Tuya 3Q 2025 Earnings Call - Resilient Growth Amid AI Integration and Global Uncertainty

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to Tuya’s third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be informed that today’s conference is being recorded. I’ll now turn the call over to your first speaker today, Ms. Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager of Tuya. Please go ahead.

Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager, Tuya: Thank you, Regina. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tuya’s third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining us today are founder and CEO of Tuya, Mr. Gerry Wang, and our co-founder and CFO, Mr. Alex Yang. The third quarter 2025 financial results and website of today’s conference call are available on our IR website at irtuya.com, and the replay will be posted shortly after our conclude. Before we continue, please notice that our safe harbor statement in the earnings press release applies to today’s call. As we may make forward-looking statements with that, let me now turn the call over to our founder and CEO, Mr. Gerry Wang. Gerry will deliver his remark in Chinese, which will be followed by a corresponding English translation. Gerry, please.

Gerry Wang, Founder and CEO, Tuya: 大家好，感谢大家参加Tuya 2025年第三季度业绩电话会。

Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager, Tuya: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining Tuya’s earnings call for the third quarter of 2025.

Gerry Wang, Founder and CEO, Tuya: 今年三季度，外部环境仍然延续了年初以来的波动特征。全球消费电子行业整体处于恢复的节奏不均，客户需求更加谨慎的阶段。同时，去年同期的技术较高，同对同比的增速形成一定的压力。在这样的背景下，本季度总收入达到约8,250万美元，连续第九个季度保持同比增长，彰显了公司业务模式的抗风险能力。毛利率继续保持在48%以上，体现了公司业务结构的韧性，以及产品组合和经营效率在过去几个季度的持续改善的成果。

Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager, Tuya: In the third quarter, the external environment remains volatile, continuing the trends seen since the beginning of the year. The global consumer electronics industry experienced an uneven recovery, with customer demand becoming more conscious in the ongoing macro uncertainties. In addition, the high base from the same period last year created added pressure on year-over-year growth. Against the backdrop, our total revenue for the quarter reached approximately $82.5 million, marking our ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and underscoring the strength of Tuya’s business model. Gross margin remained above 48%. This result further reflects the resilience of our business structure and the steady improvements we have made in product mix and operating efficiency over recent quarters.

Gerry Wang, Founder and CEO, Tuya: 净利润方面，受益于毛利率的结构改善、费用效率提升及规模杠杆的持续释放，让GAAP的净利润率为24.4%。GAAP的净利润率为18.2%，其中GAAP的净利润率同比提升超过23.6个百分点。整体来看，我们在保证业务发展的战略投入的前提下，实现了费用结构的持续优化，收入和毛利的增量正在更加高效地转化为经营利润。

Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager, Tuya: In terms of profitability, supported by an improved gross margin profile, greater expense efficiency, and sustained scale leverage, our non-GAAP net margin reached 24.4%, while GAAP net margin was 18.2%. Notably, GAAP net margin expanded by more than 23.6 percentage points year-over-year. Overall, while maintaining key investments in business development, we have continued to optimize our expense structure, enabling incremental revenue and gross profits to translate more effectively in operating profits.

Gerry Wang, Founder and CEO, Tuya: it at the CES show in the United States in just over a month.

Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager, Tuya: At the same time, on the strategic execution front, we continue to fully embrace AI and deepen its integrations across our ecosystem. As of the end of Q3, smart devices equipped with AI capabilities account for 93.99% of total shipments, an increase from the previous quarter, demonstrating that AI is swiftly becoming the default configuration for smart devices. On the user side, AI adoption is also scaling quickly. AI has clear moves beyond single category features like AI Wise to a broader spectrum of product categories. Tuya’s AI Agent service now handles 155 million daily interactions for global users, spanning diverse scenarios such as AI Note, AI Translate, AI Health, AI Energy, AI Pet Care, AI Trendy Play, AI Gaming, AI Secure Guard, and AI Robotics. AI continues to penetrate the broader range of daily devices and life scenarios, laying the foundation for large-scale product innovation and long-term valuation creation.

During the quarter, we also began global beta testing of our new AI Agent App with Tuya ecosystem users. Aligned with our Smart Life, Smart Living mission, we are currently developing a universal AI life assistant for global users, which is scheduled for official release at the CES show in the United States in just over a month.

Gerry Wang, Founder and CEO, Tuya: 接下来请我们的CFO为大家带来更多的财务表现和经营进展。

Regina Wang, Investor Relations Senior Manager, Tuya: Now, let me turn the call over to our Co-founder and CFO, Alex Yang, who will share more details about our financial performance and business progress.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: Hello everyone, this is Alex. I will now provide more details on my third-party results. Please note that all the figures are in US dollar-based, and all the comparisons are year-over-year based. We delivered a total revenue of approximately $82.5 million in the third quarter, representing a 1.1% year-over-year increase. Despite a strong comparison base last year and continued caution in external demand, we achieved our ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, underscoring our resilience and scalability in our business. With the total revenue, our PaaS business delivered strong results, generating $59.2 million, a 2.4% year-over-year increase, driven prevalently by our strategic focus on the customer demand and the product optimization. In Q3, the number of PaaS premium customers reached 280, further strengthening our core customer base.

In addition, fueled by growth in the cloud software products revenue, the SaaS and others business showed consistent expansion, generating $11.5 million this quarter, a 15.4% increase year-over-year. This momentum was driven by continued rise in in-store devices and a high proportion of recurring revenues. Revenue from smart solutions reached $11.8 million during this quarter. We strategically scaled by lower efficiency products and prioritized scalable high-value solutions such as AI energy management solutions and spatial AI solutions to further improve overall growth margin and cash recovery efficiency. For a regional perspective, in the China market, AI Toy continued to show healthy growth in the third quarter. More than 50 customers, including brands, channel partners, and solution providers, launched products powered by Tuya.

Key product capabilities also continued to advance, such as multimodal interactions, long-term memory, and emotional expressions, with several connectivity versions coming soon as well. These improvements further strengthened the foundation of expanding into new product categories and regional markets. In the European market, demand from AI-powered solutions such as AI cloud storage and AI energy saving solutions continued to rise. At the same time, we added several new industrial clients in the energy and HVAC sectors during this quarter. In Asia-Pacific, deployment of CUBE, the privatized platforms for several Southeast Asian telecom operators, is scaling rapidly, with additional cities entering the delivery phase. The Singapore HDB housing deployment boards of Singapore projects also progressed into implementation, with the first batch of the hardware and software solutions delivered and in stores in this quarter. In North America, AI-enabled products such as smart bird feeders continue to record healthy growth.

The strong adoption validates the commercial potential of niche scenarios that integrate emotional values, frequent content interactions, and long-term subscription models, and underscores the structural growth opportunities for AI products in mature consumer markets. In summary, despite pressure in the global consumer environment, Tuya leveraged its diversified product portfolios and strong software capabilities to achieve structural growth. Those trends further strengthen our resilience against external macro volatilities and uncertainties. Moving to gross margin, our branded gross margin for Q3 in 2025 was 48.3%. Total gross profit reached approximately $39.8 million, representing a 6.1% year-over-year increase. This growth was primarily driven by concurrent improvements in both our revenue mix and cost structure. By segments, the PaaS gross margin rose to 48.8%, continuing the upward trend from the second quarter of 2025. SaaS and others maintain a strong gross margin of 70.8%, remaining above the 70% level.

Smart solutions posted a gross margin of 23.8%, slightly higher than last year’s 23.5%. Overall, our Q3 performance aligned with our expectations and continued to reinforce the profitability foundation at this stage. On the expense side, we continue to maintain prudent and disciplined financial management. Even as both our scale and profitability expanded, total operating expenses declined to $36 million, down 34.1% year-over-year. GAAP operating margins improved significantly to 4.6%, and GAAP net margins increased 23.6 percentage points year-over-year to 18.2%. While ensuring that R&D investment in key AI initiatives and platform development remained intact, we continued to exercise strategic cost control to balance growth quantity and profitability. On the cash flow front, operating net cash flow continued to grow steadily this quarter, reaching $30 million, a 25.7% increase year-over-year. Our cash collection cycles remained stable, and cash flow quantity materially improved.

At the end of Q3, our net cash balance stayed above $1 billion, giving us ample flexibility to balance shareholders’ returns, manage external uncertainties, and support long-term strategic investment. Next, I’d like to briefly highlight some recent progress in our AI capabilities and developers’ ecosystem, which serves as a crucial foundation for Tuya long-term growth. At the end of Q3, Tuya’s platform had 1.62 million registered developers, representing a 23% year-over-year increase. AI adoptions across smart devices also continued to accelerate. Commercial AI developers have collectively created more than 12,000 AI agents on the Tuya platform, covering a broad range of smart product categories, including toys, pet products, electronics, home appliances, IP cameras, and wearables. Meanwhile, we continue to deepen and strengthen our AI developer ecosystem, anchored by Tuya OS, Tuya Open, and the T-Series AI Developer Board.

On the open-source front, Tuya Open has seen steady growth in both documentation and code engagement. Since the beginning of this year, the GitHub repository star count has increased by about 80%. To date, over 2.3 million lines of code have been contributed to open-source projects. Beyond the rise in Tuya developer participation, the overall quantity of the ecosystem is also improving significantly. In summary, despite the prevailing external uncertainties, we still demonstrate strong resilience and operational agility, achieving solid financial growth and impressive profitability, which is steadily advancing the AI plus IoT developer ecosystem across our core business segments. Thank you all, operators. We can begin the Q&A session right now.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question now, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from the line of Yang Liu from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question, Yang.

Yang Liu, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Thanks for the opportunity. I have one question regarding the business outlook. With more and more trade deals settling down in the international trade market, what is the business outlook going into fourth quarter this year, which is a peak season? Also, what is your early look for customers’ demand going into 2026? Thanks a lot.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: Thanks, Liu. I’d like to share three points. The first one is that this year, we still see that will be the kind of the soft demand on the growth side. Because of the uncertainties on the global macroeconomic situations at this year, this year, the Q4, we’ll see that the regular promotion season will be kind of the soft end versus the last year. We will keep closing on to review that while we already have the stable kind of the stable turns across multiple countries, that’s whether the demand will be coming to return steadily on December. That will be the short term.

For 2026, what we see here is that because, like Jerry shared earlier before, all those kind of AI features and smart home portfolios become more and more inevitable trend for the entire sector, which means that more and more consumers are really starting to familiar with this type of products. They really become the beginning users of this type of things. All the major brands and the players, manufacturers in industries are really starting to enter these sectors and bring that into their growth factors. Those type of trend will never stop. For 2026, we’ll have a very positive outlook about the growth, keep growing the entire business sectors.

The third one I’d like to share is that by reviewing all the technology improvements in the past decade, we review AI will be one of the boosters that bring the IoT experience into the next level. In the past, the smart home experience, it’s majorly focused on the connectivities, some automation, and control. While coming on with the AI capabilities, the user experience will come into a next level to more friendly, more easy to use, and more smart. That is why we decided to provide a new AI assistant for life, which connects all the home scenarios and to ordinary people and have more people be able to enjoy the smart devices experience. That will lower another bar for the end-to-end user. Combine that three together, the short times, we’ll see that 2025, there’s still some uncertainty and pressure on that.

It has become more and more inevitable and become a default option for major brands and players there. We are trying to bring the bar lower for more users who have not become smart device users as well. I think the overall outlook is very positive in the long term and constantly in the short term. Thank you.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you.

Yang Liu, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Hey, thank you.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Timothy Zhao from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, Timothy.

Timothy Zhao, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. Good morning, Management. Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the solid results. I have two questions here. One is regarding the AI home agent that you just mentioned. Just wondering if you can share more color on the detailed specs and the use case of this AI agent that you are going to officially release at CES next month, and how do you think about the impact on the overall business of Tuya with this new product. Secondly, it’s about the AI overall impact on your PaaS and PaaS smart solution business. Just wondering, for example, for the segment growth this quarter, will you please break down in terms of by volume and by pricing? Has AI brought any positive impact on the overall pricing of your product and services, and also on the impact on the gross book margin? Thank you.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: Okay. Thank you, Timothy. The first one is that we will define this as an AI assistant. It is bigger than an agent. We think that if you review the life scenarios, even only for home, you find that you have multiple things you want someone to help you with. This is an AI assistant that comes with multiple agents that can help you to do almost everything you need in a home. That is the first one. That is how we designed this new assistant. The key value for that part, we believe in two things. The first one is that while coming on with the adoptions of the Gemini and app, including the GPT, including the Chen Wang, etc., you find that the AI can help you to do a lot of things, a lot of tasks on the software side.

There is no assistant focused on home. That is what you need for your home and how you want taking care of the home. For us, we design the different type of agents and capabilities focused on those scenarios people want to interact and people want to have a better life quality or easier life experience in home. That is the first one. The second one is that the key differentiation of this assistant among any generic assistant is that this assistant will naturally be able to interact with the physical scenarios through the hundreds of millions of the powered by Tuya devices. Which means that we are trying to bring kind of the science fiction into come true. Like the Jarvis in Iron Man’s house, every people appreciate that. Every people, I mean, admire that. There is no that type of Jarvis yet.

We want to create that type of experience for the global people. That is how we define the key features and value for the user side. I think what it means for the ordinary users, I think the key part is that right now we find the smart devices are still kind of complicated. It becomes way more easier than 10 years before, but still kind of complicated to, I mean, to learn to use, to interact with by many non-users, I mean, for those beginners. Those bars are still there. Coming on with through the assistant, you do not have to learn to use the app anymore. You do not even need—you just need to know how to speak, right? Like how you can tell your housekeeper to do something, how to tell a servant to do something.

It’s similar, like the assistant will be able to take the orders and to do all those kind of complicated operations for you. We believe that will lower the bar significantly for the new users for home. Right now we will see that while the penetration of even smart home is still in a low, no digits, and by lowering the entry bar, we’ll be able to open more doors for those new users while they find that the smart devices will be accessible for them to use. That’s for the AI assistant part. The second part, second question is for the AI. First one is that this year we’re considered as the beginning year of the AI device.

We’re very happy to see that finally our education to the market, to the developers, to the customers are already starting to offer some feedback. Like the numbers we shared before, by the end of Q3, over 93% of the products we shipped this year already been turned on some AI capability. Which means that my customers, my developers are already very active to try whatever AI features or capabilities they can provide through their devices, even their existing devices. That’s the first one. We already have a lot of innovative developers trying to try the ideas and try to educate end users and test end users’ feedback. We believe that will be a very, very typical starting point for any new technology adoption. We already have that kind of scale test field taking places.

The second one is that we still provide the AI seamlessly through our three business models. Including the PaaS, including the solution, including the SaaS, right now we have different type of AI offering in different business models as well. Which means that for my customer side, on the procurement perspective, they do not have to learn how they will be able to purchase something from Tuya differently. It is a similar like offering, but comes with different features. And maybe it comes with a different pricing, maybe not. For that part, we try to open, have almost all my customers defaultly be able to try AI, try AI, try bring AI into their existing products and solutions. Through that seamless integrations into my existing business models, we believe that will help you in two things.

The first one is that coming on with a new feature set, any new feature set will bring new demands. That will be able to speed up the penetration and adoption of the entire market. We’re looking forward to have the AI have that coming as a booster. The second one is that with some really new feature set, we will price that, and that will improve our GPM as well. We’re looking forward to have the GPM impact coming very soon because it’s still in the beginning. We try to promote the market. We try to incubate in the market in the beginning, but not running very aggressively on the profitability side on that type of niche sector. That’s the overall outlook, Timothy.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: That’s very clear. Thank you, Management.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ming Ran Li from CICC. Please go ahead, Ming Ran.

Ming Ran Li, Analyst, CICC: Thanks, Management, for taking my questions. Congrats on your solid results and two questions from my side. First is that following adjustment to freaking global tariff policy, could Management share more color on downstream or the recovery progress in your overseas markets, especially North America? My second point is that could Management share the latest progress on the AI technology, particularly in terms of commercialization? Thanks.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: Yeah. The first one is that a couple of weeks ago we get a temporary one-year terms between China and US, right? Which means that all the merchants, importers, right now they have stable cost levels at a specific timing. That will be a good thing. At least we get some certainty. The promotion for this year will be pretty locked in. Those kind of new terms will be able to impact for next year’s demand. We’re looking forward to have that to be a positive impact. Right now on the customers and importer side, they still kind of review, okay, what will be the tune for next year’s? They like to review what will be the turns out sell-throughs for this promotion season starting from this week, right? We’ll have the Black Friday this week.

We’re looking forward to have more feedbacks on December, like I described. While people already know that what cost they’re going to get for next year, over a year, and what will be the demand looks like, and then how they like to set the tunes for the new projects and the new sell-in reordering. That’s the first one. Still under review. The second one is for the AI. I think that I already answered part of that to Timothy earlier for the earlier questions. The first one is that right now we’re offering AI across almost all my categories. We have some generic AI capabilities that can work on anything. We also have some differentiated vertical AI capability for a specific type of the products.

All those kind of offerings are seamlessly integrated into my existing three services, the PaaS, the solution, and the SaaS. That’s the first one. In this year, on the new device side, including the PaaS and solutions, we’re really happy to see some breakthroughs into some new sectors like the toys. We shared that earlier last quarter as well. This will be a totally new vertical category coming up with a large total addressable market size that we didn’t touch before. The IoT never got to be able to enter that sector, but coming on with AI, right now we’ll open the door. In this year only, we’re running three quarters only. Many of the key players in the industry, starting from China in the toy industry, are already starting to cooperate with us.

In Q3, we’re really helping the customer to launch a lot of the use cases to test the demand. It turns out that the end users love it. I’ll say that trial sales for many of the customers works out. We’re looking forward to continuously improving the experience. Also, the customer is starting to reorder and to run a new type of promotion across all its sales channels to scale it. That’s what we see, that the AI opened new doors. That’s the second one. The third one is that not only upgrades, kind of upgrades on my existing categories and open new categories. The third one we tried to open is the 2C experience.

We’re looking forward to using the new AI Assistant to open all the new home users’ doors, especially for those ones who still do not have any smart devices. They still consider that type of devices will be kind of complicated for them. We’re using an assistant to help them out. That’s it.

Ming Ran Li, Analyst, CICC: Okay. Thank you. Very clear.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Ma from Jefferies. Please go ahead, Matt.

Matt Ma, Analyst, Jefferies: Hello. Good morning, Management. Thank you for taking my question. I just have one question regarding smart solutions. The smart solution revenue declined by around 14% in the third quarter. Just wondering what is the reason behind it? Could Management provide any growth outlooks for the segment in 2026? Also, any thoughts on product category expansion going forward? Thank you.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: Yeah. I think that the first one is that in 2026, we’re looking for have a better year versus 2025 because we should have less turbulence for the marketing economy side on the global basis. Like I described, the customers right now in many vertical sectors, the customers already think that the AI features or AIoT features will become more and more default for them. Like some categories that every single new project they’ve been doing, they have to come along with the AIoT. We become to take a larger portion in their pie. That’s the first one. We will see that the penetration will grow. I mean, for the overall industries, we continue to grow steadily no matter what. It’s only a matter of speed which year will be the tipping point. That’s the first one.

In 2026, and we keep closing eye. We think that we can share more colors around the second half of December while the customers have more feedback on the end demand side. While they’re starting to set the tunes for 2026 because they don’t like to run in a very conservative operation base for a long time. They’re already running for 2025. I think that’s for the first one. The second one, yeah, it’s for AI.

Matt Ma, Analyst, Jefferies: Yeah. The second one is also regarding smart solutions. Just want to understand what is our thoughts on product category expansion for smart solutions going forward. Thank you.

Alex Yang, Co-founder and CFO, Tuya: Right. I missed one part. I think that for smart solutions, we’re very carefully looking for the expansion to new categories because we’re already learning that business model for over two years. I think that for smart solutions, we’re still kind of focused on some strategically highly valued categories. For those ones that the AI can bring a total difference, like it brings some innovative idea to come true, without the AI it never exists. Also, to some categories that we’re really helping customers to do a differentiation to help them out. Usually the solutions is the one we design for the customers for their flagship model. That’s what we put out.

Right now the solutions, the major categories will be the video and related multimodal capabilities, the control panels, that’s a super comprehensive interactions on the touch panel side, and including the gateways focused on specific scenarios and energy. I think that for the middle term that we continue to put focus and scale those kind of verticals unless we see some opportunities with scalabilities in some new vertical categories.

Matt Ma, Analyst, Jefferies: Okay. Thank you, Alex.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I’ll now hand the conference back to the management team for closing remarks.

Ming Ran Li, Analyst, CICC: Thank you, Aubrey, and thank you all for participating on today’s call and for your support. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to our IR team. We look forward to speaking with you at our upcoming investor event. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day.

Aubrey, Conference Operator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.