Research Report Interpretation | Dongwu Securities: Ruqi Mobility (9680.HK) shows a trend of "strong growth, narrowed losses, and optimized structure" in its performance, initially rated as "Buy"

On March 15, Dongwu Securities released an initial coverage research report on Ruqi Travel (9680.HK), assigning the company a “Buy” rating. The report is optimistic about the company’s advantages in expanding ride-hailing and in Robotaxi commercialization, driven by shareholder synergies and its hybrid operations model.

Dongwu Securities’ analysis believes that Ruqi Travel’s performance has already shown a clear trend of “strong growth, narrowing losses, and improved structure.” The company is expected to achieve profitability in 2027. For 2025–2027, revenue is forecast to be RMB 5.3 billion, RMB 10.5 billion, and RMB 15.8 billion, respectively. The current market value implies PS of 0.3x, 0.1x, and 0.1x over the three years.

Market views hold that Ruqi Travel’s PS is currently significantly lower than the average PS of leading listed companies in the domestic mobility services and Robotaxi sectors. Combined with the trend of the company’s improving profitability in recent years, the current valuation has some appeal.

Earlier, on March 3, Ruqi Travel issued a positive profit alert, saying it expects a year-on-year improvement of over 43.4% in 2025 full-year profit. It also expects comprehensive revenue of more than RMB 5.0 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of over 100%.

**　　PS for 2025–2027 is below the average of comparable companies**

Dongwu Securities believes that Ruqi Travel’s performance has shown a clear trend of “strong growth, narrowing losses, and improved structure.”

The company’s revenue structure has evolved from a single ride-hailing services model to a dual-engine driver of “mobility + technology.” Technology services, as the company’s second-largest revenue source, have increased its share from 8.5% in 2022 to 10.0% in 2024. In addition, due to scale effects brought by business expansion, while the company’s revenue grows rapidly, expense ratios reflecting operating efficiency—such as sales and marketing expenses and general and administrative expenses—have continued to be significantly diluted. These ratios fell sharply from 26.1% and 9.9% in 2021 to 8.0% and 5.5% in 2024. By the first half of 2025, they were further diluted to 3.9% and 2.9%. Meanwhile, gross margin turned positive for the first time in the first half of 2025, and the profitability structure has continued to improve.

Dongwu Securities’ analysis notes that multiple core financial indicators reflecting operating quality have continued to improve, suggesting the company is accelerating toward breakeven under the dual drivers of large-scale expansion and refined operations. The report also expects Ruqi Travel to achieve profitability in 2027, with 2025–2027 revenue of RMB 5.3 billion, RMB 10.5 billion, and RMB 15.8 billion, respectively.

Based on the PS valuation method, Dongwu Securities calculates that Ruqi Travel’s current market cap corresponds to PS of 0.3x, 0.1x, and 0.1x for 2025–2027, which is significantly lower than the three-year average PS of comparable companies such as Didi, Cao Cao Mobility, Pony.ai, and WeRide, at 18.4x, 13.0x, and 6.6x, respectively. Based on Ruqi Travel’s steady expansion of its ride-hailing business from the Greater Bay Area to across the country, as well as the broad opportunity for Robotaxi platform integration with mainstream L4 technology suppliers, the company received a “Buy” rating upon first coverage.

Market analysis believes that, based on an analysis of other companies’ industry PS averages in the research report, Ruqi Travel’s valuation is currently undervalued. Combined with the company’s future growth potential in Robotaxi, the company’s market capitalization has significant upside potential.

**　　The ripple-mode operating approach is already showing results**

Public information shows that in the past two years, Ruqi Travel’s mobility service segments—including ride-hailing and Robotaxi—have maintained a high-growth trajectory. Year-on-year revenue growth for related businesses increased from 21.2% for full-year 2024 to 86% in the first half of 2025. By the end of 2025, its service coverage had expanded to over 110 cities nationwide.

On March 3, Ruqi Travel released its first positive profit alert after listing. It expects that 2025 full-year profit will improve by more than 43.4% year-on-year. Comprehensive revenue is expected to exceed RMB 5.0 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of more than 100%. The company said that the increase in revenue is mainly driven by a significant rise in ride-hailing order volume, which increases ride-hailing service revenue, while the improvement in profit is mainly due to factors including improved ride-hailing operating efficiency and continuous gross profit growth supported by optimization of cost structure.

The company’s growth balances scale and efficiency, benefiting from Ruqi Travel’s early selection of the “ripple-mode” expansion strategy. From the early stage, it focused deeply on “high-value markets” in the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macau. In core regions, it optimized the operating system to the best possible configuration, and then started efficient replication from surrounding markets, gradually expanding to multiple cities nationwide. Dongwu Securities believes that the Greater Bay Area has extremely high population density, relatively strong consumer spending capacity, and ongoing support for L4 Robotaxi policies that have been increasing over time—providing solid market hinterland for ride-hailing and an ideal testing ground for Robotaxi. This helps the company efficiently expand into the national market.

Most market participants believe that in the future competitive landscape among mobility platforms, mastering compliant transport capacity will be the deciding factor. The research report mentions that Ruqi Travel’s ride-hailing service order scale has remained among the top ten nationwide and has formed a leading advantage in compliant operations. In the Ministry of Transport’s monthly compliance-rate ranking for ride-hailing orders, the company is the mobility platform that has received the #1 ranking the most times. As Robotaxi deployment accelerates, China’s ride-hailing market has moved from a “barbaric growth” phase into a new stage of “compliance and intelligence.” Dongwu Securities predicts that by 2030, this market will expand to a scale of RMB 850.79 billion. At the same time, the rise of aggregation platforms will accelerate traffic fragmentation, while Robotaxi will become a new growth engine.

**　　Hybrid operations strengthen resilience during industry reshuffling**

As a disruptive technology in the mobility services sector, Robotaxi is reshaping the value logic of global mobility service platform companies.

Dongwu Securities’ analysis believes that due to the combined effects of improvements in the safety of autonomous driving technology, declining hardware costs per vehicle, and the gradual refinement of policy frameworks, China’s Robotaxi market will see a turning point in 2027. It also expects the market scale to reach RMB 83.1 billion in 2030 and further increase to RMB 709.6 billion by 2035.

As a mobility services platform that began laying out its Robotaxi business relatively early in China, Ruqi Travel has since 2022 used “a mix of human and driverless operations” as its core differentiated strategy, building an open operations platform with dual-track development of human-driven ride-hailing plus Robotaxi services.

Dongwu Securities is optimistic that the hybrid operations strategy will enhance the company’s ability to withstand risks during industry reshuffling. By complementing and coordinating the human-driven vehicle fleet and the driverless vehicle fleet, Ruqi Travel can meet users’ day-to-day real mobility needs and maintain profitability, while gradually increasing Robotaxi market acceptance and the proportion of capacity. This helps reduce user experience and operational risks in the early stage of Robotaxi commercialization, while improving overall asset utilization and effectively advancing the commercialization timeline of Robotaxi, laying the foundation for future fully driverless operations.

The research report states that Ruqi Travel’s Robotaxi operating network in the Greater Bay Area is already taking shape and is in a phase of rapid expansion. As of the end of December 2025, the size of the Robotaxi fleet had exceeded 300 vehicles. Service coverage has expanded to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and the Hengqin Guangdong–Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone, and the safety operation mileage of its own fleet is close to 6 million kilometers.

In July 2025, Ruqi Travel launched its “Robotaxi+” strategy. In the next five years, it plans to invest in the 1 billion-yuan range to build a three-tier operations and maintenance network covering 100 cities, supporting offline operations and maintenance capabilities for 100k Robotaxis per year. At the same time, it will work with partners to build a Robotaxi fleet with a scale exceeding 10,000 vehicles.

Dongwu Securities points out that Ruqi Travel’s “Robotaxi+” model does not develop L4 autonomous driving technology in-house. Instead, it integrates ecosystem resources such as autonomous driving companies through a fully open operations platform to form end-to-end coordination across the “research & development–technology–platform” chain. This is expected to aggregate advantageous resources across different links of the industrial chain to efficiently solve common issues in the early stage of Robotaxi industry development and accelerate the large-scale rollout of autonomous driving technology.

Ruqi Travel’s unique shareholder ecosystem is the foundation of its core competitiveness. The company was initiated in 2019 by GAC Group and Tencent. Subsequently, it introduced shareholders including Pony.ai, WeRide, Didi Autonomous Driving, Hengjian Holding, and Guangzhou Industry Investment, among others, forming a “three-in-one iron triangle” structure of “complete vehicles + internet + intelligent driving.” Through strong synergy in areas such as traffic flow, technology, government relationships, and the supply chain, it has created a closed-loop Robotaxi commercialization model. Currently, Ruqi Travel has connected with WeRide and Pony.ai, while also advancing third-party Robotaxi fleet integrations such as Luobo Express.

(Editor: Jiao Yue ）

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