WenYuan Zhixing: High Growth and 100 Million Buyback, Is the Robotaxi Profitability Turning Point Near?

Ask AI · Newcomers Flood the Robotaxi Track—Can Waymo’s Early-Mover Advantage Hold Up?

Author: Qi Xiao, Editor: Jia Xin

On March 23, Waymo Xingxing released its full-year 2025 financial results. That same day, the board announced a plan: to use its own funds to repurchase up to $100 million worth of Class A ordinary shares within the next 12 months.

In an autonomous driving industry that’s still burning through money in huge amounts, this move is somewhat “unusual.”

When a company repurchases its stock, it usually sends a signal to the market: the company believes its share price is undervalued, has idle cash on hand, and is confident about future cash flows.

The financial report shows that Waymo Xingxing’s 2025 revenue was RMB 685 million, up 90% year over year; Robotaxi revenue was RMB 148 million, up 2x year over year; and cash reserves on the balance sheet were RMB 7.1 billion. The earnings call also mentioned that its overseas business gross margin is close to 50%, and its Middle East subsidiary has already turned profitable.

With improving performance and repurchase expectations, after the financial report was released, Waymo Xingxing’s stock price rose sharply for two consecutive days. So besides the double-digit growth, what other information in Waymo Xingxing’s financial results is worth paying attention to?

1. The product is “solid,” the service is “soft”

Waymo Xingxing has an autonomous driving general technology platform and five product lines—Robotaxi, Robobus (autonomous driving buses), Robosweeper (autonomous sanitation vehicles), Robovan (autonomous freight vehicles), and an L2-level advanced driver assistance solution.

CEO Han Xu described the five product lines as “branches growing slowly like those on a tree,” calling the process “laying eggs along the way.” In 2025, Robotaxi revenue mix increased to 22%; Robobus business revenue mix rose to 34%; and revenue contributions from L2+ ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and data services were about 20%.

Meanwhile, based on how they are categorized, Waymo Xingxing’s revenue can also be split into two parts: products and services. The former includes autonomous driving minibuses, Robotaxi, unmanned sanitation vehicles, and related sensor kits; the latter includes ADAS R&D services, intelligent data services, and autonomous driving operations support services.

What’s driving growth is product revenue—more precisely, product revenue in the second half of the year. In 2025, Waymo’s product revenue was RMB 360 million, a surge of 310.3% year over year; of this, fourth-quarter product revenue was RMB 211 million, up 309% year over year.

By comparison, the service revenue performance looks much less impressive. In 2025, service revenue was RMB 325 million, up only 18.8% year over year, and the fourth quarter saw an increase of just 15.2%.

Looking at a longer time span, Waymo Xingxing’s revenue structure hasn’t been very stable. But judging from the trend over the past three years, the product revenue segment is getting stronger.

Next, let’s look at profitability. Full-year gross margin was 30.2%, roughly in line with 30.7% in 2024; but in the fourth quarter it fell from 36.5% to 28.5%.

Among them, the gross margin from selling products is moving upward.

In July 2025, Waymo Xingxing and Lenovo jointly developed the HPC 3.0 computing platform, equipped with dual-core NVIDIA DRIVE Thor X chips. It was applied first on the new-generation Robotaxi GXR to help reduce the cost of the GXR autonomous driving kit by 50%, and the platform’s total cost over its full lifecycle was reduced by 84% versus the previous generation. The vehicle bill-of-materials cost for the new-generation GXR models also dropped by 15%.

These cost-reduction moves have expanded the profit space for selling products. Product gross margin rose from 18.2% in 2024 to around 29.5% in 2025.

However, if you look only at the fourth quarter, product gross margin fell again to below 23%, suggesting this profit isn’t very stable. Waymo Xingxing’s IPO prospectus when listed in Hong Kong already revealed that minibuses, Robotaxi, sanitation vehicles, and freight vehicles have significant differences in gross margin.

Differences in product sales mix affect gross margin to a large extent. On top of that, because overall volumes are still relatively small, economies of scale in procurement and production are hard to realize, which increases the unpredictability of its performance.

(Source: Waymo Xingxing IPO prospectus)

The gross margin of the services business is trending downward, falling from 34.6% in 2024 to 31% in 2025.

Within the services business, the highest profit margin comes from ADAS R&D—helping automakers develop customized higher-level driver assistance solutions. But in 2025, this business’s revenue contribution fell by a lot, dragging down the overall profit level of the services business.

Looking at net profit, calculated under International Financial Reporting Standards, Waymo Xingxing had a full-year net loss of RMB 1.655 billion, narrowing by 34.2% year over year. Revenue grew quickly, and the loss ratio narrowed even faster—of course, that’s a positive signal.

But if you break down this “narrowing,” on the one hand it is indeed because revenue rose; on the other hand, it’s also because the baseline for 2024 was too high due to non-cash items like equity incentive programs. Equity incentive expenses in 2025 fell from RMB 1.188 billion to RMB 450 million. If you exclude this portion, the adjusted net loss was RMB 1.247 billion, which is 55% larger than in 2024.

2. Robotaxi’s advantages—can they be protected?

Although Waymo Xingxing is “diversified all at once” and places orders along the way, if we’re to say which is the flagship business, it’s still Robotaxi.

Industry opinion generally holds that autonomous freight or sanitation vehicles may be easier to start turning profit. But Waymo Xingxing’s mid-to-long-term goal is still focused on tackling mobility: by 2030, it wants to run tens of thousands of Robotaxis worldwide; in the short term, its target is to reach a fleet size of 2,600 vehicles by end of 2026.

As of the release of the financial report, Waymo Xingxing had a global fleet of 1,125 vehicles, covering 8 countries. It’s true that Waymo is running ahead, but when you look back at competitors, pressure is already building.

2025 is a key year for the Robotaxi track to shift from “technology validation” to “commercial deployment.” New entrants like XPeng and Horizon are piling in, making the track even more lively.

On March 23, XPeng officially announced the establishment of a Robotaxi business unit. It plans to launch three Robotaxi models in 2026, equipped with four Turing chips, with 3,000 TOPS of compute on the vehicle, and it will start passenger-carrying tests with safety drivers in the second half of the year. Because XPeng can both manufacture vehicles and develop its own intelligent driving technology, it means XPeng can factor in unmanned driving from the design source.

Horizon also plans to trial Robotaxi operations in 2026. Its confidence lies in its chips: as a player selling “chips + algorithms” as a package, Horizon can optimize power consumption and costs from the very bottom layer. This cost-reduction capability is applied top-down.

Pony.ai is the most direct comparable rival to Waymo Xingxing. In December last year, its average daily rides per vehicle in Guangzhou reached 23, roughly comparable to Waymo’s level in the United States. Industry believes that reaching 24 average daily rides per vehicle implies both user demand and revenue on both ends have been “figured out.” Waymo Xingxing’s average daily rides per vehicle over the past six months were 15.

Baidu’s Apollo Go—an established player—has brought its seventh-generation vehicle cost down to the 200,000-yuan class. It has already achieved breakeven in Wuhan.

At the earnings call, Li Xuan said, “We welcome competition.” She believes that from L2 to L4 is a huge leap. To prove true unmanned driving capability, you must have performance results that can stand up to scrutiny, a record of safe operations, a mature hardware architecture, and you must pass layered approvals from regulatory authorities—these are the checkpoints competitors need to conquer one by one.

In other words, entering the market is easy; achieving fully unmanned commercial operations is hard.

Earlier, Han Xu said that in China, there are only three companies that can truly operate fully unmanned for external parties right now—Waymo Xingxing, Baidu, and Pony.ai. That is very clear.

Some observers believe that L3 passenger vehicles will see large-scale deployment, which will divert industry resources and disrupt the commercialization timeline for L4 autonomous driving. Han Xu also doesn’t agree with the view that “L3 will steal business from L4.” He believes it’s extremely difficult to jump from L2++ to L3. L3 ultimately needs to be implemented jointly by technology companies and automakers that already have fully unmanned commercial operation capabilities at the L4 level, like Waymo Xingxing.

However, in the domestic market, is Waymo Xingxing’s early-mover advantage truly unshakeable?

From the policy perspective, local governments are accelerating the opening up of autonomous driving across all domains, and the scarcity of licenses is decreasing. It has shifted from the past question of “whether you can obtain them” to “who gets the entry ticket to scale-up operations first.” Technologically, different intelligent driving routes are developing quickly and integrating; latecomers may not necessarily have no chance.

Going forward, as more players enter, to get more users to ride Robotaxis, will the industry start a price war earlier? As Li Xuan said in her interview with LeiFeng.com, the average price in China’s Robotaxi industry is roughly RMB 2 per kilometer, and each platform is also dynamically adjusting various promotional activities.

These are all questions that need to be tracked continuously to assess Waymo’s leading advantage.

Overseas, Waymo Xingxing’s advantage is still fairly clear.

On the one hand, there are more addressable markets for market entry; on the other hand, Waymo has deeply cultivated the Middle East, where its price per ride is high. In the Middle East, its average price has stayed consistently between $1 and $1.1 per kilometer, and this price has no adverse impact on ride volumes.

Author’s statement: personal views, for reference only