WeRide, a Guangzhou-based company that runs self-driving taxis, just gave investors something to chew on.
That is 82% higher than a year earlier.
Analysts had expected 170.7 million yuan, the consensus forecast. WeRide beat that by a solid margin.
The growth came mostly from China, where revenue from WeRide's ride-hailing business rose 140% compared to the first quarter. The company also pointed to faster growth in Europe as part of the sales jump.
WeRide is running robotaxi pilots in Spain, Switzerland, and Singapore. Those efforts are part of an international push, but the quarter also had an expensive side.
WeRide lost 400.7 million yuan in the quarter.
This loss surpassed the 301.3 million yuan that analysts had forecast.
The jump traces back to July. That is when the government restarted approving robotaxi permits after a pause earlier in the year.
The pause followed an incident and kept new self-driving cabs from getting approvals. When the permits started moving again, WeRide's domestic business got moving with them.
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Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Robin Leung thinks approvals will probably keep coming. He also thinks the real test is scale, which means many more robotaxis in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.
Until then, he expects profit per car to stay low in the near term. Cash burn, the rate at which a company spends more cash than it brings in, will keep going.
Leung still sees a path to better results. He said "WeRide's stronger pricing power and asset-light strategy in the Middle East should help it break even faster than rivals".
Pricing power means the company can charge more for rides. An asset-light approach means it leans on partners instead of owning every piece of the operation itself.
Leung's point about the Middle East is that WeRide does not need to own everything there. It can test the market, keep upfront costs lower, and learn whether the business works before going all in.
One thing to watch is whether the government keeps those permits coming. Leung expects it will, but the July restart shows how much this business depends on policy choices.
WeRide's chief financial officer, Jennifer Li, sees the loss as part of a bigger story. "While global commercialization of autonomous driving remains at an early stage, the addressable market is substantial, and growth visibility is high," she said.
Addressable market is the total pool of customers a company could realistically serve. In Li's view, that pool is big enough to justify the spending now.
The international pilots are early-stage. That matches Li's point that global commercialization is still early.
She also said WeRide is "firmly on the path toward self-sustaining cash generation." That is another way of saying the company expects to cover its own costs eventually.
The tricky part is that this report tells two stories at once. Sales are climbing fast, and losses are climbing too.
That is the nature of autonomous driving right now. WeRide has to test cars, win approvals, and run pilots in several countries at once, and all of that costs money before it earns money.
The next few quarters should show whether revenue can outrun the costs. If it does, WeRide gets closer to the self-sustaining cash flow its CFO keeps talking about.
If it does not, the cash burn becomes the bigger story. For your portfolio, a strong sales quarter and a wider loss can come in the same report, and growth companies live on what happens next, not just what happened last quarter.
The question is not whether WeRide is growing. It is whether the growth is big enough to pay for the losses it takes to create it, and this report leaves that question open.
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