Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead
[Foreign Language] Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. [Foreign Language] On today’s call, I will share with you highlights on Weibo's user, product, and monetization, as well as progress we made on our key initiatives in 2020. [Foreign Language] Let me start with our third quarter financial results. In the third quarter, our total revenue reached $465.7 million, flattish year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenues reached $416.7 million, an increase of 1% year-over-year. 90% of our add revenues came from mobile. [Foreign Language] On the user front, Weibo's MAUs grew 3% year-over-year to 511 million in September 2020 and average DAUs grew 4% year-over-year to 224 million in September 2020, both representing a decrease of 2% quarter-over-over. 94% of Weibo's MAU came from mobile. [Foreign Language] This quarter with grown user base as steady pace and enhanced user engagement and retention as our key strategies for use of product operation, we put more emphasis on increasing consumption efficiency of fees and enhanced user’s social interaction. [Foreign Language] That said, on the user scale front post the summer break in August, Weibo’s user number decreased in September compared with June. We have faced incremental headwinds in terms of user growth for the second-half of year, mainly due to negative impact from cutback in investments for variety shows and entertainment industries, as well as back-to-school seasonality. In addition, on the engagement front, our user engagement and time spend were also negatively impacted – influenced by the intense competition in the user market, as short video companies are still aggressively investing in the user acquisition. As such, for one thing, we have beefed up our investment in social attributes and video areas from both product and operation perspective to solidify our market competitiveness and user growth, leveraging Weibo’s unique platform positioning. For another, we have also stepped up our efforts in channel and strategic partnership since the fourth quarter, hoping to sustain our wider user coverage. [Foreign Language] On the monetization front, we have further emphasized client past performance at offerings among KA and SME advertisers from key industries and reinforced our competitiveness in the market through business structure, which are determining factors for our business recovery post the pandemic. As a result, our top KA industry sectors returned to the growth category in the third quarter, entertained by notable growth in the number of brand advertisers, which contributed to the stabilization of our ad business in the third quarter on a year-over-year basis. [Foreign Language] In discussing our operating updates for the third quarter, I’ll elaborate our progresses made in areas of product and monetization. [Foreign Language] We are facing an increasingly intense market competition for the second-half of the year. In response to this, it's crucial for us to push it – it’s crucial that we optimize our use of product to further enhance Weibo’s uniqueness and core competitiveness in the social media sector, a new one will step up our investment in video and user community in vertical areas, aiming to enhancing this acquisition capability to cultivating user’s habit of content consumption in this area. [Foreign Language] On topics products, it’s our core function to serve the public question and discussion around topic, which help to bring new users and enhance user engagement on the platform. And thus we kept our investment in the content generation, discovery and discussion around topics, as well as extended related content consumption. In the third quarter, DAUs will consume topics continue to grow double-digit year-over-year and user discussion around topics did nicely as well. Moving forward, on the product front, we will optimize post features to encourage users to put and reinforce content discovery and topic distribution mechanism to improve the efficiency of content generation. On operation front, we will further encourage media outlets and KOLs to create topics and participate in topic discussion, which enrich content offering around topics. On content consumption side, we will further enhance user consumption and discussion around hot topics through the more products content offering within the discovery zone. We just achieved through optimized algorithm mechanism of hot topic chart and hot search functions and collaboration with platform, including handset manufacturers. [Foreign Language] Moving on to social. It's our focus to enhance product social features to drive content offerings and social interaction. First, for relationship-based feeds, we have further upgraded distribution mechanism and launched new features to facilitate user interaction in the feeds. For instance, we reinforced selective content distribution in relationship with the feed to beef up social content offerings such as enhancing traffic social to post users might – to post the user might have missed and post that was heatedly discussed among users we follow. Additionally, on top of our commentary and repost features, we added social features to enhance direct interactions among users, such as enabling users to leave message on other’s main page. Second, for community products such as send group and super topics, we have further enhanced social attributes and promoted against social relationship build up and their interactions around interest, which in turn drives user’s social stickiness in relationship-based feed. As a result, in the third quarter, the use of super topic and a number of post interaction and relationship buildup in super topics all grew double-digit year-over-year and nearly 60% of the top KOLs have created their super topics. We believe the progress we have made to strengthen competitive edge of our community products will enable us to tap into growth of the overall self media market attracting more self media to Weibo and driving user engagement. [Foreign Language] Yes, [indiscernible] social attributes as Weibo’s core competitiveness. Next, let me share some color on the progress of video account program. Since the launch of the program in July, we have been focusing on optimizing our platform mechanisms to better facilitate traffic distribution and send accumulation around video accounts, as well as strengthen our brand recognition among video KOLs and users. As of November, we had over 750,000 content creators participating to video account program on Weibo, among which over 13,000 already had fan base over a million. Taking the November metrics as an example, the number of daily video submission and daily video viewership increased over 30% year-over-year for those monthly active video accounts. We are encouraged to see a notable trend among Weibo’s top content creators to ship to video leveraging introduction of video account programs. And meanwhile, video account programs also attract talent video content creators from other platforms to join and accumulate social assets on Weibo, which will supplement our current cable network and English accounting ecosystem. Going forward, for one thing, we will lower the entry barrier for opening video accounts, enabling more KOLs to join and benefit from traffic support from video account programs. For another, we'll reinforce video content distribution based on social recommendations within the video community hoping to nurture use the mindset to visit the video community and thus further drive video content consumption around video accounts. [Foreign Language] To sum up, on [indiscernible] investments are made market competition, first we will solidify our advantage in public and social media functions to grow our user base and improve user engagement so as to enhance our competitiveness in the user acquisition. Second, we will focus on increasing use of time spent and [frequency], mainly to improve consumption experience of video and the community products and thus enhance our competitiveness in the market. [Foreign Language] On the monetization front, we've continued to reinforce our competitiveness in the advertising market underpinned by the overall ad demand recovery externally and solid progress on the monetization system reform internally. As a result, Weibo advertising revenues have almost returned to the same level last year or increasing 22% quarter-over-quarter. [Foreign Language] Our KA revenues increased 12% year-over-year or 33% quarter-over-quarter. The robust growth was mainly driven by a notable increase in the number of brand customers, which reached historical high this quarter. From an industry perspective, the FMCG category saw a growth acceleration benefiting from a considerable increase in the number of customers. [Our enhanced] industry, excluding [indiscernible] also took a solid double-digit growth. Entertainment, previously hit hard by pandemic, started to come back this quarter [although is] short of the same level last year. On top of the overall ad demand recovery, we also achieved [indiscernible] through our differentiated value proposition to brand customers, maybe on two fronts. First, leveraging our unique strengths in the distribution and discussion around top IPs such as blockbuster shows and sports events. We managed to open up incremental ad inventories by [indiscernible] content around these IPs. IP-based marketing would enable us to tap into a broader customer base as well as drive monetization through our content operations. Second, we focused on also in integrated brand class performance ad solutions to KA customers to capture higher ad [wallets], especially with auto and FMCG sector. [Foreign Language] Moving on to SMEs. Our SME ad revenues decreased 15% year-over-year and increased 20% quarter-over-quarter. Notwithstanding the [gap] to the overall revenue level last year, we are pleased to see gaming and online education sector become the core growth lever of our SME business. This year, we have achieved breakthrough with these two sectors as we [beef up] our efforts to drive conversion and enhance our operation capabilities. Consequently, ad revenues from gaming and online education sector continued to book triple digit growth on an annual basis. For example, [indiscernible] industry specific ad solutions for these two sectors, most specifically, [indiscernible] to serve customers new game release marketing needs, as well as ad solution targeting high school and college examination for online education customers. Ad product like [indiscernible] effectively fulfill customer's marketing needs around product launch and the key timing, leading to broader customer coverage and higher [ad wallet] for us in return. With respect to other sectors, we continue to focus on optimized infrastructure mix, a standard customer base and improve ad quality this year. During this quarter, we took steps to optimize on areas where we frequently received negative user feedbacks by setting higher ad quality standards [indiscernible] revenue loss. We believe improvement of the overall ad quality would benefit us in expanding our customer base and optimizing ad performance in the long run. [Foreign Language] Finally, let me share some color on the progress we saw in ad products and technologies. First, we took a targeted approach to improve ad algorithm and [tough] distribution strategy. A good example is the game [indiscernible] blockbuster game, in view of customers go to reach [indiscernible] rapidly upon release. We refined our ad attribution and backend system to accommodate such marketing needs, allowing this customer to reach incremental targeted use beyond the original [indiscernible] and doing higher conversion. As a result, we could better fulfill customers [indiscernible] while helping the customer enhance its market efficiency significantly – significantly enable us to capture incremental ad budget. Viewed upon such success story, our next step is to put together an industry specific ad solution and make the standard ad offering for the gaming industry. Second, we will focus on tech optimization around our full-funnel marketing in the next few quarters. For example, with the internet service sector, we advanced our ad technology to deliver better [indiscernible] download experience and the completion rate through optimization on the download and registration process. We successfully lowered the app activation cost by over 50%. Third, to address customer lead generation needs, especially with education, e-commerce, cosmetic Surgery industries et cetera, we facilitate the easy build up of our landing page using our own CMS. Currently, customers would use our CMS, so their conversion rates improving by over 50% upon the adoption. With solid execution of the above initiative, we are well-positioned to capture higher performance ad wallet in the market. [Foreign Language] With that, let me turn the call over Fei Cao for a financial review.