Jonathan Zhang
Analyst · Alex Poon from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question
Thanks, Tang Yan and Cathy. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. We started the year off with a great quarter. Our user base continued to expand, while both top line and bottom line showed robust growth. Total net revenue for the first quarter reached $435.1 million, up 64% year-over-year exceeding the high-end of our revenue guidance by 8%. Despite the negative seasonality from Chinese New Year, we still achieved a 13% sequential growth in revenue due to the strong organic growth momentum from live streaming business. Rapid top line growth cooked with operating leverage enabled us to deliver a 36.7% non-GAAP operating margin. Non-GAAP income attributable to Momo was $142.3 million, up 57% from the same quarter last year. Looking into the key revenue items, in the first quarter 2018, the revenue from live video services reached $371.5 million, up 75% year-over-year. In Q1, we continued our initiative to incentivize the talent agencies, which significantly boosted the improvements of our content ecosystem. At the same time, our operational efforts focused on introduction of new gamifications into showrooms during the non-event days allowing the organic growth momentum of live streaming business to overcome the negative impact from Lunar year holiday, grew at an impressive 13% on a quarter-over-quarter basis. As a result, the number of live streaming paying users for the quarter was 4.4 million, a 7% increase from the same period last year. The quarterly ARPPU was RMB563 before excluding VAT compared with RMB385 from a year ago. Moving on to the VAS and mobile game business, revenue from VAS, which includes membership subscriptions and virtual gifting services together, was $37 million, up 62% from the same period last year. The year-over-year increase was largely driven by the fast growing virtual gifting business and increase in SVIP subscriptions as Wang Li mentioned earlier. As the social behaviors on our platform continue to evolve and the social used cases continue to diversify, one of our key observations is that some social experiences previously put under live streaming business line and VAS business lines are actually converging. For example, the same person who used to chat in the live channels or video services on the live streaming can shift to chat rooms or quick chat experiences, which are under VAS business line and vice-versa, can happen too. As more and more of our users adopt live interactive experiences, we expect the line between what is live streaming and what is not live streaming to get increasingly blurred. Therefore, we encourage investors to look at paying users from VAS business and live streaming business holistically. The total number of paying users from VAS and live streaming services without double-counting the overlap was 8.1 million for the first quarter 2018, up from 7 million from the same quarter last year and 7.8 million a quarter ago or a 0.3 million quarterly net add. Revenue from mobile game revenue decreased by 43% year-over-year to 6.2 million due to our strategic defocus on jointly operated games. Now on revenue from mobile marketing, the revenue from mobile marketing services was $18.7 million up 5% year-over-year. The increase was driven by brand ad revenue growth. The number of key account customers grew significantly from same period last year as we gained more recognition from the brand marketers. Now, quickly to talk about some highlights on the cost and expenses items for the first quarter 2018. Our cost of revenue on a non-GAAP basis totaled $209.1 million, up 74% from the same quarter last year. This was primarily attributable to the increase in revenue sharing with a live streaming broadcasters and agencies. However on a sequential basis, the organic growth of live streaming services during the non-event days came in extremely strong during Q1. We scaled back the revenue oriented operating efforts around the quarterly competition event. Therefore, cost on bonus or rewards offered to broadcasters during the March tournament, was significantly reduced. As a result, the non-GAAP cost of revenue as a percentage of total net revenue dropped by 3.6%. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses for the first quarter was $41.1 million compared to $31.8 million for the same quarter last year. The increase was mainly due to our stepped up efforts in marketing spending to drive user growth. The sequential decrease in sales and marketing expenses was largely due to the seasonality in our marketing spending. Q1 tends to be the lowest season in our marketing activities. We do expect marketing spending to pick up from Q1’s level both in terms of absolute dollar amount and as a percentage of revenue as we head deeper into the year. Non-GAAP R&D expenses for the first quarter was $15 million compared to $7.2 million for the same period last year, representing a 3.4% and 2.7% of total revenue respectively. The increase reflected our strategy to step up our investment efforts in R&D area by recruiting additional R&D talents to support our product innovations. We ended the quarter with 1,303 total employees, up from 985 a year ago, of which 46% and 39% are R&D personnel respectively. Non-GAAP G&A expenses for the first quarter, was $11.2 million compared to $6.4 million for the same quarter last year. The G&A expenses as a percentage of total net revenue remains stable. Non-GAAP operating income was $159.9 million, up 59% year-on-year from $100.6 million. The non-GAAP operating margin for the quarter was 36.7%, 5.8% higher sequentially. However as the year progresses, the investment tend to ramp up in different areas such as marketing and R&D activities. The operating margin will come down from Q1 level and fluctuate on a quarterly basis. We will carefully manage the balance of this investment driving overall business growth and annual profitability targets. Now, turning to balance sheet and cash flow items, as of March 31, 2018, Momo’s cash, cash equivalents and the term deposits totaled $899.4 million compared to $1059.6 million as of December 31, 2017. The decrease was mainly due to the first tranche of payments in connection with the acquisition of Tantan, which was $229.8 million. Net cash provided by operating activities in the first quarter was $129.9 million compared to $95.4 million for the same quarter last year. Now turning to the second quarter 2018 revenue guidance, we estimate our second quarter revenue to come in the range from $470 million to $485 million, which translates into a year-over-year growth from 51% to 55%. As we closed the Tantan acquisition in May 2018, we will consolidate Tantan’s financials from June 2018. Therefore, our Q2 guidance includes around $4.5 million of revenue from Tantan, which represent our current estimate of Tantan’s revenues for the month of June. Please be mindful that this forecast represents the company’s current and preliminary view on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. In summary, we are very pleased with the remarkable results achieved in the first quarter 2018. That demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategy and the strong execution capabilities of management team. That concluded the prepared portion of today’s discussion. With that, I would like to turn the call back to Cathy to start the Q&A session.