Tao Zou
Analyst · CICC. Please go ahead. Your line is open
Hello, everyone. Thank you, and welcome all for joining Kingsoft Cloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2024 earnings call. I am Zou Tao, CEO of Kingsoft Cloud. This quarter, our high-quality and sustainable development strategy continued to bear fruitful results. Our non-GAAP operating profit achieved profitability for the first time and a series of our key financial performance measures reached all-time highs. First, our revenue growth rate has climbed to a new level, building on the 16% year-over-year growth in Q3. We achieved total revenue of RMB2.23 billion this quarter, doubling year-over-year growth rate to 30% leading the industry's growth rate. Among this, Public Cloud revenue grew by 34% year-over-year and Enterprise Cloud revenue grew by 23% year-over-year, achieving a balanced development with dual growth engines. Second, our profitability improvement accelerated. This quarter, we achieved both revenue growth and profitability improvement, marking a turnaround from the company's longstanding history of operating losses and marching towards the goal of net profit breakeven. Non-GAAP operating profit turned positive for the first time with non-GAAP operating margin reaching 1.1%, representing a 12 percentage point improvement compared to a loss of 10.9% [technical difficulty]. Non-GAAP gross profit reached a record-high of RMB427.7 million, up 63% year-over-year. Non-GAAP gross margin was 19.2%. Our non-GAAP EBITDA margin also reached a new high at 16%, representing a year-over-year increase of 17.7 percentage points and a sequential increase of 6.3 percentage points. These are gratifying results of our comprehensive efforts to improve revenue quality, optimize business structure, and implement multiple cost reduction and efficiency enhancement measures simultaneously. Third, we continue to lead our transformation with AI. This quarter, our AI-related business achieved gross billing of RMB474 million, representing nearly 500% year-over-year growth and 31% year-over - quarter-over-quarter growth. Its contribution to Public Cloud revenue further increased to 34%. Fourth, as the sole strategic cloud platform of the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, we continue to fully embrace the opportunities brought by the AI era within the ecosystem. Thanks to the unique historical opportunities driven by Xiaomi EV, mobile phones, IoT devices, smart manufacturing, and WPS AI initiatives. This quarter, our revenues from Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem amounted to RMB493 million, up 78% year-over-year with its share of total revenues further increasing to 22%. Now let me walk you through the key business highlights for the fourth quarter of 2024. In terms of Public Cloud services, revenues reached RMB1.4 billion this quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 34%, capitalizing on the opportunities presented by Xiaomi's Human x Car x Home smart ecosystem, and the WPS AI penetration. As the sole strategic cloud platform within the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, we are seeing strong growth potential in the AI era. In December 2024, the shareholders approved a significantly increased revenue contribution from Xiaomi and Kingsoft, from 2025 to 2027 to a total of RMB11.3 billion, representing 10 times the amount in 2023. This quarter, revenue from Xiaomi and Kingsoft increased by 76% year-over-year and we are steadily advancing and executing our business cooperation as we expect the growth momentum to continue in 2025. Meanwhile, our AI-related business continues to gain momentum as well. This quarter, the gross billing of AI-related business reached RMB474 million, increasing by 31% sequentially and contributing 34% of Public Cloud services revenue, leading the industry. Both Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem and external AI customers increased their usage and we made breakthroughs in customer acquisition, including large language model customers and expansion in use cases, including AI application for Internet company customers. In the era of AI cloud computing with in-depth industry insights, advanced R&D investments, and substantial computing power, we have been highly praised in terms of customer service, technology capabilities, and quality assurance by our customers and industry experts. Moreover, our competitive strengths have gained recognition by a top tier in the industry. In this wave of intelligent computing cloud, the company's market share and industry reputation have significantly improved, securing a top position in the industry. In terms of Enterprise Cloud services, revenue amounted to RMB822 million, increasing by 22.7 year-over-year. In Public services space, we promote solutions with standardized operations, leveraging a foundation of model capabilities, big data and collaborative office tools. This quarter, we completed the construction of the Wuhan Optics Valley cloud platform, where as a joint operating partner, we will be fully responsible for the regional implementation, operation, and maintenance, strengthening the management and application development of data resources, so as to achieve the unified planning, construction, and management of digital optics value. In Digital Healthcare space, in December 2024, we completed a significant milestone of the system construction of Ezhou Central Hospital and the KDX, which stands for Kingsoft Cloud Data X, data middle platform has been put into operation. We adopted a cloud-native microservice architecture to solve the multi-campus business collaboration and real-time data integration difficulties of Ezhou Central People's Hospital with a unified data platform supporting more than [8,600] data operations. In addition, in collaboration with Kingsoft Office, we jointly developed an electronic medical record product based on WPS, which has supported 61 medical departments' daily operations of the hospital. In terms of product and technology, we uphold the principle of building success, based on technology and innovation, focusing on delivering best-in-class customer experience across our core product offerings. This quarter, we continued to enhance the product capabilities of our intelligent cloud computing services. We launched the ninth-generation cloud server, which efficiently supports high-performance computing use cases such as AI, machine learning, and inference. It also effectively meets the demand of large-scale databases, real time data analysis and have strengthened data security and encryption processing. We officially released our proprietary training and inference platform, namely [Singular] platform, which supports customers' needs for development, training and customizing images. Meanwhile, our intelligent computing network has significantly reduced the troubleshooting time for large model training from hours to minutes, ensuring service stability. We will continue to strengthen our intelligent cloud computing products and technologies to provide customers with stable and fast computing services. In addition, both our Public Cloud and Enterprise Cloud solutions use cases have achieved compatibility with DeepSeek. In summary, led by the high-quality and sustainable development strategy, our fundamentals have substantially improved and we have entered into a new era of healthy growth. Looking ahead, we aim to simultaneously expand our revenue scale and improve profitability. Deepen cooperation with Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, comprehensively understand and explore AI opportunities, thereby continuously creating value for our customers, shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders. I will now pass the call to our CFO, Haijian, to go over our financials for the fourth quarter 2024. Thank you.