As a leader in the "AI + recruitment" sector, TONGDAO LIEPIN (06100), a dominant player in the mid-to-high-end recruitment industry, continues to advance its AI product portfolio and upgrades, demonstrating sustained operational resilience and improved profitability. On March 27, the company released its 2025 financial results, reporting revenue of RMB 1.986 billion. Revenue from comprehensive cash collections for AI products surpassed RMB 100 million, accounting for 5% of total operating revenue, indicating that AI products are gradually contributing to performance. Additionally, the company achieved gross profit of RMB 1.522 billion and net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 103 million. The board of directors has recommended a final dividend of 20 HK cents per share. A key highlight of the 2025 performance lies in the AI products and their enabling role. The BHC ecosystem barrier, built by TONGDAO LIEPIN over the years, serves as an optimal commercialization platform for these AI products. With comprehensive AI support, the company's user base across its three segments maintained steady growth in 2025. The number of verified enterprise clients reached 1.474 million, a year-on-year increase of 3.2%. Verified headcounts amounted to approximately 224,800, up 4.7% year-on-year. Registered job seekers totaled 116 million, reflecting a 10% year-on-year increase.
Furthermore, TONGDAO LIEPIN places significant emphasis on shareholder returns, sharing the company's developmental achievements. In 2025, the company initiated its first dividend distribution since listing, paying a special interim dividend of 42 HK cents per share in the first half. Combined with the proposed final dividend, the total dividend for the full year reaches 62 HK cents per share, representing a dividend yield of 21.38%. As AI integration in recruitment deepens, the company is poised to benefit from further performance realization, potentially leading to higher returns for shareholders.
The company's resilient performance and profit improvement are underpinned by a strong cash position exceeding RMB 2.6 billion. In recent years, despite a macroeconomic environment undergoing structural adjustments due to factors like persistent geopolitical conflicts, trade wars, and inflation expectations, technological advancements have spawned emerging industries such as AI large language models and robotics. TONGDAO LIEPIN has actively seized these opportunities. On one hand, it has invested in AI research and development to enhance revenue resilience. On the other hand, it has focused on cost reduction and efficiency improvements to drive profitability. In 2025, the company's revenue structure continued to optimize. Revenue from enterprise clients amounted to RMB 1.652 billion, constituting 83.2% of total revenue. Revenue from individual users reached RMB 334 million, achieving 5% growth against the trend.
Moreover, in the second half of 2025, by concentrating on high-value clients and promoting AI products, the company's business cash collections reversed the previous declining trend and achieved year-on-year growth. For the full year, comprehensive cash collection revenue from AI products exceeded RMB 100 million, accounting for 5% of total revenue. Empowered by AI, the company's gross margin remained stable with a slight increase, reaching 76.6% in 2025, up approximately 0.5 percentage points year-on-year, maintaining a high level. Operating expenses (including sales, administrative, and R&D) as a percentage of revenue were 72.8%, down 0.7 percentage points year-on-year. Specifically, the administrative expense ratio was 14%, decreasing by 1.2 percentage points year-on-year. The company's net finance costs increased, primarily due to foreign exchange gains from USD/RMB fluctuations, interest expenses on bank loans, and interest on lease liabilities and bank charges under IFRS 16. Excluding the impact of these finance costs, the core profit margin (gross margin minus operating expense ratio) was 3.8%, an improvement of 1.2 percentage points.
During a period of structural adjustment, TONGDAO LIEPIN emphasizes high-quality development and maintains a healthy financial position. In 2025, its asset-liability ratio was only 29.55%, with interest-bearing debt amounting to just RMB 65 million, representing an interest-bearing debt ratio of 1.5%. Concurrently, the company maintains ample cash flow, supported by strong operating cash flow, which saw a net inflow of RMB 229 million during the period, a 1.49-fold increase year-on-year. As of the end of 2025, the company held cash reserves exceeding RMB 2.6 billion, accounting for over 59.8% of total assets, including cash equivalents of RMB 952 million. This robust cash position not only provides a buffer against macroeconomic risks but also offers greater flexibility for AI product R&D and market expansion.
TONGDAO LIEPIN's unique BHC business model and the resulting ecosystem moat not only meet the needs of its three user segments but also enhance recruitment efficiency and talent mobility, solidifying its leadership in the mid-to-high-end recruitment market. Leveraging its scale and scenario advantages, the company continuously deepens the research and application of AI technology in recruitment. Through the integration of application data from AI recruitment products, deep learning algorithms, and industry knowledge bases, it advances its AI product layout and upgrades, deeply embedding AI capabilities across the entire recruitment process. Its AI product matrix now comprehensively covers all three sides of the BHC ecosystem.
The AI product matrix has significantly empowered the BHC ecosystem, driving continuous growth in user scale. In 2025, the numbers of verified enterprise users, verified individual users, and verified headhunters reached 1.474 million, 116 million, and 224,800 respectively. The compound annual growth rates from 2023 to 2025 were 6.73%, 10.55%, and 3.2% respectively. Specifically, on the enterprise side, TONGDAO LIEPIN's main AI products include Enterprise AI Accounts, the AI Recruitment Agent, and the digital interviewer Doris, all of which significantly enhance capabilities and recruitment efficiency for enterprises. In 2025, the company launched a new AI Account product for enterprises, with the AI Pro account officially launched in the fourth quarter. By the end of 2025, the coverage rate of AI accounts among platform enterprise clients reached 93%. The AI Recruitment Agent, "Intention Candidate," helps enterprises accurately source high-end talent. By the end of 2025, 65% of job orders could be fulfilled with candidates expressing communication intent within two hours. The monthly repeat initiation rate for this product's clients increased to 66%. The digital interviewer Doris automates the interview process, with its multi-interview assessment results achieving over 95% consistency with evaluations by senior experts. The number of enterprise clients reached 71,500 in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 5.3%, reversing the previous decline, and accounting for 4.85% of verified enterprise users.
On the individual user (C-end) side, the company launched the AI Agent Dora in the fourth quarter of 2025. This product provides job seekers with integrated, in-depth, full-process intelligent services for professional empowerment. Through AI voice interviews, Dora engages users in deep communication from a seasoned headhunter's perspective, accurately提炼 core competencies, thoroughly optimizes resume quality, and supports one-click export. Simultaneously, Dora features comprehensive practice questions based on real exams and immersive mock interviews, highly replicating actual interview scenarios and questions, and automatically generates professional interview assessment reports to help job seekers improve their on-the-spot performance and overall competitiveness. In an environment of high unemployment rates, Dora's multi-dimensional empowerment serves as a powerful tool for job seekers, significantly enhancing user stickiness and willingness to pay. In 2025, the number of registered individual users hit a record high, and active user numbers also increased substantially, with monthly active users growing 15.3% year-on-year.
On the headhunter side, the company launched the Multi-Hunt AI Agent Xiao Yi, which was fully upgraded to version 2.0 in 2025, evolving from a single auxiliary tool into core operational infrastructure for delivery teams, widely covering the entire recruitment process for both internal and external headhunters. The Multi-Hunt AI Agent not only handles high-frequency repetitive tasks like resume parsing and automatic candidate sourcing but also delves into intent communication and process monitoring, significantly improving headhunter delivery efficiency and acting as an amplifier for their professional capabilities.
The rapid development of AI in 2025 has made roles related to the "AI+" sector highly sought-after, creating both talent scarcity and surging demand due to the sector's high growth. TONGDAO LIEPIN's comprehensive deployment of an AI product matrix across its BHC ecosystem positions it as a leader in the "AI+recruitment" track. With its leading advantages, scale benefits, and strategic ecosystem positioning, the company is well-positioned to benefit fully from the structural development opportunities across the industry.
In the capital markets, since the rebound starting in September 2024, the company's valuation performance has significantly outperformed its peers. While its valuation has seen a pullback this year due to the broader market environment and the recruitment sector's performance, the cumulative increase in market capitalization to date exceeds 200%. However, the company's valuation remains very low, with a Price-to-Book (P/B) ratio of only 0.4x, far below the level of its peers. TONGDAO LIEPIN is boosting investor confidence through a combination of share buybacks and dividends. The company initiated buybacks starting in December 2025, conducting 17 repurchases that month totaling HK$37.47 million. Following its inaugural dividend in 2025, which included both interim and final payments, the company's dividend policy suggests a continuation of this trend in 2026, aiming to create greater value for shareholders.
It is worth noting that the company has received positive outlooks from several investment banks. For instance, Soochow Securities' research report highlights the company's unique positioning in the mid-to-high-end recruitment market and its AI technology-driven service premium capability, anticipating significant performance improvement as recruitment market demand recovers.
In summary, TONGDAO LIEPIN intensified its AI R&D efforts in 2025, building a comprehensive AI product matrix within its BHC ecosystem. User numbers across its three segments continue to grow, performance demonstrates resilience, profitability has improved, and the company maintains healthy cash flow with over RMB 2.6 billion on hand, providing strategic flexibility. This positions the company to fully capitalize on the development opportunities within the AI+recruitment sector. Driven by its dual-engine strategy focusing on both enterprise and individual users, empowered by AI for efficiency gains, and supported by a robust financial base, TONGDAO LIEPIN is steadily advancing on its long-term path. With a dividend yield exceeding 20% and a significantly undervalued valuation, the company is likely to attract the attention of value investors.