Produced by | Frontline of Entrepreneurship

Art Editor | Xing Jing

Reviewed by | Song Wen

After 11 years in operation, Didi Land, a digital and intelligent service provider for new energy logistics vehicles, has submitted a less-than-perfect listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

With 224,500 new energy logistics vehicles and a business footprint covering over 300 prefecture-level administrative regions nationwide, the company showcases its outstanding industry scale and market coverage. However, the RMB 12.1 billion in interest-bearing borrowings and over RMB 600 million in net losses starkly reveal the capital consumption behind this scale.

The depreciation, insurance, maintenance, and financing costs associated with vehicle purchases continue to test the unit returns and cash flow resilience of its business model.

From its early days of addressing the challenges of "vehicle purchase and management" in urban distribution by purchasing new energy logistics vehicles and leasing them to logistics companies and drivers, to extending its business from "vehicle ownership and rent collection" to "Fleet Management as a Service" (FMaaS)—providing services such as maintenance, charging and battery swapping, insurance, dispatch, risk control, and used vehicle disposal throughout the vehicle lifecycle—Didi Land's development logic is straightforward: shifting towards higher-margin management services.

However, as of the end of 2025, 51% of the vehicles under Didi Land's management were still company-owned. This means that over half of its fleet size is still based on the company bearing the purchase, depreciation, and financing costs.

For Didi Land, which is striving for a Hong Kong stock listing, the issue is no longer just about continuing to expand its fleet but proving that scale growth can gradually be achieved without continuous vehicle purchases and borrowing, enabling more efficient profitability.

1. Behind 220,000 Vehicles: Asset Scale or Network Capability?

The foundation of Didi Land's success stems from a large-scale era dividend.

Around 2015, new energy logistics vehicles were just entering large-scale application. For logistics companies and drivers, purchasing vehicles meant high upfront costs, uncertain residual values, and immature battery and maintenance systems. For urban distribution companies, vehicle dispatch, insurance, energy replenishment, maintenance, and driver management were all fragmented.

Didi Land's founder, Zhang Haiying, saw the business opportunity in this.

She had previously worked in planning and finance at the Shenzhen Municipal Science and Technology Authority before entering the energy and power battery industry, serving as General Manager of Shenzhen Huipu Energy Technology and General Manager of the Special Battery Business Unit at Phylion Battery.

This background gave Zhang Haiying a deep understanding of the new energy industry chain and its key points.

She chose to procure vehicles herself and lease them to logistics companies and drivers, lowering the barrier to entry for new energy logistics transportation.

The growth logic at this stage was straightforward: continuously buying, deploying, and collecting rent from vehicles. Essentially, it was a new energy logistics vehicle asset operator reliant on capital investment for expansion—the larger the fleet, the larger the revenue base, but with increasing capital occupation, depreciation, and financing pressures.

As the fleet and customer network expanded, Didi Land accumulated operational data, maintenance networks, insurance and energy replenishment resources, and capabilities for managing the entire vehicle lifecycle.

Thus, it began to externalize these capabilities originally serving its own vehicles, forming the so-called "Fleet Management as a Service"—not only leasing its own vehicles but also attempting to manage others' vehicles and generating service revenue from maintenance, insurance, charging and battery swapping, dispatch, risk control, and used vehicle disposal.

A decade later, this network has grown significantly.

As of the end of 2025, the company managed 224,500 new energy logistics vehicles. Among them, 114,500 were company-owned (51.0%), 32,200 were entrusted for management (14.4%), and 77,900 used only Didi Land-related services (34.7%).

However, from a revenue structure perspective, signs of Didi Land's asset-light transformation have emerged.

In 2025, the company's management service revenue was RMB 1.904 billion, accounting for 46.0% of total revenue, with a gross margin of 28.3%; leasing revenue was RMB 1.894 billion, accounting for 45.8%, with a gross margin of 16.3%; vehicle sales revenue was RMB 340 million, accounting for 8.2%, with a gross margin of only 7.1%.

For the first time, management service revenue slightly exceeded leasing revenue, with a gross margin 12 percentage points higher. This is the most critical data in Didi Land's asset-light narrative: if the company can serve more vehicles not owned by itself, it has the opportunity to continue expanding revenue while reducing investment in new vehicle purchases.

The prospectus shows that as of the end of 2025, the company's business covered 333 prefecture-level administrative regions, with 419 fulfillment centers, 2,827 maintenance centers, and connections to approximately 2.8 million third-party charging and battery-swapping facilities.

However, this national network is not entirely self-operated by Didi Land. Among the 419 fulfillment centers, 70 are self-operated, while the remaining 349 are operated by partners; among the 2,827 maintenance centers, only 20 are self-operated, with the other 2,807 from partner networks. By leveraging partners, Didi Land can rapidly expand its coverage with relatively low fixed investments, which is the foundation of the platform model.

The trade-off is that the company must address issues such as inconsistent service quality, varying response times, and profit distribution.

When most offline services are completed by partners, the larger the network scale, the higher the difficulty of standardized management.

Therefore, to determine whether this network truly constitutes a barrier, one must not only look at the number of outlets and vehicles but also observe vehicle utilization rates, customer retention rates, downtime due to failures, per-vehicle service revenue, and whether service quality remains consistent across different regions.

Currently, these indicators' long-term changes have not been fully disclosed in the listing application documents.

Didi Land's scale barrier ultimately lies not in "managing the most vehicles" but in whether it can enable more vehicle asset owners, logistics companies, and service providers to continuously connect to the same operational network.

Today, its transformation challenge is whether it can convert the network and operational capabilities accumulated during the asset-heavy stage into lighter, more efficient, and less vehicle-purchase-financing-dependent platform revenue.

2. From Telematics to L4: How Technology Translates into Operational Efficiency

In fact, despite being labeled as digital and intelligent, Didi Land has not chosen to directly position itself as a company independently developing a complete autonomous driving system.

In other words, its fleet's asset-heavy operational model makes direct technological upgrades and transformations difficult. Instead, collecting vehicle location, battery status, energy consumption, driving behavior, and business scenario data through onboard T-Boxes and sensors, and then connecting vehicle users, asset owners, drivers, and service providers through systems like "Vehicle Cloud," "Vehicle Manager," "Asset Management Chain," and "Xiaochao Vehicle Repair," is now the optimal solution for overall fleet upgrades.

The commercial logic of this technological route is not complex. The smooth operation duration of a logistics vehicle per day, one fewer failure, and reduced empty driving and energy consumption all affect the fulfillment costs of leasing customers and the asset owner's judgment of vehicle residual value and default risk.

Therefore, for a fleet serving as a means of production, efficiency and cost are the core of so-called digital and intelligent upgrades and definitions.

As of the end of 2025, Didi Land had established IoT protocol connections with 28 OEMs, with approximately 199,000 vehicles connected to the IoT system, covering 120 models; the company had also jointly defined or developed 89 models with 19 OEMs, involving 26 brands, with related vehicles accounting for 75.3% of its managed fleet.

However, "joint development" does not equate to having complete vehicle R&D capabilities, and data scale does not automatically translate into technological barriers. Whether the data is complete, whether cross-brand protocols can be unified, and whether the cost reductions brought by algorithms are quantifiable determine the technology's true value to customers.

In 2026, Didi Land also launched the autonomous logistics vehicle TC50. According to the prospectus, as of the last practicable date, May 20, 2026, a total of 474 L4 driverless logistics vehicles were in concept verification pilots across multiple logistics scenarios.

Public information shows that Didi Land's whole vehicle and intelligent driving capabilities for its driverless vehicle business mainly rely on third parties such as Neolix, Changan Kuayue, and CATL, reflecting its supply chain collaboration capabilities.

However, to date, its business results are still mainly reflected in vehicle deployment, project delivery, and operational estimates, with no revenue and cash flow data disclosed to prove scalable profitability. The pilot operational data of 474 vehicles, relative to its over 220,000 vehicle operational scale, clearly has not yet formed an impact comparable to its main business scale.

Another noteworthy signal is R&D investment.

From 2023 to 2025, Didi Land's R&D expenses decreased from RMB 60.86 million to RMB 50.94 million, with the proportion of revenue decreasing from 2.6% to 1.2%.

This reduction in R&D expense ratio cannot be entirely dismissed for a company like Didi Land that emphasizes digital operations. Especially when combined with the increases in revenue and gross margin during the reporting period, it instead suggests that the scale effect of digital and intelligent capabilities is gradually emerging based on scale operations.

However, this also requires Didi Land to prove that the decline in the expense ratio stems from improved operational efficiency rather than reduced technology investment. For a company attempting to reshape its valuation logic with "Fleet Management as a Service," whether R&D investment can continuously translate into higher service revenue and per-vehicle profit remains key to judging the success of its asset-light transformation.

3. Asset-Light Transformation: Can It Outpace Depreciation and Financing Costs?

Zhang Haiying has gradually shifted Didi Land's positioning from a new energy logistics vehicle lessor to an industrial "connector."

In her view, (Didi Land) should not be a "lone warrior" but connect OEMs, aftermarket service networks, data platforms, financial institutions, and logistics customers to bridge the "islands" in the industry chain. Only by organizing vehicle, energy replenishment, maintenance, data, risk control, and residual value management into a replicable service system can logistics vehicles transform from high-investment cost items into efficiency assets that sustainably generate returns.

This is also the most critical layer of logic in its IPO narrative: if management services can serve more third-party vehicles and expand revenue without significantly increasing vehicle purchases, the company has the opportunity to reduce its high dependence on asset scale and external financing.

However, the transformation is not yet complete—company-owned vehicles still account for a large proportion of the managed fleet, with vehicle purchases, depreciation, and financing remaining the underlying costs of the company's expansion.

Financing costs are precisely a hard constraint to test the viability of this asset-light transformation.

As of the end of March 2026, Didi Land had approximately RMB 12.101 billion in interest-bearing bank and other borrowings. Its business model inherently creates a mismatch between capital recovery and asset investment: vehicle purchases require upfront investment with a long duration, while rents and service fees are typically recovered monthly.

Once financing conditions tighten, interest rates rise, or vehicle utilization rates and cash recovery rhythms fall below expectations, liquidity pressures can quickly amplify.

In 2025, the company's net cash inflow from operating activities was RMB 1.462 billion, indicating that daily operations have a certain cash recovery capability. However, the positive operating cash flow mainly reflects that the existing fleet can still generate cash, not that the company has developed self-sustaining expansion capabilities.

During the same period, the net cash outflow from investing activities was RMB 4.903 billion, with cash and cash equivalents at the end of the year around RMB 200 million. For a company still needing continuous vehicle purchases and service network construction, the gap between operating and investing cash flows still relies on external financing to fill.

What truly expands the company's operational boundaries is asset management capability. Whether asset owners are willing to entrust their vehicles to the platform for management, whether the partner service network can maintain unified standards, and whether driverless vehicles can transition from pilot verification to revenue-generating operations are all key to Didi Land's future business growth.

If successfully listed, the Hong Kong stock IPO can provide Didi Land with funds for R&D, network construction, and fleet operations, but financing alone is not a commercial closed loop . In the new energy logistics industry, where prices fluctuate rapidly, battery degradation affects residual value, and insurance costs are high, if new revenue still mainly relies on the company's continuous vehicle purchases, the larger the fleet size, the greater the capital demand may become.

The 224,500 managed vehicles provide a scale foundation, the approximately RMB 12.1 billion in interest-bearing borrowings are a real constraint, and the 46% management service revenue share is an initial signal of transformation.

What will ultimately determine Didi Land's true value is not how much more its fleet size can grow but whether each additional managed vehicle can occupy less capital and contribute more sustainable profit.

*Note: The featured image and unsigned images in the article are from Didi Land's official WeChat public account.