Full Truck Alliance Co. Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Full Truck Alliance's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mao Mao, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Please note that today's discussion will contain four working statements relating to the company's future performance, which are intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liabilities. as established by the U.S. Private Securities Mitigation Reform Act. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, assumptions and other factors. Some of these risks are beyond the company's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those mentioned in today's press release and discussion. A general discussion of the risk factors that could affect FTA's business and financial results is included in certain filings of the company with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward information except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for comparison 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. Joining us today on the call from FDA's clinical management side are Mr. Hui Zhang, our founder, chairman, and the CEO, and Mr. Simon Tai, our CFO. Management will begin with prepared remarks, and the call will conclude with a Q&A session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, a webcast replay of this call will be available on FTA's investor relations website at ir.foldtruckalliance.com. I will now turn the call over to our founder, chairman, and CEO, Mr. Zhang. Please go ahead.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the third quarter of 2022. This quarter, along with China, and effective epidemic prevention and control. We are very happy to have achieved steady business growth and strong financial and business performance in the third quarter. In the process of continuous growth, from product development to technology innovation, we have further improved user experience and platform operation efficiency. This series of optimization and perfection makes us more flexible in dealing with the challenging external environment and the market of high-end companies.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on our third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. In the third quarter, under the gradual implementation of China's ensure smoothness of freight logistics policy and the effective pandemic controls, China's road transportation industry saw a series of positive changes. We are pleased with our steady growth and strong financial and operational performance. We delivered in the quarter. as we continue to enhance our capabilities from product development to technology innovation while also optimizing user experience and operational efficiency. All of these improvements have empowered us to navigate the challenging external environment and the highly dynamic market with great agility.

In a seasonally need for softness and a strong red-light wind in a large environment, Manman's stable three-week performance has recognized the resilience of our business model and demonstrated our determination to establish and strengthen the industry and lead the competitive advantage. From our operating performance, with the full recovery of new users registered by Manman and Houshigang and two core applications, our number of users in the third quarter has increased rapidly. Through the implementation of positive Laxin strategies, we have attracted more high-value users. In addition, we continue to strengthen and improve the customer's products and functionalities, and further improve the turnover rate and flow rate of users. In the third quarter, our platform GDP and turnover orders increased by 5.7% and 20.2% to 6.96 billion yuan and 33.5 million yuan respectively. Our goods and services average turnover reached 1.85 million people, which increased by 15.2% in total.

Amid weak seasonal demand and the strong macro harrowing, our solid third quarter results underscored the sustainability of our business model and our commitment to building and strengthening our industry-leading competitive edge. Looking at our operational performance, with the full resumption of new user registration on our Yunnanman and Huozhibang apps, we witnessed the rapid growth of our user base in the third quarter with an increasing number of high-quality users through a series of effective user acquisition strategies. Furthermore, we consistently strengthened and upgraded our products and functionality for direct shoppers, further enhancing both their fulfillment rate and retention. As a result, our GTV and the number of field orders grew by 5.7% and 20.2% quarter-over-quarter to RMB 69.6 billion and 33.5 million, respectively. Our average shipper MAU reached 1.85 million, representing a 15.2% increase year-over-year. In terms of finance, in the third quarter, our platform total revenue exceeded

We have given the leading market share of 45.7% to 18.1 billion yuan. In addition to continuing to expand the transformation channel and improve the transformation efficiency of the platform, we also strengthen the process of short-term operation to improve our profitability and obtain positive results. Under non-US public accounting standards, the net profit after the three-week adjustment reached 4.93 billion yuan. Compared with the net profit after the same period adjustment last year,

Now turning to our financial results, our total net revenues came in above the upper boundary of our previous top-line guidance, climbing by 45.7% year-over-year to RMB 1.81 billion. Alongside our efforts to expand our monetization channels and improve monetization efficiency, we continued to streamline our operational workflow during the third quarter to enhance our profitability. Our approach has yielded positive results with non-GAAP adjusted net income reaching RMB 493 million compared with a non-GAAP adjusted net loss of RMB 4.7 million a year ago.

On this basis, we will continue to explore and play our own advantage, improve the user experience, and improve our operating capabilities to meet the needs of the constant growth of user groups. We will also strive to improve the activity and flow rate of existing users, stimulate the use of new users, and accelerate their transformation. Through the double engine of loss and increase business, the overall business scale will continue to grow.

Building on this momentum, we will continue to explore and capitalize on our strengths, improving user experience, and refining our operational capabilities while fulfilling the demands of our growing user base. Additionally, we will try to boost our existing users' engagement and retention rate while also stimulating new user frequency and accelerating their conversion into frequent users, synchronizing and increasing across the existing and incremental business to drive the sustainable growth of our overall business scale. We have also continuously improved our operations to make sure in full compliance with the regulatory requirements. We are not aware of any ongoing government investigation or subject to any administrative penalties to date that would materially affect our business, financial position, or results of operations.

In the future, as China's goods and services industry continues to transform and upgrade its digitalization economy as the world's largest digital goods and services platform, we will continue to play a role in the size, effect, data and technology advantages of the platform. Integrated talent transportation, goods and services promotion, goods and services all-network Internet interaction, and intensively digitalized goods and services. Deep impact on each individual operation time. Looking ahead, China's road transportation industry will continue to transform and upgrade digitally.

As the world's largest digital freight platform, we will focus on leveraging our platform's skill, enhancing our fake data capabilities, and integrating with a scattered transportation capacity and supply of goods nationwide. By taking this approach, we will facilitate the connectivity of the entire freight logistics network and benefit individual truckers while driving the industry's high-quality development and creating greater value for all of our stakeholders.

下面我把时间交给Simon为大家具体介绍一下我们三季度的业绩表现。

With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Simon Cai. He will go over our operational and financial results in more detail. Simon, please go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Zhang and Mama. Hello, everyone. I will start by sharing some of this quarter's major initiatives and developments, and then walk you through our key financials. In the context of a challenging macro environment and a new wave of Omicron clusters, we're glad to have delivered another quarter of solid financial and operational results. Our third quarter average fulfillment rate reached approximately 25%, an increase of four percentage points on a sequential basis. Despite the weak demand in the third quarter and the particularly hot summer, which diminished truckers' willingness to take freight orders, These factors were partially offset by the gradual easing of the pandemic and the resumption of new users' registration. As expected, we experienced a surge in both new shipper and trucker members. Numbers are upon the full resumption of user registration on our Yumanman and Hortibon apps at the end of June. In the third quarter, Our average monthly active shippers and monthly active truckers responding to orders grew by more than 300,000 and 200,000 from the previous quarter respectively. Almost all of our newly added monthly active shippers are low and median frequency shippers, which include a large number of direct shippers, resulting in further changes to our overall shippers composition. Furthermore, The contribution to GTV and fulfilled orders by low and medium frequency shippers, including 688 members and non-members, continue to increase over the past eight quarters. Notably, the proportion of orders fulfilled by this shippers cohort has gradually increased from less than 30% two years ago to more than 40% now, and we expect this number to continue to expand in the future. Meanwhile, driven by increasing dependence on our platform, users' transaction frequency and activity level also improved, as evidenced by average quarterly fulfillment per monthly active shipper and monthly active trucker fulfilling orders strengthening quarter over quarter. Thanks to our relentless efforts to improve the quality of our services, Our continued user growth has not had a diluted impact on our user retention. On the contrary, the 12-month retention rate of paying shippers and the next month's retention rate of truckers who responded to shipping orders on our platform both remain high at around 85% in the third quarter, following the trend of previous quarters. We have also established a more effective communication channel during this quarter to re-engage users whose registration has failed within the last year, mainly through a combination of manual outbound calls, text messages, and precise information targeting. By the end of October, we had reactivated nearly 2 million new shippers and truckers from failed registrations, representing a significant rise in the reactivation rate. In the future, we will remain focused on optimizing the user experience, thereby converting and retaining more long-term users. We believe that offering a broader array of effective products and solutions to our expanding and increasingly diverse user base will be the key to our sustainable high-quality growth. To this end, we continue to optimize our platform's ecosystem during the quarter with upgraded functionalities designed to tackle shippers' and truckers' pain points. For example, we enhanced our ALGO model with more frequent updates going from daily to real-time to improve search efficiency and matching accuracy. Committed to continuous improvement in operation efficiency, we focused on our freight matching capabilities, reducing the rate of order cancellation by imposing tighter traffic restriction on shippers who frequently cancel orders. While refining the matching of truckers with Truck4Z shippers and prime orders, we extended our data analytical tools to cover more shippers, particularly those using virtual private numbers to place orders. We were delighted to see a lower order cancellation rate and an improved fulfillment rate on our platform in the third quarter as a result. Consequently, those ongoing efforts to improve operating efficiency, targeting better freight matching, are driving an overall enhanced user experience. Along with our continuous process refinements and product optimizations, we expect to support further improvements in cancellation and fulfillment rates. And importantly, we reinforce the user's positive experience on the platform going forward. During the quarter, we also made several advancements in user retention and engagement. For instance, in the third quarter, we introduced our trucker growth program in several pilot areas through which truckers accumulate reward points as a complete transaction. The more points they accumulate, the higher their priority status with respect to having full access to others posted on the platform. The program incentivizes all truckers to increase transaction frequency and improve service quality, creating better user experiences for shippers and raising overall matching efficiency. Furthermore, we successfully implemented our shipper rating system on a national scale and iterated the system in the first quarter. Our upgrade enables truckers to more precisely evaluate shippers' behaviors with operating indicators, including number of fulfilled orders, fulfillment and cancellation rate, et cetera, empowering them to make more comprehensive evaluation of the quality of other postings. After six months of pilot operations, our enhanced shipper rating system has been widely recognized by shippers and truckers leading to a 5.8% drop in the complaint rate against shippers and an 8.5% drop in the overall order cancellation rate. Finally, our online transaction service continued to deliver sustainable growth with a 114.1% year-over-year increase to RMB 390.2 million in revenue. largely attributable to the continued ramp-up of commission transaction volume. This quarter, we continued to expand our commission model to additional cities, which raised the commission penetration rate to above 50%. As a result of the increasing scale of this commission model, our online transaction service has gradually become the foundation of our overall increase in revenue. In summary, thanks to our optimized products and user composition, our third quarter results reflected solid progress. We continue to expand, capitalizing on our core competitiveness to strengthen our industry-leading position over the long term. Looking ahead, we will remain committed to elevating the quality of our products and services, refining our highly efficient operations, and protecting users' rights and interests bearing no efforts to create more value for all of our users, investors, and stakeholders. Now I'd like to provide a brief overview of our third quarter financial results. Given the limited time for today's call, I'll be presenting some abbreviated financial highlights. We encourage you to read through our press release issued earlier today for further details. Our total net revenues in the third quarter were RMB $1.8 million, representing an increase of 45.7% year-over-year, primarily attributable to an increase in revenues from freight matching services. Revenues from freight matching services, including service fees from freight brokerage models, membership fees from listing models, and commission from online transaction services were RMB $1.5 billion in the third quarter, representing an increase of 39.5% year-over-year, primarily attributable to an increase in revenue from our freight brokerage services, as well as rapid growth in transaction commissions. Revenues from freight brokerage service in the third quarter were RMB $900 billion. and 4.1 million, representing an increase of 31.2% year-over-year, primarily driven by continued growth in transaction volume as a result of improved user penetration. Revenue from freight listing service in the third quarter were RMB 219.7 million, up 2.8% year-over-year, primarily attributable to an increase in total paying members. Revenue from value-added services In the third quarter, revenue from VAT services in the third quarter were RMB 294.5 million, an increase of 88.2% year-over-year, mainly attributable to increased revenues from credit solutions. Cost of revenues in the quarter was RMB 953.0 million. compared with RMB $842.1 million in the same period of 2021. The increase was primarily attributable to an increase in VAT-related tax surcharges and other tax costs and net-off tax refunds from government authorities. These tax-related cost net-off refunds totaled $866.7 million, representing an increase of 12.7% from RMB $768.9 million in the same period last year, primarily due to an increase in transaction activities involving our freight brokerage service. Sales and marketing expenses in the third quarter were RMB $232.9 million compared with $190.6 million in the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to an increase in salary and benefits expenses driven by higher sales and marketing hedge funds. General and administrative expenses in the third quarter were RMB $206.6 million compared with RMB $190.0 million in the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to an increase in professional service fees as well as an increase in salary and benefits expenses driven by higher G&A headcounts. R&D expenses in the quarter were RMB 226.6 million, compared with RMB 202.9 million in the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to an increase in salary and benefits expenses driven by higher R&D headcount. Income from operations in the third quarter was RMB 149.7 million, compared with a loss from operation of RMB 201.7 million in the same period last year. Net income in the third quarter was RMB 395.5 million, compared with a net loss of 178.3 million in the same period last year. Under non-GAAP measures, our adjusted operating income in the third quarter was RMB 242.8 million, compared with an adjusted operating loss of $81.1 million in the same period last year. Our adjusted net income for the third quarter was RMB $493.0 million, compared with adjusted net loss of RMB $4.7 million in the same period last year. Basic and diluted net income per ADS were RMB 0.37 in the third quarter compared with basic and diluted net loss per ADS of RMB 0.17 in the same period last year. Non-GAAP adjusted basic and diluted net income per ADS were RMB 0.46 in the third quarter compared with non-GAAP adjusted basic and diluted net loss per ADS of RMB 0.0 in the same period last year. As of September 30th this year, the company has had cash and cash equivalent restricted cash and short-term investments of RMB 26.8 billion in total compared with RMB 26.0 billion as of December last year. For the third quarter of 2022, net cash generated by operating activities were RMB 398.3 million. Looking at our business outlook for the fourth quarter of this year, we expect our total net revenues to be between RMB 1.79 billion and RMB 1.88 billion. representing a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 25.2% to 31.5%. I want to emphasize that these forecasts reflect the company's current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions. The COVID outbreaks are associated with substantial uncertainties, including the geographic scope and duration of the outbreaks. The additional restrictive measures that the government authorities may take, and the further impact of the business of shippers, truckers, and other ecosystem participants, all of which are subject to change and cannot be predicted with reasonable accuracy as of the date hereof. That concludes our prepared remarks. I would now like to open the call to Q&A. Operator, please go ahead.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, if you wish to ask your question to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your question in English. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Ronald Keung from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Zhang Wei. I would like to ask, after we restored the live-streaming, what is the image of the new users? We can see some features in the behavior of the users. The overall user structure and activity of the platform has improved considerably. Are there any changes in the GTV and order structure because of these new users? I'll find you. Thank you, management. I want to ask about new user registration. Once this has resumed, could you share some color on the user profile, behavior? Have we seen any change in the platform's activity with the pickup, the GTV, and all the structure resulted from these new users? Thank you.

Thank you. So since the resumption of new user registration,

Both our shipper and trucker user base have grown significantly. In terms of newly registered shipper user profiles, the majority of them are relatively medium to low frequency direct shippers. As of now, the daily average number of new registrations have achieved normalized growth, with both new shippers and truckers basically returning to their level before the suspension of registration.

Based on the structure of the users, we saw non-members and 688 users continue to increase in the number of requests for GTVs and requests for orders. With the optimization of the strategy of the user-members and the optimization of the strategy of the bid, the number of user-members on the platform has increased. The transfer rate of new users to 688 is higher than that of 1688. Most of them are biased towards users with high annual use characteristics.

As for the GTV mix, the contribution from our member and 688 membershippers to GTV and fulfilled orders continue to rise during the quarter. Our number of membershippers also increased thanks to additional enhancement to our operational strategy and the optimization of our free order posting policy for the members. On a related note, I want to emphasize that the conversion rate from a new user to a 688 member subscriber is typically higher than that from a new user to a 1688 member membership subscriber mainly because these new users are mostly direct shippers who tend to ship less frequently while also exhibiting stronger sickness and higher retention gtv

The platform's contribution rate will also be higher. We observed that in the first batch of new users who restored Lazin, they often need about one to two months to learn. There is a learning process and a process of training habits. However, as these goods have the ability to deliver demand and turnover rate, they can be released slowly and gradually. Therefore, we are in the stage of high-speed growth in the user scale. New users' GTV and order amount contribution rate for platform turnover are not increasing linearly.

As you may know, the new users' contribution to GTV and other volume will accumulate gradually as time goes by. Let me share with you some interesting observations about these new users. Typically, those newly registered users need one to two months to learn and cultivate new shipping habits on the platform, after which their shipping requests and fulfillment capabilities will gradually improve. Therefore, even though our user scale is in a rapid growth phase, the contribution of new users to GTV and all the volume will not increase in a straight line.

从单月的数据来看,我们注意到了七八九月的GTV环比增长同时, Statistically speaking, we noticed that our overall transaction volume rose month over month in July, August, and September.

The contribution of medium to low-frequency shippers to GTV and order volume also increased sequentially. This proved again that direct shippers' reliance on our platform grew over time, laying a solid foundation for us to further refine our user competition and create an optimized user ecosystem in the longer run.

Thank you, Director Jiang. The next question comes from Violet Yi from China Renaissance. Please go ahead.

Thanks management for taking my question. My first question is on the first wait. So the platform's fulfilled GTV increased year-over-year in the third quarter, but the number of fulfilled orders declined on a quarter-over-quarter basis, which implies a year-over-year increase in average freight rate. What are the main reasons behind the fluctuation in freight rate? And my second question is, how do you see the fulfilled GTV and orders trending going forward? Thank you.

Thanks for the question. The year-over-year increase in freight rate was primarily due to an increase in fuel prices in the past year. If we look at the composition of transportation costs for truckers, we see that fuel costs account for the majority at around 40% of the freight rate, followed by highway toll fees. Also, over the last few quarters, our business has witnessed a supply-demand imbalance between shippers and truckers due to pandemic control measures, which also led to a spike in freight rates during certain periods. Compared with the number of a few others, our overall GTV along with the average freight rate will fluctuate more in the face of shifting external factors such as fuel prices, highway toll fees, and the pandemic resurgence. So because of this, we believe the volume of our fulfilled orders better reflects our overall operating capabilities. And going forward, we will encourage investors to focus more on this metric.

Our next question comes from Julie Lee from CICC. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thanks for taking my question. Against the backdrop of a weak macro environment, do you see an impact on your overall shipment volume? And what is the trend of this quarter in terms of the number of orders posted?

Thank you. Overall, order postings were basically flat on the year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis in the third quarter. We didn't see material negative impact from the changes in the macro environment. And notably, order posting from building materials related to the real estate sector also remained stable year-over-year. Despite rapid growth in shipper MAU in the third quarter, Overall, order postings remain flat year over year, partially because our newly registered monthly active shippers are low and medium frequency shippers, and their contribution to order volumes remain relatively small when they were first onboarded. Aside from that, we have implemented two operational strategies in the third quarter to boost shipping volume. For non-member shippers, we lowered the free posting from 10 posting per month to 5 posting per month, which promoted conversion of shippers into member users and improved the user stickiness. The second is for our existing member users, we fine-tuned our operating strategy, shifting our focus from shipment incentives last year to a stricter focus on fulfillment incentives this year. On a monthly basis, our overall order posting accelerated in September, offsetting the impact of hot weather in July and August. In the long run, we believe that the volume of shipments will continue to climb as our user base expands.

The next question comes from Cherry Leung from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Good evening, thank you, Mr. Wang. My question is mainly about the draw. In the past three weeks, what is the current situation of our main draw progress? For example, what is the proportion of the city we are covering now? How far is it from our target? Could you please provide an update on the progress of your transaction commissions in the third quarter? In terms of penetration, how far are we at to our long-term goal? and what we will do to increase the penetration rate in the future, and also what is the current commission rate and what is our plan to raise the commission rate going forward. Thank you.

Thank you. The revenue from transaction commissions amounted to roughly RMB 390 million in the third quarter, mostly driven by the year-over-year increase in transaction volumes. At the same time, our broader product offerings also stimulated an increase in transaction commission revenues. As of the end of September, we had launched the commission program in 201 cities with a commission penetration rate exceeding 50%. Since the end of last year, we have been rolling out a tiered commissioning strategy based on matching times. We developed this strategy mainly to cater to users' needs, having observed that users are only willing to pay for service when the platform generates enough value to make it worthwhile for them through features like fast matching and high order quality. In addition, we have seen from historical transaction data that the probabilities of disputes between shippers and truckers is still relatively high. So our tagging data algorithm including user fulfillment capability and dispute judgment has played an important role. To that end, we are allocating more resources to developing such tools to bring more value to our users and enhance our platforms overall fulfillment efficiency. At the same time, we are also exploring new user acquisition initiatives. and promoting more value-added services, such as entrusted shipments and connecting more direct shippers to truckers, which we believe will gradually improve the user ecosystem for both shippers and truckers. We remain confident that the revenues from transaction commissions will continue to be the main driver for our platform's revenue growth and monetization improvement in the future.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Brian Gong from Citi. Please go ahead.

关于我们在提高用户体验方面的努力以及去促进用户增长的交易效率, 就是关于他们能进一步介绍一下我们3G度子方面的提升的一个情况。 Thanks, Matt, for taking my question. Congratulations on solid results. Matt mentioned about our efforts to improve user experience to support user growth and enhance engagement. Can Matt elaborate a bit more on your progress on this improvement in the third quarter? Thank you.

Sure. In the third quarter, we continue to increase our focus on user experience. Each of our business divisions has established a dedicated user experience team to systemize business rules, optimize product functions, and resolve user experience issues internally, which has once again improved user experience as well as our reputation. As of the end of the third quarter, we have seen a significant decrease in user complaint rates. across all of our business segments. Moving forward, we will keep striving to improve user experience with a particular focus on building a customer service Q&A database and standardizing our operating mechanism for handling customer service requests.

Our next question comes from Ivy G from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

This is my question, and congratulations on this very successful performance. I have a question about the cost. In the third quarter, we saw that our sales cost actually increased a little. So I want to ask, what are the main areas of sales and marketing investment? And how should we think about the trend of the cost rate in the fourth quarter? I will translate it myself. Thanks, Benjamin, for taking my question. I have a question on the OPEX spending. So in 3Q, we see the sales marketing increased year-over-year, and just wanted to ask what was our kind of focus area of investing, and how should we think about the outlook for the sales marketing spending and over OPEX into the fourth quarter? Thank you.

Yes, our sales and marketing expenses mainly consist of employee compensation, welfare expenses, and marketing-related costs. On a non-GAAP basis, our sales and marketing expenses increased year-over-year, primarily due to the increase in personnel cost as a result of increased sales headcount. while the quarter-over-quarter increase was attributable to a higher marketing expense for new user acquisition since the normalization of user registration at the end of June. Going forward, we expect sales and marketing expenses to continue to rise as we further extend our new businesses. However, as the scale of our platform revenues and operating leverage increase accordingly, sales and marketing expenses as a portion of revenue will gradually decline.

And that concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Maomao for any additional or closing comments.

Thank you for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at 4TRAC Alliance directly or TPG Investor Relations. Our contact information for I.I. in both China and the U.S. can be found in today's press release. Have a good day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.