Shannon Shen
Analyst · Citi. Please go ahead
Thanks, Larry. And thank you everyone for joining the call. Now, I will walk you through our operating and financial results, and conclude with how we build out the coming quarter. Please note our financial data is in RMB terms. In 2020, we comprehensively upgraded our products in terms of our instructor and tutor teams, content development and technology, as we remained firmly committed to improving the learning experience and effectiveness of our students. Firstly, over the past year, more than 100 top-notch instructors join us many of whom have considerable years of experience. For the junior and senior high school segments, we have established a strong model and decent reputation by building up a team of industry leading instructors. Meanwhile, in 2020, we further invested in cultivating our own instructors, candidates who are young and have high potential. Many of them graduated from renowned universities, including Beijing University, Tsinghua University, Harvard University, Columbia University and Oxford University, et cetera. We have also established a roadmap to train new instructors. Many of our new instructors who graduated in July 2020, after over a half year of training have grown into instructors favored by students and parents a lot, some of whom have attracted over 10,000 regularly priced courses enrollment. Secondly, we constantly invest to develop and upgrade our educational content and products, compared with the end of 2019, our course content development team expanded over 4 times, bringing reach and localized content specialty. We have achieved progress is standardizing our curriculum in 2020 and have established curriculum of different difficulty levels across our primary school and high school courses. In 2021, we will continue to work on refining our curriculum. We developed our course content, and our lecture training jointly to streamline our course delivery process. This practice ensures the scientific nature of our course syllabus, the specialization of our instructors and the standardization of our quality control. Lastly, technology plays a vital role in improving our in-class experience. Our [S-stream streaming media system and our air sound echo] [ph] detection system leverage artificial intelligence to automatically adjust system settings to adapt to different network environments and hardware situations. Achieving an optimal effect for the in-class [multiplayer voice and interaction scenarios] [ph]. Moreover, we have developed a virtual 3D science laboratory site, which stimulates the environment for physics and chemistry experiments for junior and senior high school students and teachers. The constant upgrade of our educational products have effectively translated into our improved retention rates and provided a solid driver for our long-term healthy and sustainable development. Despite a challenging environment, we closed our fiscal year 2020 with exceptional business and financial performance. During the fourth quarter, as we set all time record for revenues, gross billings, and paid enrollments. We are pleased to see that the pandemic situation improving and we are thrilled with the way our teams continue to focus and executive throughout this period of elevated uncertainty. Moving out, I will briefly recap the financials for the fiscal year 2020. Our net revenues continued to grow reaching RMB7.1 billion, representing a 237% increase from RMB2.1 billion in 2019. With revenue grow to be more than 3.5 times of the prior year’s figure for the past 3 consecutive years. Gross billings, the leading indicator for net revenues was RMB9 billion, increasing by 168% year-over-year from RMB3.4 billion last year. Paid enrollments increased to 5,871 thousand for fiscal year 2020 or 2.68 times that of the fiscal year 2019. For 2020, we achieved net operating cash inflow of RMB603 million, compared to RMB1,285 million in 2019. Removing the effects caused by the extra cash we paid over RMB105 million for the independent investigation, our net operating cash inflow will be higher. That demonstrates our exceptional operating efficiency aimed into intense competition. Furthermore, in the second quarter of 2020, we have repurchased approximately RMB1.1 million ADS, or approximately RMB283 million. Despite such cash outlay, we have ample cash reserves as our cash, short-term investments, and long-term investments reaching approximately RMB8.2 billion as of December 31, 2020. Next, let me go through the key financials for the fourth quarter of 2020 in details. Revenue increased 137% year-over-year to RMB2.2 billion driven by continuously expanding student numbers, thanks to our enhanced teaching quality and brand recognition. Our gross billings increased by 99% year-over-year to $3.1 billion, mainly due to increase in paid enrollments from the summer and high level retention in the fall. Paid enrollments which refer to enrollment priced at or above RMB99 increased to a record high of RMB2.28 million for the quarter and 2 times that of the same period in 2019. Let’s break down our revenue streams by business line. Net revenue from our K-12 courses increased by 156% year-over-year to RMB1.98 billion and accounted for 89% of net revenues and will continue to be our main source of revenue going forward. Gross billings contributed by K-12 courses rose by 110% year-over-year to RMB2.92 billion. Paid course enrollments for K-12 grew by 113% year-over-year to RMB2.14 billion. Average enrollments per class was RMB2,600 in the fourth quarter in 2020 compared to RMB2,800 in the third quarter. Quarter-over-quarter, the numbers slipped slightly, because we offered shorter-term courses with smaller sizes to cater to various students need. Average enrollments per class this quarter increase the significantly from around RMB1,700 in the same quarter of 2019. Net revenues from our foreign language, professional, interest courses and other services grew to RMB236 million and accounted for 11% of net revenues. Gross billings contributed by foreign language, professional, interest of courses, and other services raised RMB224 million. Paid course enrollments for foreign language, professional, and interest courses reached 136,000. Leveraging our know-how with online live large class education, we will further expand into this large industry segment. Moving over to selected financial metrics summary. Our cost of revenues increased by 250% year-over-year to RMB660 million. The year-over-year growth was mainly due to increase in compensation for instructors and tutors, learning materials, rental expenses, as well as server and bandwidth cost. GAAP gross profit margin decreased to 72% down from 79% in the same period of 2019. Non-GAAP gross profit margin, which excludes share-based compensation decreased to 73% down from 80% in the same period of 2019. The decrease was primarily due to an increase in the number of instructors and tutors to enhance our service level and the personalized experience that our students received as well as an increase in compensation for such staff. Selling expenses increased to about RMB1.798 billion, up from RMB442 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. Within that expenses for traffic acquisition will approximately RMB1.267 billion. Expenses for branding activities were approximately RMB59 million and the remaining expenses cover labor, servers, bandwidth, et cetera. The selling expenses dropped by 13% from the third quarter, which is our first sequential decline in sales expenses. First of all, that attributes to the integration of our K-12 operations into the Gaotu brand, which continues to bring synergies and extra efficiency. Going forward, we will focus our K-12 branding practices around the Gaotu brand, which will save unnecessary costs in branding activities. Secondly, we have been exploring and expanding new and low-cost customer acquisition channels, including offline channels, short videos, live streaming, et cetera. By balancing our investment across different channels, we managed to control our customer acquisition costs in an acceptable range and achieved an effective growth on a lifetime value basis. We have always focused on our effective growth strategy, and we will never pursue meaningless scale expansion at the expense of losses. We have made a number of technology innovations around customer acquisition, including progresses on the intelligent traffic acquisition, sales leads grouping, traffic control and student satisfaction. We have taken the lead to closely cooperate with major media providers of traffic channels on the premise of ensuring data security, leveraging the strong algorithm capabilities of both parties to effectively control our customer acquisition cost and recruit better quality sales leads. In the meantime, we have embedded the multitask learning, transfer learning, reinforcement learning technologies into our internal service flow to effectively improve the traffic quality and efficiency in matching tutors and students. Gradually, we have created a set of refined customer acquisition, sales lead quality control and the digital operating strategy on our marketing flow. Research and development expenses increased by 229% year-over-year to RMB275 million. The increase was primarily due to an increase in the number of courses professionals and technology development personnel, as well as an increase in compensation for such staff. G&A expenses increased by 373% to RMB218 million, mainly due to an increase in G&A headcount and related compensation, as well as an increase in fees for investigation purpose. Non-GAAP net loss was RMB564 million, compared to net income of RMB198 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. GAAP net loss margin was minus 28%. As of December 31, 2020, we had RMB355 million of cash and cash equivalents, RMB7.3 billion of short-term investments, and RMB531 million of long-term investments combining to be RMB8.2 billion. That compares with a total of RMB2.7 billion of cash and cash equivalents, short-term investments and long-term investments as of December 31, 2019. As of December 31, 2020, our deferred revenue balance was RMB2.73 billion. Deferred revenue primarily consists of the tuition collected in advance. Net operating cash flow for the fourth quarter of 2020 was RMB636 million. This demonstrates our strong organizational capability, in balancing investments and returns. With that, I will now provide our business outlook. Before I start, I would like to highlight 3 factors influencing how we view the coming quarter’s performance. Firstly, the Spring Festival of 2021 started more than 2 weeks later than in 2020. Housing fewer weekends to deliver courses this quarter, and so is the corresponding revenue. Therefore, for an apple-to-apple comparison, we should add at least a 22% growth rate to the guidance we are providing. Secondly, this year’s winter break is short. Parents and students do not have enough time to take both short-term promotional courses and winter semester regular courses. Instead, we focused our offering on the sole spring semester sessions and expect the second quarter’s growth to be higher. Thirdly, we had a higher base of the gross billings and revenues in the first quarter of 2020 affected by the sudden outbreak of COVID-19. As such, based on our current estimate, net revenue for the first quarter of 2021 are expected to be between RMB1.816 billion and RMB1.856 billion, representing an increase of 40% to 43% on a year-over-year basis. That concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready to take questions. Thanks.