In 2025, Xinguodu will overall show the characteristics of “dazzling book profits and core business under pressure”.
The doubling of profits at the parent company level is mainly due to one-time non-recurring gains and losses, not a fundamental improvement in the main business operations.
By the first quarter of 2026, Xinguodu has achieved operating income of 867 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 23.61%, and the net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies is approximately 107 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 31.81%.
Xinguodu explained that the revenue growth was mainly driven by the revenue growth of the two major businesses of domestic acquiring business and electronic payment equipment, while the net profit attributable to the parent company was affected by factors such as fluctuations in the sales structure of electronic payment equipment, rising prices of upstream storage-based materials, which led to a decline in gross profit margin, and exchange losses caused by exchange rate fluctuations during the reporting period.
From the perspective of operating income, compared with 2025, Xinguodu has initially seen structural improvements in its business end in Q1 this year, and its cross-border payment business continues to make new breakthroughs.
In the future, can cross-border payments become the business pillar of New Capital?
Let’s first look at a set of Xinguodu’s core financial data in the first quarter of 2026.
From the perspective of revenue, the structural improvements on the business side are as follows: First, domestic acquisition flow has returned to growth of more than 20%, reversing the basically flat trend in 2025.
Xinguodu’s domestic acquiring business transaction volume increased significantly in Q1. In the first quarter, transaction volume exceeded 448.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than 21%, driving the business’s operating income to steadily increase; second, electronic payment equipment achieved revenue growth of more than 30% due to the large volume of overseas hardware.
The overseas market expansion of Xinguodu’s electronic payment equipment business continues to deepen, and the scale of overseas business further expands, driving the business’s operating income to grow by more than 30% year-on-year; third, cross-border payment capabilities have entered the “regional network construction” stage from “volume accumulation”. Xinguodu’s cross-border payment and global acquiring business achieved breakthroughs in both acquiring and collection in the first quarter, completed the online acquisition capabilities in Europe and Hong Kong, China, and continued to expand local collection and capital access capabilities in emerging markets.
However, the gross profit margin of Xinguodu’s acquiring business continues to be under pressure.
Affected by intensified competition in the payment industry and increased subsidies for the expansion of new merchants, Xinguodu’s comprehensive gross profit margin has dropped from approximately 40% in 2024 to approximately 34% in 2025, and further fell to 30.05% in Q1, mainly due to resonance at three levels: First, the sales structure of electronic payment equipment fluctuates.
Changes in the product type and sales proportion of the hardware business, with an increase in the sales proportion of low-margin products or a decrease in the sales of high-margin products, will have a direct impact on the overall profit level.
In the first quarter, the electronic payment equipment business revenue grew by about 30%, but the dilution effect at the gross profit margin level depressed the overall profitability; second, upstream material costs continued to rise.
The prices of raw materials, mainly memory chips, continue to rise, which directly pushes up the cost of the hardware business and further erodes the already under pressure gross profit margin; third, the RMB appreciates sharply against the U.S. dollar in the first quarter, resulting in a certain scale of exchange losses.
Xinguodu’s financial expenses surged by about 368% year-on-year, jumping to 29.4333 million yuan in 2026Q1, further dragging down net profits.
When it comes to cross-border payment capabilities, we have to mention Xinguodu’s performance in 2025.
In 2025, the amount of cross-border payment transactions will exceed 2.4 billion yuan, and the average quarter-on-quarter growth rate will exceed 100%.
So, compared with the domestic market that is in the process of “involution”, can cross-border payments become the pillar of future performance growth of Xinguodu?
From a fundamental point of view, Singapore has obtained the Luxembourg PI license, the Hong Kong MSO license, and the US MSB license. It has the license conditions to carry out global collection and acquiring integrated services. It is also strengthening the resource investment, product research and development and bank capital channel construction of its cross-border payment brand PayKKa.
At the same time, its electronic payment equipment business has been sold to more than 100 countries around the world, with overseas revenue reaching 1.149 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 26.14%. Hardware overseas and cross-border payment services constitute a “hardware + service” two-wheel drive overseas strategy.
In addition, Singapore has established a cross-border business group and plans to list in Hong Kong in 2026 to deepen its global strategic layout.
However, some clues may be revealed from the comparison of the two data.
On the one hand, the cross-border payment transaction value (GMV) in 2025 will exceed 2.4 billion yuan; on the other hand, Jialian Payment’s domestic acquiring business revenue is 1.964 billion yuan, and the transaction flow (GMV) is approximately 1.47 trillion yuan.
It can be seen that there is a huge difference between the two.
In addition, the cross-border payment business has a large investment and a long profit cycle, and the new business investment itself will also drag down the deduction of non-net profits.
Some analysts pointed out that the new business is not expected to improve the profit structure in the short term. Optimizing corporate governance and matching the compliance system with domestic and overseas dual regulatory standards also require long-term investment and system reconstruction.
It is worth mentioning that Xinguodu is also facing challenges such as rising compliance costs and increasing regulatory pressure. Jialian Payment has received fines more than once for violating merchant management regulations, liquidation management regulations, etc., and will also become a cost account in the financial report.
Overall, Xinguodu, a listed company, has both “risks” and “opportunities”. Structural improvements on the business end have begun to appear, and cross-border strategies have become a foregone conclusion. Whether it can successfully create new growth engines through emerging businesses such as cross-border payments and overseas hardware sales in the future will be the focus of our continued attention.
