Gaofei Wang
Analyst · Citi
Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Weibo's Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I will share with you highlights of Weibo's user, product and monetization in the third quarter of 2022. On the user front, Weibo's MAUs reached 584 million, and average DAUs reached 253 million in September 2022, adding approximately 11 million and 5 million users year-over-year, respectively. In September, 95% of Weibo's MAUs came from mobile. Monetization with macro-economy and consumption weighing on the overall advertising market, our clients remain cautious towards their advertising budget spend. In the third quarter, our total revenues reached $453.6 million, a decrease of 25% year-over-year and an increase of 1% quarter-over-quarter. Excluding the foreign exchange impact, our total revenues decreased 20% year-over-year and increased 5% quarter-over-quarter as revenues reached $393.4 million this quarter and 95% of our ad revenues came from mobile. This year, we have focused on improving our operating efficiency. In the third quarter, our non-GAAP operating income reached $162.1 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 36%, up from 32% last quarter. Next let me share with you our progress made in product and monetization in the third quarter. Our target on product operations still focused on strengthening the platform's competitiveness through improving operating efficiency, maintaining large user scale and enhancing user engagement. In this quarter, with the summer holiday season and hot trends effect, our overall traffic reached its peak level in August this year. Based on our experience, the opening of the fall semester in September usually negatively impact our traffic, especially when Campus promotion suspended this year due to COVID-19 related control measures. In response, on the product and operational front, we have stepped up our efforts in the areas of channel investments, community product optimization and cultivation of entertainment and eSports verticals, which resulted in healthy trend of our overall traffic in September. On the channel front, the ROI of our channel investment for the third quarter was further improved. We continue to strengthen our cooperation with handset manufacturers in Weibo top trends and social products while focusing on investing in high ROI channels. This quarter we achieved full coverage for Weibo's hot trend content in the core positions on handset devices of domestic leading manufacturers. Meanwhile we further upgraded our service for domestic smartphone users and enhanced their consumption through improving the quality of hot trends content considering the handset attributes and users' consumption scenarios. In September, the number of our hot trends users from domestic handsets increased 30% quarter-over-quarter. Next we will continue to deepen our cooperation with handset manufacturers to focus on long-term mutual benefits, expand cooperation to more app use Weibo's core products and content and increase Weibo's user scale through handset tech channels. On social attributes, this quarter, we continue to enhance social features of our products and increase the scale and engagement of our core users on relationship-based feed while maintaining user traffic. User interaction continued to grow in September, representing improved user stickiness. In July and August, which is the peak season of traffic due to the summer holiday, Weibo's content generation largely increased, particularly for verticals such as celebrities, TV series, variety shows and games et cetera. We lean our traffic distribution towards these verticals with strong stickiness of young users in the relationship-based feeds, which helped enrich the vertical content ecosystem and enhancing user interaction and consumption in relationship-based feed. In the meantime, we continue to improve the distribution structure of our relationship-based feed, further increase the distribution of content generated by KOLs and community-based content to emphasize the social features of our relationship-based feed. In particular, we made significant upgrades in algorithms to enhance distribution of community content, further integrating the community-based content and user-generated content. As a result, in the relationship-based feed 70% of users were able to consume quality community-based content of their interest directly in the feed. In September, traffic generated from community-based content distributors in the relationship-based feed and the number of users who made interactions through community contents have increased more than 50% quarter-over-quarter, which further facilitates users' relationship building and interaction efficiency in a relationship-based feed. In the third quarter, we continued to beef up our investments in community products to strengthen the perception of community products by all users. On one hand, with the independent tab of super topic at the bottom of main page launched in June, we are able to improve new users' willingness to revisit the tab through prioritizing traffic distribution for quality community content, coupled with our effective user recall strategy. In September, the DAU's Super Topic tab increased by more than 50% compared to that of June, half of which were new users for community products. Now only has the scale of users growing, users consumption stickiness increased significantly with capital consumption of community-related contents increased by 40% from June. On the other hand, we further enhanced functions and mechanism of the community products, such as new functions of posting and interaction that launched in the third quarter. The increased user stickiness in the community significantly drove the production and the interaction of quality contents in entertainment and online gaming verticals. In September, the number of users who posted and interacted in the community continued to grow double digits compared to June, while the number of post and interactions increased twice the increase of users. We believe that the constant building of our community products has strengthened the social stickiness of Weibo users, boding well for the long-term healthy development of the platform. On the content front, our strategy this year is to focus on developing social accounts in key verticals to constantly solidify our advantages in key content verticals as well as high quality accounts. And thus drive the improvement of operating efficiency. In terms of the online gaming vertical, which further cultivates our ecosystem around eSports events and deepen cooperation between Weibo and top eSports clubs. In third quarter, the daily number of posts by eSport players has increased by 50% quarter-over-quarter with both traffic and interactions doubled. Coupled with tournaments-related hot trends, the overall traffic from the eSports vertical grew over 50% sequentially. We have also attracted a wider group of young users and generated higher user engagement while helping eSports clubs build up influence and market value on our platform. As for the entertainment industry, the summer holiday was the peak season for TV series and variety of shows. We focused on partnership with video platforms and show producers to improve distribution of hot trends and user interactions, driving the volume of blockbusters to grow across the platform. In third quarter, the traffic and the interaction of TV and variety shows continued to trend up compared to that of the last summer holiday. In particular, the traffic for TV shows has reached record high, which more than doubled compared to the same period last year with multiple phenomenal project streamers. TV shows Love Like the Galaxy and the Love Between Fairy and Devil have generated over 40 billion topic views and 28 million discussions, reinforcing Weibo's position as a designated platform for show launching and promoting. Going forward, we will continue to actively support our partners and drive healthy development of the entertainment ecosystem. Moving on to monetization. In the third quarter, we saw a general recovery trend of ad spend on a sequential basis with various pieces across different industries. For example, in auto industry, thanks to positive support for new energy vehicles industry and the enhanced market recognition for Weibo's integrated new car launching marketing solution for automakers over the past 2 quarters. Weibo's index product launch and marketing solutions attracted over 90% of the overall new model launches. On top of regular brand exposure, leveraging the combo of media, vertical KOLs and hot trends, Weibo has successfully expanded its market share in new car launches, leading to sustained double-digit year-over-year growth in ad revenue from auto industry in the third quarter. As for the luxury sector, ad revenues also booked significant year-over-year growth due to the intensive launch of new lines and shows in the third quarter. In terms of online gaming industry, our differentiated marketing model that we have established over the past 2 years has resonated greatly among game developers. Even though the new games approval this year has shrunk, we have effectively helped these game developers improve user ARPU and lifecycle, leveraging cooperation around contents with our top-tier game clients and event-based marketing products and services. As a result, Weibo has gained certain ad budgets and further solidified our market position among advertisers in the online gaming sector. Other industries such as the FMCG industry continued to be impacted by headwinds of COVID-19 control measures and weak consumption season, with brands taking a wait-and-see attitude in their branding budget allocation. E-commerce platforms and the 3C products also experienced varying degrees of decline in the third quarter due to market conditions and the industry slow season. Talking about outlook, overall advertising business for the fourth quarter and the first half of next year. There is still relatively high uncertainty under the market circumstance. However, we are pleased to see positive signals with certain industries. For example, e-commerce platforms and FMCG clients have released adverts during the Double 11 shopping festival to various degrees. Although the Double 11 shopping festival was shorter this year as budgets from e-commerce platforms returned to a growth trajectory compared with the same period last year. In third quarter, we focused on conforming our algorithm to accurately fulfill the marketing needs of e-commerce platforms on the ad product front and expect to gradually capture certain advertising budgets in the fourth quarter. Meanwhile, the fourth quarter is also a key season for new product launches in the handset sector with all major handset manufacturers launching key models in their pipeline. As such, we are actively working with our clients to develop constant marketing plans to further deep up Weibo's market share in new phone launches. Moreover, the 2022 World Cup in the fourth quarter will be a key advertising window for many of our clients, especially in the food and beverage sectors. We are cooperating with clients and discussing their open marketing fencing details to tap into World Cup-related hot trend in the hope of enhancing app performance and our wallets. Not least, let me briefly recap on Weibo's progress in our initiatives to optimize costs and improve operating efficiency. As mentioned in our last earnings call, we have taken a series of effective measures to optimize our cost and expense structure and enhance efficiency during the year to better control our ROI on cost end. These measures continue to bear fruit, leveraging our solid execution. In the third quarter, we delivered a non-GAAP operating margin of 36%, up nearly 4 percentage points versus 32% in the second quarter, benefiting from solid execution of disciplined spending strategy to further improve operating efficiency. This has demonstrated our improvements in operating efficiency, giving us the opportunity to win our resources towards more potential areas. Taking channel investment as an example, through strategic channel cooperation, we acquired more high-op users and SaaS shortened the ROI retrieving period of China investments. Currently, the cost retrieving cycles of most of our channels shortened to nearly half of that in the same period last year. On the product operations front, we deepened the strategic cooperation with our content partners focused on social products and strengthen our advantages in hot trends and key verticals such as eSports and sports. We built strategic partnership with video site, mainstream media and eSports club this year to acquire more content and users. Despite potential costs incurred in the short run, we could significantly enhance our competitiveness in content operations and improved the operating efficiency of the platform's traffic. On the ad product front, for one thing, we will tap into market trends and beef up our investments in content marketing to strengthen our differentiation. For another, we focus on delivering breakthroughs in accurate algorithm adaption to capture e-commerce ad budget. Looking into the fourth quarter, we will continue to execute against our strategy of reducing costs and improving efficiency with more focus on adjusting our cost structure and optimizing resource allocation to ensure efficient operation of our company on the high uncertainty of macro environment and solidify our long-term competitiveness. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for a financial review.