results, right? So the airlines with good safety record remain in the market, an airline without a good safety record cannot — got eliminated. So — and we do suggest like the regulatory framework should favor companies with proven technology, operational experience and a strong safety record. We also expect regulation over time to become more differentiated based on factors such as safety performance, operational track record and technical capability. For WeRide specifically, we remain confident because we have accumulated a meaningful real-world operational experience, both in China and internationally.

Just two numbers, right? We operate and test across more than 40 cities in 12 countries who else have achieved such number. Overall, we view this necessary step for the industry and believe it will ultimately lead to a more sustainable competitive landscape. I don’t want a kind of a company with [ lowly ] safety record to ramp around in the market. It’s not safe to the public, not safe to our community. So we are very confident that safety — a company with a very good safety record, like WeRide have a higher motor and WeRide will continue as a leading player, a first mover, to keep our very good safety record and keep our reliable operation. We try every [indiscernible] we possibly can to maintain this very good record. Second question, because my answer is a little bit, lengthy, sorry about that, for the first question.

The second question is just want to remind everybody a question is about actually is the long-term debate that is LiDAR versus HD Map and approach from Waymo versus Tesla. So my view is simple, okay, I spent many years in Missouri, okay, more than 10, 12 years. Missouri has been long called a show me state. Okay. To me, I don’t want to argue about approach. I want to see the results. For L4 level robotaxi, today, I think everybody have already seen that Waymo deployed thousands of robotaxi and safely operated in many cities in the United States. There are all kinds of claimers but I just want to say for L4 level robotaxis, driverless autonomous driving vehicle and safety is very important. If we can use HD map as an [indiscernible] of the information, why not.

We have long adopted multisensor redundancy oriented technology path. We believe that camera and the LiDAR combining together build a strong, robust autonomous driving system and this approach actually is broadly aligned with the direction adopted by leading global robotaxi players like Waymo, okay? At the same time, we are closely watching the progress of vision-only based and [indiscernible] approach, including Tesla’s recent approach. I have to say FSD 14.3 make a very good progress, and we admire Tesla’s achievement. However, it is still not robotaxi, not driverless. And — but we took a similar approach, as I mentioned in the opening remarks, right, our ADAS system based on 1-stage end-to-end world model, has achieved 4 consecutive championships in China, basically, we beat all other ADAS [indiscernible] solutions.

I think the only competitor, we haven’t have a direct face-to-face matching that is Tesla FSD 14.3. And we look forward, as I mentioned, we look forward to a head-to-head comparison and give our consumers the best experience. So with that said, I just want to emphasize, we are very, very aware of the advantage of camera-only solutions based on foundation model and world model. And we are pretty good at it. That’s why we — I think I’m currently the best suitable CEO to answer this question. And we really consider about the very complicated traffic scenarios in cities like Madrid in Europe. We have already spent a lot of time to solving all possible corner cases in Madrid because we have to be prepared to deploy a busy city, in a busy European city like Madrid.

Historically, a city like Zurich and Madrid would require significant localization and testing of our resources. But with our GENESIS model, we believe we can really combining HD Map approach the [indiscernible] version. So one of WeRide’s strengths is flexibility across different architectures. And we are — we can make a perfect marriage between this [ HDMI ] LiDAR-based with camera solution and [indiscernible] solution. But overall, I just want to emphasize to have a reliable and safe robotaxi deployment at the current stage. We need to really rely on HD Map. But gradually, we may use [indiscernible] approach to accommodate emergency world construction and the map change and we can keep the freshness of map. But overall, we have to cherrypick the advantage of camera solution, [indiscernible] solution based on world model like Tesla support into our core system.

That’s our approach. And I think currently only company are capable of doing this in the world is WeRide because our ADAS programs in — ADAS programs and because our alpha-level deployment operational experience. Okay. That concludes my answer.

Operator: Next, we have [indiscernible] from Huatai Securities.

Unknown Analyst: So yes, I’ve got two questions for you guys, right? So first of all, we are seeing more and more Level 2 portfolios announcing plans to enter Level 4 market. So what’s your view on this? And then also, can you give us more details on multi-chip platform compatibility for Level 2? And I understand that this shift — so how do you achieve this chipset versus [indiscernible]?

Xu Han: Okay. So thank you for these two questions. I think these questions are more like a technical question. So I’ll answer both questions, okay? So first question is about like an overview about like the so-called L2 company or ADAS company, although they themselves don’t want to call them themselves as L2 company. Plans to enter our core market, what’s our view? So to us, like currently, I still want to emphasize there’s only one company to my best knowledge, like doing L4-level robotaxi at the same time doing L2++ system. I have some standards that is for a company, you claim yourself as a robotaxi company or [indiscernible] company. You have to have a robotaxi fleet of 100 driverless robotaxi fleet open to public operate for more than half a year and without any significant or serious accidents.

I’m sorry, may I remind like the listeners, if you are not speaking please mute your mic because I heard some background noise. So please mute your noise if you are not speaking, okay. So I — so for a L4-level company, you have to have a fleet of 100 vehicles open to public, operate for half a year. And then you can call itself a robotaxi company. For ADAS company, you have to deploy your system to mass production car. Previously, I would say, three years ago or four years ago, WeRide although have some ADAS solution in our lab, but we cannot call yourself ADAS company because we haven’t deployed our system to mass production car but now we can because we have deployed our ADAS [indiscernible] more than — close to 30 types of vehicles and several of them are [ falling ] by tens of thousands every month.

okay? So now we know the difference. I believe with all of that said, I believe there is still a significant gap between advanced driver assistance system, i.e. ADAS system and a true L4 robotaxi driverless system. The challenge is fundamentally about robustness, operational capability and scalability. So there are some numbers I want to share with you, okay? So [ orally ], most of the data system today, according to our test, mile per critical intervention. If you marry in kilometers, although it’s called MPCI, mile per critical intervention, a lot of competitors in China, they aim at to reach 1,000 kilometers of MPCI. But I want to share you a number that for L4-level autonomous driving, you can see numbers from WeRide and from Waymo. And the managed per critical intervention is at above 1 million kilometers level.

So there is a 3 magnitude difference. So although some company claims they can boost their MPCI by a factor of 10 every year, that’s still 3 years away. But let me tell you, like you boost your MPCI every 10x every year is a formidable task, a mission impossible because if some company can do that, then WeRide, Waymo, so many good companies start autonomous driving in the year of 2017, within 7 years think about the MPCI. So basically, all I’m saying is like you really need to operate for half a year before you know the difficulties about L4. So it’s great to have an ambitious goal, but always you need to really try to achieve your ambitious goals through our concrete path and the concrete path is the key. And from our past experience, it takes many years to really make your fleet available and reliable for driving, for operation.

So my– I have a golden [ test ] rule that is made a driverless fleet of at least 100 cars, make it available to the market, operate for half a year and see what happens. And I don’t want to see some tragedy names. You’ll see some companies actually quit the market because of some accidents. You all know their names. So I don’t want to measure them anymore. Okay. Second question is about our multi-chip platform, that is actually something I’d love to answer. I think the key source is — the secret sauce is our GENESIS model. Our GENESIS model creates an AI model that can trim to different chipset of different complexity. And so far, we have already rolled out our system based on NVIDIA’s dual [indiscernible] system. And also, we rolled out our system, GAC N60 based on Qualcomm 8650, and we are going to roll out a system based on [indiscernible] on engines of chipset, okay?

So basically, we believe with our current GENESIS based approach, we build up a word model, and we can really support a different platform, and this gives us a great competitive advantage. And again, to my best knowledge, we haven’t seen any other company can support such a wide spectrum of chipset at the same time, make them available for ADAS solution as well as for global taxi solution. Okay. That’s my answer to these two questions. Thank you.

Operator: Next, we have Kai Xiao from CICC.

Kai Xiao: So I also have a question on the multichip platform strategy you mentioned. Can you share why is this strategy important for your L2++ ADAS business?

Xu Han: Okay. So basically, the main reason is like different OEMs have different hardware preference from OEMs, they want extremely cost-effective chips that some OEMs want very high tops computational platform. And they have different supply chain requirements. Basically a flexible multichip architecture allow us to support a broad range of vehicle platforms without like redesigning system every time. And — but speak for yourself, it’s really our GENESIS model, because GENESIS model can help us do a spectrum of onboard AI model, which accommodate different top requirements like 8650 [indiscernible]. So we have to be able to adjust. More importantly, multi-chip vendor flexibility enables faster mass production and great cost optimization, different cheap platforms offer different costs and supply chain advantages.

And so that’s one, if a company — if ADAS company or autonomous driving software company can apply a spectrum of solutions based on a different chipset, the car OEM tends to work with you more closely. And we believe this flexibility also help us secure more production, more vehicle type. And we also look forward to deploy all these systems for the broad market. One thing I want to bring all the investors’ attention that is this year, you see the export of Chinese automobile to the Chinese mobile products to the rest of the world is actually growing but most of them don’t have a very good ADAS system. And we actually have already secured more than [indiscernible] vehicle models to supply ADAS system for them. So maybe next year, you will see some overseas models, you can maybe drive a car with WeRide ADAS system in Mid East Asia, Southeast Asia, in some countries, even in Europe, please stay tuned.

Thank you.

Operator: Next, we have Xinyu Fang from UBS.

Xinyu Fang: I have one question about the strategic balance and prioritization between China and international business. As we know — as Tony mentioned, there has been news about tightening scrutiny for autonomous driving permits domestically and WeRide has been making steady advancement in international markets with better [ UE ]. Could management please share your thoughts on the balance and priority of domestic and overseas operation lately?

Xuan Li: Okay, Xinyu, I’ll take your question. So we see both China and our international markets are strategically important for WeRide. In — Of course, in near to medium term, certain international market offers a clearer and faster path to commercially attractable robotaxi economics thanks to the favorable pricing partnership and [indiscernible] like favorable regulation and demonstrating sustainable profitability early on, is critical for our industry, where healthy cash flow enable self-sustained growth. And in local markets, that’s actually very important. This is very important to get into this, we call it the [indiscernible] type of like self-sustained growth. So we like — we started building a significant international mode starting in 2021, ahead of most of the peers.

And we have since then gained like very hard to replicate expertise in global deployment in regulation, localization, home location and fleet operations. And meanwhile, China remains to be a key long-term market due to the size of ecosystem infrastructure and after all, it’s our home. And we continue to maintain a very strong preference here as well. So overall, we see a powerful flywheel effect as they scale across more cities, in more countries, and we have more data and more validation to improve the performance and also to improve the regulatory trust. So it’s accelerating the permits, audit expansion and commercialization. So yes, so both are very important for us. So of course, we are very pleased to say we see huge potential that international revenue will grow rapidly this year, and we are very on track to achieve our all year revenue target this year.

Yes. That’s all to you.

Operator: Next, we have Tianyu Lu from Citic Securities.

Tianyu Lu: I have two questions. The first one is what’s Uber’s over current shareholding and how should investors think about the relationship between WeRide and Uber? And secondly, could you share your go-to-market model across different markets?

Xuan Li: So overall, Uber has more than 5%. It’s — Uber is a strategic shareholder and a key partner for WeRide. So based on their latest public filing, they hold over 5% of WeRide which we view as a strong endorsement of WeRide technology and our solid deployment and commercialization strategy. So operationally, we’re already deploying this Uber in more cities outside the U.S. than any of the [ AV ] players out there which reflects both the depth of our relationships and our ability to execute at scale. So we expect we will expand — there’s like echo somewhere, can someone — can you mute? Thank you. Yes, we expect to expand to — there’s still echo. Yes. We will enter into more cities with Uber this year. And yes, so and we remain to be a trusted partner as they build up, as they build their Global [indiscernible] strategy.

Of course, at the same time, our go-to-market approach is diversified. We work with a partner that fits best with each other in each market. And in China, we offered our own app and to build [indiscernible] awareness and operational capabilities. You can get our robotaxi on WeRide Go and you can also get it from the Amap and then also the Tencent mini program. In Southeast Asia, we partnered with Grab and in Europe, we collaborate with local platforms, operators and PTOs, including SBB in Zurich, TPG in Geneva and [indiscernible] in Slovakia, et cetera. So all of this will accelerate our deployment and the permitting process. Yes. So overall, we see strong alignment with platform like Uber installing our robotaxi globally. And of course, we continue to take flexible approach in working with multiple platforms to ensure that we execute very effectively across different market.

And the second one, the other one is the asset — our asset-light business model for robotaxi Yes. I think the time [indiscernible] short, I’ll try to be quick. So out of China, we already implement asset-light business model in all markets. It’s a mature and proven structure for WeRide. So in like — I’ll just give you an example. In some cases, robotaxis are purchased by the [indiscernible] platform or like local customers. In some other cases, they are owned by third-party fleet owners. We have already executed in both models successfully. So the asset-led model means like WeRide will focus on providing the tag and operation while leveraging the local capital to scale more efficiently. And in China right now, the priority is to continue improving the unit economics and, of course, operational efficiency with a larger ODD so that the revenue share will become sizable enough for it to become appealing to a third party as an owner to participate.

So over the long term, we also China to move into the same direction, as utilization continue to strengthen the model should naturally transition towards more asset-light structure.

Operator: Our last question comes from [ May Lou ] from HSBC.

Unknown Analyst: So I will only have one question. So what’s the trajectory for robotaxi vehicle cost reduction?

Xuan Li: Okay. I’ll take this one. So cost reduction, of course, always remains to be one of our key focus areas and we continue to see meaningful progress, there are 3 main drivers. The first one is the hardware and system integration. So with our latest platform and our purpose-built vehicle GXR, we are moving towards like the pre-integrated and very standard solution. And every year, the [ BOM ] cost continue to drop. And the second is scale and supply chain optimization. As now, we are moving to like a few thousand unit deployments. As we can see, we are able to do better cost efficiency across different components and manufacturing. And the last one is on the operational efficiency. We already see that there is a strong efficiency improvement as fleet scales and utilization increase.

For example, in last quarter, we already announced that our remote safety officer ratio has already improved to 1:40 from previously as a 1:10, 1:20, now it’s already 1:40. And internationally, we are following the same trend, but now, of course, it’s not 1:40 yet, but we are moving into the same direction. So we believe all of this are very important because [ remote ] operational efficiency, it’s a very meaningful — has a very meaningful impact over per vehicle [ TCO ] on the overall unit economics. So additionally, when we entered some new markets, there might be some upfront like home litigation and localization costs which sometimes temporarily increase the per vehicle cost in early stage. However, as deployment scale within each market, those costs are amortized and the overall impact will become very limited and manageable.

So yes, so this is the a cost reduction as a combination of hardware as well as operational efficiency.

Operator: Due to time restraints, I will conclude the call today. Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.