Behind the performance divergence, Yidian Tianxia's "heavy investment" and "strategic buildup"

Jingji Daily Editor-in-Chief: Zhang Wenyu

On the digital marketing “chessboard,” AI is rewriting the old rules of the past.

Recently, Yidian Tianxia (301171.SZ), which has been deeply focused on globalized digital marketing, turned in a rather “tense” annual performance report.

On one side, revenue hit a new high, with operating revenue surpassing the 3.8 billion yuan mark, up 50.39% year over year; on the other, profits on the bottom line were “lost,” with attributable net profit down 31.80% year over year.

At first glance, this seems like a typical story of “higher revenue but no higher profits.” But once the financial statements are broken down, the details behind the figures become even more intriguing.

After excluding the effects of foreign exchange gains/losses and share-based payments, Yidian Tianxia’s total profit increased 42.81% year over year. In the annual report, for the first time the company independently split and disclosed its two major business segments, and the two are now achieving effective complementarity. At the same time, the company is preparing for an IPO in Hong Kong, accelerating its entry into the international capital market.

What kind of transformation is this company—one with more than a decade of overseas marketing experience—going through?

Heavy on the future; overhead expenses surge year over year

One thing is certain: Yidian Tianxia’s actual profitability of its core business has not weakened.

From the expense side, in 2025 the company’s total period expenses were 389 million yuan, up 59.72% year over year. Among them, selling expenses, administrative expenses, and R&D expenses increased by 48.60%, 58.04%, and 74.28%, respectively, exerting clear downward pressure on profits for the period.

Source: Yidian Tianxia’s announcement

The company explained that the reason for the large increase in these three major expenses was both higher personnel costs and an increase in share-based payments. During the reporting period, Yidian Tianxia recognized share-based payment expenses of approximately 82 million yuan, stemming from the mid- to long-term equity incentive plan launched in 2025. The incentives mainly focus on core technologies in the AI era, as well as product and management talent.

In addition, because the company has a high proportion of overseas business, its foreign exchange gains/losses are greatly affected by exchange-rate fluctuations. During the reporting period, it incurred foreign exchange losses of approximately 36 million yuan.

This factor has certain stage-specific and non-operating characteristics. To address the risk of exchange-rate volatility in cross-border business, the company has approved a foreign exchange hedging program not exceeding 2.5 billion yuan in order to implement risk hedging.

If foreign exchange gains/losses and share-based payments are excluded, the company achieved total profit of 281 million yuan, up 42.81% year over year; attributable net profit was 252 million yuan, up 18.98% year over year. Its main business demonstrates ample resilience.

To a certain extent, this is a “surrender” of short-term profit in exchange for deeper room for long-term strategy.

The company is putting resources into areas that can realize value in the coming years, accumulating “qualitative change” in areas including talent, technology, capital, and resilience to risks—so as to pursue more certain and sustainable development.

This image appears to be AI-generated

Source: Keling AI

In terms of shareholder returns, Yidian Tianxia’s 2025 distribution proposal is to pay cash dividends of 0.35 yuan for every 10 shares (including tax). At the same time, it will increase shares by capitalizing capital surplus on the basis of 3 shares for every 10 shares. This is also the fifth time the company has implemented cash dividends since its listing.

It is worth noting that during the reporting period, Yidian Tianxia initiated preparations for a listing in Hong Kong, aiming to build an “A+H” dual-capital platform.

At a performance exchange meeting on March 25, company management stated that a listing in Hong Kong is a natural extension of its globalization strategy. It will help the company further match the needs of global operations with those of an international capital platform, expand overseas financing channels, and enhance corporate governance, influence in capital markets, international brand credibility, and capabilities in resource integration and capital operations.

On March 26, according to filings disclosed by the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, Yidian Tianxia has formally submitted its listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s Main Board. Citic Securities will serve as the sole sponsor, taking a key step toward the international capital market.

Clarifying boundaries: both businesses are already running

There’s no denying that AI is fundamentally reshaping global trade’s traffic rules and marketing logic. In this wave of change, Yidian Tianxia has completed a re-anchor of its own identity.

In its latest annual report, Yidian Tianxia for the first time clearly split its main business into two segments: “integrated marketing services” and “advertising platform business.”

Typically, most overseas marketing service providers can only focus deeply on one track—or concentrate on media agency business, or focus on technology services—rarely do they have both. By splitting them this time, Yidian Tianxia is in effect using performance to prove that on both tracks it has already “run through,” and that it has delivered highlights.

During the reporting period, integrated marketing services contributed revenue of 1.954 billion yuan, up 49.35% year over year; advertising platform business generated revenue of 1.838 billion yuan, up 48.92% year over year. Together they represented approximately 51% and 48%, respectively. Development is balanced, and there has been no over-dependence on any single business.

Source: Yidian Tianxia’s announcement

The deeper highlight lies in the complementary logic between these two business segments.

Integrated marketing, in essence, provides end-to-end services for overseas brands—from strategy, creative, ad placement, to attribution—by deeply cultivating top media ecosystems such as Google, Meta, TikTok, and Microsoft. Its core moat lies in years of accumulated depth in media relationships and its cross-platform integration capability.

As for the advertising platform business, it is centered on programmatic advertising: it aggregates traffic from a large number of small and medium-sized APP developers, and then uses AI algorithms to conduct bidding matching within a few hundred milliseconds. The company earns a technology take rate from ad spend consumption. Its moat is the positive flywheel of “supply scale × algorithm accuracy.”

The two support each other. Integrated marketing brings budgets and data to big media ad buyers, providing the “flywheel” with start-up momentum for the advertising platform; meanwhile, the mid- to long-tail traffic aggregated by the advertising platform further expands the growth perimeter for integrated marketing.

In terms of industry expansion, it has shown inherent penetration advantages in non-gaming verticals such as e-commerce and tools. In 2025, growth in the company’s segments including applications and entertainment was 30.53%, and revenue in the e-commerce segment increased 122.80% year over year.

Source: Yidian Tianxia’s announcement

Management also set a clear tone on this. In the short term, integrated marketing will remain the company’s “stabilizing weight” for performance. With its solid customer base, industry insights, and complete solution offerings, it will continue to penetrate multiple tracks including e-commerce, apps, culture and tourism travel, new-energy vehicles, short dramas, and AI applications. In the medium to long term, driven by its platform attributes, technological leverage, and scale effects, the advertising platform business—based on continually refining traffic supply, algorithm models, and monetization capabilities—has the potential to unlock stronger revenue elasticity and profit contributions.

This “services + technology” dual-engine structure is the most valuable strategic depth for Yidian Tianxia in an environment where overseas marketing service providers are generally locked in heavy competition and price wars.

Through strategic segmenting, Yidian Tianxia is evolving step by step in the process. It is expected to become an “overseas infrastructure service provider” with data assets, algorithm moats, and a robust revenue structure—completing the value-logic shift from a “marketing company” to a “technology company.”

R&D doubles: building a dual-direction driven growth flywheel

Under the business split, what truly enables Yidian Tianxia to run with a differentiated advantage in the overseas marketing track is its comprehensive implementation of AI technology.

While most enterprises that use AI still remain in the initial stage of “single-point efficiency improvements,” and begin laying out AI since the GPT era, Yidian Tianxia has already embedded AI deeply into business workflows.

In 2025, the company’s R&D spending reached 159 million yuan, up 74.28% year over year, focusing on two key directions: “AI applications” and “programmatic advertising.”

Source: Yidian Tianxia’s announcement

In the AI applications field, the company has moved from early technical exploration and product development to a new stage where systematic capability building and commercialization validation proceed in parallel.

In 2025, the company built an AI applications product matrix, including AdsGo.ai and CyberGrow. Nearly 100 Agents and workflows have been put into full use, deeply covering end-to-end scenarios such as risk control review and ad operations. This has substantively pushed AI’s evolution from “executing instructions” toward an automated closed-loop of “autonomous decision-making.”

This greatly improves productivity per employee, enabling the company to serve a broader range of customers more efficiently.

In programmatic advertising, the company did not stop at process-level optimization, but instead rebuilt deeply at the underlying infrastructure level.

Yidian Tianxia’s core product, zMaticoo, has completed a comprehensive upgrade on both SDK and DSP 2.0. Multi-dimensional testing shows that the SDK-side key indicators achieved a leap forward: eCPM increased by 3.90%, and fill rate improved significantly by 26.70%.

At the same time, the platform has officially passed certification by the globally authoritative IAB Tech Lab and has reached a strategic cooperation with DoubleVerify. Monitoring standards have fully aligned with international top-tier teams, earning Yidian Tianxia an “entry ticket” to mainstream international markets.

It is also worth noting that, even after the funds for Yidian Tianxia’s Hong Kong listing, the intended uses still focus on deepening AI technology R&D: investing in AI infrastructure, improving the intelligence level of marketing, upgrading the advertising platform, strengthening zMaticoo’s technical capabilities and data analysis capabilities, and so on.

In the global marketing arena, companies that are among the first to complete AI transformation are often also the earliest players to build a “data flywheel.”

By using AI to deeply reconfigure the entire marketing workflow, Yidian Tianxia has evolved toward a model with higher productivity efficiency and deeper coverage across vertical industries, continuing to expand the boundaries of its business. Meanwhile, relying on underlying technological iterations, its programmatic advertising business is fully scaling up the developer ecosystem, accumulating core data assets and algorithm models, and building a growth flywheel driven bidirectionally by “attracting advertisers’ budgets” and “aggregating developers’ traffic.”

This image appears to be AI-generated

Source: Keling AI

The underlying logic is that its accumulated data trains better models, and better models attract more users, thereby obtaining higher-quality data that feeds back into algorithm iteration. Once this “data—algorithm—traffic—budget” positive cycle forms, it will have strong self-reinforcing capability.

This is also the structural advantage that Yidian Tianxia hopes to construct on this long-slope-and-deep-snow track of overseas marketing, one that is difficult to replicate in the short term.

And all of this, in the end, points to “people.” During the reporting period, Yidian Tianxia’s R&D personnel increased 49.75% year over year, and it rolled out an equity incentive plan with broader coverage, deeply binding technical and business backbones.

In a trend where competition in AI technology is increasingly focusing on top-tier talent, this series of talent deployments is precisely to ensure the company can continuously drive the “data flywheel” to operate at high speed and to meet the release of the next round of technology dividends.

Jingji Daily News (Daily Economic News)