Tuya Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Revenue growth accelerated to $92.9 million, up 16% year over year, while PaaS revenue increased 16.9% and smart home and robot products revenue rose 23.2%.
  • Positive Sentiment: Tuya reported stable operating profitability, with a 10.3% non-GAAP operating margin and $9.6 million in non-GAAP operating profit; liquid assets totaled approximately $976 million.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company is expanding its AI platform through AI companion devices, AI energy solutions, and the newly launched Tuya CodeBuilder, which management says can shorten hardware development cycles and broaden its developer ecosystem.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Management described demand as gradually recovering rather than rebounding immediately, with strong momentum in Europe’s energy-related products, telecom-led opportunities in Southeast Asia and Latin America, and growing AI hardware adoption in China.
  • Negative Sentiment: Gross margin was pressured by semiconductor cost increases and business mix, while traditional lighting and IP camera demand remained weak; AI application revenue growth slowed to 3.9% as Tuya reduced lower-margin, project-based B2B work.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Tuya Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to Tuya Inc.'s second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be informed that today's conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your first speaker today, Ms. Regina Wang, Investor Relations Associate Director of Tuya. Please go ahead.

Regina Wang
Regina Wang
Investor Relations Associate Director at Tuya

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us today is our Founder and CEO, Mr. Jerry Wang, and our Co-Founder and CFO, Mr. Alex Yang. Our results and the webcast of the conference call are available at ir.tuya.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our IR website in a few hours. Before we continue, I would like to refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call, as we will make forward-looking statements. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Founder and CEO, Mr. Jerry Wang. Jerry, please.

Jerry Wang
Jerry Wang
Founder and CEO at Tuya

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Tuya's earnings conference call for the second quarter of 2026. Tuya maintained solid growth momentum during the quarter, despite the continued complexity of the global operating environment. Our total revenue reached $92.9 million, a year-over-year increase of 16%, with growth accelerating from the first quarter. Within this, revenue from our core PaaS business increased 16.9% year-over-year. These results reflect the ongoing rise in smart product penetration, including steady demand across home appliances, increased adoption of differentiated solutions such as smart door locks, and growing demand for emerging AI-enabled product categories, and also underscore the resilience of our platform business across different regions and product categories. In terms of strategic execution, we continue to advance our AI-driven development strategy, extending our AI capabilities beyond foundation models and standalone features towards platformization, productization, and scenario-based deployment.

Jerry Wang
Jerry Wang
Founder and CEO at Tuya

In the second quarter, shipment volumes of AI companion product solutions continued to expand, and consumer acceptance of new forms of AI hardware began to be validated. Meanwhile, we launched the Tuya Cobuilder, which applies live coding to AI hardware development, enabling developers to cover the core development process from product concept to physical device validation using natural language, further shortening AI hardware development cycles. These developments further reinforce AI's evolution from a mere conversational tool into a technology that operates in real physical environments and participates in sensing, understanding, and execution. Looking ahead, we will deepen our focus on the following three key areas. First, we will continue to advance AI's native application and product innovation, centering on high-potential scenarios such as AI home, AI energy, and AI robot. We will drive the large-scale adoption of AI across a broader range of physical devices.

Jerry Wang
Jerry Wang
Founder and CEO at Tuya

Second, we will continue to enhance AI development tools such as live coding, agent orchestration, and cloud-edge device collaboration, further shortening the cycle from ideation and development to deployment on physical devices for AI hardware. Third, we will advance the global expansion of proven solutions while further strengthening our developer ecosystem and industry partnerships to jointly explore long-term opportunities in the AI application market. Now, let me turn the call over to our Co-Founder and CFO, Alex Yang, who will share more details about our financial performance and business progress.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Hello, everyone. This is Alex. I will now provide a brief overview of our second quarter results. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures are in U.S. dollars and all comparisons are on year-over-year basis. In the second quarter of 2026, we generated total revenue of approximately $92.9 million, up 16% year-over-year, and accelerating from the 8.3% growth recorded in the first quarter. Our PaaS business maintained strong growth, where revenue from the smart home and robot products segment is also increased by double digits. Of our total revenue, the PaaS business generated revenue of about $67.9 million, a year-over-year increase of 16.9%, serving as important growth drivers for the quarter.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

At the end of the second quarter, the number of PaaS premium customers for the trailing 12 months reached 318, contributing approximately 89.5% of the PaaS revenue, with our core customer base remaining stable. The AI application and other segments generated revenue of about $11.5 million, a year-over-year increase of 3.9%, primarily driven by growth in cloud-based service revenue such as Video Cloud Storage. We continue to advance value-added services including video and AI-driven energy saving, among others, with AI-enabled applications capabilities, while gradually strengthening our new and recurring service capability. Smart home and robot products revenue was about $13.5 million, a year-over-year increase of 23.2%, primarily driven by growing customer demand from smart security, energy, and other differentiated smart products. We will continue to increase the contribution of high value-added products and strengthen their integration with the software and value-added services.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Looking at the specific driver of PaaS growth, home appliances, smart door locks, electronics, and energy products, and AI companion product solutions performed relatively well during the quarter. Growth in the home appliances segments were mainly driven by customers' rollout of the smart-enabled models, the expansion of their geographic reach, a higher contribution from smart-enabled products, and the migration of certain overseas brand projects from our customers' legacy solutions into Tuya's. Growth in smart door locks was primarily driven by increased adoption of audio-video and low-power Wi-Fi solutions. By comparison, demand recovery in categories such as traditional lighting and IP cameras has been relatively slow, reflecting continued divergency in performance across products and regions. In AI companion products, shipment volumes of the devices powered by our solutions continue to expand.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

During the June 18 Shopping Festival in China, Fuzozo, built on Tuya solutions, ranked first in the AI toy categories on Tmall, while a number of other ecosystem products also delivered strong ranking and sales performance across major e-commerce platforms. This provided early validation of both consumer acceptance and the commercialization potential of the new form of AI device. Beyond basic voice interactions, we have been building out capabilities in multi-modal perception, personalization and memory, content services, and user engagement, helping customers accelerate the development and mass productions of the AI-native consumer hardware. In the energy sectors, solutions including EV chargers, smart power distribution, metering, and home energy management maintain solid growth. We are expanding our AI energy capabilities from electricity, consumption, analytics, abnormal alerts, and personalized recommendations towards dynamic electricity tariff management and user-authorized automated device coordination.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Within the smart home ecosystem, customers' adoptions of matter-based solutions continue to increase across categories such as electronic products, lighting, and climate control. In parallel, we enhance the local control, multi-protocol interoperabilities and third-party ecosystem compatibilities. On margin side, our blended gross margin for this quarter was 46.3%. By segment, gross margin for PaaS was 46.8%, gross margin for AI adaptation and others were 72%, and gross margin from smart home and robot products were 21.9%. Gross margin fluctuations were mainly driven by the volatilities in upstream semiconductors cost and changes in business mix in line of the expectation. Despite this, gross profit increased by 11.1% year-over-year to approximately $43 million. On expenses, we maintained a disciplined expense management while continuing to invest on AI and R&D, and platform capability.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

GAAP operating expenses for this quarter were approximately $33.7 million, down 10.4% year-over-year, primarily due to the lower share-based compensation expenses. In the term of profitability, we recorded GAAP profit from operations of approximately $9.3 million, with a GAAP operating margin of 10%. Non-GAAP profit from operations were approximately $9.6 million, a year-over-year increase by 11.7%, while non-GAAP operating margin remained in the double digit at 10.3%. While delivering revenue growth, we maintained relatively stable core operating profitability. Net profit for the quarter was approximately $18.6 million, while non-GAAP net profit was approximately $18.9 million. The year-over-year decline in non-GAAP net profit was primarily due to the lower financial income and foreign exchange losses, while core operating profit continued to grow. On cash flow side, net cash generated from operating activities was $6.2 million during the quarter and remained positive.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

At the end of the second quarter, the company's total liquid assets, including cash and cash equivalent, time deposit, and treasury securities, amounted to approximately $976 million, continually to provide ample resources to support the development of AI capability, global business expansion, and our ability to navigate external uncertainties in a long-term strategy investment. Next, I'll briefly walk you through our progress in the AI developer ecosystem. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, the number of registered developers on our platform exceeded 2.09 million. Launched during the second quarter, Tuya Cobuilder served as an AI developer gateway to the Tuya developer platform, applying live coding to AI hardware development. By describing their requirements in natural language, developers can complete product definition, add user interface, embedded firmware, AI agents, and workflow development in one place, and then proceed directly to the device flashing and debugging.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

This covers the whole development process from product concept to physical devices validation and help shorten the AI hardware development cycles. In just over a month since launch, Tuya Cobuilder's AI-powered panel generations capabilities has expanded to cover 30 product categories, with average generation time for a single panel reduced to approximately 190 seconds only. This progress demonstrates that we are advancing our developer tools beyond development assistance towards end-to-end delivery capability, spanning product definition, software generation, and deployment on physical devices. As an application layer, we continue to enhance Hey Tuya's device task execution capabilities, control reliability, and response efficiency while exploring subscription-based and value-added services across scenarios such as AI-driven energy saving, pet care, and video understanding. Certain scenarios has already begun to generate early payment and renewals. We'll continue to focus on high-frequency use cases and the long-term use value.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

From a broader perspective, AI capabilities are gradually expanding beyond single model integrations and in compact device sensory, and contextually understanding memory, agent orchestration, and device-side execution. We'll continue to leverage the strength of our platform, device ecosystem, and global developer base to translate AI capability into a scalable commercial value across a broader range of the real-world scenarios. In summary, our revenue growth accelerated in the second quarter of 2026, with the PaaS business continuing to serve as a primary growth engine. Meanwhile, our AI capabilities are being commercialized in parallel across multiple paths, including smart products, and AI applications. Despite the impact on growth margin from semiconductor supply chain price fluctuation and business mix change, we've maintained stable operating profitability and ample financial resources.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Looking ahead, we remain focused on AI-native applications, physical AI scenarios, and developer platform capability, and continue to advance the transformation of AI technologies from tool level capabilities into tangible and scalable commercial value. Thank you all, operators. Right now, we can begin the Q and A.

Operator

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question now, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. One moment for our first question. We will now take our first question from the line of Yang Liu of Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question, Yang. Your line is open.

Yang Liu
Yang Liu
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Thanks for the opportunity, and congratulations on the solid earnings. My question is about the future demand outlook. Based on your discussion with key customers, in current environment, what is the growth or demand outlook going into the second half of 2026? If you can provide a little bit more breakdown by geographic, that will be even better. What is the demand profile in U.S. or in Europe and ASEAN, et cetera? Thank you.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Okay. Thank you, Liu. Right now, we see that the end demand and internal momentum is still within our expectation. As we stated in the beginning of this year, the entire customers and the consumer side, they are looking forward to consuming more and transform more legacy devices and solutions into the new AI one that we provide. This momentum continues. What we see that we have the accelerated type of rebalancing on the demand side. This will be the overall view. We see that the recovery will not come overnight. It is gradually climbing. What we found here is the momentum still continuing, and especially based on those kind of very positive sales through feedback from the end user side. That is the first one. If I break down into the geographic areas, there are different type of demand drivers.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Europe still show very strong on the demand side, especially for all type of energy-related segments. Including the new AI homes, home management solutions, we provide as a total solution or include different type of energy efficiency improvement, single device, no matter it is what we provide as a PaaS or we provide as a smart home and robot products to the solution together. That show very strong demand still. That is the first one. On Southeast Asia and Latin America, the driving force is majorly come from our strong channels in the telecom carriers. While trying to establish a strategic partnership along with them around two and a half years ago, and we are starting to scale, commercialize that part. Through their own channels to deliver some comprehensive total solutions for their users in the IoT fields.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

That is a very strong potential and very promising one because they are running as a B2B cycle. By the end of the time, it is a B2C, but they run a really strong B2B cycles rather than a retail side. They are campaigning on that. That is for Southeast Asia and Latin America. The Middle East is still kind of in a pause right now because of the military conflict going on in the second quarter. Right now we are still kind of wait and see. The customer is still there, and the customer is still doing a lot of preparations, including the product development and the new concept definitions and type of stuff. But right now, I think that overall the business is not coming back yet. We are looking forward to have a better scenarios, perhaps maybe end of Q3 or Q4.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

We're looking forward to have some agreement for those conflicting countries then we'll be able to catch the demand. That way overall. North America is that the sales team is still there, but some price sensitive, especially low price type of the devices, that show kind of fluctuations, by the pricing raise coming from the supply chain side. We structured that type of product mix along with my customers to deliver a better sale too, in the second half of this year. I think that way overall. For China right now, we'll be seeing some really good promising categories, including part of the home appliances.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

But we can find that recently the major brands right now, they are speeding up the transformations from the legacy type of devices into the smart one and from a first generation IoT type of smart devices into the AI one. So we are catching the transformation trend and helping a lot of China brands to do that. The second one is that in China, some AI native categories starting to boom in like the AI companion. Our first market we start to break through for AI companion categories is from China. That's why I saw this as sweeping Tmall. We already see that based on a large target consumer scale in China and where we find the right type of applications and coming on with a very active customer base. As we'll try to find more potentials in the new type of the innovations in China.

Yang Liu
Yang Liu
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Timothy Zhao of Goldman Sachs. Please ask your question, Timothy. Your line is open.

Timothy Zhao
Timothy Zhao
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Great. Good morning, management. Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the very solid results. My question is on your gross profit margin. I noticed that in the second quarter, the IoT PaaS margin declined on a year-on-year basis, although stabilized sequentially, while your smart home and robot products margin actually declined sequentially on a year-on-year. Just wondering if you can share more color on what was the margin drivers behind, and what is your margin outlook for these two segments for the third quarter and rest of this year. Thank you.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Okay. First of all, as everyone knows that the upstream cost fluctuations started to increase over two quarters on a global basis. We are the last one to catch the impact because our buying forces. In Q2, what we are doing is that the major of the product we just passed through the cost raise. Which means that we maintain the gross profit, but we do not stick to the gross margin. Till now that we will really build a very good buffering on the inventory and cost balance between now and future. In next two quarter or three, right now we have the confidence that we will be able to working through a more stable cost level of my major type of material which we needed.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

We are looking for to either to stabilize the gross margin, and we figure out whatever or all the possibilities that by offering new capabilities, new technologies, would like to improve the gross margins overall. That is pretty much of that. For the customer side, we really show our kindness that we best pass through the cost. In the future, anything happens, we are looking for the most positive way to help the company to continue to run the business. It is not stick to the cost, but more stick to the value and the competence that we deliver to the customers to help them get through that.

Operator

Right. Thank you.

Timothy Zhao
Timothy Zhao
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Kai Xiao of CICC. Please ask your question, Kai. Your line is open.

Kai Xiao
Kai Xiao
Analyst at CICC

Okay. Thank you, management. This is Kai. I have two questions. One is on Tuya Cobuilder you mentioned in the quarter. I wonder what is the current adoption status of Tuya Cobuilder, and what is the company's [audio distortion]—

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Cobuilder is something we have to do for a couple of quarters. Starting from second half of last year, some department in Tuya R&D centers were really starting to the live codings and to improve our own coding efficiency, and also to bring more ROIs on R&D side. We start to do that as a major users of that coding. While we have enough experience, how we will be able to use that and the different right ROI, and be able to know how to manage that. We start to think about the way we need to duplicate our experience and open that to our customers. At the beginning of this year, we start to build the Cobuilder. We are happy to launch it at the second quarter.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

We believe that will be the new type of default gateway in the future for many developers, not only device developers, many developers to lower the bar. Including me, like right now, including my financial department. Many of them, they do not know coding at all for their entire lifetime, but they are starting to write their own agent, to improve their own workflow, to improve their own individual efficiencies. I believe some of you did that, too. Cobuilder will be kind of the show where, I mean, how low the bar can reach and how easy those ideal developers will come with some innovative ideas.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

They can really quickly to testify the innovations and to validate whether those kind of crazy ideas make senses for some of the users, and build a demo and get some pilot users, and starting to run, including the fundraisings and the scale it. Cobuilder, we believe, to be kind of the, in the hardware world, should be the momentum, like, wow, you have the cloud code maybe one year before. We believe that will be default this way. We will continue to bring that to in Q2, after we launch it, and then we will continue to do a lot of webinar trainings for those developers, even while they do not know what does coding mean and how they can deal with it. We are starting to train a lot of developers.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Also in the same time, we will use this tool to attract those not developer at this moment, but they are more considered as a product manager, maybe in some hardware companies. In the past, the strength or capability for those type of talents are user insight, product definition, and interface and design, and psychological understanding. But right now we offer them a better tool that they can transfer that part with or without annoying any of their engineers. They will be able to stretch that out themselves. That will be the value of the Cobuilder. We can use that to enlarge the entire developer base by building up a better target, and also be able to improve my customers' R&D efficiencies in the long run.

Operator

Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Matt Ma of Jefferies. Please ask your question, Matt. Your line is open.

Matt Ma
Matt Ma
Analyst at Jefferies

Hey. Hello. Thank you for taking my question. I have a question on the AI application segment. It seems like in Q2, the revenue growth has been decelerated from 17% in the first quarter. I am just curious, what is the reason behind that? I calculated it. It seems that Q2 growth is only 3%. What can get this line back to a double-digit growth? Also on the segment margin. On the Q1 call, you pointed that a seasonal rebound in device usage from Q2 would help you to increase the margin for this segment, but it does not seem that have come through. Could you walk us through what could actually happen in this quarter or the coming quarters to help the margin recovery for this segment?

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Okay. I am not sure I lost the second question. Is the margin for which segment? You mean the home robot?

Matt Ma
Matt Ma
Analyst at Jefferies

AI application.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Okay. AI application. Got it. The first one is, thank you for bringing the question. For AI applications, right now the growth slowing majorly come from the mix of my offering. As you might know that in that segment, they cover two offers. One is B2B, and especially some of the project-based customization services we provide for the key customers. The second part of that is the B2C, so directly services we offer for the consumer. They are the user of the devices. They activated my value-added services through subscription. The growth major is that we gradually still slowing, and we do not want to handle this kind of B2B projects for a long time. The B2B project-based, the revenue and the growth slower. But actually, the China grows good. My China service recurring revenue growth in Q2 is 22%.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

We are happy to see that change because we want to have their segment in the B2C will be able to cover more and more portion of their segment because we believe that would be a better value for that. That is for the first question. The second question about the your margin is on the application segment, right? You are asking the margin for?

Matt Ma
Matt Ma
Analyst at Jefferies

Yep.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

Yeah. For this one is the same is that, the segment we want to have more is based on the cloud and based on the AI capability. That will be a higher valued one. 70% up is the target margin for this segment. Right now we will be hit it. In the future, we have to hit between 75%-80%. The driver for that, the first one I explained that, we do not want to have this kind of project and customization-based services take a larger portion because that is kind of more labor centric and lower margin type of services. We try to lower the entire portion of that. By increasing more and more cloud-based one, B2C side.

Alex Yang
Alex Yang
Co-Founder and CFO at Tuya

On the B2C side, not only enlarge the contribution percentage on revenue, but also in the same time, by we scale the services and be able to improve more and more efficient architecture on the technique side. We will be able to figure out a better way to manage the cost and the ANN of functions in our model. Through that, we will be able to push the cloud-based services margin from 70% into 75% and 80%. I will wait for my next share, please.

Matt Ma
Matt Ma
Analyst at Jefferies

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand back to the management team for closing remarks.

Regina Wang
Regina Wang
Investor Relations Associate Director at Tuya

Thank you, Operator, and thank you all once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact the IR team of Tuya. Goodbye and see you next quarter.

Operator

Your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.

Executives
    • Regina Wang
      Regina Wang
      Investor Relations Associate Director
    • Jerry Wang
      Jerry Wang
      Founder and CEO
    • Alex Yang
      Alex Yang
      Co-Founder and CFO
Analysts