Gaofei Wang
Analyst · JPMorgan. Please ask your question
[Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo’s first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. On today’s call, I’ll share with you highlights in Weibo’s user growth, product and monetization, as well as progress we made on key initiatives in 2019. Let me start with our first quarter financial results. We continue to see solid growth in revenues and user base this quarter. Our total revenues reached $399.2 million, up 14% year-over-year, or 21% on a constant currency basis. Advertising and marketing revenues reached $341.1 million, up 13% year-over-year, or 20% on a constant currency basis, with 85% of our ad revenues coming from mobile. Non-GAAP net income during the first quarter was $128.5 million, up 14% year-over-year. On the user front, in March 2019, Weibo’s MAUs reached 465 million, up 13% year-over-year, representing a net addition of 54 million users on an annual basis. Average DAUs reached 203 million, up 10% year-over-year. 94% of Weibo’s MAUs came from mobile. During the Chinese New Year, we delivered solid user growth and improved user engagement through innovative grand advent of marketing and holiday-specific branded campaigns. On the monetization front, KA business continued its momentum, thanks to sales team efforts and our ongoing ad product optimization and innovation. SME business also exhibited some positive signs with product mix and customer structure revamp and ad product optimization. In discussing our operating ARPU for the first quarter, our covered areas of users’ content and customers of Weibo. Let’s start from user growth and user engagement. We have two areas of focus this year. First, our user growth. Both strived to ramp up our user scale in the third and fourth-tier cities to further user product optimization and channel investment. From a channel perspective, we continue to partner with major domestic smartphone manufacturers for user acquisition. From a product perspective, we’ll continue to enhance the location-based content consumption and create an experience to meet the specific content and social interaction demand of low-tier city users. In 2019, we’ll further drive user engagement time spend growth by boosting content consumption and social interaction of the lower-tier city users underpinned by our step-up effort in creating location-based social and content consumption context. Weibo will further penetrate into lower-tier cities, leveraging our core strength in social attributes and into film discovery, coupled with our effective channel investments. Second, on user engagement, our emphasis this year is to increase frequency of usage by each Weibo user. To achieve this purpose, our first area of focus is to drive content generation and user engagement with strengthening our cooperation with partner in public sector, including media outlets, TV stations and sports events and also launching brand campaigns that integrate vertical resources and feature participation of top content creators combined with our effort to diverse user interactive functionalities. For example, during the Chinese New Year this year, we focused on aggregation of video content and innovation of online interactive activities to enhance user engagement, leveraging our collaboration with CCTV’s Chinese New Year Gala. As a result, we are encouraged to see higher usage of Weibo in such context with speeds posted surpassing 100 million, facilitating over 300 million social interactions and over 5 billion short video reviews. These three measures all growing at double-digit percentage year-over-year. We also organized the #ChineseNewYear photography contest in concert with CCTV News encouraging users to capture moments in their life through the spring festival in the forms of pictures and videos. During the 20 days context, over 10 million related photos and video contents were generated on Weibo, with nearly 100 quality photographics – photographic work selected to be shown on CCTV programs. The topic of the context was viewed over 10 billion times on Weibo during that period. Our second area of focus is further enhance social attributes of our user products and improve social interactions among users. For instance, we have established a social interaction arena [Classic Native substance] [ph] based on secret topic communities and advanced group functions in the past two years. User penetration and user engagement generated through this two functions grew nicely year-over-year, with user interaction within secret topic community. The number of daily average users who access that group and their daily average user, all delivering double-digit growth year-over-year in March 2019. We believe, our step-up investment in the social attribute of our user product will play a critical role in growing our user base, improving user engagement and particularly enhancing Weibo users content consumption frequency. Specifically, content consumption information feed grew very robustly in 2019. Our emphasis on social attributes of our user product could enhance the competitive advantage of our product amid enhanced competition in the industry, laying a solid foundation for solid user base expansion and adding [ph] monetization efficiency underpinned by user frequency improvement on the platform. Next on content. Let’s start with content consumption. For the relationship-based feeds, we further enhance content distribution capability based on social relationship, leading to high efficiency in social content consumption and improved the user engagement. In the first quarter, the average refreshment per user for the relationship-based feed further increased year-over-year. For the interest-based feeds, we continue to optimize algorithm backing the feeds. On the one hand, the refined algorithm in enhanced exposure of contents from hot search trend and topic in interest-based feeds, leveraging stronger synergies within these two – these products. On the other hand, we enhanced our data mining and distribution capabilities of contents from mid-tier and long-tail verticals in terms of traffic viewership, which led to over 50% year-over-year growth of content exposures from this vertical in interest-based feed. Subsequently, in March, both user fill and monthly refreshment of interest-based feed continue to grow from the same period last year. From the content generation perspective, as of March 2019, Weibo’s partnership with MCN has exceeded 2,800. We will still host distinct leaderships in area of top content creators,with number of top content creators post and views generated in March 2019 all maintaining double-digit growth year-over-year. Regarding video content generation, in the first quarter, daily video post by top content creators increased almost 50% year-over-year, primarily driven by PGC video content. The robust growth of PGC video content generation was attributable to the below two factors. First, benefiting from the rich expression of short videos, we saw increasing adoption of video format among top content creators. For example, VLOG, which caught on last year offered content creator a better experience to express their personalities to capture daily live moments in a video format. Compared with photo and text, video format offer content creator a more vivid and immersive experience to interact with fans. In March, the number of daily post on VLOG grew over 50% on a sequential basis. Second, Weibo video community enable us to derive massive target user topic to high-quality video content creators. In the first quarter, we proactively invited content creators to generate quality video content or single out quality video contribution and then offered healthy traffic support to these video contents in interest-based feed. We saw meaningful growth in average video view of those videos being selected. Over the next two quarters, we will further strengthen traffic support mechanism through selective quality video content from two aspects. First, we’ll distribute this quality video contents through multiple feeds to ensure and enhance their content exposure. Second, we will more precisely distribute those video content to target users with different interests to various vertical channels within the video communities, which further promote this content exposure, while solidify the new things for video content consumption on Weibo. We are encouraged to see that the average daily time spent per user for those who access the video community tab more than doubled compared with that for those who didn’t. This year, we will establish an operating mechanism for video content generators to further development video community, which will fortify Weibo’s competitive edge in the PGC content area. This year, we’ll continue to execute against our vertical content strategies with a special focus on building out ecosystem around top verticals and empowering top KOLs to uplift their fans engagement and thus better monetize within our ecosystem. Through years of investment, Weibo had well established the monetization ecosystem for content creators to monetize through advertising, e-commerce, live streaming and paid subscription, et cetera. This year, we’ll facilitate more top content creators to benefit from the ecosystem, further reinforcing the platform ecosystem around the content, influence and monetization. Moreover, for mid-tier and long-tail verticals, we’ll focus on expanding the scale of top content creators and uplifting their influence. Take aviation and collection of verticals as examples. In the first quarter, the two verticals ranked among top five out of the six verticals – 60 verticals by year-over-year growth in the scale of top content creators and monthly views. In particular, the collection vertical was the most rapid growing vertical, with monthly viewership more than doubled year-over-year. Lastly, on monetization, KA revenue continue to grow robustly in the first quarter increasing 31% year-over-year with 39% on a constant currency basis. We attributed the strong growth to multiple reasons. First, in the past several years, we benefited from the radio ad partnership from offline to online for brand advertisers. Second, we will capitalize on the trend that an increasing number of trend customers desire to associate their campaign – campaigns with a blockbuster IP and also accurately measure their campaign results through data analytics afterwards, leveraging IP partnership with TV station and celebrities, as well as in new marketing program with Alibaba, Weibo continue – continuously validate this capability to satisfy customers various marketing demands. Third, we pioneered the innovation in social marketing product and ad formats in the digital ad industry and showcase desire to ROI to customers with a series of successful cases. For instance, we offer integrated social marketing solution for customers to uplift their marketing performance that associating Weibo’s ad inventory with our rich IP content resources, such as celebrities, variety shows, TV programs and films. Take the marketing campaign of Illy, the national famous dairy group as an example where Weibo worked closely with the TV program SINA on 2019 to maximize the brand and marketing effect of Illy. During the campaign for the first time, fans interaction on Weibo greatly impacted the competition rules of the TV program, effectively transforming the contestants and their fans into Illy’s endorsers. Weibo also proactively invited over 30 [in-grow] [ph] celebrities and over 100 participants [indiscernible] to generate around 500 posts, with growing 1.6 billion views, 20 million interactions, significantly uplifting Illy’s brand exposure. In total, views on topic discussion around the SINA 2019 program exceeded 20 billion. According to [indiscernible] research, the campaign drew up users’ brand preference on Illy’s promoted products by 41% and desire for consumption by 25%. SME business on the other hand will continue to face intense competition across the feed of advertising market. First, top SME customer ad spend became more scattered across platform bloating a traffic search in ad inventory release into the market. The oversupply of ad inventory also caused pricing pressure in the bidding process across the industry. And meanwhile starting from the third quarter and fourth quarter of 2018, macro uncertainties and pricing and financing environment also weighed on the growth of that entire SME end market. In response to these challenges, we took specific steps to form a separate sales team to directly serve our top SME customers aiming to improve their ad performance. We also enhanced our capability to acquire mid-tier and long-tail customers to adjustment to our sales agency structure. Overall, our SME’s business reached a thaw [ph] in March and April and started to recover in May with double-digit sequential growth in daily ad spend. As this above initiative gradually play out, we estimate that our SME ad business will be covered in a more meaningful way in the latter-half of 2019. On the ad product front, we had made plenty of optimization as well. For example, we launched an automatically recommended targeting data package on [indiscernible] system to meet customers industry-specific targeting requirements. We saw double-digit growth in ECPM and ad engagement for the same customer upon adoption of such package. We have also refined functionalities of vertical video ad product in terms of traffic direction and social interaction, leading to double the click-through rate and a higher sell-through rate, as well as customers’ purchase intention. Finally, on gaming sector, despite a resumption of gaming license approval and modest recovery of ad spend in the quarter, our view is that it will still take one or two more quarters for a market rebound In view of the current situation, we have nevertheless stepped up our operating efforts to engage more users in the gaming sector, hoping to lay a good foundation for the monetization in the future. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial update.