Stock prices fell 14% a day after the fast-tracking: user growth slammed into market anxiety at the height of $26 billion in AI capital expenditure

The fast-tracked financial report for the whole of 2025, released on 25 March 2026, resulted in a total income of $142.8 billion, an increase of 12.5 per cent over the previous year; adjusted net profit of $20.6 billion, a 16.5 per cent increase over the same period, with a net profit rate rising to 14.4 per cent. Against the background of the current pressure on the Internet industry as a whole, this is a two-fold increase in profits. First, fast-handed management clearly disclosed that the group’s overall capital expenditure in 2026 would amount to about $26 billion, an increase of about $11 billion over 2025, and was directed mainly to large-scale models and other broad-based models. On this basis, the fast-tracked net profit forecast for 2026 will decline by 15 to 17.6 billion dollars on a year-on-year basis. Second, the growth curve of multiple core indicators has slowed at a high point. The electricity provider, GMV, grew by about 1.6 trillion yuan in 2025, a 15 per cent increase over the previous year, but the rate of increase has fallen from 78 per cent in 2021 to 17 per cent by 2024 and 12.9 per cent through 2025, further exacerbating market concerns about growth failure since the first quarter of 2026. In terms of user data, fast-track users in April 2025 fell to 741 million, down to 0.7 per cent from more than 3 per cent in the previous three quarters, the company’s lowest level since it was listed in 2021. More alarmingly, the daily active user ring dropped by about 8.7 million, from 416 million in Q3 to 408 million in K44 million, and the user-size trend towards the ceiling has been shown. User portraits tend to be directed towards low-line cities and sunk markets, and they also determine that their advertising bill has a natural ceiling of only about 70 million high-value users, or 15.5 per cent, at the bottom of the mainstream platform. Congenial AI was positioned by management as a fast-track "The Hope of the Village". In 2025, Q4, it earned $340 million in a single season; and in December 2025, income exceeded $20 million in one month, corresponding to an annualized income rate of about $240 million. Management expects that in 2026, the congenial income will reach over $2.08 billion. By the end of 2025, it generated over 60 million global users, generating over 600 million videos and more than 30,000 service enterprises. However, the pattern of competition is changing dramatically. The byte swings of Seedance 2.0, released in February 2026, triggered a global AI video-generation market, and Mask publicly evaluated its "expanding speed". On March 26, Seedance 2.0 was lined up at CapCut under the byte flag, with the first group of seven country users, such as Brazil and Indonesia, gradually covering more markets. In 2025, fast-handedly cut marginal operations such as take-out, reduced sales and marketing spending from 32.4% to 29.6%, and increased profits through "save" growth. But this growth pattern is not sustainable enough to inflame the imagination of capital markets.