Earnings Labs

Tuniu Corporation (TOUR)

Q4 2017 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 14, 2018

$6.92

-0.86%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello. And thank you for standing by for the Tuniu’s 2017 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After managements prepared remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today’s conference call, Direct of Investor Relations, Mary. Mary, please go ahead.

Mary Chen

Management

Thank you. And welcome to our 2017 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Donald Yu, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Maria Xin, Chief Financial Officer. For today’s agenda, management will discuss business updates, operational highlights and financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year 2017. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statements in earnings press release, which applies to this call as we will make forward-looking statements. Also, this call includes discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our earnings release, which contains a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. Finally, please note that, unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in RMB. I would now like to turn the call over to our Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Donald Yu.

Donald Yu

Management

Thank you, Mary. Good day, everyone. Welcome to our 2017 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. We are pleased to report solid results for the fourth quarter of 2017. Net revenues increased by 46.1% year-over-year, while gross profit increased by 39.6% year-over-year. In the fourth quarter, we continued to make improvements to Tuniu's overall operating efficiency. For full year 2017, Tuniu's net revenues increased by 53.3% year-over-year, while gross profit increased by 80.9% year-over-year. Our growth rate continues to outpace our industry peers. According to third-party research reports, Tuniu holds the highest market share in China's online leisure travel market in 2017 and continues to distance itself from other players. 2017 has been a year filled with achievements and milestones for Tuniu. On the service side, we successfully launched our own local tour operators in a number of domestic and international destinations to better serve our customers. On the distribution side, we continued to diversify our sales channels, which included opening off-line retail stores throughout China to increase efficiency in acquiring new users and engaging with existing customers. We improved our loyalty program in order to better understand and retain our customers. And lastly, on the financial side, we were able to reach non-GAAP profitability during the third quarter of 2017. We are pleased with these achievements and our ability to execute our strategies quickly and efficiently. We believe our commitment to these long-term strategies will allow Tuniu to develop its competitive advantage within the travel industry and truly differentiate ourselves from the other players. Now I would like to give an update on these strategies in greater detail. First, I would like to talk about our sales network. Last year, we made a breakthrough in our distribution network. Tuniu initially started as a company focused on acquiring…

Maria Xin

Management

Thank you, Donald. Hello, everyone. Before I walk you through the financial highlights, I want to, first, give a bit more color on the guidance for the fourth quarter of 2018. As you know, Tuniu's net revenue has two components, packaged tour revenues and other revenues. The external events in Maldives, Bali and South Korea have negatively influenced our packaged tour revenues in the first of 2018. Even so, our packaged tour revenues in the fourth quarter of 2018 is expected to grow at a pace above our blended guidance gross rate and when factoring these external events. Our other revenue, which primarily consist of the service fee received from the insurance company, revenues from the other travel-related products are expected to experience negative growth during the first quarter of 2018, largely due to the new requirement to un-bundle products. As a result of this new policy, service fees from the insurance companies will significantly decline during the quarter. As recent booking data indicates, we expect our growth rate to recover during the second quarter of 2018 as we take our customers to other destinations and as we have further diversified ourselves in terms of the product and the distribution. Now I will walk you through the fourth quarter and full year 2017 financial results in greater detail. Please note that all the monetary amounts are in RMB, unless otherwise stated. You can find the U.S. dollar equivalent of the numbers in our earnings release. Starting from the fourth quarter of 2017. Net revenues were RMB469.9 million, representing 46% year-over-year growth on a non-GAAP basis. Revenues from packaged tours, which are mainly recognized on a net basis, were up 32% year-over-year on a non-GAAP basis to RMB290.1 million and accounted for 52% of our total net revenues for the quarter.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Chun Choi with 86Research. Please go ahead.

Chun Choi

Analyst

Hi. Thank you, management for taking my question. I have one. I just want to understand more on the off-line retail store initiative. So one of your major competitors has been aggressively rolling out a number of off-line stores as well. So how do you view the competitive landscape? And what are our edges over our peers? And in terms of the selection of the location, how do you strategically select the stores so that you guys won't have face-to-face competition? Yes, that is my question.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

Quickly translating for Donald. We are rolling out a number of stores within China, and it is true that a number of our peers also are opening. However, there is a major difference between our models. So first of all, we open our stores and these stores are run directly by Tuniu, while many of our competitors within the industry use the franchise model. So this is a lot different in terms of the customer experience. So with stores that Tuniu opened, we are able to control the quality of our services and to better engage with our customers and to provide the correct products to these customers, whereas the franchise model is much more difficult.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

In terms of - by running our own stores, we are able to protect one of the key assets to Tuniu, which is our customers. And by using these stores, we could extract the most amount of value from our customers as we are able to give them the best services and products. This allows us to improve the repurchase rate and engage them in a much better level than using a franchise model.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

The general logic that we use in opening our stores is we identify where Tuniu customers are online, and then we are able to find locations where they could be off-line, and then we try to open stores within those areas. So this method is very precise and we're able to clearly identify the locations where we want to open stores. And in terms of the overall balance within China, approximately 80% of customers still book through off-line channels and only 20% book through online channels. So we see this as a large opportunity, and that's one of the reasons why we continue to open off-line stores to capture this market. And this year, we are seeing very positive results from our off-line stores. In 2017 as a percentage of our total -- during the fourth quarter of 2017, as a percentage of our total GMV, off-line stores contributed approximately 18% of our total GMV.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

So another benefit of our self-run stores is the dedicated customer service that we are able to provide locally at these stores. Within these locally -- local retail stores, we are able to dedicate specific customer representatives to customers. These people are -- provide very high quality VIP services to help the customer book their products. And this combines -- and this complements our online customer service. So with this off-line customers service, we are able to increase the stickiness of our customer to our platform and, overall, develop our online and off-line customer service experience.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

Okay. Our customer service is divided into 2 components. One is the dedicated customer service. This component follows the customer and provides very dedicated overall comprehensive service to this customer, and this complements our online customer service. So we have this model previously -- before, even before we opened our off-line retail stores. However, once we did open the store, we put the dedicated service -- customer service into the local stores. So by having dedicated customer service, we're able to address all of the customer's questions by -- through one customer representative instead of having multiple people help out the booking process. So overall, by having two types of customer representatives and especially now within the local retail stores, we are seeing a much higher customer repurchase rate. And this could be seen by the amount of repeat customer contribution to our overall GMV during the last quarter.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

And this is the key here. This model is impossible to be executed on for a franchise retail store.

Chun Choi

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Follow-up on the -- could management share with regard to -- share some color on the profitability of the off-line store and also the payback period and also the ramp up, the sort of the ramp-up period? How long does it take to generate positive return?

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

Okay, thank you for your question. So we started our -- opening our local retail stores during the first half of 2017. So most of our stores have now been opened for -- have now been in operation for over a year. Of the stores that have been opened for more than a year, we are seeing a general positive data. So these stores are able to generally reach profitability within 1 year or 1.5 years. So -- and we are seeing this trend for most of our stores. And the other model that we also use is the single-city model. So we put stores within a single city. So combining these two models, we are -- we believe that we're able to quickly and efficiently increase our coverage of China.

Chun Choi

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The next questions come from Ivy Ji with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Ivy Ji

Analyst

Good evening, management. Sir, in the opening remarks, you mentioned that there were some headwinds in certain destinations. So I just wanted to check what's the current contribution -- I mean, GMV contribution by destination and what's your strategy to handle some of the headwinds? Thank you.

Maria Xin

Management

During the fourth quarter of 2017, we continued to see the recovery from the Europe since tariff tax earlier in 2016. And in this quarter, as a percentage of GMV, Europe, Southeast Asia and Middle East each contributed approximately 10% of our overall GMV. Japan and South Korea, combined together, contributed about 9% of the total GMV. And other destinations, such as North America, contributed 3% and the cruise line contributed 7%. Since the impacts in some islands in this quarter only contributed 5% because of the volcano in the Bali.

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst

There have been a number of external factors that have influenced some of the demand for travel. This is especially true for Bali and Maldives. But, however, because Tuniu is a highly diversified company, both in terms of product and destination, we believe the impact of these internal events will be short term and limited and -- limited. So these external events are pretty common in the travel industry and -- however, we believe that, based on our early booking data, we are seeing -- we are already seeing a very strong recovery starting in the second quarter of 2018. So we -- this recovery mostly concern our -- directing many of our customers to other locations and giving them alternative products and services.

Ivy Ji

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Tian Hou with T.H. Capital. Please go ahead.

Tian Hou

Analyst · T.H. Capital. Please go ahead.

Good evening, management. So the guidance is -- looks weak, so I wonder what's the reason behind it. That's number one. So in 2018, so there can be some headwinds, and what's the company's strategy in terms of a new product development? So that's number one question. Number two, in terms of our future routes like Southeast Asia and Europe or other places, what can be the focus of Tuniu to continue to develop? So that's my two questions.

Maria Xin

Management

Hi, Tian. The guidance, so you know, we have two part of the revenue and the packaged tours and as well as the other revenues. So the packaged tours growth rates actually is higher than the blended guidance growth rates even it's impacted by some external events in the Maldives, Bali and some other destinations. So for the other revenues, it's mostly because of the new policy on the insurance bundling because we can't -- we are now don't bundle the insurance with our online tickets, so twin tickets [ph] So this is the reason why it impacts our other revenue growth rate. So it's a negative growth in the fourth quarter 2018, so that's lowering our blended growth rate in the fourth quarter.

Tian Hou

Analyst · T.H. Capital. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Donald Yu

Management

[Foreign Language]

Unidentified Company Representative

Analyst · T.H. Capital. Please go ahead.

In terms of our approach, we are, first, going to emphasize on the destinations that are within close proximity of China. So this includes, primarily, Japan, Southeast Asia. So in Japan and Thailand, we already have our local tour operator. And with those local tour operators, we are able to provide domestic local services to them. So this year, we'll be putting increased emphasis into the -- our Asia expansion. We have -- one of the key difference between Tuniu and many of our peers is that we have the distribution power and we are able to push any destination that we want. And starting this year, we'll primarily do Asia. And going forward, we think Europe and America will also be areas we will put increased emphasis in. We have a number of travelers to those regions. Although the number of trips is relatively lower than those of Asia, the ASP is much higher. So we see the next logical step for us will be to go for Europe and America.

Tian Hou

Analyst · T.H. Capital. Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I will now turn the conference over to Tuniu's CFO, Maria Xin, for any closing remarks.

Maria Xin

Management

Once again, thank you for joining us today. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions. Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to speaking with you in the coming months.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the presentation. You may now disconnect. Good day.