Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Citigroup
[Foreign Language] Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2018 Earnings Call. [Foreign Language] On today's call, I will share with you highlights in Weibo's user growth, product and monetization, as well as our key initiatives in 2018. [Foreign Language] But first, let me discuss our first quarter financial results. We continued to see strong revenue and the user growth this quarter. Our total revenue in the first quarter reached $349.9 million, up 76% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $302.9 million, up 79% year-over-year, with 80% of our ad revenue in Q1 from mobile. Value-added services revenue in the first quarter was $46.9 million, up 57% year-over-year. [Foreign Language] Moving on to the user front, Weibo's monthly active users reached 411 million in March, up 20.7% year-over-year. Average daily active users in March reached 184 million, up 19.5% year-over-year. In March, 93% of Weibo's MAUs were from mobile. [Foreign Language] Leveraging the Chinese New Year holiday, we considerably increased our investment activities in user growth and engagement through our cooperation with CCTV's Chinese New Year Gala and a series of platform-wide marketing campaigns and events, such as the red envelope giveaway. On the monetization front, our customers continued to increase their ad spending on Weibo, much to the credit of our sales force. Our key accounts ARPA in Q1 reached a historical high. The persistent growth in Weibo's user base and the business demand for social marketing further solidifies Weibo's leading position among brand advertisers. [Foreign Language] In discussing our operational updates for the first quarter, I will cover Weibo's progress in the area of user content and customer. [Foreign Language] As we saw in the first quarter, the period around the Chinese New Year presents an opportunity for Weibo to accelerate its user growth and increase user engagement. This year, the competition for promoting Internet product during the Chinese New Year was particularly fierce as the growth rate of the mobile Internet users has begun to slow down in China. However, we were able to leverage the unique product features, our innovative social marketing solutions, and our well-defined joint efforts with the celebrities, self-media, enterprises and the brands to support the execution in contents that focus on the user growth. More importantly, few such platform events as the red envelope giveaway and the collaboration with the CCTV's Chinese New Year Gala, we have demonstrated our capability to generate greater brand exposure and the user growth by partnering with the top IP content providers. In fact, during the red envelope giveaway event, more than 2 billion red envelopes was received by Weibo user, which were -- which was a nearly 50% increase in the number of envelopes received by Weibo users from last year. [Foreign Language] Specifically, we will form a strategic partnership with the CCTV Chinese New Year Gala, one of the most watched TV show at Chinese New Year Eve, as the exclusive social platform partner. As a result, we will have a greater brand exposure, promoted user participation in the discussion of Chinese New Year Gala, and increased user engagement by branding, marketing activities in number of interactive formats such as the Chinese New Year live streaming [Q&A], Chinese New Year invitation, competition and others. Nearly 100 million users participated in our interactive contents, and the Chinese New Year related video were watched more than 3 billion times. During the 2-week promotion now appeared for the Chinese New Year live streaming Q&A, nearly 24 million users participated in the event, effectively increasing the scale of our [record users and their] engagement. Cooperation with traditional media and the product innovation that leverage well known IP content to promote user growth and user engagement are one of Weibo's core competitive strengths as a social media platform. As such, we plan to reinforce our cooperation with selective TV programs and the variety show content, as well as start up a product innovation this year. As we look into the rest of 2018, taken the current competitive landscape, we believe our product positioning [indiscernible] will continue to support our user growth and provide a competitive edge in the industry. [Foreign Language] On the user product front, we continue to improve the user engagement rate of the relationship-based feed and expand the distribution scale of interest-based feed so as to increase the time spent by users on the platform. In terms of the relationship-based feed, we increased our efficiency in distributing feed based on the user consumption behavior, effectively promoted user consumption of the social content and increasing the user retention rate. As a result, in March, the users' engagement rate in the relationship-based feeds grew by double digits year-over-year. For interest-based feed, we enhanced our content mining abilities in other verticals, increasing the exposure of content in long-tail verticals such as education, [PAT] and others. In March, total impression of the content in both education and PAT verticals more than doubled from last year. Based on the dynamic feedback we received from the users, we were able to leverage users interest to recommend relevant content to other users in real-time. Subsequently, in March, those number of users who refreshed the interest-based feed and the interest-based feed that were consumed grew double digits from last year. In addition, we plan to promote Weibo Light in the first quarter, which was mainly targeted toward mobile users who used relatively low-end smartphones. In March, the number of new users of Weibo Light continued to increase, with the user retention rate of Weibo Light now close to that of the Weibo app. Weibo Light not only highlights the regional and the popular feeds on Weibo but also prioritize the consumption of the video feed, allowing more users from lower tier cities to access Weibo. [Foreign Language] In the first quarter, the full-screen vertical short video market grew at an explosive pace. In response to the rapid trend in the short video market, we have made numbers of adjustments to our related products by promoting the media attributes of the Weibo Stories to align with Weibo's positioning as a social media. Specifically for product development on the content creation front, we further enhanced Weibo Stories interactive feature to better users and self-expression needs. On the content consumption front, we canceled the previous 24-hour time limit and enabled stories to reside on the top of the users' homepage as well as users' individual page, promoting the construction of the user relationships. On the operational front, we focus on promoting the stories generated by celebrities and the KOLs, who are providing exemplary content, and the interactivities that further incentivize the general group of users to create and share their story. For example, in the first quarter, more than 60 celebrities participated in marketing campaigns and they posted stories around the theme of complementing the nation. This resulted in a significant increased number of users participating in the creation of the stories, and the related stories reached nearly 150,000 posts in addition, allowing users to distribute stories in the feeds that has also promoted the user consumption for similar content. The number of users viewed the stories grew double digit sequentially. We believe the product realignment and operational adjustments will help Weibo strengthen our vertical screen video creation and provide a better user experience in consumption, as well as enable us to capture our share in the vertical video market in a more swift way. [Foreign Language] Turning to content, we have deepened our cooperation with the government organizations and the media outlets over the past 6 months, which have enabled Weibo to play an increasingly important role in the current media landscape in China. In particular, Weibo's partnership in 2018 with a top media outlet to broadcast live streaming and the short videos of China's Two Sessions, the annual sessions of China's top legislative and advisory bodies, generated impressive results. During the Two Sessions period, Weibo cooperated with the national media outlets such has Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily, and the CCTV News, as well as other mainstream media outlets and the government agencies. This ensured that the content from the Two Sessions was immediately available to users. Weibo also formed a exclusive partnership with CCTV to promote the Two Sessions related content in the Weibo video information feed, hot information feed, [hot search], further expanding the coverage of the event on Weibo. As a result, the total video views relating to Two Sessions exceeded 3 billion, or up 25% year-over-year. Weibo was granted the rights to a live stream [indiscernible] conference held during the Two Sessions, which resulted in more or less 500 live streams, nearly double the numbers on the previous year; and attracted nearly 200 million users. Through such strategic partnership, Weibo is becoming the most important political content consumption platform on mobile Internet. Although the investment of the core -- Weibo's core traffic in the promotion of the Two Sessions has affected users of the short video consumption to a certain extent. We believe such investment will help Weibo solidify its competitive edge, amplify Weibo's social impact, and enhance its brand power [after taking] a longer term. [Foreign Language] This quarter, one of our key focus area has been to further verticalize content to build stronger engagement throughout every level of the Weibo platform. To support this goal, in March, we partnered with about 1,700 MCNs, growing by nearly 400 MCNs from last quarter. Importantly, daily posts by top content creators and the number of our monthly views both maintained double digit growth from the last year. Weibo continues to be a key platform for top content creators to create and distribute content. [Foreign Language] Next, let me share an update of our key initiative for the celebrity vertical. As Weibo has built a competitive advantage in this segment in the past few years, Weibo's celebrity verticals has become an indispensable platform for celebrities to distribute our content to a large audience base, accumulate their assets, exercise their influence and interact with the fan. As such, we'll focus our investment in the celebrity vertical through the rest of 2018. To support this effort, we are taking step to further reinforce the ecosystem around content, influence and monetization, including initiating a series of projects to help top celebrities to create video programs. For example, we are going to launch the celebrity producer [video] project in Q2, where we will work together with celebrities to create video programs that display their lifestyles or show their pursuit of interest. The project serves the dual purpose of helping those celebrities enrich their content offering and increase their monetization potential in Weibo, while at the same token, promoting Weibo's value to celebrities and in generating a sense of belonging to the Weibo user community. Based on the preliminary results, the first 3 episodes of the video program developed between Weibo and [indiscernible] a celebrity in China was viewed by more than 30 million users. We hope this renewed focus on cooperation between celebrities and the Weibo will help Weibo to further expand our horizon in video social media market. [Foreign Language] Lastly on monetization. KA ad revenue continued to grow rapidly in the first quarter, up 111% year-over-year. As I mentioned on the previous earnings call, we continued to leverage Weibo's uniqueness in social marketing to enable advertisers to maximize their marketing effectiveness. In particular, customers [indiscernible] on Weibo were able to raise their brand awareness with the younger users, enhance brand satisfaction and increase purchasing intent. Importantly, for Weibo, recurring customers continue to increase their ad spending on Weibo as Weibo has become the long term marketing partner for other advertisers to deploy their brand strategy and executing re-branding campaign. As I indicated in the earlier part of our prepared remarks, we deepened our cooperative activities with the TV programs and the celebrities in 2018, Weibo's strong influence on breaking news and the celebrity vertical have attracted more new users who are shifting their budget [efforts] on Weibo. For example, the Hot Blood Dance Crew, the variety show, is now the [very] distributed on Weibo, with William Chan, one of the judges on the show, attracting the attention of many users. As a result, Levi's, a international apparel brand, leveraged William Chan's popularity with the users and [indiscernible] Levi's branding campaigns on Weibo with a new and a massive stage. William Chan related posts were engaged by users for more than 1 million times in total, and the total related video views for the campaign reached more than 30 million. [Foreign Language] Turning to SMEs. In the first quarter, SME revenues increased 47% from the prior year, in the information of the advertising market, which undergoes a serious competition, we saw 2 primary drivers for SME revenue growth. First, we continuously enhanced our ad platform through the optimization of our ad results and improved advertising efficiency. Second, we continued to focus on innovating new ad products and the marketing solution to meet SME customers' marketing demand. In the first quarter, we tapped a new advertising inventory in the main page of the Weibo feed to increase monetization. The incremental inventory [spots] once fully implemented will further drive our SME revenue growth. [Foreign Language] Moving onto video ads. The number of video ad customers continued to grow at a stable rate from last quarter. Video inventory as a percentage of total ad revenue maintaining the growth trajectory. We observed that more and more customers intend to adopt video ad as their primary advertising content format. Other investment in video ad product has set the stage to meet increasing demand from both KA and SME customers. Over the past 2 years, we have seen Weibo's video information feeds rapidly gain popularity among users as a way to consume content. As the consumption of our video feed continue to grow rapidly on Weibo, the ad load of the video feed still has room to grow. We have placed our priority in video ad monetization in SME customers. We are developing tools and providing supporting mechanisms to help improve the marketing effectiveness. We believe this strategy is crucial for our future video ad sales and the revenue growth. [Foreign Language] For example, we'll launch a new ad product on the Super FenSiTong ad system for app and e-commerce customers in the first quarter. The new ad product [starts conversion] with a mobile lending page that include video, app download and product sales. Such product features encourage users actionby allowing users to easily download the app and purchasing the product in a visual and immersive way. This will also help other customers to increase marketing [convergence] efficiency. For example, Ctrip, a provider of travel services, purchased our video plus ad download app, and they generated impressive marketing results. The app engagement rate increased triple digits compared to the rate of the single video app, and the cost per app engagement reduced double digits. In April, we also launched a video banner display app, allowing customers to immediately engage viewers with a visually impactful content and providing a better user experience. We have also develop a new lending type solution, include both the video and H5 to enable better presentation of the marketing content, higher self-convergence and attracts new ad customers in different industries. [Foreign Language] With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial update.