Zhihu Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the G-Who Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a Q&A session. Today's conference has been recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Yolanda Liu, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial results conference call. Participants on today's call include Mr. Zhou Yuan, our founder, our chairman, and chief executive officer, and Mr. Wang Han, our chief financial officer. Before we continue, please know that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, our results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Full information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in our public filings with the USICC and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for a configuration purpose only. For a definition of non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results, please see the earnings release issued earlier today. In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our website at ir.zhifu.com. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Wang Han, CFO of Zhifu. Han, please go ahead.

Thank you, Yolanda. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining Zhifu's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Zhou Yuan, founder, chairman, and CEO of Zhifu. In 2023, we faced a blend of challenges and opportunities. Despite a dynamic macro environment and competitive industry landscape, we achieved substantial progress in commercialization and efficiency both in the first quarter and throughout the year. Furthermore, we made considerable strides in improving our bottom line while actively exploring and investing in AI technology. Our primary focus in 2003 was motivating our content creators through a variety of incentive plans. As a result, the cumulative content creators on our platform increased by 13% year-over-year, reaching 71.3 million by the end of 2023. The cumulative cases of content grew to 774.7 million, up 19.3% year-over-year. Additionally, the average MAUs per full year increased by 4% year-over-year. Our monetization progress remained robust throughout the year. we achieved a 16.5% year-over-year increase in our full-year revenues to RMB $4,199 million. With enhanced operating efficiency, our overall cost margin for 2023 improved by more than 4 percentage points year-over-year to 54.7%. Furthermore, our operating loss margin for 2023 significantly narrowed by 19 percentage points and adjusted now loss decreased by 44.9% both on a year-over-year basis. During the first quarter, our dedication to user growth, resource allocation, and operating efficiency improvements began to pay off. As high-quality content continued to thrive across the community, we proactively refined our user growth strategy and significantly reduced acquisition costs for new users. Our focus shifted towards driving efficient and sustainable organic user growth by elevating engagement and retention rates among our highly active core users. We also continue to fortify our monetization model's resilience through diverse growth drivers. Our total revenue for the first quarter of 2013 reached RMB 1.1 billion, primarily fueled by the strong growth in our paid membership and vocational training business. Our increasing brand influence and expanded program offerings have strengthened this division's competitiveness, extending our revenue growth beyond the Chihuahua community. Together, these two segments achieved a robust revenue growth of 28.3% year-over-year for the fourth quarter of 2023. Enhancing cost control effectiveness and operating efficiency remain as our key strategic priorities during the fourth quarter. We continue to invest judiciously in cutting-edge technologies such as AI while optimizing our fixed cost structure. These initiatives resulted in an expanded gross margin of 59.1% for the fourth quarter. We also drove a significant 31.9% year-over-year reduction in adjusted net loss, which is narrowest quarterly level since our US IPO. As we move through 2024, we'll further optimize our financial performance by elevating trustworthiness within the Jugu community. We're confident that in the area of AI-generated content, users will increasingly value professional, in-depth, and authentic content as well as discussion and feedback among real users. By fostering an environment of trust, we can stimulate user interactions and inspire content creators' passion and creativity, ultimately driving organic community growth. Meanwhile, we also believe that a prudent application of AI large-language models can improve user experience and strengthen the feedback mechanism for content creators, enhancing our community's atmosphere and operating efficiency. I'd love to delve into the details of our initiatives and achievements in 2003 across content and creators, as well as our commercialization progress. Let's start with our content and content creators. As I just mentioned, we revisited our user growth strategy in 2003 to promote organic community growth through high-quality content and a thriving community ecosystem. We shifted our focus to boosting our core users' activities and retention rate. We're also reducing user acquisition costs. Consequently, our average MAUs in the fourth quarter were 99 million, a slight decrease of 1.6% year-over-year. However, we reduced user acquisition costs in the fourth quarter by more than 40% year-over-year, accounting for less than 35% of total promotion and advertising expenses. This shift drove sequential increases in our daily active users' timestamps. Additionally, in fourth quarter, we saw a significant year-over-year improvement in both the content creation contribution rate and next month's retention rate for our highly active users. Regarding content, we further refined our content operations by deeply integrating training topics and user demands for continually strengthening recommendation technology. This initiative, combined with our diverse incentive plans for content creators, propelled rapid growth in our community's high-quality content pool. As the end of 2023, the cumulative pieces of content increased to 774.7 million, among which the cumulative number of Q&As reached 592.8 million. We also leveraged Zhu Hu's position as China's leading content-centric community to encourage extensive professional discussions on training topics. For instance, in 2023, the cumulative discussion volume related to generative AI large-language models and their applications surpassed 1.2 billion across the Juhu community. A distinguished group of founders and key developers from leading LLM companies joined the discussion on Juhu, contributing their valuable insights. Science and engineering-related content was another standout, increasing by 85.6% year-over-year in 2023. Our high-end plan continues to serve as a crucial incentive for content creators. Since the release of High-End 5.0 in May 2003, we have consistently promoted professional content creation, driving creativity and productivity through initiatives such as our Blue Label certification. In 2003, this program covered 130 verticals with nearly 200,000 users certified. Furthermore, we provided a broad array of avenues for content creators to earn income. During the first quarter, the total number of content creators who earn income on our platform increased by 17.4% year-over-year. As I previously mentioned, one of our top priorities for 2024 is to enhance the trustworthiness within the Drupal community. To that end, we have been prudently empowering our community with AI, leveraging large language models to better connect human knowledge, experience, and insight and make them more accessible to a broader audience. At our recent Discovery Conference on March 20th, we introduced a new search feature called Discovery, leveraging our Zhihai to a large-language model. This significant and once-in-a-century search scenario allows our users to initiate discussions directly with content creators across the entire Zhihu community with a single question. The content featured in Discovery comes from professional content creators within the community. This feature facilitates more efficient knowledge sharing by enhancing search efficiency and content consumption experience for Google users. We're also providing feedback to our content creators. With enhancements like Discovery, we aim to strengthen community development and drive the continued emergence of high-quality, trustworthy content. We firmly believe that a combination of professional, in-depth authentic content, our culture of sincerity and respect, as well as our transparent and efficient information mechanism will further enhance our community's trustworthiness. This, in turn, will drive user engagement and retention throughout the Chihuahua community, building the efficient and sustainable organic growth of our user base in the long run. Moving into our multi-engine commercialization, in first quarter, Our total revenue increased by 2.2% year-over-year to RMB 1.1 billion. Empowered by our thriving community, paid membership and vocational training maintained the robotics growth. Together, they expanded our monetization capability beyond the Juhu community, contributing more than 50% to total revenue for both the fourth quarter and full year 2023. Their strong performance underscores the resilience and effectiveness of our business models and diversified revenue growth engines. In terms of revenue growth by sector, vocational training and paid membership revenues led the way, increasing by 28.3% to RMB 625.2 million. Notably, revenue from vocational training doubled compared to the first quarter of last year. Its revenue contribution remained at over 10% throughout 2023. While marketing services had yet to fully recover on a yearly basis, it picked up sequentially with quarter-over-quarter growth of 21.5% in the first quarter. Particularly, display-based advertising delivers sequential growth of over 33%. In addition, we saw rapid year-over-year growth in various verticals that requires a longer decision-making process, such as ID3C and home appliance. This highlights the vital role of Juhu's professional, in-depth, and authentic content in consumer decision-making. We continue to streamline and upgrade our CCS business offerings throughout 2023 to drive further marketing efficiency improvements and a lot greater commercial potential in this business segment. The increasingly diverse premium content has contributed to consistent growth in our payment membership business. In the first quarter, our paid membership revenue increased by 13.3% year-over-year to RMB 455.9 million. In the first quarter of 2023, Average monthly subscribers reached 14.2 million, representing a 9.2% year-over-year increase. Average revenue per user, or pool, also improved year-over-year. There were two primary growth drivers. First, the expansion of both our high-quality content categories and our target audience shows vast and diverse library of premium content in context of not only knowledge-based content like columns, research papers, and e-books, but also short stories that are gaining popularity among users. As of the end of 2003, our content library amassed 4.9 million visits, an increase of 15.7% year-over-year. Additionally, the number of premium content creators who earn income in Ongzhi Hu in 2003-04 surged by 36.8% year-over-year. Joining our massive content library, Many of our short stories originate from professional discussion in Zhihu Q&A community. Since the launch of Zhihu Yanyan Story in May 2003, it has emerged as a frontrunner in the multi-billion dollar short story market in terms of both content production and consumption. Today, the cumulative number of content creators on Yanyan Story exceeds 600,000 with a cumulative of over 100,000 short stories published. Topical coverage has expanded beyond the platform's original romance, professional, and suspense genres to encompass over 180 subcategories. While the content categories popular among female users continue to grow, we're also expanding into categories favored by male users, such as science fiction and mystery. Meanwhile, the Jihoo community's financial rewards effectively motivated our premium content creators. Over 100 paid content creators on Chihu has earned more than 1 million RMB. Also, in 2023, the average monthly income of signed content creators on Yanyan was close to 10,000 RMB, nearly doubling the average income on other platforms. Second, media format diversification and IP monetization have continued to bolster our users' long-term value. In the first quarter, we introduced a variety of formats to boost content consumption, including audiobooks and radio dramas. These initiatives are carefully designed to provide our subscribers with an immersive and fulfilling storytelling experience. By leveraging our expanding media formats and deepening our penetration across the value chain, we're expanding from a short story market to a broader IP monetization market. The success of our short-form blockbusters clearly reflects strong IP development potential within the Yanyan storage platform. Moving forward, we will harness the power of AI large-language model technology to explore and develop integrated content formats, further unleashing the value of Zhihu's premium content. This approach will help enhance our subscribers' LTV in the long term. Our vocational training business continues to grow robustly, with fourth quarter revenues stretched by 100.1% year-over-year. Looking ahead, we officially announced our development strategy focusing on digital empowerment for our Zhixue Tang brand at our annual Zhihu Education Conference in January 2014. Zhixue Tang is a vocational training platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and practical learning services for new generation professionals throughout their lifelong personal development journey. Currently, it's expanded course offerings over three main categories, examic improvements, such as postgraduate exams and English proficiency tests, career enhancements, such as CFA, accounting, and ESG exams, and other vocational skills and interests, such as writing, IT skills, and AGI courses. The vocational training sector offers immense opportunities for the one thing, digitalization. AI and large-language models are poised to revolutionize the industry leading to efficiency improvement and significant shift in user experience. By leveraging AI LLM and AI agent applications in vocational training scenarios, we can advance the digitalization of process such as job selection, exam practice, and homework correction. Our vocational training business success underscores Trueco's unique position. We started as a community, but we are expanding beyond it. Moreover, Its rapid revenue growth will bring us greater scale advantages in terms of coastal dilution and efficiency improvement. We will continue to control and optimize its business costs and expenses to continually boost its overall operating efficiency. In the fourth quarter, marketing and services revenue decreased by 18.7% year-over-year, but increased by 21.5% quarter-over-quarter. The year-over-year decline can be attributed to the challenging economic environment and hidden market competition, as well as our proactive efforts to prioritize user experience by reducing the distribution of commercial content that may negatively impact our users. However, the cornerstone verticals of our community continue to demonstrate robust growth. This reaffirms our core users' recognition of our professional content's value. particularly in the current environment, emphasizing cost-effective and rational consumption. Specifically, the ID3C vertical grew by nearly 40% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2023. This trend is also evident in other consumer verticals involving significant decision-making processes, such as home renovation, paths, and order activities, which appeals to our core users. Shih-Hu's unique content advantages and ongoing product efficiency upgrades empower brands and merchants to gain deep insights into users' evolving mindsets, allowing them to influence decision-making and purchase behavior. Furthermore, we have established a feedback mechanism for data collaborations with e-commerce platforms like Taobao and JD.com. Leveraging virtualized data, we help brands and merchants achieve their business objectives more effectively by boosting ad card rates, store visits, and category penetration rates, as well as lowering customer acquisition costs. Our market services made substantial progress during the 2011 period, with the average conversion rate from Juhu to brand online stores reached 6% across our verticals. Moreover, both transaction rates and new customer acquisition rates offered from the industry. As we progress through 2024 and elevate the community's trustworthiness, we will also continue to build our scientific trust-based marketing system across two primary aspects. First, we will continue to upgrade our underlying capability to further improve the efficiency of commercial content recommendations. Since the beginning of this year, we have sought to cover major advertising categories with a library of graded and labeled SBUs so that we can establish a user evolution system empowered by AI. This will allow more suitable products to be recommended by a broader base of content creators. Second, we will strive to maintain a high level of user experience, especially for our highly active users. If a user submits a feedback indicating no interest for a piece of content, the user will no longer seek commercial content for that product. Moving on to our key strategy for 2024. Enhancing operating efficiency and accelerating profitability remain our core strategic objectives for sustainable growth. Alongside ongoing efforts to improve our commercialization efficiency, we're committed to optimizing our cost and expensive structures. Efficiency will be a pivotal performance indicator at each BU level. This approach will expedite our journey towards profitability. Meanwhile, we'll prioritize initiatives that contribute significantly to the community's long-term growth and sustainability. Additionally, we will deepen our commitment to protecting our core users' engagement and creative contributions, reflecting the growing value we place on our trustworthy community culture and professional, in-depth, and authentic content. Finally, in terms of AI investment, we will shift our focus to developing application scenarios. We will prudently integrate AI into our a diverse professional and trustworthy community to provide Juhu users with efficient access to our massive library of trustworthy answers and a lot greater expansion opportunities beyond it. This concludes Mr. Julian's remarks. Now I will review the details of our fourth quarter financials. For a complete overview of our fourth quarter and full year 2003 results, Please see our press release issued earlier today. While we continue to face various challenges, we remain resilient and devoted to our multi-engine monetization strategy. Our total revenue increased by 2.2% and 16.5% year-over-year for first quarter and full year, respectively. We're also pleased to deliver measurable progress in refining our cost controls and operating leverage. shaping a record high gross margin since our U.S. IPO and a significantly narrow net loss for the post-quarter. Our paid membership revenue for the quarter increased 13.3% year-over-year to RMB 555.9 million. These growths were primarily driven by continued expansion of our subscribers, which increased by 9.2% year-over-year to 14.2 million as a result of content enhancement and user experience improvements. Our vocational training business revenue for the first quarter surged by 100.1% year-over-year to RMB 169.3 million. This impressive growth can be attributed to our ongoing efforts to expand our course offerings. All our courses are specifically designed to meet our users' evolving demands, covering areas such as academic improvements, career advancement, and other vocational skills and interests. It continued to garner market recognition for our programs and drive its sustainable development. The overall macro environment and uncertainties in the advertising market pressured our marketing services throughout 2023. In the first quarter, marketing services randomly declined by 18.7% year-over-year. However, they recovered by 21.5% quarter-over-quarter. driven by our product enhancement has sustained increasing performance in verticals such as IE and 3C in home and play. Gross profit for the first quarter increased by 7.1% year-over-year to RMB 673.1 million, with gross margin expanding to 59.1%, its highest level since our US IPO. Gross margin improvement reflects our enhanced monetization efforts, as well as improved efficiency in cloud services and bandwidth utilization. Total operating expenses were RMB 851.3 million for the fourth quarter, compared with RMB 844.8 million for the same period of 2022. Selling and marketing expenses for the fourth quarter increased to RMB 527.6 million from RMB 509.2 million for the same period of 2022. As we continue to invest in product and service offering promotions with a prudent ROI-based approach, Research and development expenses slightly increased to RMB 232.6 million for the first quarter from RMB 212.5 million for the same period of 2022. The increase was primarily attributable to our increased spending on technology innovation. General and administrative expenses for the quarter decreased by 26% to RMB 91.1 million from RMB 123.1 million in the same period of 2022. primarily attributable to a decline in personnel-related expenses as we continue to improve operating efficiency. Driven by our ongoing efforts to control costs and enhancing operating efficiency, our gap net loss per quarter narrowed significantly year-over-year by 42.6% to RMB 103.1 million. Our non-GAAP adjusted net loss, which primarily excludes share-based compensation expenses and amortization of intangible assets resulting from business acquisitions, narrowed by 31.9% year-over-year to RMB 91.3 million for the first quarter. Moving forward, as we continue to optimize our cost structure, control our operating expenses, and record growth driven by our multi-engine amortization model, we expect to further enhance our operating leverage. As of December 31st, 2023, we had cash and cash equivalents term deposit and short-term investment on RMB 5.5 billion compared with RMB 6.3 billion as of December 31st, 2022. Also, as of December 31st, 2023, we had repurchased 26.3 million class A auditory shares, including ADS, for a total of 58.5 million US dollars on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. This concludes my prepared remarks on our financial performance for this quarter. Let's turn the call over to the operators for the Q&A session.