Aurora Mobile Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Aurora Mobile Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like to hand the conference over to your host today, Christian Arnell. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Michelle. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Aurora Mobile's earnings release was distributed earlier today and is available on the IR website at ir.jiguang.cn. On the call today are Mr. Wei Dongluo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Shannon Bong, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. Guangyan Chen, General Manager. Following their prepared remarks, they will be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session that follows. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meeting of Section 21E of the Security Exchange Act of 1934 as amended and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions, which are difficult to predict and may cause the company's actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties, and factors are included in the company's filings with the U.S. SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required under applicable law. With that, I'd now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Law. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Kristen. Greetings to all. Welcome to Aurora Mobile's 2024 first quarter earnings call. Before I comment on our Q3 results, I would like to remind everyone that the quarterly earnings data is available on our website. You may refer to the data as we proceed with the call today. As we did in the past, based on the Q3 numbers, the appropriate description I will use for the first quarter results is record-breaking for the following reasons. Firstly, we are writing our own history. We are on the road. In this quarter, we record the fifth consecutive quarterly Prestige Adjusted EBITDA. Secondly, developer subscription revenue record both 7% growth quarter-of-quarter and 11% growth year-over-year. More importantly, the quarterly revenue has exceeded maybe $15 million for the first time in history. yet another record-breaking event in this quarter. Further, our EngageLab business continues to shine in terms of customer numbers and cumulative signed contract value, with a good 32% and 23% quarter-to-quarter respectively. Firstly, we record net operating cash inflow of Renminbi to $12.3 million, being the highest level in the past 16 quarters, bringing the cash balance about Renminbi as of 9-30-2024. These are the snapshots of the great numbers we have achieved in this quarter. Now, let me expand further. Our total group revenue has grown 7% year-over-year, fueled by the strong numbers from developer services. Within the group revenue, developer subscription services and financial risk management record 11% and 29% year-over-year revenue growth, respectively. Developer services revenue, which consists of subscription services and value-add services, increased by 12% year-over-year and 2% quarter-of-quarter. Subscription revenue has been recorded in great numbers where it increased by 11% year-over-year and 7% quarter-of-quarter. Value-add services revenue grew by 20% year-over-year but decreased 30% quarter-of-quarter. Our core basis subscription services revenue of revenue being 51.7 million grew strongly by 11% year-over-year and 7% quarter-of-quarter. The year-over-year and quarter-of-quarter revenue growth was mainly driven by increase in ARPU. As I mentioned earlier, we brought our own quarterly revenue record in this quarter where we had for the first time in history. Subscription revenue is 50 million in a single quarter This is a remarkable achievement. I would like to take a moment to thank all our customers in trusting our products and services, and our G1 teams for working hard and delivering great service to our customers. Another major contributor of this impressive revenue growth was the solid performance of our EngageLab business. The EngageLab business has contributed strong revenue growth in this quarter. On a year-over-year basis, the recognized revenue for Engagelab has grown close to 100%. I shall share more on Engagelab's business shortly. Within subscription revenue, some of the notable new and renewable customers in this quarter include, but not limited to, the world's largest EV company for their Chinese operations, BYD and Shunfeng Express, Kimmy Chia, Mengshuang, and Guangda Credit Card, just to name a few. Value-added services revenue will remain be 5.8 million, decreased by 30% quarter-of-quarter but increased by 20% year-over-year. The sequential decrease was due to the Liu Yaba online shopping festival in Q2 but was non-existent in Q3. This revenue trend in Q3 was within our expectations. Next is the most exciting part of the business in terms of its growth and future perspective. Allow me to spend the next few minutes on our engagement business this quarter. Firstly, we continue to acquire more overseas customers in Q3, then the contracted customer numbers can reach 513, representing a 32% sequential growth. Secondly, the cumulative signed contract value of Engager has grown by maybe 6 million quarter of quarter as of September 30, 2024. The total signed contract values do add Approximately, there may be 48 million. We are truly pleased with this result. Further, we expand our global reach to additional countries in this quarter by September 30, 2024. Our engagement products and services will show to customers in more than 41 different countries and regions globally. In summary, since we expand the overseas, more than 513 customers from 41 countries has tested, convinced, and brought out multi-channel engagement services to help them improve their user engagement effort and to do it in a more cost-efficient manner. Meeting and existing the client's expectations is what we believe to be the key to our success globally. We will certainly not be sitting on our laurels. We will continue to work hard and harder. We have high hopes to achieve greater things overseas. Internally, we can properly follow and prepare the detailed execution plans and allocate our resources accordingly. And this is an ongoing process where we will make continuous adjustment and take as when necessary. Yes, the overseas expansion is not easy, but with the track record we have had for the past six quarters, I'm very hopeful yet committed to ensure we can and will continue to bring in great customers from around the world every quarter. As of today, apart from our Singapore office, we can set up our Kuala Lumpur office. In Kuala Lumpur, we now have local sales who have great local knowledge on the ground and can better serve the local markets and the neighboring countries and customers. As a matter of fact, I was in Kuala Lumpur last week for the For the short one-week business trip there, I was overwhelmed with the great responses from our potential customers in Kuala Lumpur. They were very impressed with the multi-channel engagement services we have and are committed to subscribe to our services. Our services are indeed very suited to the local market and customers' needs. Therefore, we are building a very strong sales pipeline in Malaysia and will allocate more resources to increase both the market penetration and market share there. With the success cases we have in both Singapore and Malaysia, we are going to replicate this conversion of new customers acquisition experience to other countries in Asia Pacific region. I believe there will be more great success story that I am able to share with you in the next earnings call. With that, I will now pass the call to Shannon, who will share more about the vertical applications and other aspects of our financial performance for this quarter.

Thanks, Chris. Next, I'll go over the revenue for vertical application that includes financial risk management and market intelligence. Overall, vertical application had a relatively quiet quarter, where revenue decreased by 6% quarter over quarter and 4% year over year. Nevertheless, within a relatively quiet quarter, we still saw great numbers from financial risk management, where it recorded a 29% growth in revenue year-over-year and relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. They were the star performer within vertical applications. The 29% year-over-year revenue growth was mainly due to a strong 28% growth in ARPU. The trend we have seen in Q3 was existing customers have increased their consumption of our financial risk management products and services. And this is very important, as it provided a very solid foundation for the revenue numbers every quarter. This also demonstrates that our products are widely used and well received by the financial sector customers in their own risk model. The customers that we sign up or renew in Q3 include, but not limited to, Ningbo Bank, Chengdu Bank, Hai'er Xiaojin, Ping'an Xiaojin, and many other more licensed credit and financial institutions throughout China. Market intelligence revenue decreased by 41% year-over-year and 22% quarter-over-quarter due to the continued weak market demand for Chinese APP data. This is in line with our expectation. In Q3 of 2024, we did manage to sign renewal contracts with some well-known large customers. And within market intelligence, for product perspective, we have recently launched a global ranking of APP service, where customers can now have access to multi-dimensional indicators, including app penetration rate, active user, and new users of global key APP across different countries and different regions. And since its launch in September, we have seen good trial accounts registration rate, And we believe it will give a good and new set of independent source of data to enterprises and investment customers for them to make informed investment decision. Next, I'll go through some of the key expenses and balance sheet items. Onto operating expenses. Our Q3 operating expenses was at RMB 57.1 million. representing a slight 4% increase quarter-over-quarter and 5% decrease year-over-year. The majority of the increase was attributable to our sales and marketing department. As we expand overseas, this has no doubt required additional resources allocation. Also, the increase in revenue and cash collection in this quarter also resulted in additional commission and expenses. These are all within our expectation. And so long as the revenue and gross profit are growing at a faster pace than OPEX, the end result will be a plus to the financial statement. I'll now go through the individual OPEX category. For R&D expenses, it decreased by 26% year-over-year to RMB 24.2 million, mainly due to lower headcount that reduced salary costs and associated share-based compensation, and a decrease in data analysis and technical service expense. Selling and marketing expenses increased by 3% year-over-year to $22.4 million, mainly due to the increase in sales commission and traveling expenses as we continue to expand overseas. G&A expense increased by 92% year-over-year to RMB $10.4 million, mainly due to the one-off RMB $7.6 million gain from disposal of fixed assets in last year. that was non-existent in Q3 of this year. Other G&A expenses movement was within expectation. On to the balance sheet. I'll share two very important KPIs that we closely monitor. We continue to maintain a healthy AR turnover days at 48 days. We will continue to work hard to ensure we actively collect cash from customers and at the same time mitigating the risk of bad and awful debts. Secondly, one of the key KPIs for tracking performance of SaaS companies is the total deferred revenue, which represents cash collected in advance from customers for future contract performance, which remains high at RMB $134.8 million. This is the 11th consecutive quarter where our deferred revenue balance has exceeded $130 million. On the cash flow, we are very pleased with the team's diligent cash management in the operating activity this quarter. For the quarter ended September 30th, we have recorded net operating activities cash inflow of RMB 12.3 million, which is the highest level for the past 16 quarters. Next, total assets were at RMB 351.7 million as of September 30th. These include cash and cash equivalent of $101 million, accounts receivable of $40.5 million, prepayments and other current assets of $20.2 million, operating list right of use assets of $20.9 million, fixed assets of $3.2 million, long-term investment of $112.5 million, goodwill of $37.8 million, and intangible assets of $14.7 million resulting from the SendCloud acquisition in March 2022. Total current liabilities were at $238.3 million. This includes accounts payable of $27.1 million, current operating list liability of $5.4 million, deferred revenue of $134.8 million, accrued liabilities of $68 million. Now let me take a few minutes here to recap Q3 of 2024 that we just had. In this quarter, our developer subscription services recorded solid and impressive revenue growth year-over-year. And more importantly, we achieved a $50 million revenue quarter for the first time in history. Number two, we are making history again in this quarter where we had the fifth consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA. Number three, our engaged share business recorded customer number growth of more than 32% quarter-over-quarter and cumulative contract value increased by more than $7 million between the quarters to more than $38 million. And we recorded net operating cash inflow of $12.3 million. And lastly, before I conclude, I shall give an update on the share repurchase plan. In the quarter ended September 30th, 2024, we repurchased 29,000 ADS. Cumulatively, we have repurchased a total of 246,000 ADS since the start of our repurchase program. And this concludes our prepared remarks. We're happy to take your question now. Operator, please proceed.

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1-1. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 1-1 again. Our first question comes from Calvin Wong with Spica Capital. Your line is open.

Thank you for taking my questions. I really appreciate that the management has delivered another quarter of very impressive results. I'd like to recap what I heard from you. A few things. One, five consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA. And two, core developer subscription business revenue of more than 15 million RMB. And finally, engaged investors. that business is growing significantly every quarter. So I really appreciate management could provide more colors on all of these three great achievements. Thanks.

Thanks, Kevin. Let me take this question. For many, including yourself, would appreciate achieving this, any one of this within a quarter is not an easy task. And for us to do it, with three great milestones that you mentioned in one quarter, I think it's remarkable to say the least. And if there's one thing that I can attribute this to, I would say it would be the effective execution that helped us bring these numbers. I mean, you can spend as much time and energy in the planning and preparation stage, but I think the key to any success is how well you execute your plan. And probably, as you know, we started the planned to go overseas about 18 to 20 months ago. And by then it was a rough road ahead of us, and we had to start everything from scratch. And we did not just buy an overseas company who has operations overseas. We did it the hard way. But on the way we learned a lot. We tackled all the issues ourselves. And for instance, when we venture overseas, we need to sort out where we should store our customers' data. And which overseas cloud service provider that suits us best and suits our customers best? And also which IT structure should we have to serve our customers across 31 countries that Chris mentioned? And the best answer to this can only be had through on-field execution. And also because we executed the going overseas plan really well, and we were able to have a $50 million revenue quarter for developers subscription service. And this is the highest single-quarter revenue for this segment in our history. And this will not be achieved by simply having really good plans. And at the same token, having a 50 million revenue quarters for developer subscription revenue itself will not automatically achieve positive adjusted EBITDA. We have to properly execute the business expansion and cost-saving plans simultaneously. And all these are interrelated. So therefore, in conclusion, it is clear that the management has an execution skill and determination to manage the business and managing it well. So only when we effectively executed this plan that we can achieve a record-breaking quarter that Chris mentioned at the beginning of this call. I hope this answers your question, Kevin.

Very clear. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jack Sun with Geelongu Research. Your line is open.

Congratulations, Strongwater. I'm Jack Sun from Geelongu Research. I have a question for management. I heard Chris mention during the call that for the overseas expansion, you have offices and staff in both Singapore and Malaysia. To support overseas business growth, Are we expecting more offices around the world in the near future? Thanks.

Thanks, Jack. Let me take this question too. Yes, you're right. We now have offices in both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, which is in Malaysia. And we make conscious decision when selecting these two cities to have our offices. For the immediate, we believe these two offices are strategically well located to help us expand in the Southeast Asia and beyond. Currently, a good portion of our overseas revenue are derived from customers in the Southeast Asia region. Therefore, having local teams to support this region is key. Also, we need to be there when customers have issues that need addressing or when they have plans to buy more of our services. We believe there are a lot of opportunities in the Southeast Asia countries that we can harvest in the near future. And also with teams in KL and Singapore, it is only a short trip for them if they need to be in, say, Bangkok, Taipei, Jakarta, or even any cities within the Southeast Asia region. And as a matter of fact, our Singapore team has flown to Taipei this week for meetings with our customers and ISV there. And looking ahead, we certainly will be considering more offices when there is a good reason to have. For example, Should a business in terms of customer's number and revenue in the GAF region is becoming material, we will certainly be open to having our offices in Doha, Dubai, or even Abu Dhabi to serve the customer in that region. So if I may, the short answer to your question is that the need to have more offices overseas is solely dependent on the numbers. So long as the numbers add up, i.e. we have enough customers and enough revenue, we definitely will set up overseas more overseas offices in the near future. Hope this answers to your question, Jack.

Yeah, that's very clear. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call over to Christian Arnell for closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. for joining our call tonight. If you have any further questions and comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to the IR team. This concludes the call. Have a great evening, everyone. Thank you.

Thank you for your participation. This does include the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.