Earnings Labs

Cheetah Mobile Inc. (CMCM)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 16, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello and welcome to Cheetah Mobile Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2015 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions]. After today’s presentation there will an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Helen Zhu. Please go ahead.

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Welcome to Cheetah Mobile’s fourth quarter earnings conference call. First of all, we are very sorry for our delay of the earnings call and also the earnings release. With us today are our CEO, Mr. Fu Sheng, and our CFO Mr. Andy Yeung. Following management’s prepared remarks we will conduct a Q&A session. Before we begin, I refer you to the Safe Harbor Statements in our earnings release, which also applies to our conference call today, as we will make forward-looking statements. At this time, I would now turn the conference call over to our CEO, Mr. Fu Sheng. Please go ahead, Fu Sheng.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

Thanks, Helen. In Q4 we had strong performance on both on the mobile user growth and monetization front setting new records across a number of areas including Mobile MAUs, revenues and profit. For 2016, we’ve reached our exceeded our strategic target for growing our mobile and overseas revenue to account for the vast majority of Cheetah Mobile’s overall sales. This enabled us complete our transformation into a truly global and mobile company. Looking ahead, we remain firmly committed to building Cheetah mobile into one of the leading mobile platforms globally and are sustainable and profitable basis. Our strategy is simple and clear. Using tool apps a main entry point for user acquisition further building content into our platform for user engagements and the leverage big data analytics as our strategic differentiation which is serving both our user and advertisers more efficiently and effectively. Clean Master, CM Security and other utility apps has helped us acquire a massive user base and we continue to serve as main entry points of our user occupation. To leverage our massive user base for 635 million mobile MAUs, we intend to build highly engaging mobile platform with content reach apps that we are doing out. In fact, our content strategy is already showing some promising results. In February our breakthrough mobile game apps Piano Tiles 2, was reached ranked as number one most downloaded free game on both Google Play and Apple app globally. In China, since integrating these content and personalization new servers into our mobile browser, we have seen significant growth in daily time spent per user to over 27 minutes. And these listings are our strategic is big data. Over the top of the year, we have made significant investments in big data analytics in order to better understanding and better serve…

Andy Yeung

Analyst

Thank you, Sheng. Hello everyone. Again, we apologize for the delay in release our earnings announcement today also the delays in our conference call. We actually closed 2015 with a very solid quarter both financially and operationally. For the full-year 2015, we are pleased to report that we have successfully accomplished the ambitious subsidiaries that we sat for last March, mainly exiting 2015 with more than 600 million monthly mobile active users doubling our annual revenues and making both mobile and overseas revenues the last maturity of our total revenue. Overall, 2015 marked an important and successful milestone for our transformation into a leading global mobile internet company having a tap for more sustainable and profitable growth in the future. Now, I’ll walk you through the details of our financial performance, all financial numbers are in RMB unless otherwise noted. Total revenues grew by 92% year-over-year and 12% quarter-over-quarter to RMB1.13 billion in the fourth quarter. For the full year 2015, our total revenues increased by 109% year-over-year to RMB3.68 billion. This strong performance was again driven by our mobile and global businesses. By platform, mobile revenues grew by 262% year-over-year and 14% quarter-over-quarter to RMB804 million for the fourth quarter. Mobile revenues account for 71% of our total revenues in the quarter up from 38% in the prior year period, and 70% in the previous quarter. In December, Cheetah has approximately 635 million mobile monthly active users worldwide, a 61% increase from the year ago and about 12% increase from September 2015. For the full-year 2015, mobile revenues grew by 423% year-over-year to RMB2.43 billion and accounted for 66% of total revenues in 2015. PC revenue declined by 10% year-over-year in Q4 and 4% year-over-year in the full-year 2015, the decreases in PC revenues were mainly due to the…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. And the first question comes from Jeff Hao with China Merchants.

Jeff Hao

Analyst

Hi, thank you for taking my question.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

Hi Jeff.

Jeff Hao

Analyst

[Interpreted]. Hi. So, my first question is about overseas competition landscape. We’ve seen that lot of Chinese firm have achieved a very good progress in terms of user acquisition and monetization in the overseas market, especially in the tool app category, so also especially in the emerging market. So, can the management comment on your views on competitive landscape and will this issue, impact your profitability for this year and I have a follow-up?

Fu Sheng

Analyst

[Interpreted]. So, thank you for your question Jeff. Our overseas competition is a hot topic at this stage. In fact, we are glad that like Cheetah Mobile have not only being successful overseas, but now have become a model for other Chinese companies, even they look for business opportunity. And to a great extent, there is recognition our model success, the success of our model. Right, so, yes, we do see a lot of competitors topping our business model. We think that there are two types of competition, the first type is that they initially use a very - vast amount of money to spend on sales and marketing expenditure to try to acquire user fairly quickly. The example of that would be some company like Apple. Yes, initially they are very successful. You think the channel to acquire some possible number of users download and value acquisition. But that’s not sustainable model. So as we have seen it in all the past two quarters, we are going to see the user acquisition when app was declining. So as such, like we do not think that, just by spending a lot of money in sales and marketing to acquire users is a long-term sustainable model. Right, so, another type is that they completely copy our business model. And it’s true that for small sized players it’s much easier to copy our overall product and business model. I think the comfortable with that 360 Security. I think they enjoyed some earlier success. So, certainly like they were successful which and our scales, but once they reached that I think they reached a pattern it’s very difficult for them to reach the scale of our level. So, I think if you look at some of the very concentrated stages, we work with…

Jeff Hao

Analyst

[Interpreted]. So my second question is about the content-driven product. Management mentioned in last quarter that there may be some breakthrough in one or two quarters, so can management give us some updates on development of content-driven products and if there can be some examples that would be great? Thank you.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

[Interpreted]. So, I think when we talk about content, I think maybe we can give some example of the recent product that we have launched. The first one is our like, Piano Tiles 2, it continued it went very well globally, very well with C5 users. I was I think number one on both iOS and Google Play in February. So, that’s one example. Right. So, another one of that we have mentioned before what was called personalized content. This product has been mentioned on the prepared remarks in China, this product, we have user engagement levels on a daily basis on average user use it for almost 30 minutes per day. So, we also have beginning to rollout our product in some of the overseas markets. I think in the second quarter we’ll have a more, wider rollout of those products in the second quarter. Thank you.

Jeff Hao

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. And the next question comes from Evan Zhou with Credit Suisse.

Evan Zhou

Analyst · Credit Suisse.

[Interpreted]. Hi, good evening Follow-up Sheng. Thanks for taking my questions. Questions regarding the performance of the legacy two core products CM Security and Clean Master, now we’re seeing some recent slight drop in the app download ranking in Google Play and all the other major rankings. So, just want to pick and source regarding, what’s your source regarding that and how do we see the kind of the overall lifecycle for these two key products? And also, how do you think about balance between the investments in user acquisition versus the itinerary of profit in 2016? Thank you.

Fu Sheng

Analyst · Credit Suisse.

[Interpreted]. So, well, thank you for your question Evan. This is a very good question. I think if you look at our scale today, we already have more than 600 million monthly mobile active users, in fact 35 million. And I think as we set the target last year, we’re hoping for that very ambitious target. But given the critical math what they have acquired, I think we don’t want to make pursuing a high MAU as our target or goal this year. So, I think if you look at our focus this year, we have to shift a little bit from focusing on the quantity of user growth into more the quality of the user growth and engagement. We know that some methods also have concern regarding the time users spend on the two applications. And as we have mentioned all along, we have a strategy over time to convert our user into high-engagement product. And this year our main focus will be improving that user engagement levels and the time spent that they have on our applications until content will be a major driver for that. And so, that’s how we look at the quantity versus quality of growth for our user base. The second part is that, regarding the modest declines in our rankings on app pennies, I think there are a couple of things and one is mentioned here. One is that we have, right now as we mentioned, beginning in 2014 late second half of 2014 we have a strategy to install our applications in some of the handsets with some OEM. And that now has become a quite an important channel for us especially in the emerging market. We acquired almost on a daily basis several hundred thousand new users every day, to installations.…

Evan Zhou

Analyst · Credit Suisse.

[Interpreted]. Thank you. Questions regarding the R&D spending and operation plan, I think you’d been recently launching the R&D center in U.S. and also hired a new CTO. I’m just wondering which are the major R&D areas that you’d be focusing on, is it more relied to - ready to fundamental technology or product driven enhancement, and how do we see the kind of the R&D spending in 2016 download? Thank you.

Fu Sheng

Analyst · Credit Suisse.

[Interpreted]. Okay. Thank you for your question. Your question is very professional. So, your question is very professional, very good questions. I think when we talked to some of the investors of industry a lot of time they only see one dimension of our company which is our user number, user growth and MAU growth. But we also, actually we have very strong R&D team. Over time we have now close to almost like 1,600 people that is in R&D department. And those folks have developed very good strong skill in new products. So, I think compared to our competitors we have a much stronger R&D project line teams. I think that would make a big difference in our competitive landscape. Right. So, I believe if you look at the mobile market today, I think you will see that user would use less to seek out information but rather they would enjoy the benefit of smart content delivery, more personalized content will be delivered to mobile user. So, this is an area that we think lot of opportunity there. So, if you look at what we have done, we also have higher charge on, a very experience reference in the tech industry in Charles Fan to become our CTO, and leading our global effort in some of these moments in R&D. So, I think if you think about it right, it will only deliver, if you want to focus on two applications we probably don’t need a very big team, only a few people can develop two applications. But if you think about, we want to use big data to help us to deliver and personalize content I think still there is some technical difficulty bottleneck there. I think this is an area that we have some experience and will continue to focus on it. And I think that from expertise that we can utilize in second, and that’s why we’re doing a global R&D operation. So, I think we would re-translate into competitive advantage for us. Again, we utilize big data analytics to develop personalized smart content delivery applications. And I think that would make us real competitive in the marketplace. Thank you.

Evan Zhou

Analyst · Credit Suisse.

Thank you, Fu Sheng. Thanks Andy.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And the next question comes from Wendy Huang of Macquarie.

Wendy Huang

Analyst

[Interpreted]. Thank you. My first question is so Cheetah originally was found from the Kingsoft Group. So, within the Kingsoft Group there was, also other fast growing things such as Kingsoft Cloud. So, is there any collaboration that Cheetah can have with other sister companies to generate more synergies in the future? And the second is about the global advertising market, such as [indiscernible] and also the personalized recommendation actually on the lines has changed a lot. So, what a kind of the bottlenecks or issues or issues that Cheetah focus on to address in the next one year and also what kind of resources that Cheetah expects to devout to adjust this issue? Thank you.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

[Interpreted]. Thank you for your question. I think when we look at our issue with Kingsoft, I think one of the very important contribution that Kingsoft had, is that they were very smart to maintain, allow us to maintain independence, operating independently from other products of the operations. So, if you look at our cooperation with other product, Kingsoft Corporation, they are always enhancing transactions that are based on normal commercial terms. So I think over time you would see they would continue to provide more, enhancing our last influence on Cheetah Mobile. I think that’s a good thing. I think as a publicly listed company, we always maintain our independence. So, of course like overall, we’ve continued to work very well with Kingsoft and the operation there. For example, going forward we’re going to utilize Kingsoft Japan to be part of how expansion effort in Japan. And that agreement they have been reached between us and Kingsoft operations on that. So, I think you would continue to see in certain areas we’ll work very well with Kingsoft to benefit both companies. But generally we always have often transaction with our parent company. So, your question about the global advertising market, I was very tuned. So if you look at some of the softness in the first quarter in our guidance I think that’s as we mentioned before big data seasonality and some of the greater than expected seasonality or softness coming from one of our largest platform partners Facebook. So, I think if you look globally, I think that’s how we look at it. One of the key areas for us for investment in the direct Southeast, in the direct south market team, we initially go with these. This is an area that we will have to probably do up one. Selling, advertising in developed market like U.S. and Europe is more complicated and more complex than most people would think. So, this is an area that we will continue to investing, to mention, we have a number of initiatives to expand our direct sales network in U.S. And we think that in couple of - probably in the second quarter or third quarter we will see some content coming from those efforts.

Wendy Huang

Analyst

[Interpreted]. Yes, my question is about the Indian market expansion, so what you’re thinking up there and what kind of investment size and also what kind of partners are you looking in the Indian market? And second question is about Seabird’s database recently talked. So was the intuition of the Seabird’s database many to actually increase the ROI of the advertising platform in future and also to kind of reduce some malicious or the fraud clicks? Thank you.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

[Interpreted]. Yes, so quickly to answer your question, I think you were trying to, the announcement that we made that we have formed, it’s not like alliance with other firms to share information on potential threat to content. And I don’t think we’re collecting viruses, I think we’re trying to collect information on potential strategic smartphone and share that with industry players. I think that’s a pretty normal security issue practice where different security firm would share what they know about different viruses and share information to help protect some on similar entity. So, that’s the purpose of that announcement and that agreement which is we’re working with other industry players, to provide better security software for mobile handsets. So that’s the second part of the question. I think the first part of the question, do you want to answer that. So, I think your question is about our investment strategy particularly in India. I think the overall point of view that we have for investment is that we, investment has to be considered case by case basis. And we have to make clear stand for us and we are also mindful of migrations. Obviously, some of our competitors for example, a company called 360 when overseas acquired Opera for a very happy migration of RMB1.2 billion, it was like $200 million of net debt. That’s a pretty happy price when we look at it because we actually have studied this case for more than a year now, almost a year now. And then, we cannot use the Asia migration to make acquisition overseas. We have to make sure that it should valuate, take the investment, valuation makes sense to us. So, for India, our view is that, India is a very attractive long-term market. There is a lot of potential. But it’s also a market that has limited multi-station capability at this point. So we’re mindful of that. Given the market view, we’re early in development. I think we’ll continue to rely on organic growth in India and only use investment as a supplementary strategy that’s not going to be a meaningful [indiscernible] our effort in India. But yes, opportunity presents itself when there is no small investment that makes sense to us, we’ll make that investment. But again you have to consider context of our overall strategic in India and also in terms of reasonable valuation that makes sense to us. If you look at our, currently if you look at our balance sheet we have almost $200 million in cash and we can certainly have the capability to raise more funds if we need to make investments. But I think at this point we’re pretty comfortable with our cash balance and also our position in market right now.

Wendy Huang

Analyst

Thank you.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And as there are no more questions, I would like to turn the call back over to management for any closing comments.

Andy Yeung

Analyst

Yes. Before we end the call, I just want to, just in case, due to an earnings release, we actually we also have make another announcement in addition to just our fourth quarter earnings. As we mentioned before, our board of directors have announced share repurchase program. And so I just want to provide a bit more details of that to investors before we close out the call today. Our board of directors has authorized in purchase of up to RMB100 million worth of our share on ADS. If you look at our board of directors’ decisions, it’s our strong belief that our company is in a very strong position, and our shares are undervalued and demonstrate our confidence in the longer-term business prospects for our business. So, just in case, people have not noticed that on our earnings call or in the press release, I just wanted to mention that. So, Helen?

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Yes. Thank you all for joining our conference call today. If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact. Thank you. Bye.

Fu Sheng

Analyst

Thank you.

Andy Yeung

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The conference call is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.