Youjiao Innovation (02431) marries with Didi to expand the growth curve of unmanned delivery and a “continuous capacity” that leverages the valuation ceiling
The unmanned delivery track in the same city ushered in a milestone.
On the evening of July 13, Youjiao Innovation (02431) officially announced the signing of the “Unmanned Logistics Global Operation Strategic Cooperation Agreement” with Beijing Kuaiju Transportation Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter: Didi Delivery). The announcement stated that the two sides officially opened the deep binding of L4 class unmanned logistics vehicles in the field of terminal delivery. The next day, Youjiao Innovation, along with Didi Delivery and Foshan Chancheng Urban Construction Group, completed a tripartite contract, and the layout of the unmanned delivery industry in Foshan was implemented simultaneously.
According to the Zhitong Finance App, the core link of this cooperation is clear and highly complementary: Youjiao Innovation is the technology and capacity supplier, exporting compliant mass-produced L4 unmanned logistics vehicles, autonomous driving software and hardware systems, and full-cycle operation and maintenance guarantees; Didi Delivery opened the traffic entrance and intelligent scheduling engine of its freight platform in the same city to integrate unmanned vehicles into the human-robot capacity network to achieve a closed loop of the entire process from order placement and intelligent dispatch to execution tracking and cost settlement. The two sides jointly export “unmanned delivery integrated solutions” to governments and commercial customers at all levels to open up a closed commercial loop of “autonomous driving capacity+platform traffic”.
In a context where the freight industry in the same city has long faced structural pain points in cost and efficiency, unmanned delivery is moving towards a key point of large-scale commercial verification. This cooperation not only provided stable order sources and scenario verification for Youjiao Innovation, but also explored a new model of human-robot hybrid capacity for DiDi Delivery. This joint operation model is regarded as an important sample for observing whether the commercial value of terminal delivery can be achieved.
Trillion-dollar track starts a new journey: unmanned capacity leverages the freight cost revolution in the same city
The same city freight business is a large-scale but meager profit. The fundamentals of the industry have long been characterized by a “large market and low gross profit”. According to Frost & Sullivan data, the size of China's same-city freight market has exceeded trillion yuan in 2024, but the net profit margin of leading platforms has been hovering in single digits for a long time. The cost structure is the core of the problem — terminal delivery costs account for more than 50% of the total cost of a single ticket, and there is a rigid upward trend. In 2025, the delivery business volume of China's postal express industry will exceed 200 billion units, and the traditional “sea of people tactics” is approaching the ceiling of efficiency.
Reducing costs and increasing efficiency has become the industry's most urgent common demand. Unmanned delivery vehicles are viewed by the market as the core gripper to solve the cost dilemma. According to Huatai Securities estimates, in the express terminal scenario, the single ticket cost for a 5m³ unmanned delivery vehicle is about 0.067 yuan, while the manual delivery cost for the same route is about 1 yuan, and the economic account difference is huge. More importantly, the marginal cost of unmanned vehicles decreases as the scale expands, and efficiency improvements brought about by algorithm iteration have long-term compounding effects.
The cooperation between DiDi and Youjiao Innovation is based on this industrial logic. DiDi needs lower cost and more deterministic capacity to optimize platform fulfillment efficiency; Youchao needs to verify and iterate its unmanned logistics technology in real business scenarios. At the same time, Youjia was able to use Didi's traffic portal to embed RaaS capacity services into the daily operation system of the same city freight, moving from single product delivery to continuous capacity operation.
The transformation of freight in the same city is no longer a question of “whether we want to change”, but rather a question of “who changes first and who can get better”. However, in order for unmanned vehicles to be truly embedded in the commercial operation system of freight in the same city, it is necessary to answer a key question at a technical level: how can large-scale replication be achieved in complex road conditions in different cities at sufficiently low marginal costs and fast enough deployment speed? Youjiao's innovative “truly unimaginable” technology has provided a differentiated solution to this problem.
There is no plan to break the game and see the truth: the RaaS model opens up a closed loop of terminal cities and commercialization
The core fulcrum of Youjiao's innovation leveraging the freight cost revolution in the same city lies in its “really uncharted” technology path. The solution completely eliminates the reliance on high-precision maps, relies only on real-time sensing and online environment understanding from in-vehicle sensors, dynamically constructs local road semantics and drivable space on the vehicle side, reduces the deployment cycle from weekly units to the hourly level, and eliminates the fixed costs associated with high-precision map collection, update, and compliance maintenance. This technological breakthrough has removed fundamental barriers to the commercialization of the RaaS (Robovan-as-a-Service) capacity service model.
Based on the rapid deployment capabilities of graphless technology, the cooperation between Youjia and DiDi establishes a complete closed commercial loop from the four dimensions of supply, traffic, operation, and revenue. On the supply side, Youjia outputs compliant and mass-produced Xiaozhu series L4 unmanned logistics vehicles and full-cycle operation and maintenance guarantees; on the traffic side, Didi opens the order portal to connect unmanned vehicles to the same city's freight network with an intelligent scheduling engine to ensure stable order density; on the operation side, Youjia provides full cycle guarantees such as vehicle warranty, normalized OTA upgrades, offline operation and maintenance, and remote security personnel takeover.
More importantly, this cooperation is particularly critical to the structural upgrade of Youjiao's innovative profit model. As a result, its revenue source has fundamentally changed — it is no longer limited to one-time revenue from vehicle sales, but also obtains continuous service revenue through capacity sharing, operation support, etc. Under the RaaS model, Youjia charges capacity service fees per order, mileage, or as needed. Revenue is directly linked to the number of orders delivered by the Didi platform, and has platform-based financial characteristics such as high gross profit margin, high customer stickiness, and strong revenue predictability. The shift in profit structure from “selling products” to “selling capacity” has not only smoothed out revenue fluctuations, but also opened up room for long-term revenue growth.
As the scale of operations expands, Youcha is locking in triple profit effects. At the level of data compounding, the actual distribution scenario continues to feed back the iteration of algorithms, and the accumulation of operating data on an average of dozens of bicycle orders per day enables continuous optimization of autonomous driving capabilities; at the customer compound interest level, the high stickiness of the RaaS model makes it difficult for customers to migrate once connected, and you can expand more platform customers outside of Didi; at the level of ecological compounding, the ability to quickly replicate across cities, superimposing “technology+platform+government” tripartite collaboration, is standardizing the operating experience of individual cities into replicable solutions.
Long-term competitive barriers formed by the superposition of triple benefits are driving Youjiao's innovation from a one-time revenue model of hardware sales to a continuous value growth curve of ecological operation.
Ecological Cohesion: Triple Flywheel Drive Valuation Logic Breakthrough Upwards
The cooperation between Youjiao Innovation and DiDi is strategically far more far-reaching than a paper agreement. The two sides joined forces with Foshan Chancheng Urban Construction Group to form a tripartite collaborative ecological style of “technology+platform+government”, each exerting a leverage effect within the boundaries of ability. On the technical side, Youjia provides standardized L4 unmanned capacity and full-cycle operation and maintenance, making cross-city replication possible — continuously opening the five cities of Nantong, Zibo, Luoyang, Taiyuan, and Zhangjiakou within a month. On the platform side, Didi guarantees order density, and traffic entry and intelligent scheduling systems continue to introduce stable terminal delivery orders. On the government side, Foshan Chancheng Urban Construction Group participated to effectively lower the implementation threshold and revitalize local infrastructure resources. The three work together to form a positive cycle: more city launches → more operating data → continuous algorithm iteration → cost reduction → attracting more platforms and customers → continuous scale expansion.
The formation of this ecological collaboration is driving a fundamental shift in the capital market's valuation logic for Youchao Innovation. In the past, unmanned vehicle manufacturers were mostly valued by hardware technology companies in the market, and pricing was anchored in sales volume and gross margin level. And when an enterprise has continuous service revenue and operating attributes, the valuation ceiling will rise significantly.
Referring to the pricing framework of SaaS and platform companies, recurring revenue enjoys a valuation ratio significantly higher than hardware sales. Youjia's innovative RaaS model shifts its revenue structure from a single product sales to a diverse combination of “product+service+capacity sharing”, showing platform-based financial characteristics of high gross profit margin, high customer retention rate, and high revenue visibility. As the share of recurring revenue gradually increases, the market is expected to re-examine the company's commercial nature — switching from a technology product company to a platform-based service provider, which will be the core driving force for the company's medium- to long-term value revaluation.
At the industry level, unmanned city car distribution has fully entered the stage of large-scale mass production and normalized operation, and the racetrack pattern has gradually evolved from being led by duopolies in the early days to more competitive advantage. In this process, the new first-tier pattern of “Hsinchu” has already taken shape — Neolithic and Jiushi Intelligence are at the forefront of the industry with first-mover advantage and large-scale delivery, while Youjiao Innovation has made a strong breakthrough with a combination of “technology breakthrough+ecological bundling+batch landing”. Together, the three form the most competitive leading matrix for unmanned logistics tracks. This strategic cooperation with DiDi has further consolidated Youjia's position in the “Hsinchu” industry. iResearch predicts that China's unmanned city vehicle sales will reach 89,000 units in 2026, and is expected to approach 1.5 million units in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 75%. As policy-side rights continue to be liberalized, the technology-side hardware cost curve declines, and the commercial-side RaaS model gradually runs through, unmanned delivery is moving from exploratory investment to a deterministic growth range.
For Youjiao Innovation, which pioneered the closed loop of “graphless technology+RaaS operation+platform binding”, this is not only a valuation narrative, but also a fundamental shift in the business model — from “seller” to “partner”, it is no longer just a supplier that provides tools to the industry, but a core role that is deeply embedded in the transportation operation process and continues to share the dividends of ecological growth.
In summary, the transformation of freight capacity in the same city is undergoing a critical transition from quantitative to qualitative change. With “no real picture” technological breakthroughs and the closed loop commercial construction of the RaaS model, Youjiao Innovation has taken a differentiated position in this transformation. The strategic cooperation with DiDi is not only a simple superposition of technical solutions and platform traffic, but also a practical verification of the “technology+platform+government” tripartite ecological collaboration — it marks a new stage in unmanned logistics from “can it run” to “how can it be earned”.
As the replicability and scale effects of the business model begin to show, the market's assessment of its value will also surpass the traditional hardware valuation framework and enter a new cycle driven by continuous service revenue and ecological synergy. For investors, this may mean that the time has come to re-examine the track's value coordinates.