Earnings Labs

Cheetah Mobile Inc. (CMCM)

Q1 2024 Earnings Call· Fri, Jun 7, 2024

$5.50

+2.71%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
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Same-Day

+1.25%

1 Week

-8.93%

1 Month

-25.18%

vs S&P

-30.33%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Cheetah Mobile First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a 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 Helen, Investor Relations for Cheetah Mobile.

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Welcome to Cheetah Mobile's fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With us today, our company's Chairman and CEO, Mr. Fu Sheng, and Director and CFO, Mr. Thomas Ren. 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 conference call today, as we will make forward-looking statements. At this time, I would now like to turn the conference call over to Chairman and CEO, Mr. Fu Sheng. Please go ahead, Fu Sheng.

Sheng Fu

Analyst

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This is our first earnings call since November 2021. And we are excited to share our progress as we resume our quarterly updates. Cheetah Mobile is making changes. We are moving from focus on 2C to 2B. In Q1, our revenue from AI and others or enterprise focused increased by 62% compared to last year and 36% from the previous quarter. Now these revenues make up 43% of our total revenue. We expect this to grow to about 50% by the end of the year, making significant steps in our transformation. Our recent acquisition of Beijing OrionStar, an AI service provider, was an important move. It gave us a skilled sales team, strong tie-ups with business customers, and end-to-end capabilities for LLMs, including model training, fire training, developing LLS-based apps, and enhancing service robots, a new attachment for interacting with end users and customers in the AI era. With OrionStar, we are now focusing on making customer enterprise apps with LLMs and introducing LLM powered robot for specific business needs. We see two main reasons for this focus. First, market opportunity. Unlike competitive 2C market, enterprises are increasingly choosing LLM-based apps on private cloud due to data security concerns. However, they face challenges in developing paired apps and presenting a substantial opportunities in China's enterprise sector. Second, [Technical Difficulty] bring together Cheetah and OrionStar allow us to combine our app enterprise with AI skills, better converting the market opportunities by selling robots to business, we can even find new ways to use LLMs to improve efficiency. We are using product driving approach to enhance our LLM capabilities. This is why we focus on the 10B parameters LMS segments and avoid large upfront investment in GPUs. We believe that a trillion parameters LLMs…

Thomas Ren

Analyst

Thank you, [Fuzong] (ph). Hello, everyone on the call. Please note that unless stated otherwise, all money amounts are in RMB terms. Today, I am going to talk about two topics. First, our continued investment in large language models, or LLMs, resulting in a widened operating loss for the quarter, while total revenue has resumed its increase. Second, our healthy balance sheet. First, we are investing in LLMs. We aim to help enterprises quickly develop LLM-based new apps. As Fuzong mentioned in his speech, our acquisition of OrionStar has allowed service robots to become a key revenue contributor to the segment of AI and others. In Q1 of 2024, revenues from AI and others increased by 62% year-over-year and 36% quarter-over-quarter to RMB81 million, accounting for 43% of total revenue in the same period. Driven by contributions from Beijing OrionStar, our total revenue increased by 12% year-over-year and 14% quarter-over-quarter to RMB190 million. This acquisition also allows the two teams from Cheetah and OrionStar to work more efficiently together to better capture the opportunity in LLMs, as we help Chinese enterprises develop apps on LLMs to boost productivity. We expect this will lead to a substantial growth in revenue over time. In addition, LLMs are enabling us to improve the product experience provided by our service robots, which are now more capable of answering users' different inquiries. This enhancement has strengthened our competitiveness and should drive the sale of our service robots over time. In Q1 of 2024, our total non-GAAP cost and expenses increased 21% year-over-year and 19% quarter-over-quarter. And non-GAAP operating loss was RMB66 million in the quarter, up from RMB42 million in the same period last year and RMB49 million in the previous quarter. This is primarily due to the investments in LLM as mentioned earlier. Through…

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Everyone, for today's call, management will answer questions in Chinese. And an AI agent will translate management comments into English in a separate line. Please note the translation is for convenience purposes only. In the case of any discrepancies, management's statement in Chinese works well. If you are unable to hear the Chinese -- the English translation, a transcript in English will be available on our IR website within seven working days. Thank you so much. Operator, please now take questions. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Nancy Lu with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Nancy Lu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Operator, please move to the second question. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Operator, please move to the next question. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from [indiscernible] with Citi. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Operator, please move to the next question.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Miranda Zhuang with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Miranda, your line is open, you may ask your question. It appears we are unable to connect with Miranda at this time. So the next question comes from [Karen Kong] (ph) with TS Securities. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Okay. Operator, please move to the next question.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Miranda Zhuang with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Miranda Zhuang

Analyst · Bank of America. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst · Bank of America. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst · Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Please move to the next question. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from [Zhai Lulu] with [indiscernible]. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Next question, please, operator.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from [indiscernible] with Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Operator, please move to the next question. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Richie Sun with HSBC. Please go ahead.

Ritchie Sun

Analyst · HSBC. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst · HSBC. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Helen Zhu

Analyst · HSBC. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Operator, please move to the next question.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Wei Fang with Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Wei Fang

Analyst · Mizuho. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Sheng Fu

Analyst · Mizuho. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language]

Wei Fang

Analyst · Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you.

Helen Zhu

Analyst · Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Operator, we have no further questions. No we will end the call.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I'd now like to hand the call back over for closing remarks.

Helen Zhu

Analyst

Thank you operator and thank you so much for joining our conference call.

Sheng Fu

Analyst

Thank you.

Thomas Ren

Analyst

Thank you, everybody.

Operator

Operator

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