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Q4 2024 WeRide Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Tony Han; Chief Executive Officer; WeRide Inc

Jennifer Lee; Chief Financial Officer; WeRide Inc

Yan Li; Chief Technology Officer; WeRide Inc

Tim Hsiao; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Jia Zheng; Analyst; JP Morgan

Li Ping Zhao; Analyst; CICC

Ting Song; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Xinyu Guo; Analyst; UBS

Jia Qi Huang; Analyst; SPDBI

Presentation

Operator

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to WeRide's fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions)
Please note that today's event is being recorded.
The company's financial and operating results were released by the news wire earlier today and are currently available online. Joining us today are WeRide's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Dr. Tony Xu Han, and CFO, Ms. Jennifer Lee. In addition, Co-Founder and CTO, Dr. Yan Li will also be available during the question and answer session.
Before we continue, I'd 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 our strategies and future plans. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied by these for the statements as a result of various important factors, and please refer to the risk factors section of our US perspectives filed with the SEC for full disclosure of these risk factors.
Please note that all numbers stated in matchment's prepared remarks are in RMB terms, and we will discuss non-IFRS measures today which are more thoroughly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC.
With that, I'll now turn the call over to the company's founder, Chairman and CEO, Dr. Tony Han.

Tony Han

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first earnings call as a not that listed property company 2024 was an important year for we write marked by significant advance of our core tax business, international expansion, and product development.
As we continue to build on our positions as an industry leader, we may, we remain committed to our mission of transferring, transforming urban living through safe, reliable, and accessible autonomous driving solutions. The progress we have made during the fourth quarter has been particularly encouraging.
And the positions of well for 2025 and beyond. It also reflects our strategic focus on establishing foundations for long-term sustainable growth. We believe this will allow us to best deliver on our mission and create lasting value for our stakeholders. Let's begin with our core business, robotaxi.
We have made exciting achievements together with our partners. In October, we launched our new purpose built robotaxi, the GXR, which represents a significant leap forward in AV technology. Just four months after the launch GXR has begun her full driverless commercial operation in Beijing, becoming our second AV authorized to provide unmanned and pay robotaxi in the capital of China.
This rapid development demonstrates both our techno technology superiority and the increasing regulatory acceptance of AV's. The debut of GXR also coincided with the 3rd anniversary of our robotaxi operation in UAE.
In the fourth quarter, we started a new chapter in this region by collaborating with Uber to launch a ride-hailing partnership in Abu Dhabi. This represents the first time that AVs are available on Uber outside the US. We are excited to announce that by mid-2025, the number of global taxi on the Uber platform will reach 50.
With the support of Abu Dhabi Integrated Transport Center, our service is available in major areas, including Saadiyat Island, Yas Island, and Rock to the International Airport. This marks a key milestone of our commercialization in this region. We believe that the global taxi industry has entered an exciting development phase, powered by increasing public acceptance and a more favourable regulatory environment.
As a first mover, we are well positioned to capitalize this shift and fully committed to improving the accessibility of our global tax service, Global tax service globally. In January, we launched our first strategic robotaxi pilot project in Switzerland. In March, we officially obtained a permit to conduct commercial robotaxi ride-hailing service in core urban area.
In Beijing, our WeRide one foundation model enables us to operate successfully in diverse environments. Our robotaxi can manoeuvre smoothly in crowded tier one cities such as Guangzhou and Beijing and maintain very stable performance in extreme weather conditions such as very heavy rain and extreme heat.
Most importantly, we prioritize our operations, our robotaxi fleet has completed more than 1,900 days of commercial operation on public roads with zero regulatory discipline caused by automous driving system failure. Next, I'm going to share with you our market strategy, which focuses on internationalization. We have been spearheading commercialization in the global market since 2021.
Back then, we launched our robotaxi ride hailing service in Abu Dhabi, which was the first of its kind in the region. Our outstanding performance leads to UAE's first and only national permit, which was granted to WeRide in 2023. We were greatly encouraged by this success, which validate both our technology and service.
In new markets, we are committed to fostering constructive dialogue with regulators to realize our mutual visions for safe autonomous driving. We have also built a robust ecosystem by forging strategic partnership with a wide range of key stakeholders besides joining forces with Uber in the Mideast.
We collaborate with the Zurich Airport in Switzerland to provide global bus shuttle service and partnered with Renault, Beti, and Macif in France to offer trial global bus service. We also provide driverless solutions to the largest sanitation operator in Singapore, chat of maintenance. These initiatives are evidence of our serious commitment to the global expansion.
As of today we have deployed L4 vehicles across more than 30 cities in 10 countries. Domestically, despite current economic headwind, we have expanded our footprint to over 20 cities in China with our robotaxi, robus, robosweeper, robovan, and related services. We are actively building a strong business development team and implementing dynamic pricing strategies to drive growth in our home market.
We remain optimistic about her long term potential our strategy of engaging in multiple markets provide us with resilience and the various opportunities for growth, thereby mitigating the risks associated with dependence on any single market through focusing on international expansion, we are confident in our ability to expand the customer base and the turbocharge our long-term growth.
Now, let's discuss technology and products that underscore success. Our global strategy is governed by the focus on technology innovation. It ensures that we remain competitive in every single market we enter. We began deploying end-to-end models for both ADAS and L4 driverless systems in the second half of 2024.
The end-to-end model employs a large VLM visual language model, which is pre-trained with all the data available from the internet as a backbone to encode the word knowledge. It is then trained with nearly 1 million hours of carefully selected driving data from both human drivers and the simulated driving scenarios based on a world model. The training data continuously grow with high-quality driving data as well as more long tail cases covered by real-world data and simulated data.
Such an approach ensures the train model has a general understanding of the world, as well as deep insight in driving. Eventually, our autonomous driving systems can perform like a seasoned taxi driver in various complex urban scenarios.
For our L4 driverless products such as robotech and robobus, the end-to-end model is accompanied with safety critical frameworks to bring humanlike driving experience while maintaining the same high level of safety required by driverless system. They are available in our latest version of robotaxi GXR, which is currently running in multiple countries.
We have also achieved several key breakthroughs in product development in 2024. First and foremost, as mentioned at the beginning, we unveiled our newly, our new purpose-built robotaxi, the GXR. It is carefully tailored for scalable and driverless operation with an improved redundant system.
It features an industry leading L4 drive-by we chassis architecture, spacious seating design, and WeRide proprietary sensor suite 5.6. With an auto-grid computing power of 1,300 tops, GXR is able to handle the highest level of complexity. We have also put into further consideration of user experience such as designated carry-on luggage area, a gradual stop button, and an electrical power sliding door.
GXR has started serving citizens in Beijing in this February and will soon be deployed in Guangzhou and Abu Dhabi. With this ground breaking product, we are going to redefine autonomous driving experience by providing a safer and more comfortable mobility option. In other L4 segments, we extended our product family by releasing a new robosweeper, the S1, and a new robot one on the W5. Both represent our customer-centric productization philosophy.
S1 robosweeper complements and is deployed alongside our larger S6 global sweeper. It can navigate smoothly in narrow space while effectively cleaning various road surface W5 features the largest cargo capacity in its class, making it fit for various point to point logistic scenarios. We have seen strong demand just one month after we introduced the W5 Global one. These innovations expand our addressable market, enhance our capabilities, and offer to create additional revenue streams beyond our call taxi business.
As we look forward to the remainder of 2025, our strategy will focus on setting the stage for future growth through multiple coordinated initiatives. We are preparing to take advantage of the recovery of domestic market and expanding our process internationally. In tandem, we will continue to diversify our revenue streams through product innovation and upgrade.
Finally, we are committed to scaling our global tax fleet to a meaningful size that drives operational efficiencies and strengthens our industry leadership. These efforts will lead to sustainable long-term growth.
With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO Jennifer Lee, to discuss our financial.