Company: ZHIHF
Filing Date: 2025-04-15
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001410578-25-000729
Chunk: 33

Company: Zhihu Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-04-15
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 3
Chunk 33
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 addition, if these channel partners raise their charges on us, our margins could be adversely affected. The collaboration also highly depends on the total amount of smartphone shipment and sales of these channel partners, which may fluctuate or slow down compared with prior years. The growth of our user base is impacted by the pre-installations of the Zhihu app on mobile devices. A continued slowdown of new smartphone market in China may adversely affect our user growth.

In addition, we work with application marketplaces, such as Apple’s app store and various app stores on Android devices, to drive downloads of the Zhihu app. Currently, a majority of the downloads of the Zhihu app are from the app stores on Android devices. As such, the promotion, distribution, and operation of the Zhihu app are subject to the standard terms and policies for application developers of these application marketplaces, which are subject to the interpretation of, and frequent changes by, these application marketplaces. If these third-party application marketplaces change their terms and conditions in a manner that is detrimental to us, or refuse to distribute the Zhihu app, or if any other major channel with which we seek collaboration becomes less popular or effective, or refuses to collaborate with us in the future on commercially favorable terms, our user growth, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects may be materially and adversely affected.

Table of Contents

Many of our products and services utilize open-source software, which may pose particular risks to our proprietary software, products and services in a manner that negatively affects our business.

We use open source software in our products and services and will continue to use open source software in the future. There is a risk that open source software licenses could be construed in a manner that imposes unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to provide or distribute our products or services. Additionally, we may face claims from third parties claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the open source software or derivative works that we developed using such software. These claims could result in litigation and could require us to make our software source code freely available, purchase a costly license or cease offering the implicated products or services unless and until we can re-engineer them to avoid infringement. This re-engineering process could require significant additional research and development resources, and we may not be able to complete it successfully.

Our success depends on the efforts of our key employees, including our senior management members and other technology talents. If we fail to hire, retain, and motivate our key employees, our business may suffer.