Jay Xiao
Analyst · CICC. Please go ahead
Good morning, and good evening, everyone. It's my pleasure to speak with you again. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the COVID situation in China underwent a major turning point, bringing considerable pressures to the Chinese economy. But despite such pressure, we were able to achieve satisfactory results by rigorously adhering to a strategy of prioritizing risk management, making data-driven decisions, and continuously focusing on improving and refining our operations. Our loan originations for the past quarter reached RMB56.1 billion, representing an increase of 29% year-over-year with total outstanding loan balance reaching RMB99.6 billion as of December 31, 2022, representing an increase of 16% year-over-year. Total revenue reached RMB3.1 billion, representing an increase of 38.7% year-over-year with net income reaching RMB301 million, representing an increase of 17.9% year-over-year. Our asset quality continues to steadily improve. And in addition, funding costs decreased to 6.8% from 7.0% in the third quarter. Our net profit margin increased substantially from 4.8% in the first quarter of 2022 to 9.9% this past quarter. From our fourth quarter numbers, we can see that Lexin has clearly produced three consecutive quarters of steadily improving profitability, realizing a V-shaped recovery. To be more specific, there were three main highlights for the past quarter. First, the continued improvement in asset quality; second, the ability of our installment e-commerce platform service business to deliver growth against a weak backdrop and breakthroughs in our tech-empowerment service sector, which achieved its first quarterly profit; and third, notable results in reducing operating costs and in increasing efficiency. On asset quality, although we were affected by the COVID outbreaks, Lexin was able to continue our stable and upward trajectory in asset quality, which was accomplished through our focus on continuous improvements to our risk management capabilities and our progress in refining our operations, and this can be seen from our existing and our new customers. For existing customers, we took the following two steps. First, we improved our ability to identify prime customers from our data and through deeper data mining of the information available with Lexin's ecosystem. We refined our ability to identify different customer segments. In particular, we continue to data-mine and obtain valuable information from the PBOCs credit data. This allowed us to more deeply and comprehensively to improve our customer risk assessment related profiles in multiple dimensions, including customer risk profile, income level information, asset information, and existing customer liability. In the application of our models, we were able to finalize the joint modeling of over 10 data loops, building an accurate ROI evaluation framework in the progress. Improvements in our ability to identify prime customers allowed us to dedicate greater resources towards serving this customer segment, while also expediting the reduction of high risk segments. Second, we applied our [indiscernible] policy, which refines our operating strategy by improving our ability to identify different customer groups and segments via more accurate segmentation capabilities, enabling us to dig deeper to meet and satisfy the needs of different customer cohorts and improve our customer satisfaction rates and customer retention. In the fourth quarter, loan contributions from our prime customers increased by 60% year-over-year, while loan contributions from our high risk customers increased by 13%. So prime customers as a percentage of loan increased from 72% in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 82% in the fourth quarter of 2022. For our new customers, we continue to expand our dataset and the use of our models. We have built a complete end-to-end RTA processing model, which has significantly improved our post customer acquisition conversion rate by over 50%. We have improved the efficiency and accuracy of our customer identification capabilities by 20% through pre-lending and in-lending channel model iterations. We have also constructed a new operational metrics to continuously increase and improve the retention rate and the activity rate for both new and existing customers. In the fourth quarter, the percentage of new prime customers with approved credit lines increased by 18.2% with average ticket sizes for new customers increasing by 16.7% quarter-over-quarter. Online advertising cost to convert credit lines into active borrowers from the time of granting of the credit line to the time of the use of credit decreased by 25.9% quarter-over-quarter for prime customers. The second highlight was the ability of our installment e-commerce platform service business to deliver growth against a weak backdrop and outbreaks in our tech-empowerment service sector, which achieve its first quarterly profit. Our installment e-commerce platform service business under a weak backdrop of poor overall consumption throughout the year last year was able to achieve 1.4 billion in GMV for the fourth quarter, an increase of 40.2% year-over-year. Younger more fashion-focused non-electronic device consumption scenarios such as cosmetics, apparel, and footwear favored by younger demographics became our main driver, demonstrating notable increases in growth and further enhancing our competitive advantages in consumption scenarios and consumer demographics in the process. For the year 2022, our e-commerce platform [indiscernible] total number of merchants grew by a 103% year-over-year with average tickets prices increasing by 39% year-over-year. In addition, our tech-empowerment service business is designed for small and medium sized banks, has also made significant progress. Our service enables the digital transformation of our financial institutional partners by providing five core services: Product development, customer acquisition channel for building, joint risk management, customer lifecycle management and intelligent customer services, enabling our partners to achieve breakthroughs in their businesses. Our partners have been steadily grown wherever the corporation has come online and all new launches in the fourth quarter has progressed to scale, enabling our tech-empowerment service business to achieve profitability for the quarter. These two businesses are both critical components of our ecosystem, forming a mutually reinforcing cycle and linking with our main credit facilitation business. Each business has also achieved its own respective breakthroughs in the fourth quarter and can be expected to be [accomplishing] new growth driver in the future. Lexin's ecosystem, which is integrated with different businesses in various consumption scenarios as well as technological capabilities will in time become our core competitive advantage, differentiating ourselves from our competition and establishing our sustainable long-term core competitive advantages. The third highlight is related to the notable results in reducing operating costs and increasing efficiency. Operational expenses for the fourth quarter were RMB660 million, down 2.1%, sequentially. In particular, G&A expenses decreased by 7% quarter-over-quarter to about RMB97 million. Total expenses as a percentage of the outstanding loan balance has continued [indiscernible] second quarter of 2022. In addition, in the fourth quarter, we reconstructed some functions and downsized the headcount to further stimulate the overall vitality of the company and to improve organizational efficiency. Behind the aforementioned operational achievement is the continued enhancement of our data and technological capabilities. R&D expenses for the fourth quarter was approximately RMB136 million, which represents a leading position in the industry. Lexin's unique smart business engine has integrated digital and intelligent capabilities into every key aspect of our daily operation and enterprise. Specifically, in terms of system capabilities, we further applied the indicator variation and intelligent attribution systems to the core notes of our transaction and risk management systems. We built a unified event management platform, covering all internal and external events related to products and technology, greatly improving our data efficiency and accuracy. In terms of model applications, we continue to improve our lifecycle models and have developed and iterated more than 30 targeted marketing models, among which our model metrics of customer intent and customer reaction is able to cover scales of 10 million users per month and has achieved meaningful results. For specific customer groups, after using our models, order rates have increased by 30% with ARPU and profit increasing by over 50%. Finally, I would like to update you on Lexin's corporate social responsibility initiatives. In the first half of 2022, we launched a specific program called [indiscernible] to help relieve small and micro enterprise with their cash liquidity problems. In the fourth quarter, we continue to provide consistency, enabling the total amount of small and micro loans to reach RMB5 billion for the quarter. In February of this year, a follow-up program called [indiscernible] was launched, which aims to promote a recovery in consumption through our nine initiatives and three directives, promoting individual consumption, facilitating merchant growth, and enabling the recovery of small and micro type business. In addition to better protect customers, we are currently instituting a 24/7 customer protection hotline, which will also further enhance our customer satisfaction rates. Going forward, we see an accelerated pace of recovery for domestic consumption and improved macroeconomic environment. So we remain cautiously optimistic about the prospect for business growth this year. In 2023, we will make sustainable profitability, which is Lexin's main objective. For concrete steps, which will take towards this goal are: first, is to continue to strengthen our risk management systems and build our core capabilities further improving our asset quality in the process. Second, is to focus on refining our customer operations by improving our ability to identify and manage our prime customers from our existing ones, adjusting policies for our new customers based on the economic conditions, capturing the opportunities presented by the consumption recovery through investing in customer acquisition at the opportune times, continuing to both improve our customer quality and quantity and improving asset quality in the process. Third, is to strengthen Lexin's unique business ecosystem, including online consumer finance, offline – installment e-commerce platform service, tech-empowerment service and more, allowing our multiple and diverse businesses to become mutually supportive and mutually reinforcing, generating a virtuous cycle. Fourth is to continue to reduce cost and improve efficiency, increasing our ability to generate sustainable profits in the process. In the first quarter of 2023, our total loan balance exceeded RMB100 billion, marking another milestone in a company's growth and development with the exception of the beginning of the first quarter, which was negatively impacted by the tail end of the COVID outbreak. All risk management-related metrics have started to recover since February and we expect both our loan originations and profitability for the first quarter of 2023 to improve from levels achieved in the fourth quarter of 2022. In addition, we expect to continue double-digit growth in both our loan originations and net profit for the year 2023. Let me now hand over the call to our CFO for the financial update. Thank you.