Gaofei Wang
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I'll share with you the highlights of Weibo's user growth, product and monetization, review the progress that we have made in 2018 and lay out the strategies for 2019. Let me start with our fourth quarter financial results. We continue to see solid growth in revenues and user base this quarter. Our total revenue reached $481.9 million, up 28% year-over-year, and advertising and marketing revenues reached $470 million, up 35% year-over-year with 84% of our ad revenues coming from mobile. Non-GAAP net income during the fourth quarter was $183.6 million, up 26% year-over-year, representing a non-GAAP net margin of 38%. For full year 2018, Weibo total revenue reached $1.72 billion, up 49% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenues were $1.5 billion, up 50% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income reached $624.2 million, up 54% year-over-year, representing a non-GAAP net margin of 36%. The sustainable growth of Weibo's revenue and profits in 2018 were mainly derived from the following three areas. First, the continued user base expansion has further solidified Weibo's indispensable position in China's mobile advertising market. Second, Weibo's monetization ecosystem continue to evolve to a more sophisticated level, in particular KOL marketing, which leveraged KOL's influence in branding and the performance out of campaigns as it enhanced our monetization efficiency and differentiated us from rivals in a highly competitive market. Lastly, through years of investment in a self-reinforced accounting change monetization ecosystem, we were nurtured and empowered many content generators to grow with the platform and eventually turn them into the build of our ad customers. The native demand from these content creators lay good foundation for Weibo's growth and to the current economic cycle. The market [indiscernible] our content creators, it's an essential component to our ecosystem and will benefit the platform even in the longer term. On the user front, in December 2018, Weibo's MAU reached 462 million, up 18% year-over-year with a net addition of 70 million users during the year. Average day use reached 200 million, up 16% year-over-year. 93% of Weibo's MAU coming from mobile. Weibo's ecosystem has been viewed upon itself reinforcing cycles of users, content creators and customers. To elaborate, Weibo's massive user base empowers content creators to accumulate social assets based on which content creator enhance their influence and monetize eventually. So - accumulate such social assets, content creators have to generate premium content for user to consume, discuss and share, which drives user engagement growth income. Completing the cycle, customer could reach out to user efficiently through the powerful distribution network, connected by social relationship, particular with participation from content creators. This affirmation self-reinforcing cycle has continuously driven the platform expansion and strengthened our competitive edge. Therefore, I'd like to share our progress in areas of users, content and the customers for the fourth quarter 2018. Let me start with user growth engagement. Leveraging stronger network effect and enhance social media functions, Weibo has been working closely with domestic smartphone manufacturers, TV networks and top applications, benefiting from this are close collaboration with partners in content and marketing solutions. We will maintain this competitive edge in user acquisition cost amid a market filled with fierce competition in traffic acquisition. As for our use of products, we continue to optimize the user experience and enhance user engagement. Let me provide some color on our feed product first. Our relationship basically, we stress in social interaction and accounting distribution through the continued optimization of our algorithm this year. This intensive social content consumption efficiency and improved the user retention with the average refreshment of relationship feed per user increasing by double-digit year-over-year in the fourth quarter. On our interest base fees, we were confronted with challenges and escalating our competition due to the search of similar product in the market. Beginning in the third quarter, we took step to reinforce our competitive edge by emphasizing the strategic focus on hot search and hot topics as well integration of these two functions. By featuring trend discovery and the facilitation, why we distribute a very big discussion. The hot search and topic products not only attract massive level of traffic from general users but also incentivized top content creators to generate and improve the professional content, which further elevate our competitive edge amongst the products. As a result, in the fourth quarter, the traffic of our hot search and topic products grew double-digit and triple-digit percentage, respectively, on a year-over-year basis. In December, the number of topics with weekly views over 1 billion increased by triple digit q-on-q and the daily post of topics from our top content creators increased by double-digit quarter-over-quarter. Moving on to multimedia products. We sold short videos entrusting over the past two years. Compared with other video platform, Weibo's core competence in videos still centers on our social media positioning, specifically by helping video content creators in vertical areas, use up their social relationship with users and afflict their influence. Since the second half of 2018, Weibo has continued to enhance PGC video offerings on top of the existing advantages in traffic-centric areas, such as media and [indiscernible]. Specifically, we expanded content categories and lowered barriers for content creators to engage the PGC video production, which resulted in further adoption of video product amount in fees. In addition, we strive to further increase sense of belonging for user with consumer video content and strengthening the collections and interactions between content creators and users. In the fourth quarter, we also rolled out video community for a select user base. The average daily time spent of user, who entered the video community surpass average content of the [indiscernible] users by 50%. The daily PGC view post from top content creators grew by triple digits year-over-year. Heading into 2019, we'll continue to invest in those three areas to grow our user base and engagement. First, we'll continue to constructively engage and collaborate smartphone manufacturers, TV network and top CPC, particularly in the content areas to improve the efficiency of user acquisition and enhance user engagement. Second, we'll continue to optimize the offers and behind the true fees and beef up efforts in machine learning to improve its relevancy. We are also working to differentiating the positioning of the true fees and creating more synergies between them, especially for our trend, search and topic products. This will enable us to transform the enormous one-off traffic brought by the hockey fans and interest exploration in social media [indiscernible], which bodes well for our long-term competitive edge. Third, we will continue to focus on advancing the adoption of video product among top content creators and in reaching the series video program offering. Our goal is to reinforce our social media position to our hot content creators, to express their personality and empower them to accumulate fan base and facilitate interactions, which solidify our competitive edge in the market. As for content creators, we have three consistent initiatives, namely: reinforcing same social attachment to content creators, expanding content verticals and empowering content creators to increase their monetization opportunities within our ecosystem. Through years of operational efforts, we have already established social network for top content creators, grounded by a general fans community, organized by core fans accounts and curated to super topics. Within this network, leaders in the fans community continues to generate quality content and sustain the popularity of the topics, inspiring general fans to discover, develop their interest and to continuously consume copies of the companies. For example, the top celebrities on our platform. There has been 13,000 super topic communities and 15,000 fans organization covering 130 million users interested in this vertical. We are encouraged to see double-digit growth in active fan base and post YouTube, the aggregation of fans to super topic community, as well as double-digit growth in average post per user and interaction, once the celebrity follow their own different topics. By cultivating active participation from accounts at zero level, we will continue to shape the content ecosystem and solidify its leadership position in celebrity vertical. In the fourth quarter, the number of MCNs which we [indiscernible] has extended to 2,600. In December, the number of daily post by top content creators and monthly views who double-digit with 33 - 32 verticals and passing 10 billion monthly views, an increase of nine verticals from last year, such as travel, maternal and baby and automobile verticals, et cetera. We continue to see huge potential for most our verticals to further expand and evaluate to increase traffic contribution across the entire platform. Specifically, we book an effective gain user traffic through hot topics and discussion on breaking news and celebrities. However, to retain users, trends in social network and ultimately makes them an integral part of the platform, it's critical to enhance content generation and engagement from content creators and enrich and diversify the content ecosystem through verticalization. Heading into 2019, we'll further invest in the following three areas to reinforce our content ecosystem. First, we'll further strengthen our social network with more verticals, where we have advantages. Based on each verticals development status, we will help expand the scale of general fans, core fans accounts and top content creators. And we will help content creator convert more general fans into more engaged fans but eventually into monetizable fans. Second, we'll further expand our vertical into a broader range and improve the content generation and consumption of each vertical and English Weibo's content ecosystem. Third, we will continue to empower top content creators across more verticals with monetization opportunities, such as monetizing through e-commerce and like products and models, leveraging Weibo's powerful social network in fact, as we believe there's still ample room for content creators to grow and monetize at a greater scale in Weibo's ecosystem. Lastly, on monetization cost, we achieved solid growth and high revenues in the fourth quarter with KA revenue growing 62% to $205.9 million and SME ad revenues grew 8% to $179.6 million on a year-over-year basis. Our KA business continue to delever robust growth in the fourth quarter and for the first time, surpass SME revenue contribution in the last the three years. We're encouraged to see those, the number of KA customer and their [indiscernible]. Robust growth is mainly driven by three factors. First, rent advertising in China gradually increased in marketing prices on social platform as Internet penetrate deeply into the mainstream consumer groups. Weibo's view has distinct competitive advantage in social advertising sector, leveraging continued user base, expansion and KOL's unique value proposition. More notably, Weibo has been able to pass [indiscernible], from this top advertisement budget despite a slowdown growth in the overall ad budget in the recent years, as we tailor our marketing solution through the strategic needs of these customers and leverage our social marketing offerings. Second, Weibo has been putting emphasis on the data analytic assets of our social marketing products and the continuous performance in enhancing our ad offerings. For instance, through the cooperation with Alibaba in a Uni Marketing program, which will help advertisers better evaluate their sales conversion achieved on Tmall stores, associated with the fans accumulated on Weibo through advertising campaigns, which bridge the connection between advertisers and potential customers. This enable us to tap into the paid customers performance at budget in addition to the brand at dollars, which was the one of the key drivers in our pie improvement. Specifically, in 2018, the total ad budget Weibo acquired from the top-100 A customers grew double digit year-over-year, particularly Estee Lauder, the global renowned - globally renowned beauty and skin care brand, more than doubled their ad budget on Weibo and the number of marketing campaigns conducted on Weibo surpassed 100. Moving on to the SMEs. In the fourth quarter, our SME revenue grew 8% or 14% year-over-year in a constant-currency terms. On the one hand, regulation having - has impacted ad budget of customer in certain sectors. For instance, we have seen short of ad revenues from online gaming sectors since the second quarter in 2018 as we announced the turnaround in the second half of 2018. On the other side, the SME revenue growth rate was further compromised due to the pricing pressure resulting from the inventory oversupply in the feed ad market. In addition, we incentivized content creators with niche demand by our operating resources, which might curtail their ad spending needs in the short term. But we believe that investment in the self-reinforcing ecosystem will benefit our monetization in the long run. In response to this, we took efficient steps to revamp our SME customer structures and shift our strategic focus in the latter half of 2018. For one thing, we invested more operating resources to refine our management on existing customers and acquire more of their ad budgets through our innovative social advertising products. For another, we stepped to adjust our SME customer structure and devote more resources to expanding into untapped industries and exploring opportunities with customers with native advertising demand on our platform. Specifically, we have adapted our ad products and business reporting system to align with the new customer structure and improve the functionality of our customer development system. For instance, despite the robust user growth from third tier and fourth tier cities, we saw ad spend growth from those high ARPU customer sectors such as O2O customers into tourism and the wedding sectors left behind. Yet e-commerce customer, especially customer like Taobao merchants, ramp up their spending on our platform. This changing customer composition requires a structural change in our agency and regional agency system, which constitute the primary initiative for our SME market in 2019. Heading into 2019, we'll continue to strengthen our monetization capability from the following three perspectives. First, we attempt to further reinforce our unique strategy position and capture higher ad while it's here in the market. Particularly, we will further invest in products and operating resources in KOLs marketing and data analysis to capture high marketing dollar from paying customers. Second, adjusting customer structure of SME customer is our top priority as our user penetrating into more cities. We will tap into more industries in the SME sector and improve the sell-through rate to acquire higher ad budget. Third, we'll continue to improve our advertising algorithm. This improvement will boost ad conversion to our new ad format and the fee rate of our new advertising inventories resulting in higher ad dollars. They will also further expand our ad marketing dimensions beyond the current level from user targeting to content targeting, to continue refine our ad system and enhance our ad's performance. And meanwhile, with additional WAX, W-A-X platform in terms of data and algorithm capabilities to enhance our efficiency in monetization traffic across the platform. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for financial updates.