Gaofei Wang
Analyst · 86 Research
Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's Second Quarter 2018 Earnings Call. On today's call, we'll share with you highlights of Weibo's user growth, product and the monetization, as well as our key initiatives in 2018. First, let me discuss our second quarter financial results. We continued to see strong revenue and user growth this quarter. Our total revenue reached $426.6 million, up 68% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $369.9 million, up 69% year-over-year, with 82% of our ad revenue in Q2 from mobile. Non-GAAP operating margin during the second quarter reached 39%. On the user front, Weibo's monthly active user reached 431.1 million in June, an increase of 19% year-over-year or up 20 million on a quarter-over-quarter basis, representing the largest net addition of MAUs in the second quarter 2017. The average daily active users in June reached 189.9 million, up 19% year-over-year. In June, 93% of Weibo's MAU were from mobile. With the recent Fifa World Cup and other events, Weibo has once again achieved strong user growth and user engagement this quarter, leveraging our enhanced offering, consistent user engagement and content distribution, as well as our insights into market opportunities. Weibo's monetization capability was further improved. We have diversified our advertising in the marketing solutions, tailored to different customer segments for individuals to small and medium-sized enterprises to key accounts to offer better marketing experience, and the higher investment returns to our customer. Advertisers are increasingly recognizing our social marketing capabilities. In discussing our operational OpEx for the second quarter, I will cover Weibo's program in areas of users, content and the customers. First, on the user growth. We continue to increase our channel coverage and the efficiency in user acquisition. This quarter, our strategic partnership with the smartphone manufacturers, TV programs and other channels have allowed our products to reach our broader user base more rapidly. In particular, our partnership with a key domestic smartphone manufacturers have shown meaningful results. During the first half of 2018, our mobile direct coverage increased by double-digit year-over-year, setting the stage for - of our strong MAU growth. Our continued investment in user acquisition is essential to help us enhance our network impact, achieve user base expansion, increased penetration into lower tier cities, and solidify our leading act in the social and media competitive landscape. In the meantime, our efforts to promote the user discussion over high events and to strengthen the social attributes of our user product have resulted in greater user engagement at each level of our [indiscernible] compared to the last quarter. This quarter, leveraging Weibo's unique market acquisition within the social media space, Weibo was able to form strategic partnership with Fifa, CCTV, youkou and China Mobile and to distribute the license to work-up content generated by the partners. We will have become the primary platform for users to come to work-up related content. Users otherwise enjoy the consumption of the premium content. We're able to participate in work-up related Weibo activities, led by the celebrity and the sports KOLs in a number of interactive format. The significant participation by the users work up helped by the platform to attract new users and boost our user engagement. The workup brought together over 100 million users on Weibo, generating more than 1 billion highly related interactions. Meanwhile, related short video posted nearly 700,000, and were viewed more or less 17 billion times, while related topic has viewership by nearly 100 billion times during the workup. Moreover, our deep collaboration with online variety show helped Weibo further solidify its competitive act in content distribution, and helped our celebrities increase their influence. For example, as part of our strategic partnership with the Tencent talent show, Produce 101, Weibo was one of the official voting channels. This collaboration has promoted the show and its contestants to interact with the broad user base, as a result, Produce 101 related topics nearly 37 billion viewership. Meanwhile, short videos exceeded 11 billion viewership, and the fan base of Produce 101 contestants reached 40 million. This partnership has enabled Produce 101 to become the blockbuster variety show in 2018, while Weibo benefited from their increased user engagement, including the rise in daily user post on platforms. Other than our continuing investment in channel marketing, we have increased our efforts and investments in user products to more efficiently acquire new users and reactivate old users. For example, we launched a number of social-focused activities, such as giving away red envelope to new users when they complete - completed indiscernible] in content creation, content consumption or social relation pertubation. In addition, we have achieved a meaningful result by deploying more effort in machine learning, which have helped the users establish more social connections and optimize their content consumption experience. During the quarter, the user consumption rate of both relationship-based and interest-based feeds continues to grow. Moreover, the number of users on Weibo Lite, which mainly targets mobile users, who owns relatively low-end smartphones rose sharply in June. MAUs for Weibo Lite had a triple digit sequential increase. This has further expanded our channel network, and the product coverage and increased efficiency in acquiring new users. Moving to the relationship-based feed. We continued to strengthen the relationship-based feed with social attributes on the promoter side and interactions. In June, the users engagement rate in the relationship-based feed maintained double-digit growth year-over-year. Pertaining to the interest-based feed, we allocated considerable resources associated with the content safety, such as implementing manual review of the content compliance in the first quarter. These actions have resulted in lower traffic growth of the hot search and the hot Weibo feeds in the first quarter. However, as our operations gradually return to normal during the second quarter, we were able to improve our content offerings and the user consumption rate of the interest-based feeds and the trending topics. In the second quarter, we have enhanced the distribution scale of the full screen vertical short video to users on Weibo to promote user consumption and the content creation by allowing users to distribute Weibo story in the fleet, and add a separate fee to recommend other story to users in the discover zone of the Weibo app. In the second quarter, daily post of Weibo story increased by double digits sequentially and the daily star viewership increased by triple digits sequentially. We are confident that our effort to increase the distribution of full screen ratable short video will help to build a stronger content ecosystem, and attract more top KOLs from other platforms to accumulate incremental social assets of Weibo. In addition to vertical short videos, our focus and efforts were primarily on horizontal short videos. We will leverage our deepened collaboration with the content creators in multiple fields to focus on content creation with IP and the programs in the period. In the second quarter, we allowed - Weibo app client to allow users to access video content at a primary entry point, rather than asking users to navigate through the video section. We also partially rolled out the [indiscernible] app rate to certain Weibo users. As the new version of the app will prioritize the consumption of the premium video content, the preliminary past result show a significant increase in the user scale of Weibo - of video feeds and that user can't find. We plan to grow [indiscernible] Weibo app where it's beyond initial pass-through of the user in the third quarter. We believe this revamp will help increase our market share in the mobile short video industry. Moving on to the content. One of our key focus area has been to further verticalize our content to build stronger engagement throughout every level of Weibo platform. To support this cause, in June, we expanded content category to 16 verticals, and we partnered with more or less 1900 MCNs. We're going to build the number of our daily posters by top content creators, and the number of our monthly views maintained double-digit growth year-over-year in this quarter. Now I would like to share a few thoughts on our strategy on how to work with the top content providers, and that differentiate Weibo in operation from other content operating platform. A key product assumption of Weibo's primary focus on facilitating social relation perturbation, and enabling top content creators to express themselves, grow social assets, and in direct with the followers who are fast leveraging Weibo's diverse media formats, including fast picture live broadcasting on the video. For example, Sama, a KOL in this vertical, was originally using Bilibili to build her personal brand. When she opened an account on Weibo, and has started posting content in various formats, in June, both the viewership of Sama's feed and the fan's engagement increased by 20 times on a year-over-year basis. Another example is [indiscernible], a KOL originally from [indiscernible] who has grew his fans to nearly 5 million followers year-on-year on Weibo. The interesting part that we observed recently is that despite the selected verticals more and the medium content creators, such as building [indiscernible] on Weibo may distribute where content or other platform. We have returned to Weibo after establishing a baseline of influence. Weibo is reflected as the automated platform for KOL to expand our horizon, and again [indiscernible] top influence, whereby achieving effective monetization. Lastly, turning to monetization. We achieved a strong ad revenue growth in the second quarter. More and more key accounts have liked the value of our social marketing on Weibo, and our successful marketing campaigns have demonstrated Weibo's ability to help advertisers generate a high marketing return rate. As a result, both the number of key advertisers and key ad revenues continued to grow rapidly in the second quarter. Our KOL revenue was up 91% year-over-year, while our customer standing hit a historical high at more than 50% year-over-year. Despite the price increase of our display app product earlier this year, our product sales rate hasn't been affected. Moving forward, we will continue to strengthen our cooperation with the third-party to share brand marketing data across the [indiscernible]. We expect this will help our KA customers better recognized Weibo's marketing value. In return, we anticipate generating increased [indiscernible] outstanding. In the second quarter, we launched the Weibo uni-marketing program with Alibaba. Here, the program's data analyticals and integration, we were able to help brand advertisers more perfectly reach a larger group of our target users, and to better understand the app conversion. This program optimized the advertiser's marketing model by starting the marketing reaction to our products, marketing content and more celebrity cooperation. Turning to SME. In the second quarter, SME revenues were up 48% year-over-year. Both the number of SME advertisers and app have continued to grow. This growth were preliminary driven by the increased result rates after introducing the new app inventory, and the continues optimization of our app algorithm, which has helped the SME customer achieve marketing goals more efficiently. In the second quarter, both ECPM and the app engagement rates grew sequentially. We have made a number of adjustments on our app products, and have adapt our strategy to face the - a serially competitive information piece advertising market in the following suite access. First, [indiscernible] sales rate of new app inventories we added in the video feeds in the discover zone of the Weibo app, the recommended video feeds and the feed in the main page. However, it may take time for our customers to adjust to our content creations to accommodate the new app format available in the app inventories that we added. Second, further enhance our algorithm, especially on those new app inventories to boost the targeting capability in different dimensions, as well as to improve the app conversion rate. Third, further expand our customer base, and to deploy tailored product and marketing solution to advertisers this to different verticals. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for our financial update.