0次浏览 发布时间：2025-04-22 10:23:00
(Image Source: Photo by Lin Zhijia, TMTPost AGI Editor)
TMTPOST— Chinese AI giant iFlytek reported strong revenue growth for the fiscal year 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, fueled by rising demand across its open platform, smart education, and enterprise AI businesses — even as profit margins remained under pressure due to soaring R&D costs and impairments.
Annual revenue rose 18.8% year-over-year to 23.34 billion yuan, while net profit attributable to shareholders fell 14.8% to 560 million yuan, the company said in its earnings release. Earnings per share slipped 14.3% to 0.24 yuan. Notably, fourth-quarter revenue came in at 8.49 billion yuan — up 36.4% year-over-year — signaling strong year-end momentum.
In Q1 2025, iFlytek posted 4.66 billion yuan in revenue, marking a 27.7% increase from a year earlier. Net losses narrowed 35.7% to 193 million yuan, while losses excluding non-recurring items dropped 48.3% to 227 million yuan. Operating cash flow surged 48.5% during the same period.
The company attributed its 2024 net profit decline largely to a 740 million yuan increase in R&D spending focused on large model development, bringing total R&D investment for the year to 4.58 billion yuan — nearly 20% of annual revenue. Additional drag came from higher bad debt provisions and lower returns on investments in firms like Cambricon.
Despite the margin squeeze, iFlytek is doubling down on AI infrastructure. As of 2024, its open platform supported over 8 million developer teams and more than 2.9 million AI applications. The platform added over 2.2 million new developer teams in 2024 alone, including 460,000 overseas. API call volume for large models soared over 763% year-over-year.
The company also reported 170,000 large-model applications developed by 1.02 million developers — positioning iFlytek as China's largest LLM developer ecosystem, according to IDC.
iFlytek's smart education revenue jumped nearly 30% to 7.23 billion yuan, while its consumer and open platform business brought in 7.89 billion yuan — up 27.6% year-over-year. Automotive, healthcare, and enterprise AI revenues also posted robust gains, with the enterprise AI segment more than doubling.
In December, iFlytek successfully spun off its healthcare unit — iFlytek Healthcare — on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Its GBC revenue segments grew 10%, 103%, and 57%, respectively, in 2024.
The iFlytek Spark App surpassed 200 million downloads, while its Smart Text app — which auto-generates PPTs — achieved a 73% download conversion rate and 1.5 million enterprise users. The XiaoYi app recorded over 20 million downloads, with a user satisfaction rate of 98%.
On April 20, iFlytek upgraded its Spark X1 deep reasoning model, claiming performance parity with models like OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1. The Spark X1 now supports deployment on four Huawei 910B chips and enterprise customization with just 16 chips — significantly lowering deployment thresholds.
Despite being added twice to the U.S. Entity List, iFlytek said it has built a self-reliant AI ecosystem and will maintain a balanced strategy between domestic and international markets. Chairman Liu Qingfeng noted that domestic AI capabilities will be key to capitalizing on the global AI wave.
The company recently operated its domestic computing platform "Fei Xing No.1" with 94% average utilization and expects to trial its next-generation "Fei Xing No.2" platform in 2025.
Liu said iFlytek will focus on improving profitability through product strategy, supply chain cost control, delivery efficiency, and channel expansion.
The board has proposed a dividend of 1 yuan per 10 shares. As of April 21, iFlytek shares closed at 45.38 yuan, up 2% on the day and 2.48% higher over the past year.
"In 2025, facing the future, we are more confident than ever," Liu said.
(Note: 1 USD equals about 7.25 yuan)