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Noah Holdings Limited (NOAH)

Q1 2015 Earnings Call· Tue, May 19, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Noah Holdings Limited First Quarter 2015 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. During the Q&A session, we ask that you please limit yourselves to two questions and one follow-up. If you would like to ask additional questions, you may reenter the queue to do so. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. After the close of the U.S. market on Monday, Noah issued a press release announcing its first quarter 2015 financial results, which is available on the company's IR webpage at noahwm.investorroom.com. This call is also being webcast and will be available for replay purposes on the company's website. I would like to call your attention to the Safe Harbor statements in connection with today's call. The company will make forward-looking statements, including those with respect to expected future operating results and expansion of its business. Please refer to the risk factors inherent in the company's business and that have been filed with the SEC. Actual results may be materially different from any forward-looking statements the company makes today. Noah Holdings Limited does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under the applicable law. The results announced today are unaudited and subject to adjustments in connection with the completion of the company's audit. Additionally, certain non-GAAP measures will be issued in our financial discussion. A reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP financial results can be found in the earnings press release posted on the company's website. I would now like to hand the call over to Ms. Jingbo Wang, Chairman and CEO of Noah. She will be speaking in Chinese and her remarks will be translated into English. Thank you. And please go ahead.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Interpreted] Thank you, operator and thank you all for joining us. With me today are Mr. Kenny Lam, Noah’s Group President and Ms. Ching Tao, Noah’s CFO. Mr. Lam will start by providing a brief overview of our financial highlights for the first quarter of 2015 and will walk you through the performance of our core wealth and asset management businesses. After that I will provide an update on the progress we are making to develop the global open architecture product platform as well as progress with our new internet finance business. I will also review our strategic initiatives to establish an integrated financial services platform to support the sustainable growth of the company. Lastly, Ching will provide further insights into our financials and reiterate our 2015 guidance. We will be happy to take any questions at the end of our prepared remarks. Now I’ll turn the call to Mr. Lam.

Kenny Lam

Management

Thank you, Chairman Wang. What we’ll do is we’ll do mine and Chairman Wang’s both in Chinese and English. And in Tao Ching’s section in the Q&A will mostly be in English. [Interpreted] Thank you, Chairman Wang. We are pleased to have delivered strong results in the first quarter of 2015 with top and bottom lines both in line of our expectations. Net revenues were $71.8 million, a 43% increase from the corresponding period in 2014 and a 14% increase from the fourth quarter of 2014. On the bottom line, non-GAAP net income was $22.5 million and a 24% increase from the corresponding period in 2014 and a 45% increase from the fourth quarter of 2014. In terms of our core businesses, we distributed $3.9 billion of wealth management products during the first quarter representing a 64% increase year-over-year and a 108% increase quarter-over-quarter. Our total registered client into active client base also increased at an encouraging rate. Total registered clients as of the end of Q1 increased by 35% year-over-year to 74,895. And total active clients reached 5,275 a 62% increase from the corresponding period in 2014. In the first quarter, there was a substantial change in the product mix. The transaction value of PE and VC products distributed increased by 108% compared with the same period of the prior year and 139% compared to the last quarter. Secondary market product distributed increased by 622% year-over-year and 97% quarter-over-quarter. We started distribution of asset allocation related products since the second quarter of 2014. In the first quarter of 2015, asset allocation related products increased by 1,312% compared with the last quarter. Our clients asset allocation to international asset classes increased by 761% compared with the same period of the prior year and 2,062% compared to the last quarter. Over…

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Interpreted]. Thank you, Kenny. Noah was founded with the vision of becoming a wealth management company with outstanding asset management capabilities that serves Chinese people all over the world. Over the past few years, this vision has inspired us to continuously meet customer needs and constantly expanded growth. Thanks to Kenny joining Noah, I have a lot more time and energy to focus on building Noah’s global open architecture product platform and developing our internet finance platform. Our product center which is positioned as a global open architecture product platform covers eight regions across China as well as global markets through our team in Hong Kong. Currently we have over 50 employees in our Hong Kong team. At the same time we are also focused on expanding our customer services by building professional care subsidiaries. For example, leveraging a specialized loan company to provide customers with collateralized loans to meet short-term liquidity needs or using an insurance brokerage, the insurance needs of our customers or using overseas trust and overseas insurance brokers to provide trust and insurance services to our family office clients. In the first quarter, the local people’s mind has changed very quickly. We see the trend of previous alternative products transitioning into standardized wealth management products. Regarding secondary market products, we started the transition from our boutique select model to a platform model. First the research team and product team create a pool of products and provide our customers with a platform to choose secondary market product they prefer. At the same time, our research department will closely monitor, investigate and report on managers of large funds on regular basis. Based on our internal research, we would choose some funds for large-scale distribution. The new platform plus our new screening model will effectively improve our coverage and…

Ching Tao

CFO

Thank you, Kenny and Wang and hello everyone. To make use of everyone’s time, rather than reading through the financials that are disclosed in our release I will give a high level overview of our Q1 results and highlight a few areas before we go into the Q&A. We are pleased to have started the year with a steady top and bottom line performance. Q1 net revenues increased 43% year-over-year to $71.8 million. And Q1 non-GAAP net income grew 24% year-over-year to $22.5 million, both largely in line with management’s expectations. We distributed approximately $3.9 billion worth of wealth management products during the quarter representing a 64% increase year-over-year and continue to diversify our product mix as Kenny mentioned earlier in the call. You can find a break-down of the operating metrics of our wealth management business in a table at the back of our earnings release. The effective commission rate for the first quarter of 2015 was 0.82% compared to 0.77% in the same period last year and 1.08% in the fourth quarter of 2014. The sequential reduction in the effective commission rates was primarily due to changes in the product mix. Some fluctuation in the quarterly commission rate is also related to the volatility of the underlying market and it’s still within a very healthy range. Recurring revenues was $34.7 million accounting for 51% of net revenues in Q1 2015 compared to $30.9 million in Q1 of 2014 or 65% of net revenues. The decrease in recurring revenues as a percentage of total was primarily due to the increase of one-time commission revenue along with a significant increase in total transaction value quarter-over-quarter and an increase of performance based income as well as revenues from other - from the internet finance business. While we believe this trend has…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from Ellen Tu [ph] from BICC. Please go ahead.

Ellen Tu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Kenny Lam

Management

I think the first question is really around the middle and back office and how we are entailing you best in the middle and back office, and what’s the impact is likely going to be on the financial side? I’ll answer the strategy on the middle and back office. And then the impact on the financial side, I’ll let Tao Ching to answer. The second set of question is really around our product structure, was it really related to two sets of questions, one is around the mix between international and domestic asset allocation and second is really on our asset allocation products, what the impact is likely going to be going forward. Within the second set of questions I think there is a set of questions around our carried interest and our performance base fee, based on secondary market. I think I will first answer the first set of questions and then let Wang to answer the second set of questions. [Foreign Language]. And I’m just going to answer the question first, also in English as well. So, we’re basically focusing on a major transformation of our systems this year. We’re focusing on two main areas, one; is actually on the core system transformation where we’re changing our ERP system as well as our functional system like CRM, HR and finance. And that will actually have an impact not only for this year but also we expect the systems would be helpful for our growth in the next three or five years. The second part of our, on operation and transformation is that, we’re now turning into a group management matrix organization whereby the group will now basically set our policies for the main businesses, the wealth management, the asset management and the internet finance business. So, each of the businesses, wealth management, asset management and internet finance will basically develop the more capabilities in each function. In that way we’ll be longer efficient in the group and we also developed a lot more capability at the business level.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

Okay, well, let me translate summarize what Chairman Wang actually just said. I think on Gopher Asset Management, we’re still progressing towards the multi-boutique asset management firm. Most of our asset classes are still focused on funds. I think particularly for VCP we’re actually developing quite an even brand in China where not only positioning would now be in a lot of client loyalty. And on that particular asset class we would do a lot of co-investment to recon this and be at the class to do, and mostly fund-of-funds. Overseas platform we expect it be currently around, like you said around 10%, I think we’re expecting it to be around 20% to 30% of the split within our total asset allocation, particularly Chairman Wang mentioned on real-estate, we expect it to be a substantial proportion of our asset management asset allocation. We expect that within real-estate, we currently have a long-lore that is share based than debt based. And so, the way that we’ve screened, we’ve actually improved substantially. So we expect this to still continue to grow despite the volatility in the market, with leading asset classes actually a based on with management approach, it’s still a very good asset class, the approach is different. But we believe it will still be the asset class.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

So, basically in our financial projection we never forecast carry interest but our revenue now is shifting away from one-time commission to more that’s it more carried income and performance, carried income as well as recurring management fee. But this shift will reflect our business model we’re also making our revenue a lot more stable. As I said, I think the carried income is something that we don’t castle in our projection we tend to be a lot more conservative.

Ching Tao

CFO

And this is Ching Tao, I can tell that we’re expecting to spend anywhere from RMB80 million to maybe even RMB100 million on our IT systems this year. As Kenny mentioned too improve the ERP CRM, HR and for example we’re upgrading to Oracle for the finance system, RMB.

Kenny Lam

Management

In RMB, so Tao Ching mentioned was in RMB so around RMB80 million to RMB100 million which is around $15 million. And lastly, I would like to extend, we can extend the call I bit, I know that we are going but the business is right now is quite broad. And so we could extend the call a bit to take more questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Your next question, Ella Ji from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Ella Ji

Analyst

[Foreign Language]. My second question is relating to your overall spending level innovation to the IT related spending, especially the sales and marketing as well as headcount. What is your plan for the full year? And also, especially regarding the internet finance segment, I noticed that the compensation spending is slightly down quarter-over-quarter. I wonder if you can also explain that. Thank you.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

So, let me just summarize on what Chairman Wang actually said. I think we are in select products moving to what we call it platform approach where we would screen in public mutual fund type products, secondary market products to be put on a platform to be sold. Now, within that we would still select and recommend a certain type of products for our clients. This is how we will be approaching for the non-alternative products. For talent products we maintain our protocol of highly selective product approach whereby we will spend lot of time selecting and screening the managers and putting things up on the shelf real high. So this is the broad approach. The idea behind is that we believe the client needs are evolving and therefore there is a stronger need for us to put more products in the current market, in mutual fund areas where that we want to make available on the platform. But in alternative products we maintain our selection approach it would still be highly selected by our product team. Limited, and to your second question, which is really around our investments in people and marketing expenses. We expect that we will continue to invest in people this year whereby we will increase our headcount still substantially. We believe that across businesses we’re still growing at around anywhere between 20% to 40%, in this market talent is the most important thing and therefore with our brand name and our position in market, we’ve been able to attract good talent, we want to maintain that trajectory this year, so we’ll continue to invest in growing our employee base. And therefore the people cost would continue to see rise relatively faster than previous years, that’s one. Secondly, in terms of marketing and service, we’re still very selective in how we spend our money in terms of marketing. Currently Noah still maintains a principle that we want to be selective in terms of how we advertise and how we connect with our clients, it is still a very high-end client base business. And therefore we’re not going to do broad-based, broad-media advertising, we’re still very selective. At the same time, we want to be lot more talkative. We do want to spend money in the right media. I’ll let Tao Ching answer a bit about the cost.

Ching Tao

CFO

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

We basically combine our VIP lending and Yuan Gong Bao platform together and that actually helps it to be a lot more effective at finance. And then we were now approaching the end of our official time that we can extend the call for another 15 minutes to take more questions.

Ching Tao

CFO

Okay, sorry, let me just translate my answer just now into English for those of you who don’t understand Chinese. So, I was just saying a couple of things. First of all, with respect to selling and general administrative expenses, there has been an increase by segment in the internet finance segment mainly because we’re still building scale there and we find that to be appropriate. Overall, we expect our operating margins to continue to suffer a bit as we continue to build scale across all of our businesses. Also, I was mentioning for headcount, 2013 year-end headcount was approximately 1,300 employees, 2014 year-end was approximately 1,900 employees. As of the end of March, we’re a tad over 2,000 employees, about 2,020 to 2,025 or so. So, as Kenny mentioned, we’re going to continue to invest in talent in the team but we won’t be doubling every two years like in the past. And then lastly on Ella’s question regarding the drop in employee related expenses for the internet finance segment, at the end of last year we combined several internet finance teams into one larger team, so it was a Yuan Gong Bao team, the VIP lending team and also the micro-lending business. And so, on a segment basis, the internet finance team has shrunk headcount a little bit. And with that, I think we still have time to take a few more questions.

Operator

Operator

Yes. We have one more question from Julie Lu with Panther [ph] China Funds. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

The first question is really around when would - when are we going to stop investing in IT or how long would the investment be on IT fund? The second question is really around incentives for our key management and how that’s going to help on a long-term growth of the business? [Foreign Language]. So, in terms of IT systems, we expect that we will finish the implementation of a core transaction system by the end of the year. And then, some of the core functional systems to be also completed by the end of the year or first quarter 2016, so, we expect that the core transformation in related investments would actually be done by the end of the year or first quarter of 2016. As I said, I think this is, the whole point is to make sure that we have a proper system to help us for the next three to five years because we expect growth to be continuous in the next three to five years.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

So, let me just summarize what Chairman Wang said, in terms of compensation for our senior management. Basically there are three components, one is, a cash base bonus, one is a share incentive scheme and the third is employee fund that we invest in our new businesses. So, on the first part, on cash base, on the base RV and bonus, we actually mark-to-market and look at the corresponding market compensation to make sure that our segments are actually paid based on market rate. So that’s the cash proportion. On top of that, we also intend to buy space on share and options across segments. Last year I think we did about 80 to 90 segments actually received share based compensation that is the second component. The third component is we actually had created an employee fund that invest in our new businesses, and these funds were actually open to our executives at relatively low share price for many of our businesses, for example Yuan Gong Bao and eventually we’ll also have other subsidiaries that are open to this one.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

So, the best incentive is actually not monetary, and the best incentive is actually the culture of the firm as well as the belief that we’re still at the very beginning of our growth off the distance. So that’s how we’ve been driving the stability of our management team.

Ching Tao

CFO

[Foreign Language]. So, just to summarize again for IT expenditures between expenses and also CapEx which we will capitalize over a period of time, we expect to invest close to RMB100 million in the next 15 months or so to upgrade our systems.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from David Lee with BM Capital. Please go ahead.

David Lee

Analyst · BM Capital. Please go ahead

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

The question was actually, given the growth of the Asia market, our performance team have carried interest in the secondary products as well as S&P products is actually performing very well. If the markets were all substantial, if there is a current, and the question was a catastrophic situation in our Asian market, what would the impact be on our business? I think that one we’ll let Chairman Wang answer.

Jingbo Wang

Chairman

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

So, let me just quickly summarize what Chairman Wang said. I think overall we are probably the only wealth manager in China to have experienced a few product market volatility, right, we started in 2004, in ‘05 the market was around 998 points, I think it grew to 6,000 points in ‘07 and dropped back to 1,600 points. We’ve actually been through a few cycles within our history in the last 11 years. I think two main thing that we maintain, one is we are, we maintain a very sane and clear approach to asset allocation. Our aim is to ensure that to protect our client assets while we grow the assets. So therefore in many parts, for example, secondary market, we may not be the best performing in the market, but we also expect let’s say in five years time, we hope the client growth 5% per year while clients investing in other finance may actually lose their money completely. In VCPE for example, we’re actually are heavily selecting our managers. We’ve actually grown in our skill as well as our influence in the market. And therefore we’re really going to actually select managers quite heavily. So, the first point we want to make is that we’ve actually seen the cycles. The second point is that we’ve actually been able to maintain a very sane approach through Chairman Wang’s leadership. The last point we want to make is that we actually a lot of time in client education, I think this point was briefly made in my remarks. Enoch education, a Noah subsidiary is focused just on our client’s education and investment. So we actually have strategic alliance with Stanford, Wharton and Yale. And all of these programs are tailored towards investment philosophies and how to invest. This is also a culture of Noah, whereby we spend a lot of time educating our clients to ensure that they understand the risk they’re taking and how to allocate asset. And that’s why last year we have about 1,200 clients that have participated in our programs. We expect that number to grow tremendously this year through the programs we have with Stanford, Wharton and Yale.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from Chao Chen with Citi China. Please go ahead.

Chao Chen

Analyst · Citi China. Please go ahead

[Foreign Language].

Kenny Lam

Management

Okay. Why don’t we take maybe one more question? No more question?

Kenny Lam

Management

Okay, great. Okay, so, thank you everyone for the time today. And look forward to our next call. Thank you. Bye-bye.