KANZHUN (NASDAQ:BZ) used its fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2025 earnings call to highlight accelerating profitability, steady recovery in China’s recruitment market, and a growing role for artificial intelligence in expanding services beyond traditional job matching. Management also announced a new shareholder return framework starting in 2026 and increased its existing repurchase authorization.
Fourth-quarter and full-year results
Founder, Chairman, and CEO Jonathan Peng Zhao said the company generated fourth-quarter revenue of RMB 2.08 billion, up 14% year-over-year. Excluding share-based compensation, adjusted operating profit reached RMB 900 million, up 37% year-over-year. He noted that the fourth quarter is typically a seasonal low point for hiring in China, but said enterprise hiring demand “continued the steady recovery trend” when adjusting for seasonality, with the supply-demand ratio remaining healthy.
User growth and platform activity
Management emphasized continued expansion in both its job seeker and enterprise user bases. In 2025, the company added nearly 46 million newly verified users. As of year-end 2025, the platform had cumulatively served over 250 million job seekers and 36 million enterprise users, with total enterprises served exceeding 20 million.
Operational metrics also increased. The company said the BOSS Zhipin app’s average monthly active users (MAU) in 2025 reached more than 60.7 million, up 14.5% year-over-year. The platform facilitated more than 2.27 billion “mutually consented exchanges” of resume or contact information during the year, up 22.4%, and mutual consent per job seeker rose 7%.
Zhao pointed to deeper penetration in blue-collar roles, lower-tier cities, and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). He said blue-collar user growth led the overall user base and that blue-collar revenue contribution increased further, while white-collar demand “recovered steadily.” Revenue contribution from third-tier and lower-tier cities approached 25% in the fourth quarter, which management said roughly doubled versus four years ago. By enterprise size, revenue contributed by companies with fewer than 100 employees exceeded 50% for the first time in 2025.
On monetization, the company reported 6.83 million paid enterprise customers in the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2025, up 11.6% year-over-year and 1.3% quarter-over-quarter. Management said the paying user rate among active users rose modestly, while ARPPU remained broadly stable due to a higher revenue mix from SMEs.
Margins, expenses, and cash position
Deputy CFO Wenbei Wang said the company delivered “accelerating momentum and enlarged profitability.” Fourth-quarter revenue was described as RMB 2.1 billion, and full-year revenue as RMB 8.3 billion. Paid enterprise customers expanded to 6.8 million, with Wang also noting balanced growth across key and smaller accounts, including fourth-quarter revenue growth of 21% year-over-year from small-sized accounts.
Wang said total operating costs and expenses decreased 7% year-over-year to RMB 1.4 billion in the fourth quarter, and fell 7% to RMB 5.8 billion for the full year. Share-based compensation expenses declined 23% year-over-year in the quarter and 20% for the full year, falling by 5 percentage points as a share of revenue in both periods. Excluding share-based compensation, adjusted income from operations increased 37% to RMB 900 million in the quarter and 46% to RMB 3.5 billion for the full year, with a quarterly record adjusted operating margin of 43.3% and a full-year margin of 40.8%.
Cost of revenues decreased slightly, which management attributed mainly to lower employee-related and rental expenses, partly offset by higher payment processing costs. Gross margin increased by two percentage points to 85.1% in 2025, which Wang said marked the second consecutive year of improvement.
- Sales and marketing: RMB 389 million in Q4, down 9% year-over-year; RMB 1.7 billion for the full year, down 18%, with the company citing improved sales efficiency and no major marketing campaign.
- R&D: RMB 406 million in Q4, down 8%; RMB 1.7 billion for the full year, down 9%. Adjusted R&D was RMB 1.3 billion for the year, down 4%.
- G&A: RMB 256 million in Q4, down 7%; RMB 1.2 billion for the full year, up 10% due primarily to a one-off intangible asset impairment booked in the third quarter.
Income tax expense was RMB 165 million in the quarter, up 81% year-over-year, driven by higher pre-tax income and a RMB 38 million top-up tax related to OECD Pillar Two global minimum tax rules. The company reported net income of RMB 682 million in Q4 and RMB 2.7 billion for 2025. Adjusted net income was RMB 906 million in Q4, up 25% year-over-year, and RMB 3.6 billion for the year, up 33%, with adjusted net margin reaching a historical high of 43.6%.
Operating cash flow was RMB 1.3 billion in Q4 and RMB 4.6 billion for 2025, up 29% year-over-year. Cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments totaled RMB 19.9 billion as of December 31, 2025.
Spring recruitment trends and Q1 outlook
Zhao said the company is seeing “robust momentum” on both supply and demand during the spring recruitment season, China’s annual post–Spring Festival peak hiring period. Adjusting for the holiday, average daily newly verified users (job seekers and enterprise users) exceeded the same period last year, and app activity reached a record high. The company said average daily job postings in the 15 days after the Spring Festival rose by a double-digit percentage year-over-year, while the platform’s job seeker-to-enterprise user (C-to-B) ratio remained healthy.
By industry, management said active job postings in manufacturing, electronics and communications, semiconductors, automotive, advertising and media, and urban services grew faster than other sectors. Zhao added that, despite a later Spring Festival and the usual lag in white-collar and large-enterprise hiring, internet, AI, and technology job postings were already showing accelerated year-over-year growth.
For first-quarter 2026, the company guided revenue to RMB 2.050 billion to RMB 2.085 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 6.6% to 8.4%. Wang said the later Chinese New Year shortened the peak-season window in the quarter, but added that underlying momentum remains strong and the company expects “clear acceleration” in coming quarters.
AI strategy, shareholder returns, and overseas progress
Management described AI as a catalyst for moving the business toward “closed-loop services,” including models where platforms can charge based on outcomes. Zhao said that in 2025, revenue from closed-loop services reached “hundreds of millions” of RMB and has been growing faster than other segments. He also discussed AI initiatives including an “AI quick hiring tool” for high-end enterprise users, an AI-assisted interview feature rolled out in the company’s interview rooms, and the use of AI agents to support sourcing and screening in bulk hiring scenarios, while disclosing to job seekers that they are interacting with an AI agent.
In response to investor questions about whether AI could reduce white-collar hiring demand, Zhao argued that AI’s efficiency gains could help offset China’s labor force decline over the next 10 to 20 years, and said current data show rising demand for AI talent. He cited company observations that after the Spring Festival, newly posted AI-related jobs rose 172% year-over-year and active online AI job postings rose 80% year-over-year. He also said the company has not felt its competitive position being challenged by AI and believes AI can help reinforce its bilateral network effects.
On AI research, Zhao said the company’s Nanbeige Lab open-sourced the Nanbeige 4.1/3B model and said it ranked first on Hugging Face’s trending list for text generation models for a period in late February. He characterized the company’s approach as a “tail light strategy”—staying close to the frontier rather than trying to lead outright—and said small models offer lower training and inference costs.
On capital returns, Zhao said the board approved a plan starting in 2026 to allocate no less than 50% of the prior year’s adjusted net income to dividends and share repurchases for three years. The company also increased the cap on its share repurchase program, initially approved in August 2025, to $400 million from $250 million. Wang added that the company declared an $80 million dividend in 2025 and had repurchased $50 million of shares year-to-date in 2026.
Management also provided an update on OfferToday in Hong Kong. Zhao said OfferToday ranked number one in Hong Kong by mobile daily active users, and described user penetration as roughly one out of every 50 workers using the app daily. He said next steps include further localization of both the product and the team, with a goal of bringing in more local Hong Kong talent into leadership roles. Beyond Hong Kong, Zhao said the company is seeking more opportunities to work with local institutions overseas but said it was not yet time to provide additional details.
About KANZHUN (NASDAQ:BZ)
Kanzhun Ltd. (NASDAQ: BZ) operates a leading AI-driven online recruitment platform under the brand name Boss Zhipin. The platform leverages algorithmic job matching and instant in-app messaging to connect job seekers and employers, streamlining the hiring process and reducing time-to-fill. By combining machine-learning recommendations with direct recruiter interactions, Kanzhun aims to create a more efficient, personalized recruitment experience compared with traditional job boards.
Beyond its core peer-to-peer marketplace, Kanzhun provides a suite of premium services for corporate clients, including employer branding packages, targeted marketing campaigns and SaaS-based human capital management tools.
