On March 19, 2025, $Kingsoft Cloud (KC.US)$ released the Earnings Reports for the fourth quarter of 2024. Guided by a high-quality sustainable development strategy, the company achieved a dual leap in revenue scale and profitability during the quarter, with adjusted Operation profit turning positive for the first time. As of this report, Kingsoft Cloud's stock rose over 5%.

The Earnings Reports show that Kingsoft Cloud's Q4 revenue reached 2.23 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29.6%, surpassing the average growth rate in the Industry; among them, public cloud revenue reached 1.41 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 34.0%, and industry cloud revenue reached 0.82 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.7%, achieving dual-wheel drive and balanced development. In this quarter, the company continued to lead the transformation with AI, with AI billing revenue reaching 0.474 billion yuan, a nearly 500% year-on-year increase, and the proportion of public cloud revenue rose to 34%.

During the quarter, the company's profitability level accelerated, achieving both "revenue growth" and "profit growth". The adjusted gross profit reached a record high of 0.43 billion yuan; the adjusted gross margin reached 19.2%; the adjusted EBITDA rate reached a new high of 16.1%, a year-on-year increase of 17.7 percentage points and a quarter-on-quarter increase of 6.3 percentage points; the adjusted Operation profit turned positive for the first time, with an adjusted Operation profit margin of 1.1%, an increase of 12.0 percentage points compared to the same period last year.

In 2024, Kingsoft Cloud will deeply combine the solid promotion of the AI strategy with the resilient development goals of its core Business, and the good performance reflects that the company has made breakthrough progress. Currently, the company has achieved the adaptation of DeepSeek for use in both public cloud and industry cloud scenarios. In the new technological development cycle, the company will continue to capture new growth opportunities based on its advantageous position.

Technological innovation is resonating; AI revenue continues to rise.

The development of AI brings transformative opportunities. Kingsoft Cloud constructs an AI capability system around basic cloud, intelligent computing network, and intelligent computing platform to accumulate technology for the implementation of large models. As the sole strategic cloud platform in the ecosystem, the company not only provides cloud computing services for ecological enterprises but also achieves new breakthroughs in general AI and autonomous driving.

In terms of basic cloud, various cloud servers have been successively released to meet the elastic computing needs of customers. Among them, the ninth-generation performance-guaranteed X9 cloud server officially started the invitation for testing this quarter, with a full-core frequency reaching 3.8GHz, and supporting ESSD rapid cloud disks across the series; for intelligent computing scenarios, the company has constructed a full-category high-performance file storage product matrix suitable for AI training, autonomous driving, video rendering, and other high-performance computing scenarios.

At the platform level, the Kingsoft Cloud Star Streaming Training platform has resource pool management and training task management capabilities. On one hand, it provides RoCE network observability and GPU fault self-recovery capabilities. On the other hand, it supports running mainstream framework distributed training with task observability and fault tolerance capabilities. In addition, the platform also offers an independent training and recommendation integrated module, supporting the entire process of model development, training, and inference.

To solve the "last mile" problem of large model implementation, Kingsoft Cloud's Han Hai platform has released the App Builder product, which has continuously delivered to multiple key projects including Peking's government cloud. According to the "2024 China MaaS Market Development Research Report" and the "2024 H1 China Generative AI Enterprise Application Report" released by CCID, the Kingsoft Cloud Han Hai MaaS platform and Kingsoft Cloud Qingzhou Zhwen application both made it to the Leaders quadrant.

In response to the digital intelligence upgrade of government and enterprises, Kingsoft Cloud's Galaxy platform V3.2.0 has achieved comprehensive and significant enhancements from multiple dimensions including cost, performance, security, and usability. The upgraded Galaxy platform fully embraces the cloud-native ecosystem, with substantial upgrades completed for the cloud platform foundation and over 30 core components, supporting starting from 5+N nodes, and reducing costs by up to 50% under IaaS+PaaS scenarios. With the comprehensive strength of the Galaxy platform, Kingsoft Cloud has been awarded the highest level 1 certification in ITSS operational service capability maturity.

Industry benchmarks are taking root and blooming, partnering with customers to expand business boundaries.

The rapid development of large models is profoundly driving the digital transformation of vertical industries such as public services and medical. Kingsoft Cloud collaborates with clients through technological integration and scenario innovation to jointly expand business boundaries and create new engines for growth.

Focusing on integrated cloud intelligence, Kingsoft Cloud, based in Peking, Wuhan, and Zhuhai, has achieved fruitful results in the government cloud and state-owned enterprise cloud markets. This quarter, the company reached a strategic cooperation with the Zhuhai Municipal Government, and both parties will conduct in-depth cooperation around government AIGC intelligent large models, government AI office applications, and digital innovation capabilities in the government cloud. They completed the deep trust investment data assetization project, and based on this project, will continue to explore deep cooperation in CNI Data Factor Index, large models, and other fields. The company won the bid for the Wuhan Optics Valley cloud project, and both parties will form a joint operation team to achieve unified planning, construction, and management of the "Digital Optics Valley". The Yunnan state-owned enterprise cloud, officially launched in the second quarter, has won the “Pioneering Plan 2024” typical case of cloud building and usage from the China Electronic Technology Standardization Institute.

Benefiting from a deep industry accumulation and solid self-research capabilities, the company has successfully launched benchmark projects in the digital health field. In Central China, the company completed the phased acceptance of the system construction for the Yichang Central People's Hospital project, and the Kingsoft Cloud KDX data platform has gone online; successfully signed the phase three project of the Xiantao Medical Community, which will carry out business transformation based on the Kingsoft Cloud's own KDX platform; meanwhile, the phase one of the Chibi Medical Community constructed by the company has completed overall acceptance and successfully signed the phase two project. In South China, the project for the Zhuhai High-tech Zone People's Hospital that the company serves has been delivered and launched; in East and Southwest China, the Jiangsu Imaging Cloud and Chongqing Imaging Cloud are continuously expanding; in Northeast China, the Kingsoft Cloud KDX data platform product was successfully delivered and accepted at the Changchun CDC.

Zou Tao, Vice Chairman and CEO of Kingsoft Cloud, stated: "Under the guidance of a high-quality sustainable development strategy, our Business fundamentals have improved comprehensively, and our Business has entered a new development cycle. Looking ahead, we will simultaneously promote revenue growth and profit improvement measures, deeply cooperate with Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem, fully understand and explore new AI opportunities, thereby continuously creating value for our customers, Shareholders, employees, and Other stakeholders."

Editor/Somer