Yeahka Stock

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Yeahka Limited 2026 Interim Results Announcement Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'll now pass the call to Mr. Vincent Chan, Head of Corporate Development and Capital Markets of Yeahka. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Yeahka's 2026 Interim Results Conference Call. Before we start, we would like to remind you this representation includes forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Information on general market conditions comes from a variety of sources outside of Yeahka's control. Please refer to our disclosure documents on our website IR section for a detailed discussion of risk factors.

Now let me introduce the management team on today's call. Luke Liu, our Founder, Chairman and CEO, will kick off with a short overview. I will then provide a business overview. John Yao, our CFO, will conclude with a financial review translated by Derek Lai, our Director of Finance, before we open up the floor for questions. Without further ado, I will now turn the call over to Luke.

Thank you, Vincent. Hello, everyone. In the first half of 2026, we continue to a commercialization and increased profitability. We delivered this to overseas expansion, innovation across product lines and in the cost discipline. More than before, we are better positioned to deliver long-term sustainable growth in profitability and return to shareholders. Therefore, we are delighted to announce our first dividend insurance and Yeahka's listing with HKD 13.8 million for interim results.

Yeahka remains highly confident in the significant growth opportunity in global payments. The acquiring market is worth USD 36 trillion. This digital payment penetration remains low in many markets, while Mainland China has reached over 90% digital payment penetration with Yeahka's contribution. Countries such as Japan and other developed economies are still at around 50% or below, leaving significant room for growth.

This creates strong entry point for Yeahka. Our overseas payments volume grew fourfold year-on-year to CNY 6 billion, continuing its exponential growth trajectory. Going forward, our overseas payment strategy will be centered around 3 key parities. First, we'll continue to focus on local customer and merchant payments rather than being limited to tourist rented payments. We believe this segment offers stronger growth potential for overall business. This resulting business model will give us greater scalability as we expand globally across the market.

Second, with a more comprehensive payments and merchant software product portfolio in our overseas competitors are uniquely positioned to expand in these markets by integrating wide-eyed services with our payment solutions, we provide merchants with one-stop service that help them reduce costs and increase revenue.

Third, we have enhanced our team with the leading international talent experienced in overseas payments and launched our online payment business overseas, extending our coverage into the web 3 sector. Our other strategic focus is the application of AI externally for customers as internally to enhance our operating efficiencies. We are closely tracking the publication of AI in payments and merchant were added services.

Agentic payments, where AI agents initiate and complete transactions on behalf of users with an authorized parameters are expected to become an important payment model across e-commerce, local services, gaming, advertising and other digital scenario is. We have conducted in-depth research in this area and initiated R&D collaboration with international financial institutions. Further updates will be disclosed in due course.

Separately, through our investment platform, Fuse, we have launched an AI agent-based merchant software product which has already been commercialized and received positive market feedback. Internally with Yeahka, we have also scaled up AI usage to drive administration and R&D efficiencies. [indiscernible] fully -- but autonomous AI-driven product development lines hugely reduce the time of product development and launch cycle.

Our digital employees which provides day-to-day tools with AI, automated main routing operational tasks. The combination of human talent and digital employees helped to address the evolving customers' demands more quickly, more precisely and sales resources for more strategically anticipates for the company. Yeahka can force that technical platform lay a great foundation for to scale in each of our business lines and more globally, share synergies across our operational best practice. Therefore, profitability has been increasingly across our business segments in both payment and weather added services.

In the Chinese Mainland, we delivered our payment profit by almost 25% year-over-year. In value-added services, in-store e-commerce posted a first half of net profit together with a historic high of GMV. AI will continue to drive revenue increase cost reduction and efficiency enhancements, and together with our faster overseas expansion as an international market leader. These strategies will strengthen Yeahka's industry mode, long-term profitability and capability to create greater value for our shareholders. As such, may I pass to Vincent to give a detailed business review.

Thank you, Luke. In the first half of 2026, Yeahka made substantial progress in business commercialization, organizational efficiency and ultimately, delivery of more bottom line and return to our stakeholders. As overseas businesses, coupled with AI, has been empowering Yeahka as an increasingly global and AI-driven company. I would also like to share more about each of the business operations as well as the game plans forward that unites all our employees and partners.

I'm very glad to report that our Hong Kong, Macau and overseas operations broke record highs across the board across different metrics in the first half of 2026. First, by volume. Monthly growth of double-digit percentages for a yearly growth of multiple times maintained year after year and this first half GPV achieved nearly RMB 6 billion. The book has been more diversified with brand name customers across industries.

Second, by revenue and fee rate. As we attracted these new customers, we also increased our fee rates for the service quality and breadth of offerings differentiated from competitors. Revenue was more than 5x of that last year. And thirdly, by margins and profitability contribution. With the relative underpenetration of our services and customers' ability to pay, these margins are 4x versus that in the Chinese Mainland. This region's contribution to our payment profits is expected to meaningfully increase further going forward.

The business is already a significant part of the group. For that reason, we further made our disclosure more granular in disclosing our geographical splits across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, China, Macau China and overseas businesses across revenue, profit line and other operating metrics. We hope this helped the community to track our progresses with more ease and more regularly.

Our Chinese Mainland payments business increased its return of gross profit by almost 25% in the first half of this year, driven by our optimization in payments operational processes. We are confident about maintaining the exponential growth of Hong Kong, China, Macau, China and overseas businesses for the rest of the year.

First of all, this is a very big tamp that we are addressing. It's not just about payments related to people traveling overseas or a specific payment corridor that's subject to any idiosyncrasies. We are addressing the local to local merchants to customer payment scenarios in regions globally. According to [ Worldpay ] and third-party industry reports the TAM of such markets are USD 46 trillion year in, year out. This provides one of the most attractive and well-defined growth segments out there in the industry. And that provides the backbone of our high and sustainable growth potential for many years to come.

Second, by forming a very international talent task force across products, channels, regions and innovation, we continue to lead the latest trends in the market globally. For example, we obtained digital currency license in the U.S. and completed product R&D work for our online payment business and our Agentic payment business internationally. We are extending our collaboration with global card network scheme to promote these more cohesively. We are also expanding geographical and channel work scope with global banks to benefit more merchants and customers internationally.

Third, by playing up our unique product advantage against competitors locally and internationally, that is a very comprehensive suite spending payments merchant solutions, e-commerce services and business software that are interconnected. We are seeing increasing value delivery to customers and Yeahka's proposition being played out globally in the industry, effectively providing an AI business engine to assist merchants in enhancing customer acquisition, transaction conversion and user retention.

All these are evidenced by the transactional growth in both Merchant Solutions and in-store e-commerce solutions. In the first half of the transaction value of Merchant Solutions AI-generated videos surged by over 2x. The products were introduced into major platforms such as JD, Taobao and [ Ctrip ] and also on multiple marketing creativity and performance awards presented by the likes of [indiscernible].

Our AI tools have enabled the operational efficiency and profit margin of this business to be maintained at very high levels of over 94% gross margin. Similarly for the in-store e-commerce business, AI to significantly enhance the operational efficiency of merchants and influencers, driving the segment's GMV to increase by over 75% year-on-year to hit a historical record high.

We expanded the coverage of this business to large [ KA ] clients as well as merchants overseas, which provide a scalable growth channel going forward. By utilizing AI virtual employees to optimize service process efficiency and reduce costs, the gross profit margin of the segment improved to over 70%. We Therefore, the net profit contribution from in-store e-commerce segments hit another record high in the first half of this year.

Furthermore, across the organization, we continue to increase operational efficiency and maintain discipline on cost. We are even more asset-light with the introduction of digital employees into our front office middle office and R&D functions now. Administrative and research and development expenses decreased by 8.1% year-over-year in the first half of 2026.

Now with a clear vision of global business development across merchant acquiring, offline, online and genetic payments as well as a wide range of merchant value-added services powered by AI in both revenue generation, margins uplift and cost reductions. We have a much stronger foundation of talent, footprint and business models to deliver value to our customers partners and shareholders. With that, I will now turn the floor over to John, our CFO, to present a review of financial results with translation provided by Derek our Director of Finance.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] Thanks, Vincent. Hello, everyone. Let me introduce the financial performance of Yeahka in the first half of 2026.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] In the first half of 2026, affected by the external macroeconomic and [indiscernible] in the Chinese mainland, the domestic GPV decreased by 23% to CNY 880 billion. The total revenue of the group also decreased by 23.9% to CNY 1,249 million.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] Nevertheless, the company maintained a leading market share in the domestic market and the payment fee rate remained relatively stable at 12.3 basis points compared to 12.4 basis points for the first half of 2025 and 12.2 basis points for the second half of 2025.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] The businesses in Hong Kong, Macau and Overseas region continued to demonstrate robust growth momentum. In the first half of 2026, the overseas business record approximately CNY 6 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of 293% and the fee rate rose to 63.1 basis points.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] Benefiting from measures to optimize gross profit margin, the gross profit from one-stop payment services increased by 24.9% from CNY 195 million in the first half of 2025 to CNY 244 million for the corresponding period this year while the gross profit margin for the same period also increased from 13.7% to 21.8%.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] The group has continued to enhance efficiency through our digital workforce and the optimization of this R&D processes. In the first half of 2026, administrative and R&D expenses decreased by 8.1% year-on-year, reflecting the continued contribution of innovation technologies to cost control. The deeper integration of AI into business processes will continue to enhance the group's long-term efficiency and core competitiveness.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] In the first half of 2026, the company's profit for the period amount to CNY 41.9 million, recording the best half year profit margin since 2023 and achieving year-on-year profit growth for the first half of the year for 4 consecutive years, reflecting the continued effectiveness of the company's profit focus strategy.

[Foreign Language].

[Interpreted] We are confident about the company's long-term growth prospectives and solid financial position. The Board is divided to declare the payment of interim dividend of HKD 0.03 per share, amounting to approximately HKD 13.8 million in total. Going forward, the Board will consider measures such as share buyback and dividend payment as prop to increase returns to shareholders.

This is John and Derrick. Thank you. With that, may we open up the call to any questions from the line, please. Operator, kindly go ahead.

[Operator Instructions]. And the first question comes from the line of [ Iain Tang ] of CICC.

[Interpreted] I'm [ Toni ] from CICC. I have 2 questions. First, on domestic payments. In the first half, GPV declined as gross margin grew sharply. Could you explain the key drivers behind both movements? And how do you see the role of the domestic payments business going forward?

Second, on overseas payments, both revenue and GPV grew rapidly in the first half as Chinese payment peers accelerate their overseas expansion, how do you see the growth potential for this business? And what are the key competitive advantages?

Thank you very much, [ Ian ]. I appreciate the questions. Regarding the local environment, first of all, in the first half of this year, we do see that the average dollar value spend per transaction is of a decreasing trend. That would not be different to some of the comments that you would have heard on the earnings call of some big technology companies also listed in Hong Kong. So we think that, that is a -- what a big macro backdrop that would affect the industry across the board.

At the same time, within the company, we also cut down on customers that are of lower profitability because as we have consistently shown in the past period and stated on the earnings call, our step-up focus of driving the business going forward is ROI and delivery of bottom line profit and return because that ultimately matters the most from shareholders, investors and stakeholders' perspective.

And from that point of view, we are very focused on ultimate profit line delivery rather than GPV or revenue per se. So what we have done in the first half of this year is that we did have cut down quite significantly some of the lower profit customers. And the reason is that they can release resources and time of our higher business management to focus on the right set of customers that can in turn not just compensate for the profit loss, but actually even more profit on a very sustainable manner going forward.

So what we do is that we focus on large chain customers, brand names customers and also customers that require a little bit more differentiated services or more customized solutions. That, by definition, takes more time and resource to focus, but if we work for that is that we earn a higher margin and much more meaningful, higher margin. And that's why we see that the gross profit as well as the gross margin this year for the China business actually increased quite substantially. And that's not just one-off, that's not just for this period of time.

In fact, this is the fourth year consecutively that we have been increasing our gross profit from a China payment perspective. This is also the highest margin that you would have seen for the company in the past 6 years. So again, this is a very steadfast, long-term key focus of ours and that will continue going forward.

Now you mentioned about the strategic value of the China business given this type of background. I think this is fairly, very important. First of all, it is a very large space, a large set of customers we have refined our products to the extreme to the ultimate value to customers. As Luke mentioned, the TAM, the market of merchant acquiring is largely is very, very big.

And China has been leading the way globally with over 90% penetration rate. And therefore, there's a lot of things that we can export from a product, service perspective and very ultimate as you rightly point out, China merchants going overseas. We think this is a very secular and long-term thing. And we haven't really capitalized on that yet because they're still very nascent stage compared to others.

So when they go overseas, we indeed help a lot of [indiscernible] merchants overseas as well. For example, [indiscernible], BYD, all these big brand names and stake overseas, we're actually serving them as merchant acquirer overseas as well. So this continues to be a very important business of ours.

Now going forward, from a profit driver perspective, obviously, the overseas business is a very natural extension as we go bigger out from China where we are the dominant market leader already. And we see even more opportunities to grow in terms of profit and deliver that to our shareholders in the overseas countries.

First of all, our numbers in terms of GP revenue, profit, fee rate margins, they are very different from the structural set of metrics that you see in the Chinese Mainland. And this has been the case period-over-period. We believe that this will continue to stay, and we will continue to deliver that multiple type of growth going forward.

Even though it is a relatively short business in terms of the starting age of it, but now it's already contributing 7% of the gross profit within the payments business. And from a net profit perspective, it's already double-digit percentage. So we would not be surprised that over the next few years that would substantially increase and more than half of the company's net profit will be driving from the overseas businesses.

This is really the opportunities that we are seeing. While we are delivering all that and why we have a high mark you asked about that we can continue to defend ourselves. First of all, it is a highly regulated business. you have the licenses, the regulatory bodies, bank channels, ecosystem partners, a very huge system that is not easily replicated over the years. And therefore, we are seeing other peers entering into the space. But at the same time, we also collaborate with them.

We have the license, we have the background channels, we have the underlying -- this is actually confirming that this is a very interesting space to get into, while at the same time, our infrastructure and our moat has been quite obvious to the others. And secondly, from a product proposition perspective, all the way historically on top of payments, we also have the combination of that versus other value-added services, be it merchant solutions, e-commerce services, AI software and the engine that we can provide to merchants to help them grow their businesses as well.

We continue to see this being very differentiated, not just locally but also overseas as well. And we believe that we will continue to be uniquely positioned to expand with this set of product suites. And again, that is very hard to replicate within a short period of time.

Our next question comes from the line of Vicky Wei of Citi.

[Interpreted] Will management share your thoughts on the gross margin trend of domestic payment business and your thoughts on shareholder return program?

Thank you very much, Vicky, for your question. Regarding gross margin, as I've mentioned before, that and profitability continues to be the focus of the company going forward. So it's not surprising to see that we deliver another record, right, for our gross profit within the Chinese Mainland business. So going forward, we expect that to be staying at a relatively high level compared to the past. We continue to increase monetization, increase the commercialization of our business as well. There are a few ways to do it.

First of all, we focus on higher profitability customers and cut down on the lower profitability segments, that would help us to continue take up and focus more on customized solutions for the right set of customers that can sustainably deliver this higher gross profit and gross margins going forward.

Another two that we have is on as we input more AI elements into the business processes, for example, on fraud detection, transaction control that also help us eliminate more high risk customers and focus on those who can deliver more sustainable profits going forward. So we have a lot of leeway that we haven't really fully leveraged in the past as the technology tools as our processes become more optimized, we believe that this is something to be leveraged for the next few years.

In terms of the capital markets return as we focus on the profit and bottom line delivery, we are very confident about sustaining that going forward. And that's why we think that this is probably the right time to start doing that. So this is the first dividend issuance since our listing. In the past, we have also been doing share buyback. So going forward, a combination of that altogether would be a lot of the tools that we can continue to do sustainably going forward. So we intend to increase our profit and also delivered a return to our shareholders on a long-term basis.

And the next question comes from Yuxuan Chen of Huatai Securities.

[Interpreted]. I have 2 questions about the overseas business. First, I noticed that the gross margin of the overseas business declined in the first half. Could management share some color on what drove the decline and how you see the margin outlook going forward? Second, how do you see the competitive landscape in the overseas market? Has the comparative become more intensive recently?

Yuxuan, thank you very much for your questions. First one about the decrease in margins in our overseas business. I think this is a short-term fluctuation it's a very small percentage change within the half year period. It's still a fairly different level, much higher than the one that you see in the Chinese Mainland. So we think that is due to the mix of the portfolio, while then the fact that structurally, there's a difference between the margins between the 2.

So we think that both margins, fee rates and the economics of overseas continue to be attractive and here to stay. And secondly, in terms of the questions about our strategies overseas, first of all, we continue to focus on the local payments between merchants and consumers. That is the bigger segment, the bigger pie of the TAM that I just mentioned, and this is still hugely underserved, underpenetrated, and we believe that our products and our business models have a lot to add value as we have demonstrated in the past.

The Chinese going out is part of the [ FIM ], but that's not the only fit. The bigger thing is really the local merchants out there. And secondly, in terms of products, from doing offline, we are also launching our online payment businesses, which are already generating revenue today. So that is a very promising area because it's by diminishing a much bigger avenue to go for and web prepayments as well as stable [indiscernible] agented payments, they are all very attractive topics that companies and merchants and even consumers are thinking about.

To that end, we actually have already done our work in R&D product development as well as collaboration with some of the largest players in this space globally. So soon enough, we will make some announcement on that, and you will see that in the news. And we think that by focusing on the right areas with high demand areas, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's advertisement or local services, online payments, agentive payments have a lot of value to offer.

The question comes from Johnny Xie of Deutsche Bank.

[Interpreted] No, I will translate my question. This is Johnny Xie from Deutsche Bank. I got 2 questions. First one, we noticed that domestic GPV still contracted in the first half. So I'm wondering if the contraction has bottom out or if we need more time to -- for this transformation?

The second question is about the overseas payment. We noticed that the overseas payment take rate declined year-on-year. So we are wondering what's the normalized take rate in the future.

Johnny, this is Arnold speaking. I'm here to answer your questions. So first off, for domestic payment business, our top priority is to focus on the profitability of our overall payment business rather than focusing on the GPV growth, which we've already explained earlier that we strategize to focus more on business segments, customer segments that are more profitable and intentionally drop lower profit merchants. So going forward, I think this trend will continue.

We are not going to put GPV growth as our top priority. But rather, we want to focus more on the GP margins and operating margins going forward. So I think in the future, you will see this trend continues in the next few years domestically because on the bigger picture, China's noncash penetration rate is already there. We are already dominating or we're first-tier players in the market.

We have all the capabilities and tactics to drive up profitability, there are -- there are certain phases that we can ramp up GTVs, but we just only choose at this time that we want to focus more on profitability, which we've shown to you all that we are announcing a first time dividend payout. So I think -- in short term, our GPV will remain at a -- at this level, if not a little bit upwards. And in the next 3 to 5 years, we want to expand our GP margins. And right now, GP margin is around 20%, and we want to the expandability of that.

So second question on the fee rate. I think the international overseas payment business is on early stage. So right now, our focus is to ramp up the GPs and the businesses. So we want to take in as many different kinds of merchants as cost. So there are -- so there are there are different countries and different regions within those different countries and regions, different types of merchant profiles that they require lower or higher rates.

But I think right now, the ups and downs of fee rates of our international business is of a less observation Rather, we want to focus on the improvement of our GPV growth and our merchant base growth also on top of that, how we add other values, such as AI agents and other value-added services on top of the existing payment businesses. So in the near term, our overseas business will remain at this high level. We've explained to the market for the past year that our overseas -- the overseas fee rate is 4 to 5x of our domestic period. I think that differentiator will stay the same for the foreseeable future.

Yes. So just to add, we have different products, regions geographies and therefore, as we expand our product and diversity, as we mentioned, do expect that it would not be a stagnant number, but the overseas number overall would still be a very, very high -- meaningfully higher than the one in our original Chinese Mainland business. So we target the 60 bps, but at the same time, we will continue to focus on GPV revenue and the businesses that can provide higher value.

Our next question comes from [ Erica Cho ] of Jefferies.

[Interpreted]. Can management share more about the overseas strategies and given the current market and regulatory environment? What's your management [ as ] payment business? Or how should we think about the operating expenses in the following quarters?

Thanks a lot, Erica. On the first question, in terms of overseas strategy, I think, first of all, we need to beef up our international talents team as we have been doing that. We need to continue to do that in order to cater all the new needs, demands from the merchants as well as the ambitions that we have just mentioned about. So from that end, we hired many talents from the likes of global card networks, global banks to beef up our team. And we also strike larger partnership scheme with these global entities were banks in order to broaden our collaboration on products, channels as well as geographies. So that would continue to be the game that we should play.

And secondly, from a product, as we mentioned, about online payments, agented payments being very hot, we would continue to strike new product channels, and deliver revenue and GPV from that perspective. I mentioned about some announcement in the core to come soon. Please stay tuned on that.

And last but not least, our value-added services is indeed one of the key differentiators from a product perspective alongside all the online payments, a change payments and the innovation that we are doing on the payment side. And therefore, as payments has gone overseas, to become the leading force of driving the overseas growth of the company. The next curve of growth, so to speak, will be coming from the value-added services that we can combine over there, and that will be a very powerful combination.

In terms of the domestic strategies, the environment over there is obviously different. But it doesn't mean that we cannot our profit delivery and our margins as we have demonstrated in the first half of this year. We think that we have a lot of room to continue to provide that going forward by means of optimization of our business processes.

It could be the increase of fee rates. It could be the sharing of the scheme profits. It could also be the increase of tools in AI that can maximize our margins as well as focusing on the right customers that can deliver higher margins. And therefore, we have quite a combination of different set of -- a variety of tools that we can leverage. This is dynamic, and we will continue to leverage that given our market leadership. We are seeing that in the payment space in Mainland China, the market leaders, the bigger companies continue to have an edge over the smaller words, and we will continue to leverage on that.

Now when it comes to internal cost control, we mentioned about our digital employees being increased in usage within our system. That's really one of the driving force of the decrease in administrative expenses. And on the R&D side, actually, we decreased by even more than 10%. A lot of it is really putting R&D forces into shortening the cycle of product creation and maintenance, AI generation. And all of these stuff are proprietary created by us. And therefore, we will continue to be innovative, not just on the external business model footprint products and all that. But internally, within ourselves, the way we do things, the way we carry ourselves in terms of operations, we still have a lot of new way to go going forward.

Thank you. I am showing no further questions, and that concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back to the management for any additional or closing comments.

Thank you, everyone, again, for joining our results today. We are now ending the call. But if you have any further questions, do feel free to contact us directly. Our contact together with other information in relation to our results, can be found also on our website at yeahka.com. Thank you again, and see you again very soon.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Yeahka Limited 2025 Annual Results Announcement Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I'll now pass the call to Mr. Vincent Chan, Head of Corporate Development and Capital Markets of Yeahka. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Yeahka's 2025 Annual Results Conference Call. Before we start, we would like to remind you that this presentation includes forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Information on general market conditions comes from a variety of sources outside of Yeahka's control. Please refer to our disclosure documents on our website's IR section for a detailed discussion of risk factors.

Now let me introduce the management team on today's call. Luke Liu, our Founder, Chairman and CEO, will kick off with a short overview. I will then provide a business review. John Yao, our CFO, will conclude with a financial review translated by Derek Lai, our Director of Finance, before we open the floor for questions.

Without further ado, I will now turn the call over to Luke.

Thank you, Vincent. Hello, everyone. In 2025, we reached our product line and the commercialization to a new level. Core EBITDA rose 52.7% year-over-year. It expected rise of around 50% in 2024 versus 2023 in core EBITDA -- sorry.

Overseas expansion delivered another year of exponential growth. AI much more embedded into Yeahka. Organizationally, we have a core competitive advantage in having a full stack technical architecture over a wide range of products that provides a structurally flight ground for AI to penetrate and scale up productivity last year and in turn, increase our competitiveness in long run. Our products serving and brand names became more popular to clients globally.

All these are testaments to our core advantage in innovation, talents and our digital ecosystem, adding value based on but beyond payment. We scaled each of our business with much higher quality. Our technology adoption also continued to raise revenue and brought down costs significantly. With this setup, we are better positioned to deliver long-term sustainable growth.

First of all, we had a lot of big year of success in overseas markets with GPV over 4x of the last year. The merchant acquiring sector is big globally with over USD 30 trillion in volume in 2024 according to industry reports. The market are also fragmented, particularly in the part of the world. Many bottlenecks are still across verticals, not satisfied with existing players. Our dedicated team of experts placed locally focused on solving this, adding values with our products and service innovation.

We see in recently large room to grow and expand our propositions overseas. Therefore, with our current trajectory overseas will be a significant contributor to our earnings in the foreseeable years to come. And on top, we continue to obtain more licensed channels and launch more products services for deliver of extra growth. Our other strategic focus is application of AI externally for customers and internally to enhance our operating efficiencies.

For customers, we have launched a wide series of products. In payments, we provide merchants with apps to better monitor fraud on mobiles and server their inquiries more automatically. In value-added services, we provide customers with digital humans in live stream marketing, sharing their stories across regions instantly. We provided merchant AI tools to manage their online channels and the traffic flow more efficiently. And lately, we also developed AI shop to help F&B and retail merchants easily create digital interfaces and serve customers, just like a real human orator or a salesperson.

The results are customers more engaged, sales conversion increase for merchants, fewer personnel, median and cost save. Internally, with Yeahka, we have also scaled up AI usage to drive sales and administration and R&D efficiencies. Firstly, instead of programming enhancement, we have also launched fully automated AI-driven product development lines, including cost generation and end-to-end testing being automated. This hugely reduced the time of our product development and launch cycle.

Secondly, full development of tools operating under the light of OpenClaw, we have automated many routine day-to-day operational tasks from data analysis to customer and operational review. So we can address customers' demand more precisely and more easier and earlier and free up personnel for other high-value strategic work.

Yeahka's full stack technical architecture play great foundation for AI to scale in each of our services and operating practice and share synergies across our organization more effectively. Looking ahead, in our domestic markets, we will continue to maintain market-leading position, increasing commercialization. The successful experience accumulated will help our global expansion fast and efficiently, leveraging our proven operating model and talent team overseas.

We will enter more markets and provide more products and strengthen such network effects globally. As a full-stack technology platform, AI will drive further with added services to our customers to have increase revenue, reduce costs and improve efficiency. AI will deeply integrate into the entire business system to deliver tangible value. This strategy will strengthen the company's long-term profitability and continue to create great value for all shareholders.

As such, may I pass to Vincent to give you a detailed business review. Thank you.

Thank you, Luke. Yeahka delivered strong products better commercialization and more profit across all business lines last year. First, in one-stop payment services, our refined operations delivered 8% year-over-year increase in revenue and 10.1% year-over-year increase in gross profit in 2025. We increased our fee rate to 12.4 bps, leveraging our market-leading services and data-driven analysis on clients with high potential. We targeted higher-margin businesses, including app marketing services on payment transaction pages and put more focus on key account customers who are more demanding on service scope hence have higher willingness to pay.

We introduced new products specifically for different verticals, too, like smart checkout scale for web market industry and some boxes to taxi drivers. We also won customers from industries relatively new to us, such as education and tourism. Strategic partnerships expanded, including HSBC, Citi, JPMorgan and DBS. New merchant acquiring licenses obtained also include Japan and the U.S. in addition to the ones from Singapore, Hong Kong and China that we already have. These set up a great base for increasing volume, revenue and margins.

In particular, our overseas payment business won more high-profile customers like BYD, Oppo and GUESS. Volume hit RMB 5 billion last year, maintaining another year of month-on-month double-digit growth. If this current overseas business maintains its current trajectory, even assuming trending down to single digits month-over-month growth forward, it will still be year-over-year growth in terms of multiples.

Currently, overseas only contributed 0.2% of overall GPV, but already 3% of profit. As volume scales in multiples, we expect profit contribution scales even faster, with 30% to 50% being our midterm target. We look to further expand our licensed footprint and product suite to bring additional growth on top of those numbers mentioned. We focus on major developed economies with large TAM and attractive economics. The industry moat to this business is our merchant acquiring systems globally, comprising license, rails and talent and our know-how and innovation in addressing each and every industry's pinpoint with solutions.

We are seeing our competitive advantages playing out wider against both local and foreign players. Our merchant solutions are another profit growth driver. They posted 4.6% increase in revenue and 10.1% increase in gross profit in 2025. Gross margin also expanded to 91.8% -- these are thanks to the continued penetration of AI into content generation and operations. In particular, production of AI and digital human marketing videos almost doubled in the second half of 2025.

Our advertising transaction volume hit another record year in 2025. Yeahka's self-developed AI advertising platform enables deep AI involvement throughout the entire process from initial planning, content production to placement optimization based on customer needs. For each of these processes, the effect gets set back into the system and help it plan, produce and allocate placements more precisely. Such intelligence model enables us to attract customers more efficiency.

For example, it allows us to expand industry's coverage to e-commerce, insurance, new finance and so on to use our products. It helps us attract more large platform-based customers, including Taobao, Ctrip and DiDi. Our services continue to win industry accurate from sector partners such as ByteDance. As this business model increases commercialization and our footprint expands into more countries and regions, merchant solutions will further drive the company's overall profit growth.

Our third business segment, in-store e-commerce services also delivered better products and commercialization. Our e-commerce platform much more effectively create and matches merchants promotion with end customers' demands. AI-generated content accounted for over half of the total in 2025. Furthermore, AI virtual employees also enhanced service efficiency.

Together with a business growth model, leveraging extensive channels and focus on increasing customers repurchase rate, the GMV of in-store e-commerce grew nearly 50% versus 2024. And very importantly, it has also been delivering run rate net profit since 2025. We have accumulated much expertise in the sector, and it allows us to grow in a much more sustainable manner. In 2025, we won well-known branded customers like Haidilao, Midea and [ Shihlin ] with trust in our track record and servicing capabilities, Douyin also selected us to help expand the in-store e-commerce industry in Hong Kong, Macau and overseas.

Notable overseas customers using our services include leading restaurant groups such as LUBUDS, Fulham and Original Taste Workshop. Synergies increase between our payment services and our e-commerce value-added services. While in-store e-commerce services bring up transaction, hence payment volume for merchants, our foreign currency exchange channels also support local and cross-border merchants in fund collection processes. Such is a full-stack digital services proposition for merchants as a one-stop provider.

As we scale our businesses internationally, we look to scale such synergies and profit delivery as well. The quality growth of all our 3 businesses globally will be further enhanced by our production capacity expansion as well as increase in operating efficiencies day-to-day, much driven by AI. In new product generation process is already automated by using AI to generate codes, iterate testings and convert ideas to tangible products from front to end. For example, some of the customer insights AI tools themselves are created by our AI.

By bringing AI to the front end, we have made customers more satisfied with faster speed to delivery. And on our day-to-day operations, AI does not just assist a portion but complete tough funds to end as well. For instance, with too similar to those running under cloud or open cloud. Some of our business reviews are already actioned through AI, reducing even more manual labor than before. We are made by the effectiveness and efficiencies produced, and we look forward to more broadly implement our AI initiatives.

As such, our technical architecture has also laid a foundation for business growth in volume, revenue and profits across our product lines and regions. We will continue to focus on increasing commercialization and product enhancements across our businesses going forward.

With that, I will now turn the floor over to John, our CFO, to present a review of our business and financial results with translation provided by Derek, our Director of Finance. Thank you.

[Interpreted] Hello, everyone. Let me introduce the financial performance of Yeahka 2025. Our revenue increased by 7.3% from CNY 3.1 billion in 2024 to CNY 3.3 billion in 2025, mainly due to the growth of our one-stop payment service revenue. The GDP for domestic payments business increased by 0.1% year-on-year to CNY 2.34 trillion in 2025. The domestic payment fee rate further increased from 11.5 basis points in 2024 to 12.3 basis points in 2025, driving full year revenue of one-stop payment services by 8% year-on-year to CNY 2.9 billion.

The overseas operations continued to demonstrate growth but growth momentum. In 2025, the group's GPV for its overseas payment business which is approximately CNY 5 billion, representing a substantial year-on-year increase of 323%. The overseas payment fee rate and gross profit margin was approximately 60 basis points and 50%, respectively, providing significant growth momentum for the group's medium to long-term performance.

Driven by the growth in transaction volume and revenue, the gross profit margin of both one-stop payment services and value-added services improved accordingly. The overall gross profit margin further improved from 23.6% in 2024 to 23.8% in 2025. Gross profit for 2025 was CNY 788 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 8.1%.

Our diversified product portfolio and full set technology architecture facilitate deeper integration of AI into business process, enhancing operational efficiency and long-term competitiveness. In 2025, the group selling, administrative and R&D related expenses decreased by 13.2% compared to 2024 demonstrating remarkable cost control effect. Through proactive financial cost control, the finance cost in 2025 decreased significantly by 37.8% compared to 2024.

In terms of profit, our profit for the year attributable to equity holders reached CNY 92 million in 2025, representing an increase of 11.9% compared to 2024. In addition, our core EBITDA reached from CNY 352 million in 2025, representing a year-on-year increase of 52%, demonstrating a steady improvement in performance and continued new enhancement in profitability.

Vincent, John and Derek, thank you. With that, may we open up the call to any questions from the line. Operator, please go ahead.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from the line of Vicky Wei of Citi.

[Interpreted] So will management share what is the latest macro and off-line payment consumption performance? Are they getting better? And how should we think of competition landscape with other payment companies?

Thanks a lot, Vicky. It's good to see you. The macro environment in the Chinese Mainland is gradually recovering. There are certain areas that have been growing better than the others, particularly in the new consumption areas, such as travel, services, entertainment and health care products. People are more building spend on items that bring well-being, fulfillment, safety and nice experiences. And we think such consumption patterns should continue to grow going forward. And we are quite well positioned in some of these verticals as we are bringing all around industry solutions tailored to the IT within these specific sectors. And because of that, we are also able to enjoy better and secure economics, growing along with these clients.

In terms of competitive landscape, I think large major players in the industry, including ourselves, are gaining market share, especially for large-sized customers who have more sophisticated demands and focus more on service quality, stability and breadth of services, larger players are more equipped to address their needs. These customers also tend to have more needs on value-added services outside of payments which also tend to be more offered by larger service providers.

For Yeahka, we are seeing increasing room to expand our market share and to enjoy better economics going forward. Our ecosystem remains market leading in China with hundreds of banks, agents and dozens of industry partners forming a very entrenched system that is hard to override. For example, Meituan is also one of our partners where we enable payments or merchants domestically in the Chinese Mainland. So we will continue to increase collaboration all across.

We will now take our next question from Johnny Xie of Deutsche Bank.

[Interpreted] I will translate my questions. I got 3 questions. First, we are aware that the TPV has been trending to stabilization. So what do management anticipates the trading volume in 2026 and the take rate is -- is take rates reached the bottom? And what is the driver for the improvement of take rates?

And the second question is about merchant solution and in-store e-commerce. So what are the main drivers for the steady growth of these 2 segments? And what's your outlook for the GP margin of these 2 segments? And the third question is about the AI development. So we want to know what are the major areas that the company will invest in 2026? And what are the key metrics that the management focus on in development AI?

Thank you very much, Johnny. I will let [ Arnold ] take the rate question, and I'll address the merchant solutions and AI questions.

Hi, Johnny. Hello, everyone, this is Arnold. So for the first question regarding the GPV outlook and the take rate outlook. We think that in China market, there is a gradual bottoming up of the off-line consumption as well as the merchant activities. So we are cautiously optimistic about the future outlook.

First off, from the GPV perspective, we try to consolidate more on the channel strategy, bringing more leverage power to ourselves and take on more profits versus traditionally, we've been given out more commissions out to our ecosystem partners. So that's one strategy that we're focusing on. That is part of the profitability-driven strategy that we try to focus on in Mainland China.

And we feel pretty good about the strategy because going forward, we believe the overall payment -- competition landscape in China is gradually easing up. We don't have the regulatory overhang traditionally we had a couple of years ago. So from our perspective, we try to control what we can and gradually move on to more profitability first off by remaining more profitability to ourselves.

And the second thing about fee rates, I think in 2026, the outlook is pretty optimistic, I would say, because we've already bottomed up in -- for fee rate for a couple of years ago. And you're seeing a trajectory to gradually increase the fee rate over the last couple of years. And in 2025, we got the fee rate up to 12.3 bps in China. And we think in 2026, we're more confident about raising fee rates. But of course, that would be built into our overall channel strategy as we cover more channels, more segments, more diversified channel partners such as SaaS partners, and the banks that we have. So I think in that sense, we're pretty optimistic about that, yes.

And when it comes to merchant solutions, a lot of our AI products for customers in our merchant solutions as well as other value-added services, including in-store e-commerce. So the growth will continue to be charged by AI, be it in the Chinese Mainland or overseas. AI-related services will be another important growth driver for the company, along with our very obvious overseas growth initiatives.

Behind these segments are increasing blue chip customers in value-added services and emerging solutions such as Haidilao, Midea, LUBUDS foreign names and local names and overseas names. And our self-developed AI advertising platform enables deeper AI involvement throughout the entire process. As this model extends to overseas strategic partners and our business footprint expands into more countries and regions, they will definitely further drive Yeahka's overall profit growth.

And AI is a very important initiatives for the company. We made a lot of progress last year, both on products as well as on operations. The impact on revenue and cost savings will be huge. On products, another example is our AI shop, our AI-generated marketing content and our digital influencers. All these are bringing increased revenue to Yeahka as they bring more convenience, high-quality and better products with shorter time frame to our customers.

Now over 40% of our marketing video production is already AI-driven, and we expect that to increase. And the product creation cycle will continue to be shortened with AI as well as making all these more efficient. In the production processes, we automate code generation and testing iteration using AI as well. That's a significant upgrade from co-piloting or other programming enhancements.

Take value-added services, as an example, again, the efficiency of human personnel has increased over 60% in content production. Even in our day-to-day operations, we also use AI employees to finish tasks, whether it's data sourcing, compilation, analysis, report generation or everything from front to end, AI is already automating these work streams for us like we humans do.

So in the process, we save a lot of manual labor or tedious work that frees up resources on more important human work. Take payments fraud detection as an example, the accuracy and the intensity of work done by AI 24/7 has enhanced our process efficiency a lot. That's how we save another 13% of cost in our SG&A for yet another year in 2025. And as a native tech company, we think we can do more in this regard and continue to innovate.

Our edge is our tech architecture that is proprietary and that goes through each of our products and business lines. So in the application of AI, we have much more leverage in scaling up efficiency without the burden of the task or reliance on a particular line. So we, for sure, will continue to produce more AI products and services and bring our efficiencies to the next level this year.

If you look at our core EBITDA, which reflects true status of business operations, it increased over 50% in 2025 after another 50% growth in 2024. We, as an organization, has been consistent in becoming more effective and efficient, and we will trend towards that direction going forward, too. Thank you, Johnny.

[Operator Instructions]. Next, we have [indiscernible] Tang of CICC.

[Interpreted] I have 3 questions. First, how do you see the future growth of overseas GPV and its long-term contribution to revenue profit? Secondly, what other growth areas do you see for merchant solution and in-store e-commerce? And how will they contribute to revenue and profit over the long time? Third, what are your plans for overseas payments and stablecoin license?

Thanks, [indiscernible]. Good to see you over here. For the first question regarding overseas outlook, we expect overseas GPV to maintain growing in multiples every year for the next 5 years. We aim to grow the business, maintaining overseas markets fee way as well as margins and we do so with expenses well kept under our strict ROI evaluation for each sales and projects.

So that on a net profit basis, it will be a real significant mover to Yeahka's overall bottom line for many years to come. And we are confident about this 5-year plan as our existing overseas business already exceeds budgets across GPV, revenue and profit metrics in January, February and March. And we also haven't incorporated new products, new markets or geographies for conservative purposes.

Now besides payments, value-added services outlook, we are also very optimistic, as you mentioned about AI adoption. It will continue to drive the growth of this business. To give you a sense, our AI video transaction volume more than doubled in the second half of 2025 versus the first half of the year already. This year, for example, in in-store e-commerce segment, we will also use AI to automate more content production for customers from front to end.

As we grow overseas with both payment and value-added services, we expect synergies between them for customers to increase to maintain, call it, 10% target of overseas revenue being value-added services based on our current ratio also in the Chinese Mainland to be conservative. And the margins of these businesses have been high in our operations. They are currently at over 90%, and we expect them to continue to be high going forward given the AI component.

So value-added services with the support of both overseas and AI initiatives, will be increasingly important growth drivers for our products. When it comes to our overseas expansion licenses and all that, we continue to expand our services and channel coverage to stay at the forefront of innovation and broadening our footprint geographically. So we are really expanding in many fronts.

We continue to invest in licenses in selected areas and progress the work with various regulators and ecosystem players overseas. In terms of geographies, we continue to prefer economically developed markets as they provide very favorable context to grow healthily and sustainably. And in terms of product sets, beside stablecoins, online payments is another interesting trend we're following.

The segment is global by nature and the market is huge. I mentioned about over USD 30 trillion in terms of market size for offline merchant acquiring based on third-party reports. That is off-line only, and it doesn't even count the online auction to give you a sense of the market that we are looking at.

Right. This is Arnold. Just to add on to those points. We think the total addressable market that we're looking at right now, overseas is tremendous. For the countries that we already have licenses in, we are looking at a USD 15 trillion market size. That is to some third-parties research about 3 to 4x of that in China. So we're looking at a tremendous size overseas where we already have a head start.

So over the next few years, you will see a -- I wouldn't say overly aggressive, but very assertive growth strategy in terms of GPV. We have on-the-ground teams in all locations that we have licenses in we use asset-light models. We first cooperate with local banks and then we also cooperate with local e-wallets and card networks to expand in an asset-light mode. So you would expect us to expand our overseas business quite gradually.

And for the value-add services, just like Vincent just mentioned, we think -- and our top management already reiterated within our internal meetings that we are going to keep exploring AI-empowered solutions and processes within ourselves. With that being said, we can unleash 10x, if not 100x of efficiency boost for each and one of our employees. We've already seen what AI can be done, what AI can do in the last year, especially in 2026.

So within ourselves, we think product innovation, research and development market research, new product trials and all those points are all the things that we can explore, we can empower by AI. So I think the future -- we're at an inflection point where in the future, our 2B business nature would empower us to be one of the best or first movers to leverage AI tools, especially AI agents and so on. So that's something that -- I want to add.

And in terms of stablecoin plan, just as what Vincent mentioned, we are closely monitoring that, and we also have online payments that we try to explore. So I think the room to grow is tremendous. Coming from a Chinese background, we have the Chinese know-hows that to some point, some of the products and technologies that we have already far exceed what we are seeing in the market in Southeast Asia and beyond. So we are very optimistic about what we can do overseas.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our next question from Yuxuan Chen of Huatai.

[Interpreted] I got one question. I would like to ask about the competitive landscape of the overseas payment business in the local market? And what is the company's advantages on it? So that's all.

Thank you very much, Yuxuan. Great question. Our latest volume growth overseas is also very strong at about teens percentage growth month-over-month, continuing to take a lot of market share overseas versus competitors, local or foreign. And we are quite confident on delivering annual growth in terms of multiples going forward just based on our existing overseas markets alone. And we are doing so with profitability, maintaining high, i.e., fee rate at about 60 bps and gross profit margin around 50%. Each of these are a few times higher than those in the Chinese Mainland, as you can see. And when multiply, they are very solid growth drivers.

Competitive edge overseas, it really lie on our service quality and our ability to solve pain points. So while they're on price, we think that is a very sustainable game play, adding value to customers and local partners, including the banks with whom we co-create together, serving clients better. So effectively, we are standing in a sweet spot, more competing within the third-party nonbank provider segment. There's a long tail of smaller players, start-ups, et cetera, in these segments overseas.

And our edge against them is to make good use of our scale, our products, our licenses, listed status, our compliance sectors and a wide network of partners that we have built over time overseas that is very hard for smaller players to replicate. And on top of which, we also offer value-added services beyond payments. They drive digital payments overseas.

For example, a local restaurant that we serve want our in-store e-commerce services to attract tourists visiting them, and we can provide foreign payment acceptance methods to help them take payments from these tourists as well. That's what we call a complete solutions. It forms a virtuous a synergistic cycle that reinforces itself, bringing us increased volume overseas.

[Operator Instructions] Okay. I'm showing no further questions, and that concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the conference back to the management for any additional or closing comments.

Thank you, everyone, again for joining our results today. We are now ending the call. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us directly. Our contact together with other information in relation to our results can be found on our website at www.yeahka.com. Thank you, and see you again soon.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.