Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Fan Liu from Goldman Sachs
Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's Third 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 an update of our key initiatives in 2017. Let me first discuss our first quarter financial results. We continue to see strong revenue and user growth this quarter. Our revenue in the third quarter reached $320 million, up 81% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $276.8 million, up 77% year-over-year. 78% of ad revenue in Q3 came from mobile. Other revenues reached $43.2 million, up 114% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income in the third quarter was $115.2 million, up 111% year-over-year. Operating margin in the third quarter has reached 41%. Overall, the company's operating efficiency has continued to improve. On the user front, Weibo's MAUs reached $376 million in September 2017, 20% year-over-year. Average daily users in September reached $165 million, up 25% year-over-year. In September, 96% of Weibo's MAUs came from mobile devices. This quarter, we maintained strong user growth and user engagement, mainly attributable to the continued efforts we made in expanding online marketing channel and carrying out promotional events on campus in over third and fourth-tier cities. Moreover, riding with rapid growth in mobile advertising market in China with the combined efforts of our sales team in marketing innovation and updated new advertising systems business strong, we saw a meaningful increase in the number of our ad customers and robust ad revenue growth of Weibo. Most notably, the number of K customers grew 69% year-over-year. We're reinforcing the business cycle of user growth, user engagement and monetization as Weibo has laid a foundation for Weibo's monetization at a greater scale. As part of the third quarter operational update, I'll cover our progress in the area of user, content and customer. First, on user growth. We have beefed up our efforts for user acquisition in third and fourth-tier cities. As highlighted in last quarter's call, we continue to strengthen our cooperation with domestic smartphone manufacturers and enhance our online marketing -- channel marketing to exceed user base expansion and penetration into lower-tier cities. In the meantime, in January this year, we have accelerated our pace in regional upgradation by establishing local teams to target users and gain market shares by regions in an efficient manner. In September, we have covered over 200 cities in China, which effectively built Weibo's user growth in third and fourth-tier cities. In September, we saw 34% increase in number of top content creators and 36% increase in the number of posts generated by top content creators in this space compared with the numbers in January this year. In the next few quarters, we will accelerate our pace to expand our coverage to all third and fourth-tier cities in China. On one hand, as we build user content from customers behavior, this in turn improved user engagement and time spent on a greater scale. On the other hand, we are right in the process of urbanization, Weibo benefits from the progressing consumption upgrades. To further penetrate in lower-tier cities, we have released Weibo light version, which is mainly targeted towards the mobile users in lower-tier cities. While this version only maintains Weibo's core features, it significantly improves user experience on relatively low-end smartphones or below-average Internet speed environment. Moreover, in order to cater to user [indiscernible] in lower-tier cities, we [indiscernible] highlight regionals and hot Weibo information feeds, which are popular feeds on Weibo to lower the barrier to access and make their onboarding experience easier and consume content available. Going forward, combined with the efforts on online channel marketing, we will focus on improving user retention on Weibo light in the process of user penetration into lower-tier cities. Next, on the product front, we are continuously revamping our feed, including replacing the original recommendation engine with machine learning. As we continue to optimize our machine learning algorithm, this further drives user feed engagements. Refreshed feeds from our home timeline have increased 39% year-over-year in September. In terms of relationship-based feeds, we have adopted a personalized ranking algorithm which effectively improves social content consumption, as we saw a 10% growth of user engagement quarter-over-quarter. In terms of interest-based feeds, we have continued to optimize the algorithms to improve the content consumption experience. Going forward, we will continue to utilize machine learning and user data mining and content identification and selection to improve content consumptions for each user. On the multimedia front, as we continue to optimize a video recommendation engine, video consumption on Weibo has improved. Daily video views in September grew 175% year-over-year. On video content creation, Weibo enables users to upload videos in high definition or in short HD. In September, 30% of total videos on Weibo were in HD. Although HD video will mean higher bandwidth cost, but it greatly improves user experience in video consumption and further supports videos to be displayed on large-screen television platforms alike. Moving forward, we will continue to simplify the video upload process and optimize user experience based on user feedback, which helps solidify our leading position in the short video market in China. On the other hand, Weibo Stories have continued to gain traction as user-generated video product. Currently, Weibo Story MAUs have reached almost 40 million and the daily story posts grew over 200% from June. Going forward, we will keep enriching our features on Weibo Stories with focus on integration, location and interest parameters to further extend user-developed stories and content consumption. On live broadcasting, we began to put revenue share from Yizhibo this quarter. On top of securing the leading position in the live broadcasting market in media and celebrity verticals, the focus on Weibo's cooperation with Yizhibo has gradually shifted towards showcase live broadcasting. The number of paying users on Yizhibo increased 45% year-over-year as we integrated our product and payment system with Yizhibo. Looking ahead, we will leverage our experience with top content creators and product integrations between Weibo Stories and Yizhibo live broadcasting. We hope that it would bring stronger traffic and revenue. Lastly, let me introduce our progress in the Search product. We have invested in the Search products leveraging the mastered information of people as the cumulative number of Weibo exceeds 100 billion and Weibo's leadership position in real time content creation is solidified, our Search product has gradually formed the competitive edge in instant payment market. In terms of information accessed and distribution of top feeds, the hot trend, Weibo Search products recorded impressive user engagement over the past 3 years. In September, Weibo Search MAUs have reached nearly 100 million. Moving forward, we will further invest in our Search products. On one hand, the unique feature of Weibo Search will help us to attract more users. And on the other hand, Weibo Search could become a new revenue driver in the future. Moving on to content. Let me share with you the progress in several of our key initiatives. First of all, our network alliance has reached over 1000 MCNs spanning across 52 verticals. 25 verticals have surpassed 10 million monthly views, which further increased Weibo's user coverage and social influence. Weibo continues to lead as the primary platform that gathers top content creators and preferred channel for them to create and distribute content. In September, monthly feed views in top content creators have increased 41% year-over-year, and most notably the number of top content creators with over 2 million monthly views has increased 79% year-over-year. On video front, the collaboration with online video websites has significantly influenced both content ecosystems. In Q3, Weibo has become the first to use an online video website to promote and distribute video content. We are working more closely with the site based on IP content of TV series and variety shows. We've partnered with major online video sites, Youku, Tencent Video and iQiyi on the promotion of 14 projects, including successful series, [indiscernible] China, The Coming One and Day and Night. For example, short video's of [indiscernible] China have reached over 8 billion, views of related topics have reached over 7 billion and the number of engagements reached over 25 million. This show has become a phenomenal success this summer. We continue to see Weibo becoming an indispensable platform for videos at random and market their IP content. Going forward, we will further deepen our collaboration with TV stations and online video sites in the promotion of movies and TV proprietary shows, leveraging our platform advantages and user engagement to drive mutual benefit for each parties for their integrated value chain, content creation and distribution. During demonetization, our focus remains on expanding our customer base, enhancing the efficiency of our ad system and developing new and innovative advertising products. We continue to see robust ad revenue growth in customer base expense in the third quarter. Key ad revenue grew 71% year-over-year, while SME revenue, including service revenue, grew 70% year-over-year. Firstly, as Weibo users increased, advertisers in China continue to shift their ad spend towards social platforms, we continue to leverage Weibo's uniqueness in social marketing and help customers to develop innovative marketing solutions on our platform. Meeting customer objectives in turn has increased our wallet share in social marketing. In the third quarter, number of paying customers grew 69% year-over-year, surpassing a 1,000 for the first time. As for SME customers, as Weibo's traffic continues to increase combined with our improved ad writing capabilities, we have more effectively met marketing objectives of our customers. That said the growth in the number of SME customers has also reached an historical high. Secondly, this quarter, Weibo's new ad system Super FenSiTong was officially launched to the market, consolidating all our ad products into one unified ad system. Super FenSiTong utilizes Weibo's traffic and then enables more efficient real time bidding. Super FenSiTong has also been be open to all our advertisers and enables personalized targeting and automatic prizing maximize ROI for our advertisers. This has in turn greatly enhanced our monetization efficiency and from the customer perspective the new ad platform fulfills customers' different marketing needs during their product campaign period. We believe this will further help our customers recognize unique aspect and value of social marketing. We are pleased to see double-digit growth [indiscernible] and engagement. Lastly, we'll be launching new ad products. We're focused on video ad innovation. In Q3, number of video ad customers continued to provide double-digit spike from the last quarter. However, video ad revenue as a percentage of total ad revenue has remained stable. As highlighted last quarter, as our video traffic increases, we have been continuously optimizing Weibo's video ad part to meet various marketing objectives of our customers. For KA customers, we began testing ads embedded and Weibo Story and the feedback has been encouraging so far. KA customers welcomed the ad products that combines the postering [ph] features with privilege spotlight on the homepage. For example, Oppo collaborated with [indiscernible] and the Weibo Story's ad campaign had brought in 300 million impressions and total views over 7 million within 24 hours. We also released a new ad product that has effectively enhanced those conversions, combining video app and -- video and app download or purchase gateway features for the app for e-commerce customers. We believe it will drive a more scalable monetization on video and contribute more meaningful revenue post next year. With that let me turn the call over to Fei for the financial update.