Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead
Thank you. Hello everyone, and welcome to Weibo's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. On today's call, I'll share with you highlighting Weibo's users, product and monetization as well as progress we made on our key initiatives in 2019. Let me start with our third quarter financial results. In the third quarter, our total revenue reached $467.8 million, up 2% year-over-year or 6% on a constant currency basis. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $412.5 million, up 1% year-over-year or 5% on a constant currency basis. 87% of our ad revenues came from mobile. Non-GAAP net income during the third quarter was $176.1 million, representing a non-GAAP net margin of 38%. On the user front, in September Weibo's MAUs reached 497 million, up 12% year-over-year, representing a net addition of approximately 51 million users year-over-year. Average DAUs reached 216 million, up 11% year-over-year, representing a net addition of approximately 21 million users year-over-year. In September, 94% of Weibo's MAU came from mobile. This quarter, leverage reinforced the social interactive features, optimized with other reasons and traffic-allocation mechanisms, we capped the ramping up our efficiency in traffic distribution. Correspondingly, these refreshment, impressions and user interactions continue to grow double-digit year-over-year. Meanwhile, we continue to improve trend and topic products which help us empower user to more efficiently discover trends and hot topics and participate in discussions. These initiatives continue to drive solid user scale extension and engagement growth in the third quarter. On the monetization front, KA business continue to deliver solid growth, benefiting from Weibo's unique value propositions skewed upon KOL's influence in branding and driving performance coupled with the increasing adoption of social marketing solution within clients at budget. SME business has achieved a generally stabilized status year-over-year and grew double-digit quarter-over-quarter, leveraging the continued increase of platform traffic, improved ad performance and optimize the sales channels. That said, the near-term market challenges do persist, especially on the pricing side due our favorable demand and supply dynamics in the market amid competition. In discussing our operating update for the third quarter, I will elaborate our progress we made in areas of product and monetization. Under the current competitive landscape, instead of solely focusing on our user growth, we progressively emphasis on both user field and engagement growth to achieve platform expansion as well as reinforcement of Weibo's core advantages such as hot trend discussion and social interaction to build higher competitive barrier. First, on user growth and engagement. In the third quarter, we continued to deliver solid user and traffic growth. Our user base continue to grow double-digit year-over-year, representing a net addition of approximately 51 million MAU on annual basis. Coupled with our existing channel investment, we increasingly leverage Weibo's advantage in trend discovery and social features to further acquire users and enhance user engagement. This strategy enable us to acquire users at a lower cost and meanwhile enhance user engagement against market competition. Now, let me elaborate. Third, on hot trend. We have been constantly investing in the discovery and distribution of trends, which enable Weibo to solidify its leadership in this area and serve as one of our key competitiveness to acquire user and enhance user engagement in the past. This year, we further emphasized on extending the life span of hot trend consumption and discussions to three initiatives. First, we optimized our topic products. Second, we enhanced distribution synergies among hot search topics and hot trend feed. Third, in hot trend feeds, we further offered traffic support to promote original content and accounts around hot trend. Consequently, on one hand, our advantage in discovery and consumption of hot events over other media platform has been further strengthened. As example, during the celebration of the 70th anniversary birthday of the Founding of the People Republic of China, the total number of related topics generated on Weibo was 700 with topic discussion surpassing 100 million and top views exceeding 150 billion. On the other hand, we also have distinct advantage on the hot event discussion front, particularly from a diversity of opinion point of view. This quarter's top hot events discussed on Weibo cover across 11 content verticals and the total number of topics discussed increased 67% and a number of post around hot events generated by top content creators increased to 54% quarter-over-quarter. Compared with other media platform with a sole focus on news coverage, we will offer the wide range of hot events, more comprehensive information and diversified opinions around the hot events for the user to consume coupled with our partnership with handset manufacturer around preinstalled and exposure of contents on the handset interface, we can maintain relative lower user acquisition cost than other media platforms and further improve our user engagement and user acquisition efficiency. Moving onto the social features. Driving social content production and interactions has been our relentless focus as we take step to further sharpen our long-term competitive edge. To that end, for one thing, we have introduced more social features to our product. For instance, we rolled out hot content and community products in previous quarter and this quarter we further launched an option for content creators to limit certain post to be shown exclusive to fans as well as improve fans interactive functionalities. These efforts uplift the content creators sense of security in content sharing and improve their interaction experience with them, leading to stronger social relationship and thus deepen user engagement. As a result, within relationship based feed, we saw higher efficiency in content distribution and user reactivation as well as improved the engagement. Total refreshment for the relationship is the feed and number of user who refresh the feed continue to grow double-digit year-over-year. For another, we took steps to optimize the traffic mix of interest based feed. To facilitate incremental social relationship build out, we give more weight to quality content from mid-tier to longer-tail verticals in terms of traffic distribution. Such optimization also contributed to diversifying our current ecosystem and improving user stickiness. Executing well against these initiatives, traffic to the interest based feed continue to grow double-digit. Correspondingly increased traffic facilitate vertical content creators to better grow fans, the net addition of fans for these content creators tripled sequentially and hence drove user engagement as well. On video consumption, given intensified competition in surely the industry in the past two years, we took a step back and revisited our video product positioning and organization which is spent around three categories including media, PTC and UGC videos. First, the media video category has always been our core strength, leveraging constructive partnership with media outlet and MVNs, Weibo has become one of the most important channels for media to release media content and uplift their influence. For instance, during the celebration of China's 70th Anniversary, nearly 6,000 media outlets generated 280,000 videos of related feeds with video views surpassing 8.6 billion. Second, PTC video will be our future focus on production and operational front and serve as a key driver of short video growth. In the competitive landscape of PTC video, Weibo demonstrate certain advantage in traffic, content production and monetization. On top of our existing strength, we had been constantly optimizing our PTC video offerings and spending the video exposure in the traffic distribution, while at the same time improving the social and interactive features around these videos. For instance, we optimize the recommendation and push function of video community and enhance hardcore fans and bully chat features. In September, those that daily video view within the video community tab and user engagement on video main page grew double-digit compared to the number in Q1 as well as fans attachment to the video creators trending up. Lastly, we will continue to face and maybe face through challenges in the UGC video area. Currently, we are beta testing a new version of Weibo Star Wars, which we expect to launch in the fourth quarter. I'll share with you more color after we have further progress. Also I'd like to share some color on Oasis. As you may know, we recently roll-out our photo and video sharing social community product named Oasis as one of our approach to further tap into the social area. The product was still in the beta testing, are waiting for the final approval from regulators. Oasis is positioned as a lifestyle focused photo and video sharing social platform. In terms of differentiation from Weibo, Oasis will encourage more UGC posting, particularly from vertical content creators. Content is lifestyle related and mainly taking photos and video format, which complements Weibo's content per system and address users' diversified social and content consumption needs. During the beta testing period, we are encouraged to see early momentum in user content generation and social interaction. We expect to obtain approval and official launch of the product within this month. Going forward, we will continue to optimize product features and beef-up our efforts in the channel marketing in the hope of creating a live social platform with a distinct lifestyle live. Moving to content. The number of top content creators posts generated as well as content viewership have grown double-digit for the eighth consecutive quarters. The increase was primarily driven by our endeavor to improve content creators user experience and help them to grow on Weibo including to constantly optimize content recommendation efficiency and support traffic offering to content creators, as such we could help them to accumulate social assets and monetize our platform. Additionally, our continued investment in monetization ecosystem empower content creators to further strengthen their capability to monetize. For example, our latest collaboration with Taobao on e-commerce live broadcasting, which allow e-commerce KOLs to synchronize Taobao live broadcasting content on Weibo in a real time manner, stimulates real time interaction between KOLs and fans, enhance their monetization efficiency and meanwhile help them to better accumulate social assets on Weibo. Last on monetization, in the third quarter, our KA revenue continued to deliver solid growth, representing a year-over-year growth of 6% or 10% in renminbi term. On a sequential basis, KA revenues grew 19% in renminbi term. In the past few years, Weibo has been constantly innovating and optimize differentiated marketing offerings, such as celebrity marketing, IP program marketing and the customized content marketing. This allow Weibo to continue to capture our wallet share from brand advertisers [Technical Issues]. As social marketing continued to gain traction, we believe we have much more potential to gain additional wallet share from brand advertisers as a social ad budget and our [indiscernible] still have ample room to grow. Let me give an example of celebrity marketing. This quarter a TV series called Go Go Squid! became very popular on Weibo as well as its leading actor Li Xian whose fan base grew quickly from 5 million to 20 million. Li Xian's huge influence on Weibo attracted dozens of brand advertisers to seek co-operation including Puma, [indiscernible]. Consequently, this led to a new round of marketing campaigns on Weibo, leveraging Li Xian's influence to target broader audience and promote brand image. Moreover, our celebrity marketing solutions featuring a combination of the likely celebrity and customize the content as opposed to pure celebrity endorsement resonate well with brand advertisers. As an example, for Adidas marketing campaign to promote UltraBoost 2019 will help the brand advertisers to screen out four celebrities including Justin Wong, [indiscernible] whose image best match the new product positioning and then customize the short videos to show different personality of each celebrity. The well executed initiative largely motivated fans willingness to create and post content of their own life story on Weibo. As a result, the total video views generated for the customized video surpassed 40 million and the new products brand exposure was maximized. Moving on to the SME business. We are pleased to see a stabilizing trend with SME revenue growing 1% year-over-year or 5% in renminbi term. On a sequential basis, SME ad revenue grew 16% quarter-over-quarter in renminbi term. That said the macro and regulatory headwinds as well as intense competition coming to weigh on the growth prospects of the overall performance and market. The stabilization of our SME ad business are mainly attributable to the solid execution and reinforcement of several key initiatives. Let me elaborate on the progress we made. First, we continuously improve our ad performance and the customers' ROI. For instance, we may strive in driving the adoption of the optimized bidding, namely optimize the CPX bidding model among customers, which enable customer to bid according to a specific target. This further facility programmatic buy has significantly enhanced customers at performance efficiency. In the third quarter, ad spent through all CPX increased over 30% on a sequential basis, making up a higher percentage of the total SME ad spend. Second, we took step to further differentiate our ad product offerings. For example, we introduced a KOL marketing solution featuring a short-term celebrity on KOL endorsement, aiming to help the advertiser quickly accumulate social assets, reach a wider community and achieve better conversion on our platform. Such products will resonate well with our customer in the test run. As an example, our customer Magic Ears, a company offering English classes for juvenile initiated our KOL marketing campaign on Weibo that leverage influence of KOLs from baby and maternity vertical through their posting of promotional contents of Magic Ears. During the campaign, Magic Ears precisely target users who were recognized as the parents of juvenile. As a result, the number of consultation and registration to Magic Ears English classes ramped up with ad engagement increasing by five-fold and user acquisition cost reduced by 50% compared to the promotional campaign run by Magic Ears itself result involvement of vertical KOLs. Three, we continue to optimize ad agency structure and enhance go-to-market strategies with a focus on developing new customers and diversifying industry exposure. As a result, ad spend of newly acquired customer static improved, contributing a higher proportion of the total SME ad revenues in prior quarter. Finally, we'll offer more operational resources to nurture the so-called native added customers such as self-median and MCNs to empower them to grow and monetize within our ecosystem, which will ultimately manifest in driving their future ad demand with us. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for financial update.