Caocao Chuxing to List on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange: Customized Vehicle Ecosystem Continues to Empower, Robotaxi Seizes the Opportunity

On June 25th, Caocao Chuxing officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the largest technology-based ride-hailing platform in the Hong Kong stock market.

Although TickTick Chuxing and Ruqi Chuxing, two ride-hailing service platforms, have previously listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Caocao Chuxing still stands out in the capital market:

Firstly, it has a significantly larger scale. In 2024, Caocao Chuxing's GTV reached 17 billion yuan, ranking second in the market share of the ride-hailing industry. Secondly, it has a more comprehensive business ecosystem. The company not only has its own self-operated fleet and third-party cooperation capacity but also has large-scale deployment of customized vehicles with lower holding costs. Thirdly, it is at the forefront of business exploration. Since February 2025, the company has piloted the on-site business of Robotaxi in two cities, seizing the next trillion-yuan opportunity.

The prospectus reveals that Caocao Chuxing's operating revenues in 2022, 2023, and 2024 reached 7.631 billion yuan, 10.668 billion yuan, and 14.657 billion yuan respectively, with a compound growth rate as high as 39%. So, can Caocao Chuxing's differentiated advantages be transformed into sustainable profitability and growth momentum? What is the fundamental situation of Caocao Chuxing?

01 The Advantages of Customized Vehicles Are Apparent, and Profitability Continues to Improve

It took nearly a decade for Caocao Chuxing, incubated by Geely, to go from its official establishment in 2015 to its IPO on the Hong Kong stock market. Compared with companies that have already gone public in the industry, this cycle is not short. However, it is precisely this "slow" pace that allows Caocao Chuxing to rely on Geely's resource endowment and focus on building a ride-hailing ecosystem centered around customized vehicles.

According to the company's prospectus, as of the end of 2024, Caocao Chuxing had been operating a fleet of over 34,000 self-owned customized vehicles in 31 cities in China and planned to expand the fleet to 50,000 vehicles by replacing the existing non-customized vehicles in the future. From 2022 to 2024, the proportion of GTV from customized vehicles in the total GTV was 5.3%, 20.1%, and 25.1% respectively, showing an upward trend.

So, what are the advantages of the customized vehicle model?

The ride-hailing industry generally follows the following simple profit model: for the platform, gross profit = GTV - user subsidies - driver income - driver subsidies; for drivers, gross profit = driver income + driver subsidies - vehicle holding costs (TCO, including vehicle depreciation/lease fees, energy costs, maintenance fees).

Undoubtedly, both the platform and drivers pursue the maximization of their respective gross profits. The platform hopes to increase GTV and reduce subsidies to users and drivers, but this is likely to conflict with the interests of drivers and users. For drivers, subsidies are directly related to net income, and for users, a reduction in subsidies means a price increase. At the same time, after the traffic entry point of ride-hailing services shifted from independent apps to aggregator platforms, the switching costs for users and drivers between different ride-hailing platforms have significantly decreased. Therefore, how to balance the interests of drivers and users has become an important challenge for the platform.

Caocao Chuxing's customized vehicle ecosystem effectively addresses this pain point. Caocao Chuxing not only provides drivers with customized new energy vehicles with more competitive purchase/lease prices and lower energy costs but also integrates Geely's authorized maintenance resources. With digital and standardized processes, it effectively reduces drivers' daily maintenance and repair costs. These two measures together significantly relieve drivers' vehicle holding burden and directly promote the improvement of their gross profits.

The average hourly income of Caocao Chuxing drivers increased from 30.9 yuan in 2022 to 35.7 yuan in 2024, significantly higher than the average hourly wage of about 27 yuan for drivers shown in the sampling data of the 2024 annual report of the China Ride-Hailing Association.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the estimated TCO of Caocao Chuxing's two customized vehicle models, Maple 80V and Caocao 60, is 0.53 yuan/km and 0.47 yuan/km respectively, which is 33% and 40% lower than that of typical pure electric vehicles.

The low-cost advantage of Caocao Chuxing's customized vehicles is achieved by considering the vehicle's functions from an operational perspective, focusing on meeting the rigid needs of drivers and passengers for interior space, comfort, and standardized services, and leveraging Geely's vehicle manufacturing capabilities. That is to say, the customized vehicle model not only reduces drivers' holding costs and directly increases their net income but also improves passengers' riding experience, leaving room for the platform to gradually reduce subsidies and increase potential profits.

Of course, for Caocao Chuxing's self-owned fleet, since the ownership of the ride-hailing vehicles belongs to the platform itself, replacing them with lower-cost customized vehicles also significantly reduces the company's own depreciation, maintenance, and repair costs.

These operational advantages are clearly reflected in the financial data. On the cost side, the percentage of Caocao Chuxing's adjusted driver income and subsidies in the ride-hailing service revenue decreased from 84.2% in 2022 to 79.0% in 2024; the proportion of vehicle service costs (insurance, maintenance) decreased from 7.9% in 2022 to 3.53% in 2024. This directly drove the company's gross profit margin up from -4.44% in 2022 to 8.09% in 2024.

Figure: Proportion of major expenses in ride-hailing business revenue. Source: Prospectus, compiled by 36Kr

In terms of profit performance, with the improvement of the gross profit margin, Caocao Chuxing's adjusted net loss continued to narrow from 1.65 billion yuan in 2022 to 724 million yuan in 2024.

More importantly, from the perspective of sustainable operation, although the large amount of depreciation generated by the self-owned fleet affects the book net profit, it does not affect the company's operating cash flow. The adjusted EBITDA, which can more comprehensively reflect the company's real operating conditions and profitability, has successfully turned from -773 million yuan in 2022 to 383 million yuan in 2024, and the corresponding adjusted EBITDA rate has also increased from -10.1% to 2.6%. This indicates that Caocao Chuxing's customized vehicle model is gradually leading the company to achieve profitable growth and has initially gained the ability of self-sustaining development, ultimately expected to achieve a "win-win-win" situation for the platform, drivers, and users.

02 Deeply Cultivating the Supply Side: The Real Moat of Caocao Chuxing

Investment guru Charlie Munger, in his theory about the corporate moat, regarded brand, economies of scale, intellectual property rights, etc. as important factors in determining a company's competitiveness. In the past, the main way for Internet companies to build moats was to rely on expanding scale to spread marginal costs. Therefore, relying on burning money for subsidies to quickly acquire customers in the early stage seemed to have become a path dependence. However, for today's ride-hailing service platforms, simple scale actually cannot constitute a corporate moat.

The core reason lies in the structural transformation of the ride-hailing order entry point: users are flowing from individual ride-hailing apps to aggregator platforms, which essentially provide relatively equal opportunities for ride-hailing service providers to obtain traffic. According to Frost & Sullivan, the proportion of ride-hailing orders on aggregator platforms has increased from 7% in 2019 to 31% in 2024.

Under the aggregator platform model, the prices of different ride-hailing services become transparent and easy to compare, and users often pay more attention to convenience and price when making choices. This directly leads ride-hailing platforms to rely on price subsidies as the main means to obtain orders. But the key problem is that aggregator platforms have greatly reduced the switching costs for users between different services. Therefore, it is difficult for users attracted by price subsidies to become loyal users and core resources of a specific platform. As a result, the more a platform invests in subsidies to expand scale, the more likely it is to fall into a dilemma of increasing losses. Simple scale expansion actually erodes profitability.

Caocao Chuxing realized this problem early on and did not choose blind expansion and subsidy wars. Instead, it deeply cultivated the supply side, built differentiated service capabilities, and made its moat deeper and more stable.

The customized vehicle ecosystem is a unique supply-side barrier built by Caocao Chuxing: on the one hand, the R & D, production, and operation of customized vehicles require a profound automotive industry background and resource integration capabilities, which are difficult for general Internet-based ride-hailing platforms to possess; on the other hand, the low-cost and good experience characteristics of customized vehicles also enable Caocao Chuxing to expand scale through differentiated advantages rather than just relying on subsidies. For competitors, if they want to replicate this model, they need to invest a lot of time and resources in in-depth cooperation with automobile manufacturers, and it is difficult to shake Caocao Chuxing's first-mover advantage in the short term.

More significantly, with the accelerating arrival of the Robotaxi era, Caocao Chuxing's existing supply-side barriers will be further strengthened and extended. On June 22nd, Tesla launched the internal test of Robotaxi in Austin, the United States, marking that Robotaxi is one step closer to large-scale commercialization.

Robotaxi is regarded as a revolutionary direction for future transportation, and its commercial success highly depends on the in-depth coordination of the trinity capabilities of "autonomous driving technology + vehicle manufacturing + operation platform". Currently, globally, only Tesla has achieved this full-industry chain closed-loop with its self-developed FSD, self-built factories, and large user operation system.

Similarly, relying on Geely Group's strong vehicle manufacturing capabilities and autonomous driving technology layout, combined with its own mature experience in operating a ride-hailing platform, Caocao Chuxing has also built a closed-loop ecosystem of "customized vehicles + autonomous driving technology + ride-hailing platform". On February 28th, 2025, Caocao Chuxing announced the launch of the Caocao Zhixing autonomous driving platform and piloted the Robotaxi service in Suzhou and Hangzhou, becoming one of the few ride-hailing companies in the world to actually operate Robotaxi. Its prospectus further reveals that Caocao Chuxing is cooperating with Geely Group to develop new customized vehicles specifically for Robotaxi services, including an L4-level Robotaxi, which is expected to be launched by the end of 2026.

It can be predicted that with the continuous advancement of the commercialization process of Robotaxi, Caocao Chuxing's unique supply-side moat built in the manned driving era will be further deepened in the driverless era, enabling it to occupy a strategic high ground in the future fierce competition in the transportation market.

03 Leading in the Robotaxi Era: Caocao Chuxing

It is an undeniable fact that the profitability of the current ride-hailing industry, which has a strong livelihood attribute, naturally has a ceiling. As an important part of urban transportation, ride-hailing services undertake part of the function of public transportation and face competition from other transportation modes. On the other hand, ride-hailing platforms need to assume more social responsibilities, such as protecting drivers' rights and interests, ensuring passenger safety, and providing inclusive services, which all impact the industry's profitability.

The emergence of Robotaxi is expected to fundamentally change the cost structure and profit model of the ride-hailing industry, thus breaking through the existing profitability ceiling. The most core reason is that, in theory, Robotaxi can significantly reduce operating costs and increase the revenue per vehicle through 24/7 continuous operation. This means that ride-hailing platforms are expected to achieve a leapfrog improvement in profit margins.

The market also has high expectations for this prospect. Soochow Securities predicts that by 2030, the proportion of shared transportation in the domestic transportation market is expected to increase to 6.0%, and the penetration rate of Robotaxi in the domestic shared transportation industry will reach 36%, with the market scale expected to exceed 200 billion yuan. Tianfeng Securities is even more optimistic, predicting that the global Robotaxi market scale will reach 834.9 billion yuan in 2030, and the domestic market will reach 488.8 billion yuan.

Undoubtedly, the future of Robotaxi is bright. However, it is also necessary to calmly recognize that building a complete ecosystem of "autonomous driving technology + vehicle manufacturing + operation platform" is the key prerequisite for winning the market. Huatai Securities also points out that in the global competitive landscape, technological advantages dominate, but the ability to integrate the ecosystem will determine the final outcome. The one who can first break through the barriers among full-stack technological capabilities, stable traffic entry points, and low-cost mass-produced vehicles to achieve a truly sustainable commercial closed-loop and large-scale profit path will be the ultimate winner.

As mentioned above, compared with other ride-hailing platforms in the industry, Caocao Chuxing has unique and hard-to-imitate resources in autonomous driving technology and vehicle manufacturing capabilities due to its deep binding relationship with Geely Group; compared with other autonomous driving service providers and automobile manufacturers, Caocao Chuxing has an industry-leading ride-hailing operation platform and ten years of operation experience. Therefore, Caocao Chuxing is expected to take the lead in achieving large-scale commercial operation with its strong ecological advantages and stand out in the new round of industry reshuffle.

For the capital market, what it values most is the huge imagination space of Caocao Chuxing in the Robotaxi era, and there is still sufficient pricing space for the company's valuation.