Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Citi
[Foreign Language] Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo’s first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. [Foreign Language] On today's call, I'll share with your highlights in Weibo’s users, product and monetization in the first quarter of 2022. [Foreign Language] On the user front, Weibo’s MAUs reached 582 million and average DAUs reached 252 million in March 2022, adding approximately $51 million and $22 million a year respectively. In March, 95% of Weibo’s MAUs use came from mobile. [Foreign Language] On monetization, the macro environment, industry policy and recent domestic COVID-19 resurgence had posed short and medium term impact on the production and operation of many companies to different degrees, causing most advertisers to defer or reduce their marketing budget since March. Nevertheless, thanks to the solid growth of our user scale and traffic, as well as our efforts in key industries, such as gaming and apparel. We have further gained recognition among advertisers for our differentiated market solution that integrates well with our user product and content operation. In the first quarter, our total revenue reached $484.6 million, up 6% year-over-year, and our ad revenues reached $427.1 million, up 10% year-over-year and 94% of our ad revenue came from mobile. This quarter, our non-GAAP operating income reached $141.7 million. [Foreign Language] Next, let me share with you our progress made in product monetization in the first quarter. [Foreign Language] On product font, we continue to focus on operating efficiency, driving steady user base extension and engagement improvement, so as to update our monetization efficiency. On channel front, considering our user scale and the competitive landscape, we will emphasize on balancing user acquisition cost and monetization and improve ROI for user acquisition. On competition, we will continue to step up investment in operations of hot trends and social content, deepen strategic cooperation with partners from media, entertainment, gaming and sports verticals, to encourage discussion around hot trends and IPs and maintain our competitiveness in core user function. [Foreign Language] In the first quarter, with the Spring Festival Holiday and Winter Olympics, our user base and traffic grew robustly, demonstrating Weibo’s advantages in hot trends and social attributes. During the Spring Festival, content related to the Spring Festival Gala of 25 television stations was distributed on Weibo via topics, videos, live streaming et cetera. For Spring Festival Gala related topics, the viewership surpassed the 20 billion and the discussion was more than 70 million, up 46% from last year. And moreover, we launched the live topics and upgraded topic features that allows users to discuss live while watching the Spring Festival Gala. While the gala was on air, celebrities, KOLs and users were able to join in the live discussion altogether, igniting the willingness of discussion around the events. As a result, the discussion of the gala-related topics created by users increased by 145% from last year. [Foreign Language] Furthermore, our content operation of the Beijing Winter Olympics has attracted massive users to consume content on Weibo. From the Winter Olympics events to sports campaigns and the IPs of [indiscernible], we worked with the Winter Sports Administrative Center to encourage athletes to open accounts as they engaged on Weibo and build a content distribution network with the state media and Weibo among other media, to enhance the dissemination and discussion of content around the games. Not only did the traffic driven by the Beijing Winter Olympics surpassed that of the Tokyo Olympic games, but the athletes and their followers were also more engaged on Weibo based on historical data. As people returned to school and work after the Spring Festival, the user scale and traffic on Weibo will fall back to a certain extent. However, in March, we grew our user and traffic nicely, mainly attributable to more social events occurred and increased content online due to the disruption from COVID-19, coupled with our optimized channel strategy and improved operating efficiency of hot trends and social content. [Foreign Language] On channel front, we further optimized our channel investment strategy with focus on efficiency as the content operation of the Spring Festival and the Winter Olympic Games helped grow our user and increased user engagement. We cut the budget investment in low ROI channels and tried to shift the more budget to channels with potential of raising user visit frequency. And meanwhile, we improved our capabilities of serving products to clients and increased the long-term retention of the monetizable traffic and users to continue to optimize channel ROI. Hence, in the first quarter, we optimized our product from several aspects, driving to precisely targeting users with the recommended content. We also focused on optimizing the push report strategy and improving the product experience to increase the frequency of user consumption. In March, the per capita consumption of channel user increased by 40% from the fourth quarter last year. [Foreign Language] On social attributes, we continued to strengthen the social features of our user product by focusing on promoting scale and engagement of Weibo’s core users. On relationship based feed, the number of feed refreshment continued to improve from December, benefiting from the optimization in content distribution of the relationship based feed, we've effectively retained and engaged users throughout our platform by hot trends. Additionally, we continue to invest in social content enrichment, personalize the content distribution, and front end product experience to improve the experience of user consumption and the social stickiness of the relationship based feeds. On community product, we focused on improving the product mechanism to better serve user consumption and enable users to discover content, build relation and interact with each other with communities. At the same time, we strengthened the integration of products and operations to further expand community to more verticals, enrich vertical content, so as to better fulfill users’ need for social relations based on interests and location within the communities. In March, the number of users who use community products continues to increase, up by double digits from last December. The number of posters and posts in the community surged and users in gaming, sport, animation [indiscernible] continue to be engaged. We have seen that community [indiscernible] effectively increased user engagement and promote user intention in the long run, which boost our confidence in Weibo’s new positioning and growth potential in the market of social attributes. On videos, we continue to focus on the scale and engagement of video accounts, especially on verticals that can drive more traffic and engagement, and also high quality content creators. In 2022, we will provide more support on products and operations to these video content creators to encourage video generation and interaction with VAS and ensure the quantity and the quality of video content, which in turn drives user engagement. As of the end of March, the number of video accounts exceeded 30 million. In the first quarter, we provided video content creator with more editing tools and features to promote social interaction around video content, to increase video generation and engagement. At the same time, we encourage user consumption in core information based feed to continuously optimize the recommendation mechanism for high quality video content creators and their content. For example, for the relationship data feed, we optimize the recommendation of video accounts based on user social relations, which significantly improved the distribution of video accounts and efficiency of user consumption. We also launched the hot media list in the discovery page, which not only stimulated video consumption, but also further strengthened the positioning of the discovery page in the consumption of hot trends and the popular content. [Foreign Language] Finally, let me share some color on our work in the recent [indiscernible] against domestic COVID resurgence. Since March, new case has been reported across the country. During this outbreak, we've fully leveraged Weibo’s platform advantages in the resource application and information distribution. On one hand, we worked with Shanghai released People's Daily, CCTV news and other official accounts of governments and state media and organized more than 2,200 topics on the COVID situation in Shanghai, which generated nearly 200 million views and over 22 million discussion in total. We have also established an efficient rumor refuting mechanism in cooperation with the government department to promptly address rumors and misinformation, while optimize our product mechanism to amplify information reach for more users. On the other hand, we continue to enhance Weibo’s efficiency and the capability in a public rescue system. We quickly upgraded our rescue channel based on the existing super topic product to better converge requests for help. Up to now, we have reported more than 5,000 valid requests to government departments, resulting in more than 2,600 rescue cases. In addition, this year, we also attempt to coordinate with NGOs, business, media, volunteers, [indiscernible] veterans to build a society-wide rescue system against COVID, providing assistance and support for people seeking medical treatment, supplies, psychological consulting, so as to further amplify our value in this society-wide emergency relief and assistance. [Foreign Language] On monetization. In 2022, we continue to focus on enhancing our potential and efficiency of traffic monetization, and thus beefing up our overall monetization skill. Underpinned by the resilience of Weibo’s brand cross performance and ad offerings in key verticals, we are dedicated to expanding the marketing combo of brand cross performance ad with content operation to more industries and clients, aiming to strengthen our industry-based marketing capability as well as our market competitiveness. [Foreign Language] From an industry perspective, our ad revenue increased by 10% year-over-year in the first quarter, mainly benefiting from the Spring Festival and the Winter Olympics as well as our improved capabilities to fulfill customers’ brand cross performance marketing needs in key industries. For example, during the Winter Olympics, we helped Olympic sponsors to build hype in the market, featuring a combo of our ad offerings, such as topic, hot trend, launch screen ad, et cetera, to uplift their brand recognition, leveraging hot trends of Olympic sports event and athlete endorsement. Our unique solution of hot trend marketing has earned wider recognition amongst most of the advertisers, especially the Chinese footwear and apparel brands during the two Olympic Games season. As a result, we are pleased to see higher ad demand for the apparel vertical with ad revenue from this vertical growing very nicely year-over-year. Next, let me share our progress in the gaming vertical as well. Ad revenues from the gaming vertical sustained strong growth momentum with over 50% year-over-year growth in the first quarter. We primarily attribute the growth momentum to the differentiated ad playbook we developed for the gaming industry in the past two years. To elaborate, we have strengthened the synergies between sales, product and operation to amplify the distribution and discussion of new games as well as facilitate the accumulation and activity of social assets. Couple with our ongoing optimization in performance ad offering, we managed to capture incremental brand ad budget for new game release from client who traditionally only value conversion results. Considering the approval policy of [indiscernible], the game license, we launched event-based ad offering and service with top gaming clients in the first quarter to better align with clients event pipeline and fulfill their marketing needs in connection with major version updates and new character promotion. A good example is Yanxin [ph]. We worked closely with the game advertiser and aggregated all marketing events on Weibo, including version updates, brand ambassador official announcement and the branding and branding events et cetera. [indiscernible], the official account of [indiscernible], has accumulated over 4 million followers. The number of views and discussion around the major Yanxin topic exceeded 12 billion and 6 million respectively, with over 4 million long-term active fans of Yanxin super topic. [Foreign Language] [Technical Difficulty] good start both in terms of user traffic and financial performance. However, we have seen an inflection since March amid geopolitical issues and COVID-19 resurgence, multinational customers and offline customers sought to cut back marketing spend. Some of our channel marketing campaigns were also negatively impacted. As a result, our revenue was also negative impact in March. Entering the second quarter with more regions setting up lockdown and the prevention measures, various aspect of economics activities has been significantly disrupted, including production logistics and other offline activities, which directly weigh on the growth of the overall advertising market. [Foreign Language] For the second quarter, despite many market headwinds, we are dedicated to join together with our customers to navigate through the difficult times and reinforcing our own competitive edge in the hope of capturing market opportunities post the normalization. For one thing, we offer targeted favorable policies and resources to support the customers and industries hit hard by the COVID-19, inviting customers to exploit our brand cross performance ad offering so as to boost their confidence in the social media marketing, while raising the utilization rate of Weibo’s core ad inventories at the same time. For another, we proactively take the window to further refine our product offering and reinforce our core competitiveness. Our major initiatives include optimizing our brand cross performance ad offering to improve efficiency, beefing up our content marketing service and extending customer scenario, just to name a few. We are making solid progress against all these initiatives as critical moat to further strengthen our competitiveness in the ad market. [Foreign Language] With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial review.