Company: ZHIHF
Filing Date: 2025-04-15
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001410578-25-000729
Chunk: 75

Company: Zhihu Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-15
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 3
Chunk 75
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 shares or the ADSs. This concentrated control will limit your ability to influence corporate matters and could discourage others from pursuing any potential merger, takeover, or other change of control transactions that holders of Class A ordinary shares and ADSs may view as beneficial.

Table of Contents

If securities or industry analysts cease to publish research or reports about our business, or if they adversely change their recommendations regarding our Class A ordinary shares or the ADSs, the market price and trading volume for our Class A ordinary shares or the ADSs could decline.

The trading market for our Class A ordinary shares and the ADSs will be influenced by research or reports that industry or securities analysts publish about our business. If one or more analysts who cover us downgrade our Class A ordinary shares or the ADSs, the market price for our Class A ordinary shares or the ADSs would likely decline. If one or more of these analysts cease to cover us or fail to regularly publish reports on us, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which, in turn, could cause the market price or trading volume for our Class A ordinary shares or the ADSs to decline.

Techniques employed by short sellers may drive down the market prices of our Class A ordinary shares and the ADSs.

Short selling is the practice of selling securities that a seller does not own but rather has borrowed from a third party with the intention of buying identical securities back at a later date to return to the lender. The short seller hopes to profit from a decline in the value of the securities between the sale of the borrowed securities and the purchase of the replacement shares, as the short seller expects to pay less in that purchase than it received in the sale. As it is in the short seller’s interest for the price of the security to decline, many short sellers publish, or arrange for the publication of, negative opinions regarding relevant issuers and their business prospects in order to create negative market momentum and generate profits for themselves after selling securities short.

Public companies listed in the United States that have substantially all of their operations in China have been the subject of short selling. Much of the scrutiny and negative publicity has centered on allegations of a lack of effective internal control over financial reporting resulting in financial and accounting irregularities and mistakes, inadequate corporate governance policies or a lack of adherence thereto and, in many cases, allegations of fraud. As a result, many of these companies are now conducting internal and external investigations into the allegations and, in the interim, are subject to shareholder lawsuits or SEC enforcement actions.

It is not clear what effect such