On August 12, 2026, Tony Han, Founder and CEO of WeRide, appeared on CNBC's The China Connection, discussing WeRide's strong Q2 2026 financial performance and shared insights into the company’s technology and partnership strategy.
The following is the full transcript of the interview.
Manisha Tank, CNBC
Tony Han is CEO of WeRide, and he joins us now on the show. So we can dig in a little bit deeper and talk about these latest results. Tony, it's great to see you. I understand that you touched down in California just a couple of days ago. You yourself travel a great deal. But so far as the business goes, I think it's very clear that this is an expensive business to run. What is your sort of top line response on how the shares have performed and how these numbers have gone down in the market?
Tony Han, WeRide
As you mentioned, this is a very expensive business. WeRide as a pre-profitability company, WeRide is currently scaling a very capital intensive technology first business. And we expect this kind of volatility along this path. But if you look at our Q2 financial report, it is an outstanding financial report. Let me just give you some important numbers: 34.2 million in revenue in second quarter 2026, that is an [corrected: 82.2%] increase year-over-year. And if you count the first half year, that is a 73.3% increase. The gross margin remains at the 37.5% in Q2, up by 9.4%. And the first half margin is 36.6%, up by 6% year-over-year. With all these numbers growing, I'm actually not worried a bout this kind of stock share, short-term stock share volatility at all. And if you look at our EBITDA loss, there's also numbers. Like our EBITDA loss has narrowed by 6.5% year over year. As you mentioned, this is an expensive business and we invest a lot in GPU cards, in the token computation. The good thing is that we have two very efficient large language models GENESIS and WITT. They also reduce our costs. So we are very confident about long-term goal and I only care about execution and stick with our long-term vision and long-term goal. So the short-term volatility, I'm not worried about it at all.
Manisha Tank, CNBC
Okay, well I know that you have been at this for many years, it's been a roller coaster ride at times, so you're quite used to the ups and downs. And then, you had a professorship and you are a scientist. But today, as a CEO of WeRide, what is very important to this business, and we know this from your strategy, is those relationships that you are having to develop with some platform partners, the likes of the Ubers and the Grabs, et cetera. There is some concern in the markets about the durability of these relationships. Where are you? And I know that you are certainly working on forging more partnerships. So what can you tell us about that?
Tony Han, WeRide
I think the partnership has been always very, very important in the development of WeRide. We cherish strategic partnership a lot. And if you look at almost 10 years of development time of WeRide, we were founded in Silicon Valley in the year of 2017, April. And we have three very important strategic partners. First is Yutong. We extend our business to Robobus industry. And today, if you rank #1 Robobus company, WeRide is the dominant winner. And we have our driving Robobus all over the world, in Japan, in Europe, Middle East, everywhere. Yutong is our first very important strategic partner. The second is Bosch. You know, we worked with Bosch and you look at our L2++, you just mentioned like you see my live stream for my automated driving experience in rush hour. That's a breakthrough. And I think our technology is comparable to Tesla's FSD. I'm a heavy FSD user. I have more than 5,000 [miles] driving experience. So I think that's also the second very important one. The third one is with Uber. WeRide's business footprint has expanded to over 60 cities across 13 countries. And we cherish this kind of strategic partnership, whether you think it's very 100% symmetric or whether you have keep this duality, I think let my competitors worry about that. WeRide is a unique company and I think Uber cherish our strategic partnership.
Manisha Tank, CNBC
Yeah, okay. I want to just bring in a story that we covered just a moment ago. Ford is bringing back onshore to the US the manufacturer of some of its Lincoln models and this is very much, it seems, a response to tariffs and duties. I think it's important to ask you, you were telling me off air just before we spoke about you do a lot of travel because obviously this is a company that's operating out of China and you're spread across the world, but how is the tariff outlook affecting the business, if at all?
Tony Han, WeRide
First of all, I'm not an expert on tariff. You know, I don't think I can give you a very detailed answer. But to me, one thing I want to add is, WeRide is doing a global business. So we do respect and abide with all the regulator authority. We do believe, the regulator authorities or the local government, they have their considerations. They have more information. They must consider lots of factors to boost their local economy. And as a foreign company doing business in some local area, we want to boost the local community.
By the way, talking about about Lincoln. I like that Lincoln car. Our first autonomous driving is based on Lincoln MKZ. So congratulations to Ford. I think they are bringing some manufacturer business jobs to the US, which is pretty good. I think working laborers will like it. And we will work hard to help to boost the global economy, and we are working on that.
Manisha Tank, CNBC
Okay, Tony, very, very brief answer to a very brief question. I'm going to admit, I'm still not convinced I could get into a self-driving vehicle and feel fully confident. What would you say to a customer like me?
Tony Han, WeRide
Oh, come to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Madrid, or even San Francisco, take an autonomous driving car. Of course, I will strongly suggest you take a WeRide autonomous driving car. You can sleep inside the car. And we know for sure they are much more cautious and careful than an average human driver. That's my dream, that's my profession, that's my research. I'm very confident on that.
Manisha Tank, CNBC
Tony, thank you so much. Thank you so much for sparing the time. It was good to see you. That was Tony Han, CEO of WeRide.