Greg Abovsky
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead
Thank you, Tigran and thank you all for joining our third quarter earnings call today. It was a good quarter. Our consolidated revenue grew 38% year-on-year in Q3. Online advertising revenues increased 21% year-on-year. Total TAC grew 9% year-on-year and amounted to 12.8% of total revenues, down 350 bps from Q3 2018 and down 70 bps sequentially. Traffic acquisition costs related to our partner advertising network increased 2% year-on-year. Traffic acquisition costs related to distribution partners grew 26% year-on-year mainly on the back of the Android growth. In Q3, distribution TAC averaged 7.7% of Yandex Properties revenues, which is 20 basis points lower compared to Q2. Turning to our cost structure. In Q3, total OpEx excluding TAC and G&A grew 54% year-on-year. Excluding stock-based comp, our operating expenses also increased 54%. This growth was primarily driven by increased cost of sales, including costs related to drive and our corporate taxi services, investments in content with the media services, as well as costs related to our food delivery business and IoT devices. As of September 30th, we had 9,588 employees, up 6% compared to June 30th, primarily reflecting new hires in Taxi, Search and Portal and Geo services. On a year-over-year basis, our headcount was 8% higher. In Q3, our personnel costs amounted to 18% of total revenues. G&A expense in Q3 increased 21% year-on-year. The growth was mainly reflected in our investments in servers and data center equipment in one of our data centers, as well as costs related to purchases of office and other equipment. Our consolidated adjusted EBITDA grew 29% year-on-year. This quarter, the impact from Forex was a gain of RUB254 million related to depreciation of the Russian ruble during Q3 from RUB63.1 to the dollar to RUB64.4 to the dollar. Adjusted net income in Q3 was up 12% year-over-year. Adjusted net income margin was 15.3%. Our CapEx was 12% of total Q3 revenues. We reiterate our outlook for CapEx this year. We expect our CapEx excluding new HQ expenditures to be in the low teens as a percent of total revenues in 2019. Now, let me turn to the performance of our business units. Search and Portal delivered strong results despite tougher comps with revenues growing 20.7% year-on-year. Our IoT initiatives contributed 100 basis points to Search and Portal revenue growth. Adjusted EBITDA of Search and Portal grew 23% year-on-year in Q3, and it’s adjusted EBITDA margin was 49.6%, up 80 bps compared with a year ago. Excluding IoT, adjusted EBITDA margin of Search and Portal was 50.7%, up 1.6 percentage points from Q3 of 2018. Margin improvement was mainly due to the slowdown of traffic acquisition cost growth on both ad network and distribution partner funds, as well as savings in advertising and marketing. We now expect our adjusted EBITDA margin of Search and Portal in 2019 to be roughly in line with the previous year. Excluding IoT, we anticipate that adjusted EBITDA margin of our core business will be up slightly on a year-over-year basis. Turning to Classifieds, revenue of our classifieds business grew 39% year-over-year in Q3. The growth was mainly driven by the revenues generated from listing fees and VAS which increased 88% year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA of Classifieds was RUB43 million. On to Media Services. In Q3, Media Services revenue grew 123% year-on-year mainly reflecting the growth of our subscription services and video advertising driven by Kinopoisk. Media Services adjusted EBITDA loss was RUB636 million mainly as a result of our ongoing investments in content, costs related to advertising and marketing as well as new hires on the back of business growth. Yandex.Music continued to strengthen its position in the music streaming market in Russia with 2.7 million subscribers as of today. This is compared to 2 million subscribers that we reported on the call in July. The rapid growth of our subscriber base mainly reflected recent initiatives related to Yandex.Plus, in particular, the launch of a family subscription as well as new markets such as Kazakhstan and Belarus. We’re also building momentum with Kinopoisk, extending the content library, as well as the list of partners such as CBS and AMC. Currently, Kinopoisk's streaming catalog includes about 9,000 movies and TV shows, while we expect the number of viewing subscribers to reach 0.5 million in October, including subscribers of Yandex.Plus. Turning to Other Bets and Experiments. In Q3, revenues of Other Bets and Experiments represented by Yandex.Drive, Yandex Zen, geo services, Cloud and Education were RUB4.1 billion and grew 176% year-on-year, driven by Yandex.Drive, Geo and Zen. Adjusted EBITDA loss of Other Bets and experiments was RUB1.2 billion primarily as a result of our investments in Drive and Cloud. In Q3, Yandex.Drive increased its total fleet to 16,500 cars and became the second largest car sharing service in the world in terms of fleet size. On Geo front. In Q3 Geo services revenues continue to double year-on-year, primarily driven by local based advertising revenues, which increased almost 4 times, while the number of SMB clients tripled compared with last year. Connected cars, remain a key area of focus for us within the Yandex ecosystem. Starting in Q3, new Geely [ph] Atlas cars as well as Hyundai Creta and Kia's Cerato have been equipped with Yandex Auto. Now getting back to corporate matters. We ended the quarter with approximately RUB85.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents, which is approximately $1.3 billion at the exchange rate as of September 30th. This includes the cash of Yandex.Taxi which amounted to RUB25.7 billion or $400 million as of September 30th. Turning to guidance. Based on the recent solid performance of our businesses, we increased the outlook for consolidated revenue on ex-Yandex market basis, and now expected to grow 36% to 38% year-over-year. Also, we increased the lower range of the previous guidance of our Search and Portal business and now expected to grow in the range of 20% to 21% year-over-year in 2019. With this, I'm turning the mic to the operator for the Q&A session.