Earnings Labs

Cheetah Mobile Inc. (CMCM)

Q3 2017 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 21, 2017

$5.50

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Cheetah Mobile Third Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions]. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Helen Zhu, the IR Director of the company. Please go ahead.

Helen Jing Zhu

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Welcome to Cheetah Mobile’s third quarter 2017 earnings conference call. With us today are our company’s CEO, Mr. Fu Sheng; and Mr. Vincent Jiang, our company’s CFO. Following management's prepared remarks, we will conduct a Q&A session. Before we begin, I refer you to the Safe Harbor statement in our earnings release, which also applies to our call today as we will make forward-looking statements. At this time, I would now like to turn the conference over to our CEO, Mr. Fu Sheng. Please go ahead, Fu Sheng.

Sheng Fu

Analyst

Thanks, Helen, and hi, everyone. Our overall businesses remained healthy in Q3 2017. Our revenue remained stable while our profit and free cash flow continued to improve. Year-to-date, we made RMB3.6 billion in revenue, RMB371 million in non-GAAP net income and RMB336 million in free cash flow. In fact, we had higher non-GAAP net income and free cash flow in the first nine months of 2017 than we did in the full year of 2016. Now, let me give you more details in each of our business lines. Our utility products remain popular among users. Clean Master maintains the highest rating on Google Play. More than 100 million users access the app everyday and more than 30 million users have given it a 5-star rating. CM Launcher remains a personalized app on Google Play in the U.S. and Security Master once again topped the largest test of Android security by AV-TEST. Revenues from our utility products and services remain stable in this quarter, thanks to our large global user base. In the past years, our revenue grew [rapidly] [ph] as smartphones became popular in [developed] [ph] countries. Such growth slowed down as mobile apps market in these countries became mature. We have also built a large user base in emerging markets over the past years. However, the online industry in these markets still lags well behind that of developed countries. We believe that with fast economic growth and the shift from traditional medium to online medium, the time for larger revenue from emerging markets will come. In the domestic markets, our mobile utility products and the services business has been growing. In this quarter, revenue from our domestic utility apps grows by 35% year-over-year and 24% quarter-over-quarter. We believe this growth change will continue in the coming quarters. In addition,…

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

Thank you, Mr. Fu Sheng. Hello, everyone. I’m pleased to announce that our overall financial performance was strong in the third quarter of 2017. Our total revenue was robust and our profit and free cash flow continued to improve. Non-GAAP operating profit increased by 303% year-over-year to RMB154 million and non-GAAP net income grew by 123% year-over-year to RMB161 million, hitting a record high. Free cash flow increased to RMB192 million from a negative free cash flow of RMB99 million in the same period last year. The strong performance made a solid foundation for our ambitions in artificial intelligence technologies. Now let me walk you through the details of our financial performance. Please note that all financial numbers are in RMB unless otherwise noted. Our total revenues increased by 6% year-over-year to approximately 1.2 billion in third quarter of 2017. The increase was led by growth in our Live.me and mobile game businesses. Moving to each of our business lines. For our utility products and related services, revenues decreased by 15% year-over-year to 825 million in the third quarter of 2017. The decrease was primarily due to the decline in PC revenues as Internet traffic in China continued to migrate from PC to mobile. In the quarter, PC revenues decreased by 37% year-over-year to 144 million. Revenues from mobile utility products and related services decreased by 7% year-over-year to 688 million due to a decline in impression in the overseas market. As we mentioned in the earnings call for Q2, certain ad formats was discontinued by one of our overseas third-party advertising partners in mid-Q2, and the resulting ad inventory were not fully filled by our other advertising partners. However, mobile revenue contribution from our domestic market hit a record high in Q3. We have leveraged A.I. to strengthen our…

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. The first question comes from Thomas Chong of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong

Analyst

[Foreign Language] If I translate my questions in English, first, congratulations on the cooperation with Toutiao. I just want to get a sense about our overseas strategy with Toutiao with regard to content as well as the monetization side? And my second question is about our 2018 revenue and margin outlook, if there’s any? Thank you.

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language] . The first point, the strategic alliance with Toutiao greatly strengthens our cash reserve. The second point is that because Toutiao has done many years of personalization content delivery services, so with the strategic alliance and we expect it to combine their content into our tools so that can provide access to hundreds and millions of our users globally. So we expect that will help our revenue growth. And third point is that Live.me has certain rights that if Toutiao wants to have a certain business corporation in overseas market with third-party large streaming business, then Live.me has the priority to provide that kind of service. So we expect that the overall strategic alliance will be a win-win situation for both companies.

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

Let me take the second question about the overall outlook of the business in 2018. For this part, we expect that the utility products and services will remain stable in 2018 and we expect that it will generate healthy profit and cash flow in 2018 as well. For the mobile entertainment business, we expect that our casual game business and Live.me will continue to have revenue growth in 2018 when you expect that the profitability of the casual games will probably improve because we’re expecting to have more in-game purchase features included in our casual games. And we certainly will expect that the current loss in Live.me will narrow in the near future.

Thomas Chong

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. The next question comes from Joyce Ju of Citibank. Please go ahead.

Joyce Ju

Analyst

[Foreign Language] I will like to translate my own questions. My first question is regarding the mobile games. Given the company has introduced that, they are going to grow their in-game purchase revs, so we would like to get more color in terms of the company’s strategy and potential financial scale on that part of revenue? My second question is related to utility products profitability. We have seen the profitability continue to improve. Wondering if do you helped by more disciplined expenditures in operating expense or it’s coming from like higher gross margin because of the revenue mix change? Thank you very much.

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language] So this is a very good question. At this stage we do not disclose a lot about the portion of revenue contribution from the in-game purchase. And [indiscernible] at this stage that this portion is relatively lower. On the other hand, it also means that we have a huge potential for our casual games revenues. As you know that the popular game Honor of Kings has a certain social feature there and you have a very good in-game purchase features that has demonstrated the great potential of games. And so for us we will publish or release a new game with more in-game purchase features. And we expect – we will continue to add more social features to our casual games and add more in-game features so that we hope that we can drive more revenue growth from the casual games.

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

Okay, now let me take the second question about the profitability of utility products. Well, I think Joyce, you have asked – you’ve made two points that actually answer the question already. First of all, the improving profitability comes from the optimization of our costs and expenses and also we optimize our product structure. Certain not so profitable products we have made some adjustments to that. And the second part is that we do have very good growth for our mobile utility products in the domestic market and that also contributes significantly to the profit growth. Thank you.

Joyce Ju

Analyst

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Is there a follow-up?

Helen Jing Zhu

Analyst

Operator, can we move to the next question please?

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Wendy Huang of Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Wendy Huang

Analyst

[Technical Difficulty]

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

Excuse me, Wendy. Your voice kind of breaks off.

Wendy Huang

Analyst

Sorry.

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

Your voice kind of breaks off. Can you repeat that question please?

Wendy Huang

Analyst

Yes. First, can you give us some color on your partnership with Toutiao? How should we see the impact of this on your 2018 top line?

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language] So the purpose of our News Republic business is trying to monetize our user traffic from our utility products and services. By forming the strategic alliance with Toutiao, we can indirectly achieve this purpose because our utility products can still be providing content from Toutiao’s platform and that will help the users of our utility products to increase their engagement and the time spent on our products, which of course will help the monetization of this user traffic. While we do have a revenue sharing program – excuse me, we will have a revenue sharing plan with Toutiao. But by doing this, we will be able to reduce the cost for our R&D expenses and also will reduce some other expenses related to bandwidth and IDC centers and something like that. So overall we expect that our revenue will increase and the profitability will be improved as well.

Helen Jing Zhu

Analyst

Thank you. Can we move to the next question please, operator?

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Robert Cowell of 86Research. Please go ahead.

Robert Cowell

Analyst

Thanks. My question is about the Beijing Orion and specifically the Xiaoya speaker device. So I’m interested in what the market reception has been there? And more generally on Beijing Orion, what is its competitive position or competitive advantage going up against other smart speaker devices or other language-based operating systems? I can try and translate briefly. [Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst

Okay, Robert, so for the first part of the question about the Xiaoya A.I. speaker, that speaker has been well received by the market and has a very good reputation among its users. And in terms of the time spent per user, unfortunately we cannot comment on that because that product is our business partner’s product. For the second question regarding the competitive advantage of OrionStar, because we think that the A.I. technology has lowered the entry barrier for this kind of applications. And as you know that the Xiaoya speaker and the Orion A.I. technologies do have good reputations. Although the big companies such as Baidu and Alibaba has the potential to have more technology investments. But for us we have a better understanding of the products and of the different usage scenarios because we have been developing products for all these years and we are very experienced in product design and launch by ourselves.

Robert Cowell

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Vincent Jiang

Analyst

We have very good product managers for all these years.

Helen Jing Zhu

Analyst

Thank you. Operator, can we move to the next question please?

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Helen Jing Zhu

Analyst

Thank you all for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. Thank you. Bye.