Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Citigroup. Please go ahead
Thank you. Hello, everyone and welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference call. On today's call, I will share with you highlights on Weibo's users, products, and monetization, as well as progress we've made on our key initiatives in 2020. Let me start with our first quarter financial results. In the first quarter, our total revenue reached $323.4 a decrease of 19% year-over-year or 15% on a constant currency basis. Advertising and Marketing revenues reached $275.4 million, a decrease of 19% year-over-year or 16% on a constant currency basis, 89% [ph] of our ad revenues came from Mobile. On the user front, Weibo's MAU grew 18% year-over-year to $550 million in March 2020, representing a net addition of approximately 85 million users year-over-year. Average daily users grew 19% year-over-year to 241 million, representing a net addition of approximately 38 million users year-over-year. This is the highest reported year-over-year user growth to date in terms of net addition of MAUs and DAUs. 94% robust MAU came from Mobile. This quarter, amid the coronavirus outbreak in China, Weibo demonstrated its indispensible value as a social media platform leveraging unique strength in serving public conversations between government, media and general public. We are delighted to see strong growth in both use and traffic to our platform with [indiscernible] growing 50% year-over-year. On monetization front, advertisers in broad range [ph] cutback or suspended their ad budgets in response to the business disruptions resulting from the pandemic in short or mid-term. That said, this is all now behind us, as we have the pandemic has driven the transformation of the larger industry and their marking approach presenting long-term opportunity to both our customers and us coupled with ramp up in traffic Weibo is well positioned to further grow its social ad wallet in the long run. In discussing our operating activities for the first quarter, I will elaborate on progress made in areas of product monetization. The strong growth in users and traffic in March was mainly driven by similar [ph] stress and public conversations related to the COVID-19 pandemic. To be specific first it is a difficult season for Weibo to grow users adding group user engagement around Chinese Spring Festival. Second, we have responded to the pandemic. Weibo had to [indiscernible] operating resources and the product development to enable wider dissemination of official information from government and media, bringing professional opinion and discussion to the public, and more importantly, help general public to seek quick response from government agencies. This initiative allowed us to acquire users at a relatively lower cost and further solidify our company's ads in the market. Now I will elaborate. So [Indiscernible] in order to give people timely update of the pandemic, Weibo has facilitated official information dissemination from over 70,000 media outlets and government agencies in the form of video and live streaming and responded quickly to launch the COVID-19 feed within recommended feed and discovery zone. In the first quarter, the pandemic view total by media and the government reached nearly 6 million with total views over 400 billion. On a daily basis over 200 million users can stream pandemic related content among which 70 million users consumed COVID-19 feed. And the daily views of pandemic related content exceeded 12 billion and meanwhile we allowed 50 renews [ph] verifying nearly 1500 new Weibo accounts of medical experts, medical care staff, patients and their family members and helped in accumulating approximately 150 million followers through content distribution on Weibo. Second, on vertical content. In the early stage of the pandemic, Weibo has proactively encouraged platforms content creators to participate in the distribution and discussion around the pandemic related content. As the pandemic evolved, Weibo has diversified content outflow from some of our users to initiating online events with stay at home themes across its verticals, such as entertainment, food and humor, aiming to alleviate public anxiety over the pandemic and encourage youth to return to normal life. As a result the number of daily quotes by top content creators in the first quarter grew over 50% year-over-year and shopping for hot non-pandemic related verticals resumed to the pre-pandemic level. Let's talk about Video and Live Streaming business. For video, we are ramping up our mechanism around those PGC and UGC video content this year. In March, our daily video views and the number of users who consume videos at Weibo grew over 30% year-over-year driven by the over traffic flows and growing products improvement. On the UGC video front, we have further optimized user consumption experience, enhanced distribution efficiency and reinforced traffic support for UGC video content and thus enhanced our monetization efficiency around the video content. The daily video views of UGC videos grew 50% quarter-over-quarter leading to over 50% sequential growth in our revenues from UGC videos. On PGC video front, we further optimized social interaction experience through ramp up on the layout of PGC video main page. These had robust growth in the user content and interaction on the main page compared to the previous one. Meanwhile, we have restructured the video community through adequate [ph] video consumption [indiscernible] one which recommended [indiscernible] video, one which is popular one and inserted one with vertical UGC videos. Since the rollout of the new version in early April, we are glad to see profits change [ph] in terms of user retention and the video consumption, which in turn encouraged professional video content creators to upload content on Weibo. And moreover, benefiting from user search demand for video consumption during the pandemic, along with our further optimized content offering mechanism, our video community has gained recognition from users and content creators. In March, PGC content creators who uploaded content on Weibo reached nearly a million with the daily video growth growing over 20% quarter-over-quarter. Moving on to live streaming, driven by the pandemic, robust live streaming product saw wider adoption in an increasing number of vertical scenarios, as enterprise, celebrities and [indiscernible] our platform quickly embraced live streaming too as a desirable communication channel. With this understanding we beefed up our investment around live streaming from both product and operational fronts. [Indiscernible] by the showroom and the e-commerce live streaming facilities, we already had last year. In addition, through facilitating over 30,000 corporate and media live events around the pandemic we encouraged our partners and clients to go live on Weibo such as in the Kids [ph] online concert and product launch events. We also leveraged short video clips and KOLs to distribute and raise awareness at our diverse events leading to better promotion results for our content partners and the customers. For instance Weibo, together with Tencent Music hosted the first virtual live concert for the famous singer, Rene Liu. This live concert itself drew over 10 million total views with nearly 300 celebrities and KOLs creating publicity for the event. We also edited highlights of the concert into short video clips as a way to achieve wider distribution for the event. We are pleased to deliver over 100 million views on the video clips and over 700 million views on related topics. This distinct advantage we have around our live streaming video event promotion in which Weibo's counter offerings. In the first quarter the total number of the live video exceeded a million, double from the same period last year and going forward we will continue to optimize our products and improve content distribution efficiency through more traffic support and further enhance marketing efficiency for our clients through more diversified offerings. Lastly, let me talk to the progress we made on Oasis. The pandemic [indiscernible] impact [indiscernible] and limited content generation by certain degree. However, as people's lives in domestic areas gradually returned to normal, we saw the active user and content generation at Oasis in April resume to the pre-pandemic level and continued its growth trajectory, even without large field channel marketing activities. We will further optimize user products, primarily video content generation and distribution on top of the total community and further drive user growth and engagement with proper channel enhancement. Weibo's advertising revenues decreased by 19% on a year-over-year basis or 16% on a constant currency basis due to the adverse impact from the coronavirus pandemic. Our KA revenue decreased due to [indiscernible] were 18% excluding negative impact from currency translation and barter transaction, as several industries which were directly hit by the domestic coronavirus outbreak, cutbacks or suspended their overall ad budget in the first quarter. That's the case with the movie industry where the withdrawal of new movie release left nothing to be promoted. And meanwhile, with the epidemic evolving into a global pandemic, there were other industries such as in the case of cosmetics and luxury brands, who deferred their expense following the delay in new product launch caused by the global supply chain destruction. On the flip side, the pandemic has further driven the ad budget shift from offline to online. Industries that were traditionally opted for offline product release have begun piloting to the online model, bringing forth new opportunities as well as in the top line growth for us in the long run. Taking Auto [ph] as an example, we piloted quickly and rolled out an online product launch solution to address Auto's [ph] need to release its new model, Find XP. We successfully built [indiscernible] through the HD live stream event. Leveraging improved the watching and interaction experience, rich traffic exposure compounding influence of over 3000 KOLs. The ad solution resonated greatly with our customers delivering over 1.8 billion total views on related topics. The success will continue with Opos [ph] showcase the potential of the online past launch during the pandemic and does entice other customers from the handsets and auto sector to have a choice. We believe that [indiscernible] will continue to migrate their advertising from offline to online. And furthermore, we expect notable trends of integrating marketing featuring elements of live streaming, short video, e-commerce and KOLs. In light of this trend, we have focused on our ad product upgrades in order to further enhance our social ad wallet share. Let me answer SME, SME ad revenue decreased 23% year-over-year, or 19% on a constant currency basis. On the one hand, the pandemic has put pressure on the move to outline motions who flash marketing spend in response to the pandemic due to disruption in work and logistics from the quarantine. On the other hand, the pandemic has structurally benefited a few industries, which delivered much better results than we had expected. For example, ad revenues from the online education and gaming sector grew by triple-digits on year-over-year basis in the first quarter. We took the opportunity to tap into a broader customer base, notably in the education, cloud and gaming sectors with the pandemic accelerating internet penetration in our daily life. Our differentiated value proposition lesson [ph] well among those customers with an integrated branding plus user acquisition objectives. For instance, traditionally, customers from the online education vertical came to us mainly for commercial purpose and then our feedback. During the pandemic, market leaders such as Yuanfudao and TAL also reached with brand awareness on top of this acquisition. With this understanding, our sales team adapt quickly by rolling out an integrated branding plus performance ad solution and leverage the synergy with the vertical content operational team to deliver on both the branding and plus acquisition expense, but this entry with ad solution earned great recognition from SME customers. On top of that, we also made strides in improving our service capability to top customers while continued enhancing our feed ad offerings. As such, we see potential headroom in growing our SME ad revenues, built upon such integrating blending plus performance needs. Finally, let me share some color or progress around ad products. On the programmatic buying front, mainly [indiscernible], we focus on delivering higher ROI for customers for introducing deep learning to improve the automatic bidding process. As a result, ad spend through OCP ads grew over 50% on a sequential basis. For gaming and education industry, if we put more efforts on optimizing algorithms OCP ad spend accounted for over 60% of the total assets. On the video side, over the years, we have gradually enhanced our monetization efficiency around video underpinned by the healthy growth in the user, who consumes video content as well as the overall video view. We are encouraged to see substantially higher revenue contribution from ads in video format this quarter. That's a chunk part of the incremental ad inventory released to video consumption. We may unpack or undermine highs. To address this opportunity, we have been continuously innovating our video ad offerings. For instance, in the second quarter, we are upgrading our watch plus [ph] series of video ad products by introducing more direct response features to the video playing page, such as watch plus download, watch plus purchase, watch plus flowing and watch plus H5 serving, et cetera. Such direct response features will give you a shortcut to the conversion end, leading to optimize ad performance around short video and filters. Consequently, we believe these initiatives can further help marketing efficiency on our SME customer on Weibo. With that, let me hand it over to Fei Cao for financial review.