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spk02: Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Giant Group's fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Currently, all participants are on a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session, and instructions will follow that time. As a reminder, we are recording today's call. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Sean Zhang from Investor Relations of Giant Group. Please go ahead.
spk00: Good day, everyone. Thank you all for joining us on today's conference call to discuss Giant Group's financial results for the fourth quarter and the full year of 2021. We released the result earlier today. The press release is available on the company's website, as well as from NewsWare Services. On the call with me today are Mr. Yan Dinggui, Chief Executive Officer Ms. Celia Chen, Co-Chief Financial Officer, and Ms. Xu Yifan, Chief Risk Officer. Before we continue, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company's actual results may be immaterially different from the expectation expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in the company's public filings with the SEC. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statement except as required under applicable law. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during the conference call are in Chinese streaming B. With that, let me now turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Yan Dinggui. Please go ahead, sir.
spk01: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining our first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. In 2021, we continue to navigate a volatile microenvironment while remaining committed to building upon our core competitive advantages. After we shifted our funding sources from individuals to institutional funding partners in 2020, we prioritized forging partnerships with the financial institutions, diversifying our funding sources, strengthening our risk management systems and enhancing the critical profiles of our borrowers and improve our asset quality. We have observed multiple policy changes in 2021, including the cap on loan pricing at 24%. We actively responded to the new policies and airline our pricing strategy in line with the regulatory requirements of our founding partners. As a result, despite intensifying regulatory oversight and macro uncertainties, we studied at the forefront of the FinTech space and delivered solid financial and operating results in 2021. Notably, Lloyd's original volume increased by 89.7% year-over-year to $21.91 billion from $11.55 billion in 2020, while our revenue grew by 36.9% to $1.78 billion. As we attend our rapid portfolio growth, We also maintain a manageable delinquency rate by improving our overall credit risk profile of borrowers on our platform. Our 30-day delinquency rate finished the year at 1.31% compared to 1.34% at the end of September. The 19-day delinquency rate increased slightly to 0.72% from 0.6% at the end of September, but still ahead of the industry average. In the fourth quarter, as we continue to expand our borrower phase, we refine our marketing programs to prioritize acquiring new customers with a high credit quality. As we improved the accuracy of our marketing programs, we are able to reach our target customers more efficiently. Consequently, the number of borrowers with above-average credit profiles continues to rise, which in turn enables us to increase our platform's overall credit quality while expanding our borrow base. We also continue to invest our development of our integrated, highly automatic platforms with industry-leading risk management capabilities to serve as ideal partners to financial institutions. By the end of 2021, we have forged partnerships with 38 financial institutions, and we are currently in discussion with another 46 institutions to further expand our partnerships and diversify funding resources. As of now, most of our existing institutional funding partners are commercial banks. We are actively developing collaborations with national banks and consumer financing services provided to mitigate the certain challenges we had in regional markets with our existing partnership structure. Meanwhile, we remain focused on empowering our partner financial institutions through our full suite of serving offerings that span from borrowed, acquisition to loan administration services. We are constantly optimizing these services to help our partners better execute their business initiatives while improving their operating efficiency and decision-making process. Going forward, we plan to explore more innovative ways to cooperate with our funding partners. In addition to deepening our collaboration with financial institutions, we also continue to optimize our product portfolio during the quarter. For example, we launched a loan program for small business owners in the fourth quarter. Small business owners are one of the most marginalized and underserved groups for law and services, even though small and middle-sized businesses contribute 50% of the taxes, 60% of the Chinese GDP, and 70% of the technical innovation, 80% of the employment, and make up 19% of all companies in the country. To better serve the backbone of our country's economic development and the common prosperity in trade use, We will continue to increase the investments in product offering for SMEs. In terms of our global expansion, we tailored our growth strategy for each region based on the current stage of business development. The Mexican market in particular achieved a robust growth momentum. and we are also on track to develop new partnerships with additional licensed financial institutions in Mexico to further expand our local operations and fortify our market leadership. Notably, in Australia, we have already obtained a necessary financial service license. We continue to accelerate our business business expansion, we are regularly developing and upgrading our products and services in regions, which enable us to continue to improve the region's profit margin. Going forward, we plan to penetrate other very promising international markets, especially emerging markets in Southeast Asia, to build a multi-faceted cross-field and diversified global business metrics. Looking back on 2021, we saw major changes on the regulatory front and unprecedented disruptions to the long call by COVID-19, as well as other increased uncertainties in the macro environment. However, we remain undeterred by these challenges to achieve daily business growth, improve our critical risk profiles, expanding our borrow space, and optimize our product portfolio. As evidence of this success in our efforts, we recorded 21.91 billion in loan or annulation volume in the full year of 2021. Near the higher aid of our previous guidance for 2022, we are confident that our market leadership will enable us to carry through our goals, momentum to achieve long origination of 36 billion living beings. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Celia Chen. Celia, please go ahead.
spk03: Thank you, Mr. Yan, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. As Mr. Yan mentioned, we achieved a robust financial performance in the fourth quarter and the full year of 2021. In the first four years after our business transformation, we grew our loan ordination volume by 89.7%, revenue by 36.9%, and net income by 87.1%, year over year. The solid growth further demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategies in diversifying our funding sources, strengthening our risk management, and improving asset quality. Now, let me go through our financial highlights for the quarter. Please note that unless stated otherwise, all numbers quoted are in RMB, and the percentage referred to year-over-year comparison. Net revenue was $368.2 million, up 8.2%. Revenue growth was primarily driven by the significant growth in loan origination volume, which increased 75.3%. Other revenue was $7.1 million, down 84.4%. This decrease was primarily due to change in the consolidation of our overseas entities. Moving on to cost, our indignation and servicing expenses were $84.8 million, up 30.7%, primarily due to the increase in credit assessment expenses, which was in line with the increase in our loan indignation volume. Allowance for collectible receivables contract assets, loans receivables, and others were $17.2 million, down 15.3% since the outstanding loan balance of our legacy P2P lending business was reduced to zero in November 2020. GMA expense was $46.8 million, up 9.1% as we continue to enhance our talents to support our business expansion. R&D expense was $46.6 million, up 11.2%. We recorded higher employee compensation and benefit costs and increased the investment in developing our IT infrastructure in the quarter. Sales and marketing expenses were $156.9 million, up 33.5%. which is in line with the growth of our loan origination volume. Consequently, we reported a net income of $122.5 million compared to $81.1 million in the same period of last year. We ended this quarter with $182.6 million in cash and cash equivalents compared with $117.3 million as of December 31, 2020. Moving to our guidance, we expect our long origination volume in the first quarter of 2022 to achieve year-over-year growth of over 78% and a sequential growth of over 37%. With that, we can open the call for questions. Mr. Yen, our risk And our case risk officer, Ms. Shi, and I will answer questions. Operator, please go ahead.
spk02: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, you will need to press the Start and the 1 key on your touch-tone telephone. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And we have a question coming from the line of Andrew Scott from Roth Capital. Your line is open.
spk04: Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. My first question is about the recent COVID lockdowns in China. I was wondering just how that will affect origination growth, particularly in the first half of the year. Any color you can provide there would be great.
spk05: Hi, Andrew. This is Yifang. I'm going to take on your first question. Thank you for your about our lockdown situation in Shanghai, but we are pleased to report that the current lockdown situation hasn't had any impact on our Q1 growth at all. In fact, we are expecting a pretty, very decent, but probably better than have planned, has projected earlier for Q1 total lending volumes. We are actually seeing some unexpected higher rate in terms of our call collection volumes that has gone up by a few percent in terms of the number of calls collected by our customer service. At the same time, our investment in our IT infrastructure has enabled us to collaborate effectively even when we are working remote mode. So I hope that answers your question. Thanks.
spk04: Yeah, thanks very much for the details. My second question here is about your operations in international markets. I know you guys have one of the top players in Mexico and we're looking to expand in Nigeria. So I was just looking for an update on how origination growth is going over there, if you plan on entering any new markets, and if you might start sharing metrics in these other countries.
spk05: So, Andrew, this is Yifan again. Let me take on your question on the international expansion. As in the early disclosure about our international market, Yes, we are going to give a little bit more color into each individual market. So in Mexico, as you said, we remain as a top player in the market from the volume-wise as well as the total number of customers and number of transactions. We remain to be the top player and the numbers are pretty stable. What we'll be focusing on in Mexico is really to improve our risk metrics there. So if we're moving on to the Nigeria, as we discussed last time in Q3, sort of in the second half of the Q3, that we have secured the official lending licenses to operating online lending in Nigeria. So the Q4 for giant has to really be focusing on to ramping up the acquisition volumes at a faster pace. So just gives a little bit of more details into how, what the growth is looking like. The transactions volume, so we are seeing month over month is in the high double digit number for the entire Q4 period. And as we are able to further train our fraud detection models and the risk assessment models, so the size of the loans we're extending in this market are also seeing some growth. We are looking at a 20 plus percentage growth in terms of the size of the loans as evidence showing that we are targeting more healthier customers and we are seeing improvement on our risk metrics there. But even saying that, we are facing some uncertainties in these foreign markets. One thing, the impact on the COVID, the collections operations is heavily still relying on operating call center employees. So the COVID situation has some impact over there. We are an employee, AI supported, the voice services there to help us to navigate to the downtown. But right now, we're seeing that it's going back to the office operating in a steady state again. On the other side, on the customer acquisition, we are furthering expanding our customer acquisition channels, partnering with major online marketplace. But on the other side, we are also exploring some smaller partners. So overall that we are seeing as we started to accumulating more repeated borrowers, so we are seeing the volumes in the Nigeria market is growing as well as the risk metrics is getting more stable and improving. So that's what we have in the Nigerian market. When we move down to Indonesia, if you're looking at 2021 overall, in the first half of 2021, we're seeing some pretty healthy, good momentum over there. Unfortunately, it was put on hold because of the regulatory changes. But overall, we remain pretty positive about the maturity of the Indonesia market in terms of online lending, we see it as a strong, we have a strong strategic fit in terms of our capabilities and the proven track record in the Chinese online market where we can have a strong foundation for us to empower our growth in Indonesia. So now we are working on, we actually have already identified and we're working on executing that strategy to reenter the market in a legal and regulatory-compliant approach to reenter the market. So that's where we have been, the major markets, international markets, where we've been playing in 2021. Looking at 2022, we are evaluating some of the potential markets. But again, because of the COVID situation, we are taking a prudent approach in terms of making a big strategic quick move into a new market at this point. Hope that answers your question.
spk04: Yeah, that was very, very helpful. So thank you very much. Last one for me, with you as an online platform and China now putting in new cybersecurity regulations, Do you believe you'll need to get reviewed? Do you believe this may impact shareholders over in the U.S.? Can you just provide some background there?
spk05: On that question, we don't have too much to report on, but we expect a status quo standard will be released for the public companies. And at this point, as I mentioned, technology company that we're pretty confident that we're meeting all the standards. But as a result, we don't foresee any risk in that front.
spk04: That is good news. Thank you very much for your answers. That's all from me for now.
spk02: Thank you, and I'm showing no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to the management for any closing remarks.
spk03: Thank you, operator, and thank you all for participating on today's call, and thank you for your support. We appreciate your interest and look forward to reporting to you again next quarter on our progress.
spk02: Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
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