Cost-Cutting to Profitability: Keep’s First Full-Year Adjusted Profit

Keep achieved its first full-year adjusted profit in 2025 since listing in July 2023. The result followed several years of business cutbacks, workforce reductions and a shift toward efficiency-first operations. In the first half of 2026, adjusted net profit was RMB 5.88 million, while net loss narrowed to RMB 12.19 million.

Core financial facts:

• Full-year 2025 revenue was RMB 1.637 billion, down 20.7% year-on-year
• First-half 2026 revenue was RMB 825 million, up 0.4% year-on-year, meaning revenue had broadly stabilized but had not clearly resumed growth
• First-half 2026 adjusted net profit was RMB 5.88 million
• First-half 2026 net loss was RMB 12.19 million

On the earnings call, Wang Ning summed up the situation by saying that “the revenue scale has stayed stable, but the core is getting stronger.” He also described the first half of 2026 as a proactive adjustment period and admitted that “the numbers right now don’t look good.” In other words, Keep has found a way to operate under low-growth conditions, but it has not yet found a new growth curve.

User Attrition and Retrenchment: From 36.39 Million to 18.58 Million MAUs

Keep’s core challenge is continued user attrition. Its average monthly active users reached 36.39 million in 2022, with about 2.1 billion workouts completed that year. MAUs then fell to 29.92 million in 2024, 21.77 million in 2025, and 18.58 million in the first half of 2026. In four years, nearly half of its monthly active users disappeared.

The company’s strategy has also shifted from trying to do everything to asking again what is worth keeping. At the 2025 earnings call, Wang Ning described the change as “cutting fat and building muscle”: shedding low-margin businesses and refocusing resources on membership subscriptions, fitness equipment and apparel.

Cost reductions were visible as well. Full-time headcount fell from 827 at the end of 2024 to 632 by mid-2026. In the first half of 2026, employee benefits expense decreased 22.7% year-on-year, administrative expenses dropped 32.3%, and R&D expenses fell 23.2%. Cutting costs did narrow losses, but there is only so much a company can cut.

One important contrast stands out: average monthly revenue per MAU rose from RMB 6.1 to RMB 7.4 in the first half of 2026, and average monthly workout time increased 15.3% year-on-year. Yet average monthly subscription members fell from 2.79 million to 2.17 million, while member penetration slipped from 12.4% to 11.7%. A leaner and more engaged user base does not automatically translate into a healthier paid-user base.

Sports Products Are Now the Revenue Anchor, but Platform Growth Remains Unproven

Keep’s strongest-performing business at the moment is sports products. In the first half of 2026, revenue from its own-brand sports products reached RMB 483 million, accounting for 58.5% of total revenue. Gross margin for the business rose from 34.8% to 40.1%. Growth came from lighter, faster-turnover categories that also fit content-driven e-commerce better, including yoga mats, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands and protein foods.

This shows that Keep increasingly resembles a sports consumer brand: product sales help support revenue, while more efficient channels and operations improve margins. But it also raises a new question. Sports products can help stabilize revenue, but they may not fully replace the user growth and membership growth that an internet platform depends on.

As early as 2018, Wang Ning said Keep was not merely a fitness app: the app was only the starting point, and the company wanted to become a sports brand. Later, Keepland, KeepKit smart hardware, apparel, content, social features and user data were all folded into a broader ecosystem vision. Today, Keep is indeed closer to being a sports brand, but the full digital fitness ecosystem once imagined has not yet fully materialized.

AI Is the New Growth Hope, but the Path Is Still Unclear

With cost-cutting approaching its limits and users and paid members still declining, AI has become more important to Keep’s story. For the company, AI cannot be limited to improving efficiency or reducing costs; it needs to help bring growth back.

In business terms, AI could potentially support more personalized training recommendations, sharper user segmentation, more efficient content distribution and longer-running services built around workout data. These are natural areas for a digital fitness platform to explore. However, the available material does not disclose Keep’s specific AI technology roadmap, investment scale or monetization path.

That makes AI less a proven new engine than a question Keep must answer. Can it improve retention? Can it revive paid membership growth? Can it connect products, content and services into a stronger loop? Those answers will have to come from future performance.

Reader Takeaways and Outlook

• For investors watching digital fitness, sports consumption and AI applications: Keep is worth monitoring for whether it can balance near-term profitability with long-term user growth.
• For consumers: there is no need to rush into hardware purchases simply because the company is shifting strategy. Keep’s bigger challenge is still proving a renewed growth model.

In Closing

Keep’s trajectory reflects a broader challenge in the fitness industry: once traffic growth fades, cost-cutting alone cannot solve the ceiling on the business. If AI only optimizes existing workflows, it may make the company more efficient without creating meaningful new demand. Whether Keep can use AI to build differentiated content, services and data capabilities is the key question for its next stage.