Earnings Labs

Bilibili Inc. (BILI)

Q2 2020 Earnings Call· Thu, Aug 27, 2020

$21.44

-1.27%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Bilibili 2020 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Juliet Yang, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Juliet Yang

Management

Thank you, operator. Please note the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements, relating to the Company’s future performance, and are intended to qualify for the Safe Harbor from liability, as established by the U.S. Private Securities Litigation 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 this discussion. A general discussion of the risk factors that could affect Bilibili’s business and financial results is included in certain filings of the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information, except as required by law. During today’s call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, for comparison purposes only. For a definition of non-GAAP financial measures, and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results, please see the 2020 second quarter financial results news release issued earlier today. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, an investor presentation and a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on the Bilibili Investor Relations website, at ir.bilibili.com. Joining us today on the call from Bilibili’s senior management are Mr. Rui Chen, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer; Ms. Carly Lee, Vice Chairwoman of the Board and Chief Operating Officer; and Mr. Sam Fan, Chief Financial Officer. And I’ll now turn the call over to Mr. Fan, who will read prepared remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen.

Sam Fan

Management

Thank you, Juliet. And thank you everyone for participating in our 2020 second quarter conference call. I’m pleased to deliver today’s opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen. The second quarter was another strong quarter of growth for Bilibili. Owing to our increasingly diverse content and wider awareness of our brand, we are reaching a much broader audience. For the second quarter, MAUs were 172 million, up 55%, and DAUs were up 52% to 51 million, both on a year-over-year basis. Mobile MAUs continued to be our fastest grower, reaching 153 million in the period, up 59% compared to the same period in 2019. Along with the expanded user base, user engagement continues to be strong. In the second quarter, our users spent an average of 79 minutes per day on our Bilibili app, making us one of the most popular platforms among our peers. As we move into our peak summer season, with solid execution of our initiatives, we’re looking forward to further building on our user growth momentum. We continue to roll out more premium content and services, strengthen our monetization capabilities, and we are increasingly converting traffic to paid users. Our MPUs were up 105% year-over-year, reaching 12.9 million in the second quarter, and our paying ratio improved to 7.5%, compared to 5.7% from the same period last year. These increases fueled our top line growth and we once again reached record high revenues of RMB2.6 billion, beating the high-end of our guidance. Our gross margin expanded to 23% from 16% in the second quarter of last year as we continued to realize more operating leverage. We remain committed to our user growth focused strategy. After 11 years of cultivation, we believe our content pool is deep and diverse enough to accommodate a much larger user base,…

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question in queue comes from the line of Alex Poon from Morgan Stanley. Alex. Please ask your question, your line is open.

Alex Poon

Analyst

[Foreign Language] My first question is regarding the user growth. First half, the user growth is very strong. May I know, can you share with us the quality and retention and the user profile of the new user growth in first half and about the second half growth and also next year, what is the key focuses of your strategy of user growth? How are you going to balance the user retention and maintain the fast user growth in second half of next year? Thank you very much.

Rui Chen

Analyst

[Foreign Language] I will translate for Mr. Chen. Last year, we have reinforced and reaffirmed user growth will be our key strategic focus and we have been carrying out the strategy efficiently going through the first half of this year and have made very positive progress. As for the new user profile you asked, there’s no significant change of the new user profile, we still see a lot of new young generations that are coming into average age of our new users, they are about 20 years old. However, we would like to emphasize during the user growth process, we’re more focused on the quality over quantity, and the quality of our users can be supported by the daily time spend, daily time spent 79 minutes per day and our user engagement were up to 5.2 billion on a monthly basis and our daily video views reached 1.2 billion. So all of these numbers supported, our users are not only growing very fast, and their quality are very, very high. And notably, we’ve noticed that the new user who come in during the first half of 2020 and also paid for our services within the same period, the ratio has significantly increased compared to the same period last year. And also the new users who came on our platform during 2017, 2018 and 2019 also stayed and paid for the next few years, their paying ratio is also increasing. So once again this set of numbers is a strong testimony of the quality of our new user growth. So here we also wanted to emphasize the methodology of our user growth. The reason why we’re very confident in the user growth trajectory is based on the concept that we have been really emphasizing that we use our content to attract…

Carly Lee

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Carly would like to supplement a few points. During our brand upgrade campaign this year, our overall brand exposure has achieved over 5 billion times and the brand recognition level among -- just among the age brackets in between 17 to 35 has raised to 80%, I’m sorry 60%. And in the second half, our main focus will be on to convert people from recognizing the Bilibili brand to turning to Bilibili users. And during the second half, the marketing campaign will still grounded our key activity around the key time slots such as the summer vacation and returning to school, as well as the League of Legends World Championship and our New Year Eve’s Gala and many work-like scenario among long generation and to create new content, new brand campaigns and further drive our user growth.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Lei Zhang from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Lei, your line is now open.

Lei Zhang

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Thanks, management, and congrats on the strong results, my question is actually regarding your game business which is quite solid in the second quarter. I wonder could you share more color on the performance of Princess Connect? Specifically, what’s your expectation on the longevity for this game? And secondly, can you give us some update on your game pipeline and a game launch we can expect specifically your expectation about the Mobile Version of Fall Guys. Thank you.

Rui Chen

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Regarding Princess Connect Re:Dive its life, we expect this game will be having very long lifecycle and we expect this game to last quite - to quite a long period. And for this game, our - in many aspects, it has broke the historical record. In terms of pre-registered number, we have over 6.5 million people pre-registered, and the newly added user for this game also achieved a record high number. And the success of this game proves two one. One is that the ACG game has become the mainstream of young generation preferences over game genres. And second is over the years, our ability to operate and sustain our ACG titles have improved significantly. And we’re quite confident to continue the success. And for games like Princess Connect with such large user base and within the four month period of operating history, it has been very smooth in terms of operations and technical operations. So this once again support our testimony that Bilibili is able to operate as genres game quite well. As for the long lifecycle of this game, we expect it could be something like FGO and to last couple of years. As for our game - overall game business, currently, we have over 30 games in our pipeline. And those games are not only ACG titles. We have been actively expanding our content offerings across different genres since last year, and we’ve made a quite good progress on some of the console game, indie games and have received good results. The Fall Guys games, I thought you mentioned is another example of our successful attempt in expanding into new genres. And looking ahead, we’ll continue to explore the new genre aspect that will fit to our user demographic. In terms of revenue contribution, we believe ACG titles do have advantage in this area. And in our pipeline, we believe the Sword Art Online: Integral Factor will be a title that could make decent contribution in the revenue department.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Daniel Chen from JPMorgan. Daniel, please ask your question. Your line is now open.

Daniel Chen

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Thanks management. I have a question on advertising. Our ad revenue growth actually accelerate on a year-over-year basis from in the second quarter. So we expect the ad revenue to sustain such strong momentum in the second half. What are the key drivers behind? Is it brand advertising? Or is it because of performance advertising, including fees? So what is our expectation for the new ad system we launched in the third quarter for the content providers? Thank you.

Carly Lee

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Overall 2020 is still full of uncertainties and lots of vitality. However, under this challenging macro environment, we still delivered a pretty good advertising growth rate at 108% year-over-year. So Bilibili has a video platform, we are one of the biggest manufacturer in the overall video-lization industry trend. And we have observed that the advertisers’ budget has shifted from the traditional portal to the video platforms. As we mentioned earlier, we have invested significantly in expanding our brand awareness and raise our brand influence in the first half. And we have become the must go-to-platform for advertisers, who wanted to reach the younger generation demographic at the same time we also become the media centre to create viral marketing event and Bilibili’s brand upgrade, brand awareness increases has direct relationship with advertisers’ perception towards Bilibili’s brand proposition. So as our user continue to grow and our PUGV ecosystem continue to drive, we’ve seen that decent progress in expanding advert content verticals, such as fashion, lifestyle, technology, fitness as well as autos. So we’re also hoping to reach, expand our advertisers customers into those industry verticals. So during the second quarter, we didn’t make any singular marketing campaign towards certain verticals, but rather emphasizing our overall marketing solutions as well as Bilibili’s brand propositions and influence. And it’s working well for us. And we aim to continue that strategy going forward. The reason that the supporting system behind our Q2 strong growth is on our improvement in terms of our advertising - advertising products and our advertisers verticals as well as our AI powered algorithms to improve our ad efficiencies. And we’re confident to carry on this good trajectory into the third quarter. So looking ahead in Q3 and Q4, we are quite confident we can deliver a continued growth rate on our advertisement business and to develop a Bilibili specialty advertisement solution campaign. So the area of focus could be on the e-commerce area. Bilibili’s vibrant and engaged community has become many e-commerce platforms’ ideal platform to promote shopping festivals and shopping events. So in the second half of this year, this could be a rising sector class. So as our content verticals expansion, we are quite confident to also expand our advertisers in those verticals. The third point would be on the continuous improvement on our algorithm. We will continue to invest in improving our advertisement efficiency to increase advertisers’ ROI. And the fourth point is on the big events in the second half. There could be new variations as well as new events and Gala. And this type of Bilibili specialty event has become advertisers - favorite advertising avenues to reach young audiences.

Carly Lee

Analyst

[Foreign Language] So the Sparkle platform is a new platform we launched to help our content creators to connect with brand advertisers. And this platform provides our content creators, a pricing system, order management as well as settlement services. We’re hoping this platform will better serve our content creators to increase and expand their commercial potentials and increase their incomes. Since its launch in July, we have over 8000 content creator have already participated and signed up for this platform. For the GMV, we’ll disclose when we reach a certain milestone. Lastly, we’ll continue to focus on when improving our data power to provide better decision making assistance, pre-sale or post-sale and to increase our content creators and earning power.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Liu from China Renaissance. Alex, please ask your question. Your line is now open.

Alex Liu

Analyst

[Foreign Language] I’ll translate myself very quickly. Just wondering what are the major difference in terms of operating know-how and the road map between large streaming business and all the core business, as we consider live streaming as a business that requires some time of incubations and will reach an inflection point on user adoptions? If that’s the case, how far are we standing from that inflection point? Thank you.

Rui Chen

Analyst

[Foreign Language] Live broadcasting business is as we mentioned earlier, has always been a part of our content ecosystem. This is not a singular commercialization avenues for us, but also an important part of our content. A live broadcasting also provides a very good avenue for our content creators to activate and they tend their followers as well as for them to increase their commercialization potential. So, in the past few years you may notice they’re such heavy competitions among other live broadcasting platform. However Bilibili has remained within our own self-sustaining ecosystem that will continuously have talented content creator rising above and they become our live broadcasting host and are providing very good content. This is quite different, Bilibili live broadcasting business is quite different from the other a singular live broadcasting platform. Our content offering on the live broadcasting business is actually mirroring what we have to offer on the video platform. For example, our popular game related video will also be our popular live broadcasting content. Hence that on live broadcasting verticals games and talent shows and lifestyle related content are top verticals. You may see on our platform, a lot of the popular live broadcasting codes are also our top popular top content creators. And there are two key factors among the live broadcasting industry. One is the good stage of live broadcasting host, and second as a good base of users. And we believe we have these secret audiences for the two factors. We have both the highest quality content creator live broadcasting host. And we also have a very high quality set of users who love to watch live broadcasting content. So compared to other live broadcasting platforms, you’re right about the revenue trajectory, we tend to have more stable growth instead of a sharply increased circle because of their platform life pursuing the signing top content host, they will drive the revenue in a short-term. But the merits of our business model is we tend to have a more stable and sustaining life cycle and our content creator the live broadcasting costs life cycle will also tend to be longer period And that concludes the question-and-answer session. We’re quite confident to become the fast platform for video content creators given that the video equals live broadcasting content on our platform, we’re also quite confident that will become one of the most popular live broadcasting platform in the future.

Operator

Operator

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

Juliet Yang

Management

Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have further questions, please contact myself Juliet Yang, Bilibili’s Senior IR Director, or TPG Investor Relations. Our contact information for IR in both China and the U.S. can be found on today’s press release. Have a great day.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. Stay safe everyone. You may now disconnect.