Gaofei Wang
Analyst · TH Capital. Please ask your question
[Foreign Language] Thank you. Hello everyone and welcome to Weibo's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 earnings conference call. On today's call, I'll share with you highlights on Weibo's user product and monetization review the progress made in 2020 and elaborate our strategies for 2021. [Foreign Language] Let me start with our fourth quarter financial results. In the fourth quarter our total revenue increased 10% to $513.4 million, mainly attributable to less impact from COVID-19 pandemic to the advertising business as well as our efforts to optimize the competitive strategy for brand and performance ad business. Advertising and marketing revenue reached $453.5 million, an increase of 12% year-over-year with 91% of ad revenue coming from mobile. In the fourth quarter, non-GAAP operating income reached $204.1 million, an increase of 12% to 21%, year-over-year, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 40%. [Foreign Language] For full year 2020, Weibo's total revenues reached $1.69 billion, a decrease of 4% year-over-year. Advertising and marketing revenues were $1.49 billion, a decrease of 3% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating income reached $579.6 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 34%. [Foreign Language] On the user front Weibo's MAU reached $521 million. And average DAU reached to $235 million in December 2020. 94% of Weibo's MAU came from mobile. [Foreign Language] As we review 2020, we faced two major challenges. First, on the user front, although, the pandemic in the first half of the year brought us large scale users to consume pandemic-related needs and hot trends, it had a negative impact on the content generation of entertainment vertical and certain other areas such as, tourism and sports, which resulted in less user engagement in this sector. With progress made on the pandemic control, we adjusted our strategy accordingly in the second half of this year, putting more emphasis on our core competence in hot trends, social functions and video. So far we have seen an uptick of our overall traffic in the first quarter compared to last the December. [Foreign Language] Second on monetization. The pandemic has hit some sector of our business hard early last year. However, with a well-controlled pandemic situation and the recovery of the ad demand, Weibo's social marketing value proposition earned wider recognition among brand customers, leveraging our unique marketing offerings such as hot trends, celebrity and KOL marketing, as well as brand price performance solution. As a result, our brand ad revenues delivered a solid rebound in the second half of this year and achieved double-digit growth year-over-year in Q4 with number of branding customers spending with us setting a new record. For performance ad business despite certain pressure from advertising and market competition, the decrease of our performance ad revenue in Q4 further narrowed compared with prior quarters, mainly thanks to the fully upgraded ad bidding system, super FST and continued robust growth in gaming and education sectors under the brand plus performance model. Next, let me share some color on our progress in product and monetization in Q4, as well as layout key initiatives for 2021. On the product front, starting from Q4 last year, we further enhanced Weibo's differentiated competitiveness in hot trend and social attributes. Coupled with efficient channel strategies, we stabilized our user scale and further drove user engagement. Concurrently we also beefed up our investment in the video sector to strengthen users' mind set of using Weibo for video consumption so as to enhance our competitiveness in user acquisition. On the channel front, in Q4, we optimized channel strategy for new and recalled users combined with hot trend and topic products. When hot events occur, we will encourage media accounts and KOLs to discuss around topics through product and operating mechanism, providing real-time topic-related content to users. With the optimized strategies to further enhance the platform's confidence in this recall and retention through hot trends, bringing our strength in content offering into supply. Taking the New Year's Eve as example, remember our New Year's Eve relating toward the pass $120 million, up 77%, compared with last year and recalled more than 60 million users back to our platform. On the social front, for these users recalled through hot events or channel investment, we focus on improving their consumption depth and user frequency in the relationship-based feeds. To elaborate, we focus on improving user experience in relationship-based feeds to data mining and quality social content based on several dimensions, such as intimacy of social relations, frequency of visits, and amount of discussion by followers, et cetera. With such quality content offer, we could further deepen their consumption, as well as enhance user retention. Additionally, we focused on enhancing diversity of content distribution in the information feeds in order to drive user stickiness, interaction, and consumption. For instance, in the fourth quarter, we extended real-time consumption of video content through this simultaneous distribution in our core feeds. As a result, the effective time spend per user on a post really recommendation feed increased over 30% and the effect of video views posted each recommendation increased over 10%, compared with Q3. On the video front in 2020, we reinforced our product offerings and operation mechanism and attracted a great number of quality video content creators to Weibo. In the second half of 2020, we launched the video account program to incentivize Weibo's top content creators to shift toward video content generation, so as to encourage more video production and consumption. We saw a significant uplift in the number of video accounts. Currently, the number of registered video accounts has surpassed a million among, which over 15,000 video accounts already have more than 1 million followers per each. By verticals, there is a good proportion of video produced by top content creators in the media and variety show verticals, but we still need to increase that to many other sections on the platform. This year, we will continue to improve the overall experience for video accounts, scale-up video content generation among top content creators, as well as strengthen the effective distribution of video content in feeds and video community, so as to boost the video content consumption and improve the platform's overall video content ecosystem. [Foreign Language] Let me briefly layout our strategies for 2021 on the product and operation front. We seek to extend user base and engagement from the following three aspects. First, on the channel investment, leveraging our competitive advantage in these acquisition costs will ensure channel investments through traditional channels, and focus more on channel investment to improve user engagement, while strengthening the synergy between channel investments, and subsequent content consumption, and thereby increasing user engagement and retention. Second, on core competence, we will continue to solidify Weibo's competitive mode as a leading social media platform. From product perspective, we will improve core features of hot trend and social interactions and improve user stickiness and interaction among users' core user groups. On accounting system side, we will step up our efforts to empower top content creators to monetize within our ecosystem, which will in turn stimulate their content generation and interaction with fans, driving Weibo's user engagement. Finally, on video content, through video accounts we will accelerate the transformation of Weibo's key content creator group toward video creation and promote the supply and consumption of Weibo's video contents. And meanwhile, we are focused on content operation on key verticals such as TV series, variety show, and gaming verticals to cultivate users' consumption behavior through our differentiated video content offerings and further strengthen users' loyalty to the platform through videos. [Foreign Language] On the monetization front, our KA ad revenues in Q4 increased 18% year-over-year. The rapid recovery of KA business in the second half of the year were mainly driven by the following factors; first of all, from the perspective of the market environment most industry sectors have returned to normal operation in the second half of the year and gradually resumed ad replacement except for few sectors such as entertainment tourism. That has not fully recovered from the pandemic. And meanwhile, the pandemic has further driven ad budget shift from offline to online. We saw top brand customers and also those emerging brands embracing Internet platforms as their major campaign arena. Secondly, KA clients have shifted more of their budget from TV and long-form video platform to social and short-video platform and lowering the user engagement shift. With this trend, social platform had more strength in KA marketing. Finally in KA advertising, Weibo highlights its marketing strategies on KOL content IP and brand plus performance offering leveraging its robust content ecosystem. But one thing, we facilitate better content marketing for top KA clients. For another, we lower ad placement barriers for brand customers, especially, mid-tier customers through brand price performance ad offerings and thus deliver better ad efficiency. For example, throughout 2020, we had nearly a 1,000 content marketing projects leveraging 100s of celebrities, 1,000s of KOLs and more than 30,000 KOCs to participate in brand content-based campaigns achieving way better results than pure branding campaigns. [Foreign Language] Moving on to SMEs. In 2020, we continue to see intense competition in the performance ad market. That said, our SME and revenues decreased 5% year-over-year in the fourth quarter improving from last quarter in terms of ad new trends. Let me briefly recap our progress made in our performance ad sector in the year of 2020. [Foreign Language] On the ad product front, first, we focus on enhancing the overall efficiency of our real-time bidding system, namely super FST and further optimizing its algorithm. Second, we launched several advertising tools such as WeiboEvents and ad solution, which enables marketing content posted by celebrity and KOLs to reach a more accurate target group instantly. Leveraging the influence of celebrities and KOLs, we can maximize the campaign effect while reducing customer cost at the same time. On the sales operation front: first, we optimized the SME sales model for key industries to directly serve more clients, so that we could respond to and fulfill clients' needs more efficiently. Secondly, we further led agency to improve their service capabilities and transform into service providers. Third, we offer industry specific ad solutions to improve ad performance for different industries, leveraging our operational capability around topic and events. With the implementation of these above mentioned strategies, we saw robust growth in gaming and education sector this year maintaining a triple-digit growth year-over-year in the fourth quarter. In the second half of the year, we gradually extended such industry specific solutions to Internet service and some offline O2O industries to capture the higher wallet from key industries. [Foreign Language] In 2021, we will continue to enhance our monetization skill and efficiency from the following aspects: first, on ad products based on Weibo's unique attributes as a social media platform with younger users, we will continue to strengthen the competitiveness of our social ad products and further capture brand plus performance budget and KOL marketing ad dollars to reach more emerging clients as well as obtain incremental budget from middle tier and top clients. Hopefully, those client member and ad part could serve as drivers of our growth. Second, on sales operation, we will further develop our industry-specific solutions and support our industry-based sales team to improve organizational efficiency from the aspects of sales policy, operational synergy, product optimization and service capability, et cetera. As such, we could improve our wallet share through more diversified drivers from an industry perspective. Finally, on ad technology. Building on the upgraded Super FST, we will continue to optimize the ad targeting and the conversion rate of OCPX, so as to increase the placement efficiency and ROI clients. Coupled with the full funnel ad optimization, Weibo is well positioned to improve our ECPM in 2021. And meanwhile, we have strengthened our video ad technology and monetization efficiency to gradually unleash the potential of video traffic monetization. To sum up, in 2021, with more monetizable traffic generated from the growth in user base and engagement, we will step up our efforts in ad products, sales operation and ad technology to increase Weibo's monetization scale, efficiency and market competitiveness. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial review for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020.