Earnings Labs

Waterdrop Inc. (WDH)

Q2 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Sep 4, 2025

$1.68

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, everyone. This is Tracy Lisang from Waterdrop Investor Relations. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to Waterdrop's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in listen-only mode in our English line. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. Please note that discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities and the Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those outlined in our public filings with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required in applicable law. Also, this call includes discussion of certain non-GAAP matters. Please refer to our earnings release for a reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP. Joining us today on the call are Mr. Peng Shen, our Founder, Chairman and CEO, Mr. Ran Wei, Director and GM of the Insurance Business, Mrs. Xu Xiaoying, Head of Finance Department, and Mrs. Jasmine Lee, Board Secretary. We will be happy to take some of your questions in the middle of the conference call.

Peng Shen

Management

Good morning, everyone. In the second quarter, we are pleased to see the integration of AI with the insurance and healthcare sectors begin to deliver satisfying results. Revenue growth accelerated further with quarterly revenue reaching million, up 23.9% year over year. Powered by AI, the company's improved operational efficiency significantly, driving an 85.9% year over year increase in operating profit and lifting the operating margin by 3.9 percentage points. Our EasterTech business leverages technological innovation to bring inclusive protection for more users. Our Waterdrop Guardian AI application suite has been rolled out across customer acquisition, sales, underwriting, customer service, quality assurance, and other key processes. With that, FYP in Q2 increased 80% year over year and productivity per capita improved significantly. Waterdrop Medical corresponding platform has also upgraded its risk assessment system by integrating large language model capabilities in case authenticity and transparency. As of June 30, it has raised medical funds for 3.54 million patients. With the market rebounding, the number of patients enrolled in our eFine platform also reached a historical high, with nearly 1,000 patients enrolled in 2025, where operations remain robust and improving. We keep improving our AI technology stack. Our self-development multi-agent collaboration framework can be reused a lot. It helps us quickly build different types of agented chatbots and let AI agents collaborate within milliseconds. Thanks to this, we can provide more stable AI agents to handle more and more complex situations. We are also creating proxy reward models and adding the GRPO algorithm. This allows agents to break away from fixed scripts and change their communication strategies according to what customers do. To fix the slow responding issue when making AI agent calls, we used a distributed key-value cache. It significantly speeds up the influence of the first token. As of June 30,…

Ran Wei

Management

Thank you, Peng Shen. In Q2, our insurance business delivered robust growth. The first-year premium reached billion, up 80.2% year over year and 53.1% quarter over quarter. Insurance-related revenue was about million, up 28.7% year over year and 12.2% quarter over quarter. Operating margin improved to 23.1%, up by nearly two percentage points year over year, driven by our deeper AI integration. For short-term products, we increased the investment in customer acquisition and technology, representing FYP to billion, up 95% year over year and 62.1% quarter over quarter. In customer acquisition, we continuously tap into AI capabilities, integrate on user outreach and recommendation AI model, and drive continuous breakthrough in customer acquisition from a public domain. We are increasingly applying AI tools to enhance the production, speed, and quantity of marketing materials to support front-end customer acquisition efforts. At the same time, we use AI to facilitate better conversion of different scenarios. For example, our new AI Pro insurance model, the app, and the Mini Program use a large network model for real-time matching and convert nearly 50% better than the traditional advertising slot. In the voice services, narrow AI medical insurance experts continue to improve efficiency. In Q2, it assisted in achieving a 155% increase in the scale of insurance premiums compared to Q1. And points continue expanding in the second half of the year. In weak comp scenarios, AI medical insurance experts launched as of March and by June lifted FIP per lead 58% compared to that in May. On products, we expanded our portfolio. We have new long-term medical plans such as which requires no health declaration and guarantee renewal for five years. We also rolled out a mid to high-end plan with zero deductible and nationwide eligibility. And version 6.0 of our maternity series, Jiahao Yun,…

Jasmine Lee

Management

Thank you, Ran Wei. As of June 2025, around 480 million people cumulatively donated RMB70 billion to about 3,540,000 patients through our WhatsApp medical profiling platform. That is by Tactical Group, we again increased R and D investment on our personal medical profiling risk control. For case-level risk, like language model metrics can now identify 15 high-risk scenarios like suspected identity, abnormal spending, or ethical violations. It does this by analyzing every word in the campaign's context, comments, and hidden clues which greatly improves the detective accuracy. For fund-level risk, a dynamic monitoring algorithm checks the diagnose timeline, commercial insurance payout, and the fundraising speed. If anything wrong with the fund, it will automatically limit or post the campaign. Then menu review will be carried out within minutes. To address malicious promotion activities, we have developed an abnormal behavior recognition model. We incorporated crucial factors such as donation conversion rate, information dissemination patterns, and SaaS characteristics. This model shows the top accuracy in the industry. This model can detect and stop the malicious campaign in real-time. On May 27, we partnered with Guangzhou civil affairs bureaucracy to launch the order of Cool Help. It is the first project under our new designation as a government-endorsed platform that integrates social and public welfare resources. This project ensures that welfare resources can accurately reach the target population by integrating the system with Zhihoban's platform. At the same time, in places like Guangzhou, co-health space, and hospitals, the platform is improving its serviceability and actively responding to and exploring the government-enterprise collaboration innovation model. Turning to our healthcare business. We continue to advance on a steady and upward trajectory. Digital clinical trial business has entered a phase of rapid scale-up coupled with efficiency gains. Yifan platform expanded its collaboration to 198 pharmaceutical and contracted research organizations. Meanwhile, we initiated service for 114 new programs. The number of patients enrolled also reached a historic high with 999 patients enrolled in 2019, representing a 34.2% year-over-year revenue growth. Our digital omni-channel marketing business also accelerated. We renewed our three-year contract with a leading global multinational pharmaceutical. Through the application of AI in patient services and health education management, we achieved a 105% increase in productivity per capita, representing a substantial enhancement in our service capability. Looking ahead, we will deepen our L and M capabilities and algorithmic position to unlock further growth as healthcare digital wide vision accelerates. Now I will hand over to Xu Xiaoying, our Head of Finance Department to discuss our financial performance in this quarter.

Xu Xiaoying

Management

Thank you, Jasmine Lee. Hello, everyone. I will now walk you through our financial highlights for 2025. Before I go into detail, please be reminded that all numbers quoted here will be in RMB and please refer to our earnings release for detailed information on our financial performance on both the year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis respectively. On the base of steady growth in the previous quarter, the company has further achieved significant year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter growth in both revenue and profit this quarter. As Peng Shen and Ran Wei just mentioned, further development of the company's AI application was to improve the efficiency of our business operation in multiple segments, including customer acquisition, sales, service, and quality control providing strong motivation for the performance growth in the second quarter. In Q2, Waterdrop achieved remarkable financial results with total raw money amounted to million, representing a year-on-year increase of 23.9% and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 11.2%. By segment, the insurance business contributed million showing a year-on-year increase of 28.7%. The corresponding service fees generated million remaining stable on year-on-year. The digital clinical trial solutions used RMB27.7 million with a year-on-year increase of 34.2%. Meanwhile, the company has been making its operation more efficient. In the second quarter, the total operating costs and expenses were around million, which is about 18.7% higher than the same period last year as the growth rate of the cost and expenses was lower than that of the revenue. This quarter, the operating cost was for million, a 30.5% increase from last year. This was mainly because the cost of referral and service fee went up by about million this quarter. Also during this quarter, the company made additional efforts in the medical refining business to assist help more users. Moreover, as the company has been enhancing…