Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Fan Liu from Goldman Sachs
Thank you. Hello, everyone and welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. On today's call, I will share with you highlights on Weibo's user growth, products and monetization as well as our key initiatives in 2017. Let me first discuss our first quarter financial results. We continued to see strong revenue and user growth this quarter. Our total revenue in the first quarter reached $199.2 million, up 67% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $169.3 million, up 71% year-over-year, an acceleration from the 25% year-over-year ad revenue growth in Q1 2016. 70% of our ad revenue in Q1 came from mobile. Non-GAAP net income in the first quarter was $57.8 million, up 254% year-over-year. On the user front, Weibo's monthly active users reached 340 million in March, up 30% year-over-year. Average daily active users in March reached 154 million, up 28% year-over-year. In March, 91% of Weibo's MAUs were mobile. In the first quarter, we held a series of platform-wide marketing campaigns and events, such as the red envelope giveaway and the Chinese New Year Gala live streaming from various television stations which contributed to Weibo's strong user growth and user engagement. In March, we added 15.6 million DAUs and 27 million MAUs sequentially. In the first quarter, our customers continued to increase their ad spending on Weibo, much to the credit of our sales force and Weibo's strong advertising product offering. KA's ARPA in Q1 reached the highest level over the past year. The continued growth of Weibo's user base and user engagement further solidifies Weibo's position in the social media space as well as empowers us to become an indispensable component of mobile marketing in China. In discussing our operational updates for the first quarter, I will cover Weibo's progress in the area of user content and customer. First, on user growth, as Weibo's content ecosystem further develops and our multimedia features become even richer, Weibo is becoming a primary distribution channel for top publishers, influencers and the like to share their content, optimize their reach and increase their media influence. This phenomenon has improved our ability to acquire new users more efficiently. This year, we plan to deepen our strategic cooperation with Weibo partners, such as smartphone manufacturers, variety TV show producers and top [indiscernible] partners to increase the reach of Weibo's differentiated content and further expand our user base. As an example, Weibo obtained the rights to broadcast live streaming and short videos of the 2017 Chinese New Year Gala programs from several satellite TV stations, including [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] TV. And for the first time, we obtained the rights to broadcast short videos of CCTV's Chinese New Year Gala, one of the most popular TV shows in China. During the Lunar New Year period, Chinese New Year-related videos were watched 4.8 billion times in total, with DAUs reaching a historical high and increasing user growth. In the area of sports, we have won strategic cooperations with top sports leagues, closely working with them to increase the consumption of sports content, attract more users and boost their level of engagement on Weibo. Our partnerships with sports leagues currently include the NFL, NBA and LaLiga. Earlier this year, we obtained the rights to live stream a number of NFL games as well as broadcast NFL short videos. Despite American football being a less familiar sport in China, live streaming of the 2017 Super Bowl on Weibo attracted 3.07 million users. Super Bowl short videos were viewed over 80 million times within a 24-hour period. In March, we partnered with the NBA to jointly announce our strategic cooperation and Weibo was named the official social media of NBA China. As part of this strategic engagement, we were given the rights to broadcast NBA matches in short video format. Through strategic cooperation like these, we hope to become the preferred distribution channel and social platform for organizations with media rights, while enabling our partners to distribute our content to a large user base, grow their fans base and increase their media influence and monetization potential, this will also help increase Weibo's user base and user engagement. On the user product front, in addition to optimizing relationship-based information feed, we also focused on growing the scale of our interest-based information feed and improving its content quality, with goals to distribute breaking news in a more timely fashion, increase efficiency of interest-based consumption and promote follow relationship. In Q1, we revamped the home time line of Weibo's ad client to include interest-based information feed in addition to relationship-based information feed and partially rolled out this version to certain Weibo users. For new registered users, their home time line will start with interest-based information feed which makes their on-boarding experience easier. Based on preliminary test results, the overall consumption of Weibo's new home time line with interest-based information feed and relationship-based information feed significantly increased. In addition, preliminary results also show an increase in the retention rate of new registered users as well as their level of engagement. We plan to roll out the new Weibo upgrade beyond the initial test for users over the next 2 quarters. We hope that through these initiatives, along with Weibo's social ID, our content ecosystem as well as our user scale will not only help us increase our market share in the social media space but also enable us to enter the digital news market, thereby increasing our user base and overall market share. On the multimedia front, with the rapid development and advancement of mobile phones and 4G networks, video is replacing photos as the preferred medium for users to showcase their lifestyle, share insights and socially interact. As China's leading content distribution platform, we're making video a central focus of our future products. First, we will continue to improve the creation and consumption functionalities for professionally generated content and enable premium video content to reach a bigger audience, build a larger following and increase its brand influence. Through our partnerships with a large network of video MCNs or talent agencies for video creators, we have strengthened Weibo's offering of premium original content. We have invested significant resources to encourage top content creators from various verticals to shift their content creation to video format. The number of videos shared by top content creators in Q1 increased 176% year-over-year. In addition, through the optimization of Weibo's SIG recommendation engine which improved push relevancy and content consumption efficiency, recommended videos made up more than 30% of the total video feeds on Weibo in March. Next, this year, we're also focused on improving the user experience for sharing and consuming UGC videos, encouraging greater video engagement and making video usage the core function of Weibo. Since the second half of last year, our product team began to optimize user's experience in the creation and consumption functionalities of UGC videos, such as improving the user's experience and uploading videos in a mobile environment and innovating new ways for users to share videos and interact. For example, last month, we began beta testing Weibo Story to a select group of iPhone users. Weibo Story allows users to more easily share their moments throughout the day. Close to 10% of our test group have become regular story users and this percentage is growing. As a result of our efforts in video, we continue to see strong growth in video views and videos shared on Weibo. In March, video views grew more than 5x from prior year. Going forward, we plan to further improve the user experience for video creation and consumption. Video presents significant growth opportunities for our ecosystem. Moving on to content, this year, we will continue to concentrate on strengthening our vertical content offering. So far, we have partnered with hundreds of MCNs, mainly in the fashion, beauty and wellness, food and live streaming areas, to collaborate on content concentration, fan-based development and monetization. By partnering with MCNs, we can more efficiently branch out into different content verticals and generate demand for our advertising business. Our goal this year is to expand our partnership with MCN to cover over 40 verticals and help their content creators to grow their fans base and brands. As an example, in the education vertical, we have partnered with 8 MCNs and the number of posts shared by their content creators and related monthly views in Q1 have increased 62% and 93%, respectively, from prior year. Our efforts to try and strengthen the vertical MCN network will help us further increase the competitiveness of our content ecosystem as well as our monetization ability. Turning to live video, last year, despite intense competition, Weibo still maintained our market position within the media and overall live broadcasting market through strategic investments. Our focus for live video this year will be on continuing to enhance user's experience in live broadcasting as well as deepening our cooperation with [indiscernible] and collaborate on increasing professionally generated live content to increase our market share. We plan to revenue share with [indiscernible] later this year. On monetization, KA revenue continued to grow rapidly in the first quarter, increasing 79% year-over-year. We see 2 primary drivers, first, top brand advertisers are beginning to recognize the value of Weibo's social marketing; second, customers are choosing Weibo to deploy their brand strategy and re-branding campaign. Due to our large user base, young user demographics and high virality, Weibo is becoming a critical component of a customer's media buy, as evidenced by the increase in Weibo's wallet share. For example, among the top 20 KA customers, we saw over 200% increase in year-over-year spending in Q1. In addition, we're continuously developing new and innovative social app products and formats to help our customers optimize their marketing effectiveness. As an example, [indiscernible] or better known as [indiscernible], a long-time domestic brand for household and personal-care products, who sought to generate better brand awareness to the post '90s demographics, leveraging video ads plus strong social elements. In Q1, they launched a marketing campaign at Weibo and purchased video ads, hot topic and trending social experience to connect with their target audience. A/B test by ACNielsen showed a 23% increase in [indiscernible] product brand satisfaction. Campaign successes like these has resulted in attracting new customers to purchase video ads. Plus, we have been working hard [indiscernible] market on the value of Weibo's social marketing. Since the second half of last year, we have started to compile case studies on successful advertising campaigns on Weibo and shared them with the rest of our customers. We believe that there is still significant room for KA revenue to grow. Turning to SMEs. In the first quarter, SME revenue increased 86% from the prior year, driven by Weibo's app download performance ads and organic ads. We're finding that social advertising products like WeChat and Weibo gain increased market share in the SME ad market. SME customers are becoming more familiarized with social marketing, especially on how to utilize social platforms to achieve high virality and user engagement as well as increase their fans base and improve their marketing effectiveness and sales conversions. As an example, Beloved [ph] a company that sells engagement rings, launched a marketing campaign on Weibo targeting young white-collar professionals. Using Weibo's private messaging functions, Beloved interacted with interested customers and drove sales conversion. As a result, Beloved's revenues jumped approximately RMB 1 million per month as compared to prior to advertising on Weibo. Ad spending from the O2O industry which includes photography, beauty and wellness, fitness, travel and education has continued to increase on Weibo. This helped to diversify the SME customer base as well as validate that Weibo's brand popularity is expanding into traditional industries in China. Moving on to video ads. As video content consumption increases on Weibo, an increasing number of customers are inclined to try video ads. In Q1, the number of video ad customers increased 50% from the prior quarter. Our focus this year will be to increase video ads and information feeds and grow video advertisers. In particular, we hope to attract more customers to create video ads suitable for Weibo's platform, ones that can gain high virality and user engagement. In addition, considering that video consumption is increasing, we plan to focus on developing new video ad products as well as working with video creators to help the monetization ecosystem to capture more video ad budgets. With that, let me turn the call over to Herman for the financial update.