image credit: Bamboo Works
Key Takeaways:
Online brokerage Futu's revenue jumped 45% year-on-year, and its net profit surged 80% in the fourth quarter of 2025
The company's overseas moomoo brand accounts for 55% of total funded accounts, with Malaysia becoming a major growth driver just three years after Futu entered the market
Many Chinese companies aspire to be global players, even though few manage to make that transition despite valiant efforts. Futu Holdings Ltd. (NASDAQ:FUTU) is clearly an outlier from the much larger group of companies whose global dreams failed to take off. The online broker's overseas success, highlighted in its latest quarterly report, is all the more remarkable given its global drive was largely the result of a brief existential crisis sparked by a regulatory nightmare in its home China market.
Futu's latest blockbuster results, delivered last Thursday for the fourth quarter of last year, capped a year of retail trading frenzy that led its client base to swell and its own stock to take off. The company's revenue jumped 45.3% year-on-year to HK$6.44 billion ($827 million), smashing past analysts' estimates. Its net profit jumped by an even more impressive 80% to HK$3.4 billion. For the whole of 2025, the online broker's revenue rose 68% to HK$22.8 billion, while its net profit more than doubled to HK$11.3 billion.
Futu is roaring back just three years after a crackdown by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) threw its future into doubt. At the end of 2022, the regulator barred Futu, along with rival UP Fintech (NASDAQ:TIGR), from registering new user accounts in China. Both companies specialize in cross-border trading, initially focusing on U.S. and Hong Kong-listed stocks. But the regulator said both were operating illegally by allowing their Mainland customers to make cross-border trades without a required brokerage license.
The ban wasn't completely unexpected due to earlier signals from the regulator, and Futu had already started expanding overseas before the bombshell hit. Still, the episode was ...
