Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Zhihu Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today's conference is being recorded and webcasted. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to you, Yolanda Liu, Head of IR and Capital Markets. Please go ahead, madam.

Thank you, Hadi. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Zhihu's 2025 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results Conference Call. Joining me today on the call from senior management team are Mr. Zhou Yuan, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Wang Han, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, actual results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in our public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable law. Additionally, the discussion today will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial results for comparison purpose only. For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings release issued earlier today. In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our IR website at ir.zhihu.com. Today, Victor Zhou, an AI agent, representing Mr. Zhou Yuan, will deliver prepared remarks in English on his behalf. As Victor is still being refined, we appreciate your understanding. Victor, please go ahead.

Thank you, Yolanda. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Zhihu's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. I am Victor Zhou, and I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Zhou Yuan, Founder, Chairman and CEO. In 2025, we achieved our first ever full year non-GAAP profit. This historic milestone validates our strategic transformation and underscores the structural durability of our operational leverage. Full year 2025, adjusted net income reached RMB 37.9 million, on a substantial turnaround from the adjusted net loss of RMB 96.3 million in 2024. Our community engagement continues to thrive. In Q4, average daily time spent per user increased to over 41 minutes on the platform. Our ecosystem of trusted creators remains vibrant, consistently delivering authentic and high-quality content across diverse fields. At the same time, we accelerated AI integration within our community. The synergistic evolution of our high-quality content times the expert network times AI capabilities continuously strengthened Zhihu's competitive mode in the AI era. In 2025, we successfully optimized our business structure. With a healthier commercial ecosystem, total revenue trend improved meaningfully in the fourth quarter, driven by a double-digit sequential increase in marketing services. Entering 2026, amid the surging AI adoption, we are leveraging Zhihu's unique advantages to scale AI-driven commercialization, including rapidly building industry-leading export data solutions and deploying AI productivity tools to accelerate IP monetization of our Yan'an Stories franchise. These initiatives will unlock new commercial opportunities for Zhihu. These efforts are anchored by a robust self-sustaining ecosystem. The powerful synergies between high-quality content, our expert network and expanding AI capabilities have created a positive feedback loop, driving heightened community, activity and interaction. In the fourth quarter, our data engagement metrics strengthened significantly. Average daily time spent per user increased sharply both year-over-year and sequentially to…

I will now go over our fourth quarter financials for a complete overview of our results, please refer to our press release issued earlier today. 2025 represents a structural upgrade in Zhihu's financial profile. As Victor noted, we achieved our first full year non-GAAP profitability milestone. Financially, this progress was driven by sustained cost discipline, improved operating leverage and tighter expense control, while maintaining healthy gross margins. For the full year, we recorded non-GAAP net income of RMB 37.9 million, and our non-GAAP operating loss narrowed by 33.6% year-over-year. These results reflect the cumulative impact of our multi-quarter structure optimization and provide a strong foundation to build on as we enter 2026. Now turning to the fourth quarter. Our total revenues for the quarter were RMB 643.5 million compared with RMB 859.2 million in the same period of 2024. The year-over-year decrease continue to reflect our ongoing efforts to optimize revenue mix and focus on sustainable, high-quality growth. Notably, the pace of sequential decline continued to narrow, reinforcing a clear top line recovery trajectory. Our marketing services revenue for the quarter was RMB 234.8 million compared with RMB 315.9 million in the same period of 2024, while the year-over-year decline reflects our proactive refinement of service offerings, the sequential trend was notably positive. Marketing services revenue grew 24% sequentially, marking a clear inflection point in our recovery. This momentum was driven by stronger client quality, deeper industry penetration and the successful ramp-up of new commercial products. Paid membership revenue was RMB 333.5 million compared with RMB 422 million in the same period of 2024. Average monthly subscribing members were 12.2 million. The year-over-year decline in membership was expected and reflects our deliberate prioritization of unit economics over scale. That said, we delivered sequential improvements in both ARPPU and renewal rates…

[Operator Instructions] We will take our first question. Your first question comes from the line of Xueqing Zhang from CICC.

[Foreign Language] Thanks management for taking my question. And my question about your financial outlook. So firstly, what's the earnings outlook in 2026 and how to balance the investment with the cash flow and the profitability?

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] This is from Zhihu CFO, Wang Han. So first, 2025 demonstrated that Zhihu can achieve profitability. But more importantly, we believe, given our unique assets and positioning Zhihu's opportunity set in the AI era is meaningfully larger than what we current scale reflect. So we are not pursuing a single path of delivering profitability this year, more profitability next year. And then turning to dividends. At our current scale, that would not generate a particular meaningful level of returns for our shareholders. So what we want to do instead is stay focused on the opportunities created by AI and invest behind them. At the same time, this does not mean we will abandon the bottom line discipline that we worked hard to achieve or return to the old model of burning significant cash for growth. We will be disciplined in selecting new initiatives concentrating our investments on areas with visible ROI potential and a strong fit with Zhihu's core strength. In other words, we want to deliver growth in new AI-driven revenue stream. At the same time, to keep the overall bottom line on a healthy and responsive track. Thanks for the question.

Thank you. We will take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Daisy Chen from Haitong International.

[Foreign Language] I'll translate it myself. As of current stage, what is your strategy in terms of our commercialization? And what are the company's core priorities for 2026?

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] So thanks for your question. I will get started with my answers. This is from Zhihu CFO, Wang Han. So in terms of the priority and the strategy in 2026, these are mainly centered on 2 tracks. First of all, in our core community business, we want to continue using AI to improve efficiency and deliver a better product experience for our users and the content creators. At the same time, to maintain stable revenue and a healthier level of operating profitability. In other words, we want to -- our core business to maintain steady, while becoming increasingly AI-enhanced and financially stronger over time.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] At the same time, we want to fully leverage Zhihu's unique assets to develop new AI businesses. As I mentioned earlier, the new initiatives we choose will not be built around aggressive cash burn. We will focus on areas where we can see a path to a healthy cash flow. Right now, we are mainly focused on 2 areas.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] The first is AI-enabled short-form drama and comic adaption. As text to video and image to video models continue to evolve. The production chain is becoming increasingly streamlined. In that process, the scarce asset is high-quality upstream IP, and that is not something that can be acquired overnight, simply by spending heavily. Zhihu's advantage is not only that we have accumulated a large library of high-quality copyrighted content, but also that we have a highly active creator ecosystem that continue to generate new ideas and new IPs. More importantly, AI-generated short drama and the comic style content have already shown that users are willing to pay for this type of AI content. So we believe this is one of the most promising areas where focused investment could generate meaningful and scalable AI revenue for us.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] The second area is data -- AI data services. At a time when many AI applications are still operating with heavy cash burn, there are only a few categories in the ecosystem that can capture structurally attractive economies. One, of course, is represented by companies like NVIDIA. Another on a relatively smaller but still very attractive scale is high-quality data area. In U.S. companies such as Scale AI, Surge AI and McClure has grown rapidly within just a few years by providing high-quality data services to leading LLM developers, while also demonstrating a healthy cash flow characteristics. So with our strong export network and depending on understanding of high-quality model data, we believe Zhihu is well positioned to provide differentiated data solutions for all of these AI developers. At the same time, our community can continuously service new areas of expertise, emerging knowledge, and involving capabilities that LLMs have not yet fully covered. This gives Zhihu a very differentiated advantage in this field. And we believe this is also a business with a clear opportunity to generate positive cash flow.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] So in a word, what we want to deliver is a stable core business that continue to upgrade through AI with improving product capability and a healthy financial profile. Alongside new AI revenue streams that can grow in a disciplined way. The goal is not to pursue growth through excessive spending, but also -- but to build a new AI business with visible monetization potential and a path to positive cash flow. Thank you for the question.

[Operator Instructions] We will take our next question. The question comes from the line of Vicky Wei from Citi.

[Foreign Language] So could management share some data that will help us better understand the impact of AI on the Zhihu community? And additionally, with regard to product upgrades and user experience enhancement in the coming year, what new initiatives does Zhihu have in place?

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] Thanks for your question. I will take this question. This is from Zhihu CEO, Zhou Yuan. So first of all, the impact of AI on our community has not been passive. Over the past few quarters, we have been actively driving this accelerating and deeper integration between AI and the Zhihu community with a clear focus on improving such as content consumption, creator experience and so on. Broadly speaking, the positive changes from AI adoption can be seen across 2 groups: our core retained users and our new users.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] Starting with our core retained user, AI is helping users and creators better understand and connect with each other, which further strength the social nature of a real human interaction on our platform. In 4Q, both the coverage and frequency of the positive user interactions on the platform increased year-over-year. We are also seeing users actively call on AI capabilities, aka Zhida. In the comments section for things like fact checking, explaining professional topics and the following training discussions. Importantly, this is happening without disrupting the community atmosphere. Instead, it is helping drive -- is helping drive more interaction and the follow-on discussion among real users. More recently, we launched AI reading panel on PC, with features such as one-click summaries and explanations of professional terms. It has meaningfully improved the reading efficiency of long-form content and significantly enhance the deep reading experience for our core users.

[Foreign Language]

As we mentioned earlier, daily newly added high-quality content in the community grew by over 20% year-over-year in 4Q. But beyond content volume, while we are more -- what we care more about is a positive shift in user and the creators' behaviors. So through like AI capabilities, such as intelligence editing and multi-model associated creation, we're continuing to lower the barrier. So we can see like in the per user's interaction improved significantly in this quarter.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreter] For new users entering the community, AI is also lowering the barrier to content discovery, joining discussions and participating in interactions. In 4Q '25, the direct MAUs of Zhihu Zhida continued to grow by more than 260% year-over-year, while next month's retention improved by about 83% year-over-year. In February '26, average daily search queries per DAU increased by more than 16% compared with November '25.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreter] As we shared previously, we mentioned that we completed another upgrade of AI capability within Zhihu's main search to further integrate Zhida with our broader search experience and making it a new entry point for high-quality content for our users. So we see this happened in December. And after this upgrade, search can present more suitable answer formats based on different types of queries. Since launch, user coverage of a AI Zhida cards have increased meaningfully. CTR, click-through rate saw double-digit improved and average AI searches per user also increased noticeably.

[Foreign Language]

Continue to standby, the conference will resume shortly. [Technical Difficulty]

[Interpreter] Okay. I will continue to deliver answers from our CEO, Zhou Yuan. So for the looking forward perspective, our plans are focused on 2 areas. First, we will continue investing in the experience gains we are already seeing from AI, both in terms of enabling more social interaction and efficiency for core return users and new users. So this direction here is already quite clear, and we have been building toward it step-by-step. On top of that, we are preparing to upgrade the Zhida's core capability from AI search towards an agent-based experience. We believe this could bring broader product experience upgrades to users across community. Although there is still an innovation and execution process ahead of us, and we will continue to work through that rollout. So this is from Zhihu CEO, Zhou Yuan. Thanks for your question again.

Thank you. That concludes today's Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Yolanda for additional or closing remarks.

Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact our IR team directly or Christensen Advisory. Thank you. Thank you all.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]