Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Citigroup. Please go ahead
[Interpreted]Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo’s earnings call. On today’s call, I would share with you our key developments in products, user, and monetization, as well as the progress that we have made on our key initiatives this year. Let me first discuss third quarter financial results. We continued to see strong user – strong revenue and user growth. Our total revenue in the third quarter reached $176.9 million, up 42% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $156.7 million, up 48% year-over-year with key accounts and SME ad revenue growing 101% year-over-year. 66% of our ad revenue was from mobile. Non-GAAP net income in the third quarter was $54.6 million, up 147% year-over-year. On the user front, Weibo’s monthly active users reached 297 million in September, up 34% year-over-year. Daily active users reached 132 million, up 32% year-over-year. In September, 89% of Weibo’s MAUs were mobile. This quarter, with the occurrence of the Summer Olympics and other events, we saw strong user growth and user engagement. The Olympics brought together over 52 million users on Weibo, generating close to 579 million topic-related interactions. At the same time, as a result of improvements to Weibo’s ad effectiveness and our strong sales force, we noted a meaningful increase in the number of advertisers as well as average revenue per advertiser, aka ARPA. This includes our key account advertisers, which grew 46% year-over-year. KA revenue grew 119% year-over-year this quarter, which is higher than SME’s growth rate. With Weibo’s monetization model taking shape, with a reinforcing cycle of user growth, user engagement, and monetization, this will help us secure an enviable leading position in the mobile Internet world. In discussing our operational update for our third quarter, I will cover Weibo’s progress in the area of user, content, and customer. First, on user growth, we continue to leverage our broad channel network for user acquisition and we’re increasing our competitive advantage in user acquisition. Last quarter, we discussed the strategic cooperation that we have formed with domestic smartphone manufacturers to expand our user base. In the third quarter, as Weibo’s ecosystem for content creation further takes shape, and our multimedia features become even richer, more and more media companies and news sources are using Weibo as the first destination to distribute their content. This phenomenon is allowing more exclusive content on Weibo. For example, during the Olympics, a total of 295 Chinese Olympians posted on Weibo, generating 58 million user interactions. This network of Chinese Olympians represents approximately 70% of the Chinese athletes who had participated in the 2016 Olympics and over 90% of the Chinese athletes who won an Olympic medal. Having exclusive content like these gives us an edge in acquiring new users more effectively, with content creation shifting to KOL, social, video and mobile, we are in a unique position to attract premium exclusive content, which is extremely important, especially to continuously acquire and reactivate users in a cost-efficient manner. Next, on our product front, as I previously discussed, our focus in 2016 is to expand and optimize our information feed products. First, on Weibo’s relationship-based information feed, i.e., our homepage timeline, we worked on improving the user experience and feed consumption, increasing user engagement as well as time spent by fine-tuning the algorithm for feed recommendations. We have started to employ machine learning to increase the user engagement on our relationship-based information feed. Our test results from selective geographies in the third quarter show user interactions increasing double digits. In addition, a priority for us in 2016 is to introduce and optimize our hot Weibo information feed. This is important for us as we leverage our skill advantage and content creation to cut into additional news markets. In the third quarter, we rolled out an upgrade in hot Weibo information feed, which through interest-based mastering algorithms and continuous breaking news mining, we have improved the quality of content pushed to users. Compared to Q2, both the number of users who refreshed and the number of hot Weibo information feed that were refreshed more than doubled sequentially, significantly increasing our ad inventory. We will continue to enhance and improve the algorithms for hot Weibo information feed to improve user experience in both the discovery and consumption of content. Lastly, on the multimedia front, as mentioned on our last call, video is the top priority for us this year. We will focus on the creation and consumption of short videos. In the past two quarters, we enhanced the user experience in video consumption through product improvements. For example, we introduced auto play and optimized suggested feed to suggest a video feed as well as improved Weibo’s live streaming experience for both broadcasting and fan engagement. In the third quarter, daily video views and live streaming sessions broadcasted maintained strong growth rates. Daily video views in September increased 740% year-over-year and live streaming, which we launched this year, saw its sessions broadcasted in the third quarter increase 124% sequentially, which meaningfully improved time spent per user and Weibo’s monetization potential. Going forward, our product development will focus on improving the content creation experience for short videos and live streaming. Previously, users created short videos and live videos on third-party apps and shared them to Weibo. We are now working on making it more convenient for users to create short videos and perform live streaming directly from Weibo. In the third quarter, we have been focused on increasing the adoption of live streaming as well as product enhancements. The number of key opinion leaders and media companies who have live streamed on Weibo in the third quarter increased by 217% and 385% respectively from the prior quarter. We will continue to focus on increasing the adoption of live streaming by top KOLs and media companies on Weibo. Live streaming is one of the most important multimedia formats on Weibo. With our inherent nature of being mobile, social and viral, Weibo has a natural advantage in offering live streaming, which will help us acquire new users, increase user time spent, and improve our monetization opportunities. The number of KOLs and media accounts who live stream on Weibo will be an important metric for us as having a large network of influential accounts live streaming from Weibo will further strengthen our advantages as a leading social media platform. Creative content, previously [indiscernible] revolved around Weibo’s content verticalization effort. This quarter, let me discuss our competitive strengths in news and celebrities verticals, which are the most popular verticals on the Internet in China, consumed by nearly every Internet user. These verticals have both historically been Weibo’s strengths. As our user base expands and social media sharing becomes multimedia centric, our ability to enable media companies and celebrities to efficiently distribute content is becoming more apparent. In the past, media companies and celebrities can choose from many websites. Some do it exclusively, while others choose multiple partners to distribute their proprietary content. Now, as media celebrities hope to optimize their content reach and grow their own audience, Weibo is becoming their platform of choice for first releases. For example, during the Olympics, CCTV site shared proprietary Olympic short videos on Weibo on a real-time basis, thereby increasing its fan base on Weibo and traffic on its [indiscernible] app. And videos showing Chinese Olympian, [indiscernible], proposing to his girlfriend, [indiscernible], following his competition reached 120 million views. Another example is the humorous video interview with Olympian [indiscernible] which received over 80 million video views. As part of the strategic cooperation of the Weibo, CCTV gained 1.33 million new fans on Weibo and significant media exposure. CCTV site’s mobile app also benefited from video views redirected from Weibo and experienced significant traffic growth during the Olympics. In the future, we plan to explore monetization opportunities with media companies with content IP rights. In addition, many celebrities are choosing to make public announcements directly and exclusively on Weibo [indiscernible] to other media platforms to maximize their reach and influence. Using Chinese celebrity couple, [indiscernible], as an example, feeds related to the [indiscernible] wedding topic were viewed 7.6 billion times and generated more than 1.62 million topic-related interactions. We will continue to work on enabling media companies and celebrities to most efficiently disseminate proprietary content and further develop Weibo’s content ecosystem with our reinforcing loop of content, influence and monetization for our content partners. Lastly, turning to monetization, we achieved strong ad revenue growth in the third quarter, with more and more key accounts gradually realizing the value of social marketing on Weibo. Revenue from our KA business in the third quarter grew 119% year-over-year. This can be attributed to our existing advertisers increasing their ad spending on Weibo as well as a growing number of new customers purchasing Weibo ads. With our ad product offerings expanding, we’re seeing the ARPA of both our existing and newer customers growing double digits. The increasing mix of KA ads on Weibo is improving the quality of our ads, thereby improving user experience and our brand image, as well as giving us a good foundation to further build out our social marketing solutions. Turning to our SME business, our app channel ads and organic ads have been the drivers for our SME revenue growth. Our SME revenue, which includes self-service advertising, grew 90% year-over-year in the third quarter and ARPA grew 25% year-over-year. In the second half of this year, we started to put in place a mechanism to improve the quality of our ads, which makes algorithmic adjustments based on users’ negative feedback selection and user data analysis to ensure healthy long-term growth of our ad business. So far, we have seen an increase in ad engagement of 38%. As our client base expands, we will work with our advertisers to improve ad quality and with users to improve the user negative feedback mechanism, the combination of which will help us improve such objectives. The value of Weibo’s video ads is gradually being recognized by our KA and SME advisors. In the third quarter, the number of KA customers who purchased video ads reached 154, up 90% quarter-over-quarter, and the number of SME customers who purchased video ads reached 3,907, up 13% quarter-over-quarter. Video ad revenue makes up over 10% of our total ad revenue in Q3. Social video ads can draw huge viewership and user engagement, and thus can help us attract TV-on-online video website advertisers. For example, in September, a KA customer, Shanghai Volkswagen, purchased video ads reaching 18 million users and generated 7.9 million video views. Video ads can also help us attract more ad purchase from SME advertisers, such as those in the e-commerce industry. Due to their strong engaging nature, video ads are becoming a critical component of SME’s social marketing. For example, an SME customer with a skincare brand purchased video ads in September and reached 40.9 million users generating 32.4 million video views. Since early 2016, we have worked on developing a combined brand and performance ad solution for advertisers in the auto industry and have centered our efforts to educate the market and potential customers about our new ad product. We have focused on improving the accuracy of our ad targeting by leveraging our social interest graph recommendation engine, with users tagging data. Users tagged with an interest in auto has reached 70 million as of September, representing an increase of 117% since our efforts began early this year. I have also made good progress in developing new and innovative ad formats. Last quarter, I discussed Weibo’s leads ads This quarter, we introduced Weibo showcase, designed specifically for auto industry. Auto advertisers can have a showcase card appear at the bottom of feeds when the automakers’ brand or make is mentioned. When clicked, the showcase card will redirect the user to an information page of the car model and along with an option to fill out a degeneration form. We also plan to equip businesses with the ability to private message interested potential customers subsequent to seeing their brand campaign. This will give businesses an opportunity to retarget potential customers who have seen their ads and increase their sales leads. We’re seeing initial success from our auto ad solutions with auto ad revenue growth rate up triple digits from last year. In the future, we hope to replicate our ad solution for other industries. Weibo’s monetization ecosystem has been developing rapidly over the last few quarters. We are seeing a strong demand for our ads from brand ads to performance-based ads to organic ads. Our ad offering covers a wide range, from promoter ads, with user targeting abilities to brand ads that have broad audience reach, [indiscernible] () opening ads, promoter trends and hot Weibo feed ads, all of which are quite unique to Weibo. We’re seeing advertisers shifting their ad budget to mobile, social and video ads, which puts Weibo in its sweet spot. We hope to seize these opportunities and further develop Weibo’s monetization model. With that, let me turn the call over to Herman for a financial update.