Cao Cao Mobility 2025 Performance: First-time adjustment leads to Q4 profitability, entering a new stage of profitable growth

On March 27, Cao Cao Mobility announced its full-year 2025 financial results. The data shows that the company’s business coverage has reached 195 cities nationwide. For full-year 2025, revenue was RMB 20.0 billion, up 38% year over year. The gross margin increased to 9.4%, up 1.3 percentage points.

Even more noteworthy are the Q4 financial figures—adjusted net profit turned positive during the period, marking a historical first as it achieved single-quarter profitability for the first time. At the same time, cash flow indicators also released positive signals: the company’s full-year net cash flow from operating activities increased 60.3% year over year. This means that Cao Cao Mobility has completely moved past the stage of relying on external capital injections and truly has the ability for self-sustaining “cash generation” and endogenous growth.

In China’s shared mobility landscape, Cao Cao Mobility has always been a unique presence. Its not only is a pioneer of the customized car model, but also the “final move” by Geely Holding in the Robotaxi trillion-yuan race. This industry synergy gives it the underlying logic to reshape the transportation cost structure.

So how did Cao Cao Mobility achieve a turnaround to profitability? How will Robotaxi reshape the company’s long-term value?

Confirming the Profitability Turning Point

After sustained losses, turning profitable in a single quarter means the core reason behind the qualitative change in Cao Cao Mobility’s profit structure is the strong ramp-up in gross margin. So what drives Cao Cao Mobility’s gross margin growth?

Based on the simple profit model of “Gross margin = [1 - (sales and marketing expenses)/GTV]”, breaking down Cao Cao Mobility’s financial statements shows that its strong margin rebound is mainly determined by the following three factors:

First is the emergence of scale effects and brand premium. Specifically, the company’s average monthly active users reached 41.30 million, up 43.9% year over year; its average monthly active drivers reached 631k, up 35.4% year over year.

Second is efficiency improvement enabled by AI. According to company disclosures, its transaction engine, “Cao Cao Brain,” continues to apply AI technology to optimize algorithms and improve order dispatch efficiency. User subsidies are an important cost component for Cao Cao Mobility, so a decline in this amount also strongly supports the rebound in gross margin.

Third is the depreciation dilution effect under the customized car model. Under Cao Cao Mobility’s customized car model, its own car fleet generates relatively fixed depreciation expenses, making it more sensitive to scale effects. As the platform’s average daily orders rise significantly, the utilization rate of each car increases, effectively diluting average per-vehicle depreciation costs. Even though depreciation expense does not account for a high proportion of Cao Cao Mobility’s cost structure, it still has a positive effect on gross margin.

In addition, from the perspective of expense ratios, with a comprehensive improvement in operating efficiency, optimization of related expenses also creates some room for profitability. Also, regarding the sales expense ratio: amid growth in order volume for online aggregated platforms across the shared mobility industry, Cao Cao Mobility’s sales expense ratio has remained basically flat, which is another reflection of the company’s brand premium.

Overall, whether it is the double rise in “volume and price” on the front end or the continuous optimization of “costs and expenses” on the back end, Cao Cao Mobility is rapidly running a virtuous cycle of profitability. Under this increasingly clear “scissor gap,” improvements in profit margins are essentially beyond doubt.

Running an “Alpha” with the Customized Car Model

According to data from Frost & Sullivan, the overall market growth rate of China’s shared mobility sector in 2025 is about 24%. Cao Cao Mobility is able to outpace the industry’s benchmark with a 38% GTV growth rate; the core engine is still its long-immersed “customized car” model. As of December 31, 2025, Cao Cao Mobility had secured more than 38k customized cars across 31 cities.

At its core, the customized car model relies on Geely Holding’s manufacturing capabilities to provide drivers with customized vehicles specifically for mobility services, thereby lowering drivers’ total cost of ownership (TCO) and improving passengers’ ride experience.

This kind of “dimensionality-reduction” advantage in experience directly translates into the platform’s goodwill assets. With high-quality service, in nine rounds of user research conducted from Q4 2023 to Q4 2025, Cao Cao Mobility was consecutively rated “Best Service Reputation” among major shared mobility platforms in China.

This demonstrates a clear advantage under the current “aggregation platform” model amid intensified traffic competition. Because front-end traffic entry points are highly concentrated, fulfillment quality on the back end becomes the biggest “black box.” Amid a vast supply of commoditized capacity, Cao Cao Mobility, through strong control over customized cars and standardized services, provides scarce “fulfillment certainty,” thereby building very strong brand distinctiveness in the aggregated ecosystem and successfully capturing users’ minds, indirectly influencing user choice.

Beyond capturing users’ minds, the customized car model has also become an important means for Cao Cao Mobility to continue expanding into new cities. Currently, Cao Cao Mobility uses a “light-asset approach on the capacity side + customized cars to expand into cities” to sustain business expansion. In 2025, the company maintained its scale growth by selling customized cars to capacity partners. With a total of 195 operating cities, this is another major driver for the company’s continued growth.

Robotaxi Sets the Valuation Ceiling

If the customized car model and refined operations are Cao Cao Mobility’s current business fundamentals, then Robotaxi is the ceiling that determines the height of its valuation over the next decade.

2026 is a year in which Robotaxi commercialization accelerates. In the North American market, Tesla officially launched a Robotaxi service without a safety driver in Austin, Texas, and expects to mass-produce driverless taxis exclusively for Robotaxi—Cybercab—in April 2026. Another giant, Waymo, completed a $16 billion financing round in February 2026, with a post-investment valuation of $126 billion. Its goal is to push average weekly orders to 1 million by the end of 2026, doubling from 2025.

Progress in the domestic Robotaxi market is also moving quickly, and Cao Cao Mobility occupies a distinct niche in the ecosystem.

A complete Robotaxi commercialization chain includes backend vehicle manufacturing, autonomous driving technology R&D, and frontend fleet operations. In China’s Robotaxi industry, participants often focus on just one segment, but Cao Cao Mobility’s “intelligent customized cars + intelligent driving technology + intelligent operations” three-in-one development strategy makes it one of the few global technology mobility platforms with all Robotaxi key elements.

From the company’s Robotaxi deployment history, in February 2025, Cao Cao Mobility launched its Cao Cao Zhixing autonomous driving platform in Suzhou and Hangzhou, and began deploying and pilot-validating solutions for the Robotaxi 1.0 stage.

Less than a year later, in December 2025, the company released its Robotaxi 2.0 solution. It began rolling out a second-generation Robotaxi and explored the transition from safety-driver-led operations to driverless operations, keeping its pace broadly consistent with companies such as Tesla.

In terms of operational scale, as of the announcement, Cao Cao Mobility has deployed more than 100 Robotaxis. 2026 will also be a “ramp-up” year for Cao Cao Mobility’s Robotaxis.

According to company disclosures, Cao Cao Mobility plans to accelerate the domestic and overseas rollout of its Robotaxi business and deploy more vehicles. Domestically, the company plans to gradually expand into more cities to achieve large-scale Robotaxi operations. Internationally, it has reached a strategic cooperation with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and established a business unit to expand Robotaxi operations overseas. Meanwhile, Cao Cao Mobility will also explore Robotaxi business development in Hong Kong.

In terms of technology exploration, relying on cooperation with Geely Holding, Cao Cao Mobility is accelerating the development of the third-generation L4 fully customized Robotaxi, and the model is planned to debut this year.

For Cao Cao Mobility, the significance of Robotaxi is not only telling a sexy technology story, but also that this trillion-yuan-scale potential market truly forms a high level of synergy with the shared mobility network it already has. This is also the core reason Geely Holding chooses Cao Cao Mobility as the most important vehicle to explore future mobility and achieve Robotaxi commercialization operations.

Turning first profitable is only the beginning. As financial statements continue to be optimized and Robotaxi commercialization moves further into its “sweet spot,” Cao Cao Mobility is now telling the capital markets a brand-new mobility story—one with a hard-core technology foundation.