WeRide - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Transcript

Speaker 1

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to WeRide's Third Quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The company will be hosting a question-and-answer session after management prepare remarks. Please note that today's event is being recorded. The company's unaudited financial and operating results were released by the newswire earlier today and are currently available online. Joining us today are 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 strategies and future plans. These forward-looking statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S.

Private Securities Certification 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 Risk Factors sections of the company's Form 20F, filed with the SEC and announcements on the website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the full disclosure of these risk factors. The company does not assume any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law. Please note that all numbers stated in management prepare remarks are in R&D terms, and we will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more truly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported in the company's earnings release and filed linked with the SEC and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

With that, I'll now turn the call over to the company's founder, chairman, and CEO, Dr. Tony Han. Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 0

Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I would like to begin by highlighting some of the key milestones we achieved this past quarter. Q3 was a period of extraordinary progress for WeRide. Most notably, we made history in Abu Dhabi by securing the world's first city-level fully driverless robotaxi commercial permit outside the United States. Actually, we have already started the driverless operations through Uber, which I am going to detail in the later slides this week. With our recent expansion into Belgium and our inaugural driverless robotaxi license in Switzerland, WeRide has become the only company with autonomous driving permits for eight countries. By October, we have developed L4 fleets in 11 countries and more than 30 cities with over 1,600 L4-level autonomous driving vehicles in operation worldwide. Now, let's take a look at our third quarter accomplishments.

Let's turn into Abu Dhabi slides. Okay, next slide, please. As mentioned earlier, WeRide has been officially approved to provide full driverless commercial robotaxi service in the UAE's capital, Abu Dhabi. This landmark authorization removes the requirements for in-car safety officers and demonstrates the regulator's strong confidence in our technology. Following this approval, WeRide and Uber jointly launched the region's first fully driverless fare charging robotaxi service this week, starting from Yas Island and with a citywide rollout underway. Next page. Our commercial operation at Abu Dhabi has begun in last December. Our service now covers roughly 50% of the city's core area. In half of 12 hours, our single vehicle can complete up to 20 trips per day. I think this is a quite exciting progress.

In the midterm, we aim to extend our service hours to 24/7, increase vehicle utilization to more than 25 trips per day, and improve human-to-vehicle ratio to 1 to 10. These numbers will lead us to a very healthy unit economics. We believe Abu Dhabi will set a global benchmark for large-scale and commercially viable robotaxi operation. With all of these numbers, I think our unit economics is very, very healthy and can be profitable. I just want to emphasize this kind of breakthrough is quite exciting, and we worked so hard for a whole year to achieve this full driverless robotaxi operation in Abu Dhabi. This is the first city-level outside of the United States who are capable of first city-level robotaxi service out of the United States, and it is actually provided through Uber platform.

With all of these important factors, this is unparalleled, and we are so excited that we are making history. Now, let's talk about our current operation in Dubai. In September, we secured a self-driving vehicle trial permit from Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority and have begun road testing for our driverless operation in Dubai. Our goal is to launch a supervised trial on Uber this year and the driverless commercial operation in the year of 2026. I mean, next year, we are going to provide driverless robotaxi service in Dubai. Next page, please. We are going to talk about our current operation in Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, we began offering robotaxi rides through Uber in October, making our robotaxi service the first and only publicly accessible robotaxi service in the kingdom.

With our development in the three largest cities in the Middle East, that is Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, we have more than 100 robotaxi vehicles in the Middle East region. The launch of driverless operation in Abu Dhabi is paving the way to scale the fleet to more than 500 vehicles by next year and to tens of thousands by 2030. We are very excited and very confident and very optimistic about our full driverless robotaxi operation in the Middle East. That is not only our operation region. I want to talk about East Asia and Europe. First, in Singapore, together with Grab, we received approval from the Land Transport Authority for both robotaxi and robo-bus in the area called the Punggol District. We plan to increase our AV test volume by four times by the end of this year.

We're also integrating our technology into Grab's fleet management and the routing system so that in future, we can provide driverless robotaxi through Grab in Singapore, just what we have done in Abu Dhabi through Uber. Actually, all of these efforts will pave the groundwork for commercial service in the next phase. Let's talk about Switzerland. In Europe, the expansion in Switzerland continues to lead our robotaxi deployment. We received the country's first driverless robotaxi license, enabling our autonomous operation in the Furttal region. A full driverless public service is expected to be launched in the first half of 2026. That is our current operation in Europe and in East Asia in Singapore. Now let's talk about China. In our China market, we continue to expand and innovate. As we scale our commercial fleets, we also launched a 24/7 driverless commercial service in Huangpu District at Guangzhou.

This is an area of 150 sq km. As of October, we have deployed more than 300 robotaxis in Guangzhou and over 100 in Beijing. For all of these services, you can hail a driverless robotaxi in this region through our WeRide Go app. User value is kept very close to our heart, and we recently introduced China's first free pickup and drop-off feature for robotaxi service. We call it Pudu service, allowing our system to intelligently recommend optimal boarding locations. This greatly improved both operational flexibility and user experience, which is well captured by our operational data. In November, each robotaxi completed up to 25 daily trips in Guangzhou and 23 in Beijing, which is clear evidence of accelerated adoption. This is our current exciting progress about robotaxi. Next, let's talk about our other applications. First, robo-bus. Okay, next page.

Our robo-bus obtained Belgium's first Level 4 test permit, and we launched our operation in Lubin, making Belgium the 11th country covered by our service. In Guangzhou, after serving more than 1 million passengers since 2021, we received an order for an additional 100 mid-size robo-buses. This is a very exciting achievement. Actually, this is a newly developed robo-bus. In Hong Kong, we established a partnership with Guangzhou Bus Holding to deploy more than 500 Level 4 vehicles over the next three years. For our L2 Plus Level 8 system, WeRide and Bosch achieved a major milestone in November with the start of production of WePilot 3.0. This is an end-to-end system. It's just like what Tesla has achieved through their FSD system. Our WePilot is totally comparable to what Tesla can do with FSD.

The WePilot 3.0 will debut with the refreshed Cherry Exceed ES and ET model, and existing owners will receive OTA upgrades. With this kind of new feature, every owner of Cherry Exceed ES and ET can enjoy the experience of Tesla's FSD. With this exceptional end-to-end system, WePilot has also been selected as a major add-on system provider by Guangzhou Automotive Group, GAC, for several of their passenger car models. That part is actually a very exciting progress, demonstrating WeRide can not only be capable of doing L4-level robotaxi, but also capable of doing L2 Plus Plus level add-ons for massive production cars. This page actually summarizes our footprint in the global. Actually, WeRide's strategy prioritizes a balanced development in the global market. I want to explain this slide a little bit. You can see in these 11 countries, we have different levels of operation.

We have tested or we can operate it with other drivers. They are shown in the legend. You see our multi-product offering has maximized the value of our strategy, making us the only company whose technology is available in the 11 countries shown here. We actually have a wide spectrum of applications and service available for the global market. Next, let me discuss the backbone of our technology. This is called WeRide One's universal platform. Starting from supporting L4 applications alone in the early days, WeRide One has gradually grown into a more powerful platform that empowers the full spectrum from L2 to L4 while continuously breeding new tools and systems. One of the most prominent is our world model, WeRide Genesis.

In our Genesis model, you can see Genesis is a new platform and will allow autonomous vehicles to be tested in a digital twin of the real world safely, efficiently, and at a large scale. It features the data loop, algorithm loop, and simulation validation loop that are essential for scalable autonomy. This is our world model, and it's seamlessly integrated with our end-to-end system. This is a unique technology advantage. Our world model can be seamlessly integrated into end-to-end add-on system, and our L4 system can leverage on the data we collected from our L2 level data. This Genesis form as the core flying wheel, actually, we call it a double flywheel. We can actually leverage on L2 Plus Plus Plus level massive production car data to improve our robotaxi.

In turn, our robotaxi data with redundancy can help us to boost the performance of our add-on system. I want to emphasize in this world, there's only one company WeRide can do so. On one hand side, we have a large-scale robotaxi fleet. WeRide are capable of doing leading robotaxi service like Waymo and other companies like they can do in the U.S. so that we can actually capture all the characteristics of full driverless operation. At the same time, WeRide supplies WePilot 3.0 and very advanced add-on system comparable to the FSD of Tesla, and we can leverage on the mass production car data and collect all this kind of data in a very broad sense in all kinds of scenarios to help us to improve the performance of robotaxi. We believe we can combine the benefits of L4 and L2 Plus.

This hybrid architecture enhances adaptability, reliability, safety, and transparency, ultimately enabling robust commercial deployment. We look forward to sharing more about this advantage soon. In summary, Q3 was a quarter of exceptional execution. We expand our global leadership, and we translated technology innovation into commercial reality. With that, I will handle the call over to our CFO, Jennifer Li, to discuss our financial performance. Jennifer, please go ahead to discuss about the financial numbers. Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Before we dive into the third quarter financials, I want to highlight that all figures are in RMB and comparisons are year-over-year unless otherwise stated. Now let's discuss our third quarter financial performance. We delivered a total revenue of RMB 171 million with a year-over-year growth of 144%, driven by our continued fleet expansion and increasing service penetration.

The revenue growth also reflects a significant milestone we have achieved during this quarter, supported by our advanced technology, robust deployment, and operational capabilities. Our revenue came from both product revenue and service revenue. Product revenue delivered strong growth of 428% to RMB 79 million in this quarter, an encouraging result driven by the increased sale of our robotaxi and robo-buses. Service revenue grew 67% to RMB 92 million in Q3, supported by an increase of RMB 29 million from intelligent data service and an increase of RMB 8 million in autonomous driving-related operational and technical services. Service revenue has surpassed product revenue in this quarter, demonstrating a continual growth momentum and healthy business structure. Among our product lines, what really stood out in Q3, same as in the last two quarters, was our robotaxi businesses.

Robotaxi revenue increased 761% year-over-year to $35 million in Q3, accounting for 21% of total revenue in this quarter. With our new federal permits in UAE, we are the first and the only robotaxi company that has begun full driverless robotaxi operation in UAE. Removing in-car safety officer is a critical milestone from a financial perspective, which will enable our robotaxi service to achieve unit economic breakeven. The quality of our growth is also compelling. Group-level gross profit increased 1,124% to $56 million for the third quarter, with a group-level gross margin of 33%, demonstrating our industry-leading gross margin as our business continues to grow. We aim to keep delivering business value along with our globalization strategy. Operating expense decreased 51% to $436 million, with R&D expense accounting for 73% of the total operating expenses.

To break down further, R&D expense increased by 24% to RMB 316 million in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation, R&D expense grew 39% to RMB 288 million as we further strengthened our global data compliance and advanced R&D efforts for our pre-installed robotaxi. The increase in R&D expense was primarily due to an increase of RMB 31 million in service fees for R&D projects, an increase of RMB 21 million in personnel-related expense from HATCOM increase, and an increase of RMB 23 million in material consumption and depreciation and amortization expenses. Administrative expense decreased by 84% to RMB 100 million in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Excluding share-based compensation, administrative expense increased by 23% to RMB 74 million.

The increase was primarily due to an increase of $6 million in professional service fees mainly related to legal compliance service and an increase of $4 million in personnel costs as we continue to build necessary supporting functions to grow our business. Selling expenses increased 23% to $19 million in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation, selling expense increased by 36% to $19 million, which was well below the sales increase. Our commitment to R&D is the backbone of our strategy. We will continue to direct our resources there to pioneer the industry innovation and keep building our competitive advantage. Alongside this, we will strategically grow our global team with a clear focus on regions that have accelerated the adoption of L4 solutions. This ensures that we have a world-class talent needed to support our business expansion.

Our net loss narrowed by 71% to RMB 307 million in the third quarter of 2025. On a non-IFRS basis, adjusted net loss increased 15% to RMB 276 million, largely due to ongoing R&D investment and broader operational support required for the expansion of our business. As of September 30, 2025, we had RMB 4.5 billion in cash and cash equivalent and time deposit, RMB 926 million in investment in wealth management product, and RMB 18 million in restricted cash. We had short-term bank borrowing of RMB 245 million. Our current liquidity reserve, along with the proceeds from our recent Hong Kong dual primary listing in November, have enabled us with a resilient position for our R&D-focused strategy and our globalization deployment progress. Our fully driverless robotaxi commercial permit in Abu Dhabi is not just a local milestone. It's a scalable blueprint for the global industry.

It demonstrates a viable path for city-level full driverless operation outside the U.S., along with the potential for profitable unit economics and major international markets. Our strategy is to scale this model globally. We have the complete package: the technology, the operational experience, a proven safety record, and regulatory trust. In the next five years, we will achieve large-scale L4 deployment, creating a sustainable business and delivering tremendous value of autonomous driving to the shareholders. With that, operator, we're now ready to take on some questions. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask questions on the phone, please press star 11 and wait for your name to be announced. One moment for the first question. The first question comes from the line of Tim Xiao from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, sir. Hi, Tony and Jennifer. Thanks for taking my question.

This is Tim from Morgan Stanley. Congratulations on the strong results and continuous expansion and robotaxi operation globally. I have two questions. The first questions, we noticed that WeRide officially started commercial deployment of driverless robotaxi in Abu Dhabi, UAE. In addition to the volume upsize to WeRide's fleet sales, as Tony just mentioned, how should we quantify the revenue opportunities of vehicle sales, revenue charge, and profit sharing in the long run? That's my first question. Thank you, Tim. That's a great question. I'll take the first one. For the benefit of all listeners, I'd like to briefly elaborate on our robotaxi business model. In domestic China, we mainly own and operate vehicles by ourselves and on our own ride-hailing platform, WeRide Go.

After the UAE gets to break-even point in the next few years in China, we will gradually engage third-party add-on owners and the partnership to them. For now, we pretty much own all the vehicles by ourselves. The international market is different. From day one, we collaborated with platform partners such as Uber, Grab, FBB, TXAI, and we generate revenue from three main streams. The first one is revenue share from the ride fare. The second one is the annual licensing. The third is the sale of the vehicle. Vehicle sale is considered as the product revenue. WeRide can scale up the robotaxi fleet much quicker and in a lighter business model on an asset basis since the robotaxi operation fleet doesn't sit on our own balance sheet. We usually just sell this to our partner already.

Revenue share and annual licensing are the recurring service revenue over the whole lifespan of the vehicle, which tends to be five to seven years. In particular, revenue share will become a significant multiplier following the expansion of the fleet size. We'll take Middle East as an example. A robotaxi at a human-level utilization, which means they can complete like 25 orders per day, can generate an annual revenue of over $90,000 on a platform. If WeRide takes 30% of the revenue share, that will give us $30,000 per car per year as revenue share. If we can take 70% of the revenue share, that will give us like $60,000 per car per year.

If we are moving this one step closer to the goal and to see what we have already, let's say in Abu Dhabi, right now we have a significant presence with near 100 robotaxis in Abu Dhabi. Now we already cover 50% of the city core area. The commercial model is we integrate on platforms like Uber. Right now, we are charging at the same price level as UberX and UberComfort. In fact, if you get on Uber and call the robot just to call a normal ride-hailing car in half of the city, no matter if you pick UberX, UberComfort, or the autonomous option, you can all get a WeRide vehicle. This demonstrates that our service is competitive with the mainstream ride-hailing from day one on the pricing level. On the unit economic side, the most critical metric is utilization.

Right now, we already achieve a daily average like 12 orders per vehicle in a 12-hour shift. Sometimes we can get to, on good days, we can get to more than 20 orders per vehicle per day for the 12-hour shift. It is already indicating a strong user preference and stickiness. For your information, for 12 orders per vehicle per day, we can already get to the break-even threshold in this market. There is huge profitability potential. Based on our current driverless cost structure and plan to extend the hours to 24 hours next year, we project an average daily order can reach to 25 per vehicle per day. This level of utilization will lead to a very strong profitability potential next year.

With the specific % of revenue share as confidential between different partners, but this approach can empower a sustainable win-win partnership for everyone in the ecosystem. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing all the details. My second question is also related to WeRide's global business. Looking forward, in addition to operations in Abu Dhabi and Switzerland, which we just announced, which markets could step up as a key volume driver to WeRide? Does WeRide need to accelerate R&D and selling, expanding more aggressively into next year, 2026, to finance the company's robust expansion in overseas? That's my second question. Thank you. Okay. I'll take the question. First of all, I think besides Abu Dhabi and Switzerland, which markets would step up as key volume driver?

To us, in our plan, it's like first of all, in the Middle East, we have two major cities in UAE, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Currently, we have already got the permit, and we are doing extensive road testing. UAE is definitely one country we pay a lot of attention to. It's a very important market. There's also Saudi Arabia. You can see major countries in the Middle East. They are part of potential countries. Also, Europe and other developed countries in Asia like Japan, Singapore, and Korea, they are all potential markets that can help us to drive the volume up. One thing I want to point out is, like Tim, you just asked a very good question. That is, it's also something I have been thinking about over the years all the time.

That is, what are our target markets? And which markets can we make our service and products very profitable? I think through our testing or through our operation in Abu Dhabi, we find something so-called Abu Dhabi model. Okay. Together with Uber, we found the unit economics is good and give us a very promising projection that we will soon in this region, we can make a good, very profitable service. This Abu Dhabi model actually created a roadmap for other cities. With Uber, I think we will try to copy this kind of model to the similar cities. Also, this is a good combination of our current technology, our strategy as compared with our and also our collaboration with our strategic partnership.

With this model, I think we tend to copy to Singapore by forming another alliance with Grab, our also very important strategic partner to doing in Singapore and also potentially all East Asia. In China, we are focusing on developing a robotaxi service based on our own application. About expansion, although we are increasing R&D investment to build stronger technology platforms, and we also try hard to recruit top talents, we expect our growth of related expenditure to be moderate because we want to adopt a satellite model to strike a balance between scaling and the investment. One of our very midterm goal is trying to reach the profitability at the same time, maintain a strong market share. Also, we still want to innovate. We have to strike a balance between investment and expenditure and the development.

With our current progress, I think I'm very optimistic because I have already seen the success of the Abu Dhabi model. What's next to do is trying to find all the places we can easily copy the Abu Dhabi model to. By gathering all the strengths from these potential markets, we want to achieve profitability in the near future. Thank you so much, Tony, for sharing that great insight and congratulations, Tim. Looking forward to more exciting projects back to you from around the world. Thank you. Thank you for the excellent question, Tim. Thank you for the questions. The next questions will come from Alex Yao from JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hello and good evening, management team. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. Number one, what is your take of the robotaxi business in China?

How do you envision economics to change in the future for China and for international market, respectively? The second question is, how quickly can the driverless milestone of Abu Dhabi operation be replicated in other markets? What can we expect for your fleet expansion plan globally, and what are the catalysts or hurdles for your plan? Thank you. Okay. Let me try to answer these questions one by one. Although it's claimed to be two questions, I believe it's two groups of questions. First question, if I remember clearly, it's roughly about what do you think about China market and what's our plan for China market and our thoughts on the economics of China market? First of all, I have spoken a lot about the global market, Middle East, Asia market, Middle East, Asia market, East Asia market, European market. What about China? Okay.

China, our headquarters is located in China. China is definitely a major market. We also definitely think China is one of the most important markets we are targeted at. Okay. Now let me elaborate about the pros and cons to put resources in China market and what our strategy is. First of all, China is a unique market with the largest user base and the dynamic economics. Also, it is a great test ground. It has been both our technology proving ground and ideal operation, our sandbox for our very innovative ideas. Of course, that doesn't mean we treat them as a lab. Okay. We want to, when we do the robotaxi operation or trial operation, we keep safety as our top priority. Still, with all kinds of scenarios, all kinds of different climate, different weather conditions, China is a vast country.

We actually tested so many different methods, different algorithms. That part, actually, China is unique and a very big market. We believe China is also very, in terms of development, it's not that balanced. They have tier one cities, looks like Paris and New York. There's a tier four city, looks like rural area. We believe profitability in tier one cities can be achieved with a combination of three elements. Number one, city-level driverless permit. Number two, average daily order of high double digits. That means what we try to achieve in the Middle East should be achieved in China also, more than 20 orders per day. Number three, a kind of relatively healthy price. Although these days, the taxifier in China is still relatively low, we expect to see the fare to grow a little bit.

It is still kind of relatively healthy. With these three factors, we believe we still need to expand our market in China, mainly in tier one cities. So far, we have achieved, as I mentioned before, 300 robotaxis in Guangzhou and another 100 robotaxis, more than 100 robotaxis in Beijing in the areas of 150 km area. We are continuing to expand that. We have implemented the free pickup and drop-off features to help us to improve the user experience. I think we aim at supplying better robotaxi service than traditional taxi service supplied by human driver. Therefore, we can get more orders. We can give better user experience so that we can be ordered more frequently. We expect that economics of all of these markets will help to improve over time.

We want to actually learn what we have in China to expand to and learn what we have learned in China and use them as our competitive advantage in a global market. Therefore, I think we still treat China as one of the most important markets, and we will keep on investing and injecting resources in this market. Okay. The second group question is about how quickly we can copy Abu Dhabi model to the rest of the world. First of all, thanks for asking this question, Andy. We believe we have found this kind of Abu Dhabi model. It's kind of like a meteor effect. WeRide is kind of a unique first mover because we just got a city-level driverless permit.

It is the only one so far out of the U.S. that you can have a city-wide driverless permit, and you can provide the service through Uber. That means make the service more ubiquitously available. Therefore, I think we can quickly copy to some similar market like Dubai in UAE, same country, Riyadh in Saudi, and same region, and Singapore with a Grab support. We are trying to copy to these kind of countries. I believe the regulatory condition, all of other factors are quite similar. We also want to emphasize Europe is a very important market, and we are trying to see whether we can copy to Europe. About the catalysts and hurdles, catalysts is actually because of this meteor effect, other countries are more prone to allow our operation, are more prone to give us permit.

At the same time, the hurdles are still regulatory issues. We want to make sure we use our leverage on our current successful experience to get more driverless permits so that we can deploy the service. That's all I wanted to say about this question. Thank you for the questions. One moment for the next question. Next question comes from Ming Sun Li of Bank of America. Your line is now open. Hello, dear management team. I have two questions as well. First question, we are seeing more OEMs and ride-hailing companies announcing to plan to enter the robotaxi business. What are WeRide's key advantages, and how should we think about the competitive landscape in the future? Thank you. That's my first question. Okay.

I think these days, because of the increasing discussion and the increasing maturity of robotaxi, you see so many car OEMs and platforms, car-hailing platforms start to talk about robotaxi or start to announce their robotaxi strategy. One thing I want to mention is robotaxi, to do robotaxi is not easy. It takes many years of efforts, technology accumulation, regulatory exploration. That is why there are so few mature robotaxi companies in this world. If you count the mature robotaxi service, one standard is they have open to public driverless robotaxi operation. I think you can count at most one or three or four. Not so many. If not because of why you see a few companies getting matured, then you can announce your strategy. Better, you need to show whether you have enough technology accumulation, enough experience to do robotaxi.

Our WeRide's competitive advantage is still in several areas. First of all, technology, right? WeRide, our ability to massively deploy both L4 and L2 up to plus-plus level mass production vehicle helps us to actually, first of all, gain data, to gather data more efficiently and make our algorithm more generalizable. That one, actually, in turn, strengthens our technology. Second, our capability, actually, for fast iteration is there. Think about for car OEMs, right? Usually, they have a relatively small ADAS system development team. What you can do for L2 plus-plus FSD or L2 plus-plus ADAS system is far from what you can achieve in L4 because L4 is a driverless operation. L2 is just like a system driving system. For the L2 system, you do not need to take the final responsibility.

For L4 system, you have to be redundant, have to be redundant, have to take the responsibility. Over the past nine years, WeRide has accumulated lots of experience. That is why we can roll out the robotaxi service. I have not seen any other car OEMs or car-hailing platform be able to do so. That is one of our advantages. The last thing I want to emphasize is about the core of a company. The core of WeRide is really the AI technology. WeRide, since day one, has been an AI company. We hire so many top talents and set up our company for the fast iteration in the AI algorithm. I do not think traditional car OEMs or traditional car-hailing platforms are capable of this kind of faster iteration. Let's wait and see.

So far, I haven't seen any major car OEMs or car-hailing platform company have successfully rolled out any robotaxi service, driverless robotaxi service to public. Okay. That's my answer to these two questions. Yeah. Sorry. One more question from me. Following the last question, do you think the amount of data and the development of AI models have given OEMs certain edge to enter and compete in robotaxi? Is it possible to evolve from L2 to L4? Oh, very good question. First of all, I want us to think about one thing. Who are the best L2 plus-plus or ADAS system company in this world? Probably Tesla. In China, I think we can name a few, maybe Xpeng, Li Auto. If you look at their strategy, they are doing L2 plus-plus ADAS system.

They talk about robotaxi, but when they come to robotaxi, they always try to attack this problem or approach this project directly from L4 level. Why there is no L3 strategy? Okay. Where are their L3 strategy? There's no L3 strategy from Tesla. There's no Xpeng and Li Auto. They all skipped L3. Why is that? Because if you directly grow L2 plus-plus to L3 and then to L4, they find it's really very, very difficult. It's just like you are climbing a cliff. Instead, you maybe directly solve the problem. That is using what your experience directly solves L4 system level problem. That is just like we have already done for past eight or nine years. The technology has been there. We have used deep learning algorithms based on large language model or lots of data.

All of this, I want to say, is based on our past eight years' experience. Currently, true car OEM can leverage on the cutting-edge large language model stuff. There are lots of infrastructures that are relevant, like data simulation and the cloud computing platform. All of this, I do not think the car OEMs have enough accumulation. It will still take many years for them to really roll out a simulation platform, to roll out the protocol, to roll out the pipeline to test the driverless robotaxi. One thing I want to emphasize, having a pretty good ADAS system can let you drive for 100 mi without takeover. It is far from rolling out a driverless robotaxi. To roll out a driverless robotaxi, you have to be capable of making that car drive by itself more than 10,000 mi. That is a kind of magnitude of difficulties.

It's just like swimming in a swimming pool, and then you want to swim and then across the English Channel. That's different. I think I'm not going to say it's absolutely not possible to gradually grow from L2 plus-plus to L4. But it will take a long, long time. Before then, I think first-class, the tier one robotaxi company like WeRide will have already taken over the global market, has already been very profitable. Time left for these major car OEMs to gradually grow from L2 plus-plus to L4 is very, very limited. Any other questions? Thank you for the questions. We will now take the next question from Li Ping Chao from CICC. Your line is now open. Good evening, Tony and Jennifer. Thanks for taking my questions. First, I want to follow the previous technical question.

This question is for Tony because you are quite confident in maintaining the leadership in the industry. What tools and technology approaches help you stay ahead of the curve? Could you please share more color from a technical perspective? I have a follow-up. First of all, just as I have discussed, there is only one company in the world, to my best knowledge, that is capable of doing robotaxi, has already achieved open to public driverless operation. At the same time, supply ADAS system to mass production car company. That is WeRide. We have a so-called dual flywheel strategy that is we can gather the data we collected through our robotaxi fleet, all kinds of corner cases, and use that to facilitate our L2 plus-plus development.

At the same time, we can also get what we have collected from L2 Plus-Plus system, like AI drive based on navigation, and make our L4 system more stable and more generalizable. By combining these two sources of data, two sources of problem, we actually gradually evolve to a super platform that is capable of robotaxi at the same time, with limited hardware and limited HD map or navigation map, make us cover the whole global market. These two parts actually leverage on each other, help us to improve or to iterate our algorithm at a speed that cannot be achieved by a single strategy company. Okay. That is one of our advantages. The other thing is the globalization. Since we have deployed the fleets in the global market, we can collect the data.

We can get heterogeneous sources of data from all over the world. We can have the data that's collected in a very dry climate in the Middle East. Sometimes, we can get data from very humid tropical area in Singapore and very cold area in Japan and in China. I can't imagine any other company has this kind of wide spectrum of application area. With all of this data, and also, we hired a group of talented engineers, we actually evolved very fast. The other thing I want to emphasize is our Genesis platform. It's actually based on a physical AI model and with lots of considerations on a really world model physical AI world. It actually seamlessly integrates with our end-to-end system. This kind of simulation platform gives us a big advantage to develop.

With combination of all of this kind of algorithm and data, I think this is massively effective here. We have many, many driverless permits all over the world in many countries. We have many car OEMs collaborating with us. We have heterogeneous data collected from different countries, different levels of autonomy. By combining all of this, I think we can achieve accelerated development speed, which is much faster than our competitors. That is my answer to your question. Thanks, Tony. That is very helpful. My second question is for Jennifer. The board of the company has authorized a $1 million share repurchase program in May this year. Could you please update what is the status on this program? Thank you. Thank you, Li Ping.

Regarding the $100 million share repurchase program, which is authorized by the board in May, no purchase has been initiated to date. The reason is the pre-priority work for our Hong Kong IPO constituted for a closed period under the security regulation, during which the trading was restricted. As a dual-listed company, we are also required to obtain specific shareholder approval to ratify this program. We are currently preparing the extraordinary general meeting to seek this approval, which will allow the program to proceed. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. Sorry, operator, we're ready to take the next question. Certainly. Our last question comes from Paul Gong from UBS. Please go ahead. I beg your pardon? From UBS. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking my question. Yes, Paul Gong from UBS. I have two questions. The first one is regarding the robotaxi revenue contribution.

We have noticed that while this is about seven times year-over-year growth, it seems to have a little bit fluctuation compared to the second quarter. Could you please elaborate more on this? My second question is regarding the European strategy. Congratulations for the permit in Switzerland recently. Can you share more on the next step of the company's plan for European expansion? Thank you. Okay. I'll take the first question. I think Tony probably wants to take the second. Regarding the fluctuation of robotaxi revenue, we will say for the past three quarters, you can see our robotaxi revenue made like a 22% contribution in first quarter, 36%, and 21% revenue contribution for the past two quarters. We already showcased a very continuous momentum. The fluctuation was expected given that our delivery schedule is in tandem with the permit upgrade and the corresponding expansion of our operating area.

We made a significant step forward by securing the city-level driverless operation permit in Abu Dhabi, which will pave the way for accelerating expansion in the entire Middle East going forward. Thank you. Yeah, Tony, you want to take the second one? Yes, I will take the second one. Okay. The second question is about our actually our since we have already got the driverless robotaxi permit in Switzerland and what's our next step for Europe. Okay. European market is a great market for robotaxi. I think the taxifier in Europe is high. Also, most of the countries in the European market, they are short of labor. That is actually a very, very good scenario or opportunity for robotaxi company to deploy robotaxi service to fill the gap between the shortage of driver and the increasing demand for taxi.

These days, we know the numbers that people, especially after the coronavirus, if possible, people like to take a kind of private transportation if possible. I think there's an actual growing demand for taxi. If we can deploy a robotaxi as a very cost-effective method, people will love this kind of product. Since in Switzerland, we have already got it. We are considering some other countries. We established an office in Stuttgart and also tried to explore in Paris. In the next 12 months, we will solidify our foundation actually with our trial operation in France, in Belgium, and also our current operation in Switzerland and talk to all the possible countries. We also form a strategic partnership with Uber, with Renault, with SBB, STL, etc.

There are lots of airports in European countries talking to us to explore the possibility of our robo-bus. We want to use all of our applications like robo-bus, robo-sweeper to actually help us to explore the possibility to extend to certain countries because in certain European countries, they will like to tend to adopt robo-bus or robo-sweeper first and then try to do robo-taxi. Gradually, we want to go to Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, France, Spain, and Norway, these kind of countries to extend to more countries. Of course, I want to emphasize our approach is dynamic. It depends on the availability of strong local partners and also depends on the regulatory policy and the local weather shortage of the neighbors. All of these factors we have to consider. For sure, we'll gradually expand to the aforementioned countries and all other potential countries in Europe.

Thank you so much. Very helpful. Thank you. If there are no further questions, I'll conclude the call today. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.