Revenue hits a new high, R&D investment increases by 77.4% year-over-year! The "long-termism" behind Seres' 2025 financial report

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On March 30, 2026, Seres disclosed its 2025 full-year financial report. Full-year revenue was 165.0 billion yuan, setting a historical high; net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies was 5.96 billion yuan, achieving profitability for two consecutive years; among this, R&D expenditure was 12.51 billion yuan, up 77.4% year over year. Through steady growth throughout the year, it leads the industry’s broader market. Its core profitability is improving, fully validating the growth potential of its current investment model, forming a virtuous cycle of “invest—profit—invest again—profit again.”

Looking back at 2025, this was a turning point in China’s new energy vehicle market. Full-year penetration of new energy vehicles surpassed 50%, officially overtaking fuel vehicles to become the market mainstream. However, beneath the appearance of prosperity lies a ruthless elimination round. The reason Seres was able to break through against the trend—maintaining profitability for two consecutive years and achieving an industry-leading full-year gross margin of 28.8%—ultimately comes down to its extreme commitment to its “long-termism” strategy.

In the capital market, long-termism is often misunderstood as an empty slogan, but in Seres’s financial statements, it is investment in real dollars and real effort. While many competitors were still anxious about short-term sales fluctuations, and even beautifying their reports by cutting R&D costs, Seres chose to do the opposite and turned its attention to a more long-term future.

Seres’s 2025 financial report shows that full-year R&D expenditure reached 12.51 billion yuan, up 77.4%. Both R&D spending intensity and growth rate remain at industry-leading levels. By the end of 2025, the number of R&D personnel reached 9,019, up 45.4%, and their proportion of total employees increased to 41.1%.

In 2025, Seres leveraged a platform-based approach to achieve agile product development, closely aligned with its major single-product strategy, and advanced four models under the AITO brand to launch. In addition, by focusing on platform development, the much-anticipated “Seres Cube Technology Platform 2.0” was officially released. This effectively improves R&D efficiency, laying a solid foundation at the ground level for efficient product development and technical mass production implementation, and building Seres’s core competitive advantage as a technology-and-technology-based enterprise at the foundational architecture level, ahead of traditional automakers.

As early as 2016, when the industry was still debating the merits of range-extended routes, Seres had already quietly laid out a dual-technology path of pure electric + range-extended. Ten years磨一剑, and today Seres’s super range-extended business holds the top position in the industry with a 37.5% market share. At the same time, the sales mix of pure-electric models continues to increase.

In terms of AI-driven upgrading, Seres is steadily evolving. Step into Seres’s Super Factory (Longxing), and you’ll see a future-feeling picture: more than 3,000 intelligent robots collaborating seamlessly; in the stamping, welding, and painting workshops, 100% automation is achieved. Here is the world’s first and largest two-plate, ten-thousand-ton integrated die-casting machine, which can combine what used to be 87 parts into 1—reducing weight by 28% and significantly improving body strength and safety. This new paradigm of “an industrial brain + a future factory” gives Seres an unassailable moat in production efficiency and product quality.

In addition, Seres has also innovatively implemented a “factory within a factory” model, embedding leading partners and core suppliers such as CATL, Yanfeng, and Wenxian directly into the OEM’s production system. This leap from “geographic clustering” in the supply chain to “ecosystem co-existence” greatly reduces logistics costs, improves response speed, and gives Seres a precious “time dividend” in fierce market competition.

If technology is Seres’s skeleton, then the brand is its soul. In 2025, Seres’s position in the high-end luxury vehicle market was firmly consolidated.

The success of the AITO brand is not accidental. It’s not a result of a price war; rather, it comes from deep insight into the definition of “new luxury.” In Seres’s view, true luxury is not just leather seats and an engine, but an experience of extreme intelligence and an all-round safety protection. Upholding the philosophy of “not intelligent without safety, not electrified without safety, not luxurious without safety,” Seres has built an intelligent safety system covering life protection, body protection, health care, and privacy protection, providing users with a sense of safety that goes beyond expectations.

This philosophy has been validated most directly at the market level. In 2025, the AITO M9 delivered more than 110,000 units for the full year, retaining the sales champion position for luxury cars priced above 500,000 yuan for consecutive periods. It became a China luxury automotive brand leading in domestic sales. The AITO M8 and AITO M7 also demonstrated strong competitiveness in their respective segments. This market landscape has enabled Seres’s share in the high-end market to keep rising.

The high-end positioning of the brand is inseparable from penetration into high-end scenarios. In 2025, AITO not only became the official cooperation partner of China’s national artistic gymnastics team, but also deeply participated in high-end cultural and sports events such as the WTT Chongqing Champions event and the China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival. These cross-industry collaborations not only enhance brand awareness, but also, subtly over time, link AITO with high-end words such as “elegance,” “champion,” and “art,” greatly enriching the brand’s内涵.

With the strong momentum brought by the brand’s high-end positioning, Seres is actively laying out the next growth cycle, and its strategic plan is evolving from a single automotive manufacturing focus into a diversified framework covering products, markets, ecosystems, and cutting-edge technologies.

Seres will rely on successful experience accumulated in the high-end SUV market to further expand the boundaries of product categories, and build a matrix of high-end intelligent electric vehicle products that covers a broader range of sub-markets and precisely fits the needs of different users. While consolidating its core advantages, it will explore new growth opportunities.

Advancing global market deployment is also a core part of the future strategy. In 2026, Seres will focus on the Middle East and Central Asia markets, accelerating product introductions and the rollout of terminal service networks. Meanwhile, for other key regions such as Europe and Asia-Pacific, Seres has already begun forward-looking development preparations to solidly build a strong foundation for its global operations in stages, step by step.

While improving product and market layout, Seres is also investing heavily in the buildout of its energy-supplementing ecosystem. The company plans to roll out, within the next three years, a large network consisting of 5,000 ultra-fast charging stations through a combination of building by itself and co-building with partners. The network will precisely cover highway service areas, high-frequency living zones, and popular self-driving routes, and will simultaneously upgrade user-center energy-supplementing services across more than 220 cities nationwide, providing users with an effortless energy replenishment experience.

In addition to deeply focusing on its core business of intelligent electric vehicles, Seres is also actively cultivating future-oriented innovative businesses. Centering on “Artificial Intelligence +,” it explores new growth drivers. By building technical accumulation and exploring scenarios around cutting-edge directions such as intelligent robots and Robo-X, it accelerates the verification and preparation of related capabilities in C-end consumer markets, as well as in scenario settings such as industry-end stores and factories. This forward-looking layout will help innovation成果 achieve rapid transformation and market implementation, injecting a steady stream of new vitality into the company’s long-term development.

Under the guidance of long-termism, Seres is heading toward a broader global market, writing a new legendary chapter in China’s auto industry.

(This article does not constitute any investment advice. The information disclosure content shall be based on the company announcements. Investors act on this at their own risk.)

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