Kanzhun's Profit Surges in Q1 on Cost Cuts

Kanzhun (NASDAQ:BZ) delivered its first-quarter 2025 results on May 22, reporting that revenue rose 13% year over year to 1.92 billion yuan while GAAP net income rose 112% to 512 million yuan. The company, which operates an online job recruitment platform in China, saw a sharp expansion in adjusted operating margin to 36%, growth in blue-collar and lower-tier city users, and expanded AI integration across user, recruiter, and internal management functions.

Disciplined Cost Management Drives Exceptional Margin Expansion

Adjusted operating income reached 690 million yuan, aided by an 8% year-over-year reduction in total operating costs and an absolute decline in share-based compensation expenses for the third consecutive quarter. The company also cut its sales and marketing spending by 15% year over year. Meanwhile, paid enterprise customers climbed by 12% over the trailing 12 months to 6.38 million.

"Adjusted operating margin was 36%, up 13 percentage points year-on-year compared to 23% in the same period last year. Overall, this achievement demonstrated the company's capability to implement strategic goals and exceptional operational leverages."
-- Jonathan Peng Zhao, Founder, Chairman & CEO

Structural cost rationalization combined with robust operating leverage created significant upside for long-term profitability against a backdrop of cyclical and regulatory volatility in the sector.

Diversified User Base and Blue-Collar Penetration Offset Macro and Tariff Risks

The blue-collar segment's contribution to revenue exceeded 39%, which helped boost the revenue share from tier 3-and-below cities to more than 23%. Export-oriented enterprises, typically sensitive to trade policy, accounted for a small share of both the platform's job postings and revenue base.

"Objectively speaking, we have a quite diversified industry and location distribution. So the export-related industries, both in terms of revenue and numbers of job posting contributions, are quite low."
-- Jonathan Peng Zhao, Founder, Chairman & CEO

This limited exposure to export-dependent segments insulates Kanzhun from short-term disruptions stemming from global tariff wars and positions the company to capture secular digitization trends in the domestic employment ecosystem.

Measured AI Investment Delivers Tangible Productivity Gains Without Industry Disruption -- Yet

Kanzhun has invested over 1 billion yuan into AI infrastructure since 2023, operating an in-house lab for pretraining models, with AI-driven recruitment tools now having handled over 9 million candidate conversations during the company's beta test of the products. Despite a broad rollout of AI, management observed that competitive dynamics within the human capital industry remain substantially unchanged as of Q1 2025.

"So my assessment is for this generation of AI technology and all the AI application we can observe from the market, we haven't seen any revolutionary or disruptive changes. So the competitive landscape is relatively stable."
-- Jonathan Peng Zhao, Founder, Chairman & CEO

This proactive -- but disciplined -- AI adoption builds meaningful internal process advantages and user engagement, but absent a technological step-change, current trends should reinforce Kanzhun's defensible market share.

Looking Ahead

Management is guiding for Q2 revenue of between 2.05 billion yuan and 2.08 billion yuan, representing 7.0% to 8.5% year-over-year growth, and reaffirmed its full-year non-GAAP operating profit target of 3 billion yuan. Its share repurchase program remains active, with further capital return options under assessment. It has robust cash reserves exceeding $2 billion.

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