Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Lufax Holding Limited Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. Now, I would like to hand the conference over to your speaker host today, Ms. Liu Xinyan, the company's Head of Board Office and Capital Markets. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you very much. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Our quarterly financial and operating results were released by our newswire services earlier today and are currently available online. Today, you will hear from our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Y.S. Cho, who will provide an update of our business performance, the macroeconomic impact and our business strategies. Our Co-CEO, Mr. Greg Gibb, will then go through our fourth quarter results and provide more details on our business priorities. Afterwards, our CFO, Mr. David Choy, will offer a closer look into our financials before we open up the call for questions. Before we continue, I would like to refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which also applies to this call as we will be making forward-looking statements. Please also note that we may discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more thoroughly explained and are reconciled to the comparable measures reported under the International Financial Reporting Standards in our earnings release and filings with the SEC. With that, I'm now pleased to turn over the call to Mr. Y.S. Cho, Chairman and CEO of Lufax, please.

Thanks for joining. I would like to start by providing some perspective on where we are and on our business performance in Q4. While the fourth quarter was undoubtedly challenging, we are confident in our strategy to achieve a U-shaped recovery. At present, we must be patient, prudent and prepared. We need to be patient for the macroeconomic tailwinds to flow through to the SMB segment, be prudent in implementing new risk strategies and embedding lessons learned from the pandemic period and be prepared to gear up new business when the improved environment arrives. Recently, we have made the hard decisions on rightsizing risk and resources with many related execution work streams to be completed in the fourth quarter. In the first half of 2023, our focus will continue to be on asset quality over growth and depth over breadth in terms of upgrading our direct sales capabilities in prioritized geographies and within SBO customer segments. Our focus will also include optimizing credit enhancement approaches to provide further support to our operating margins and business sustainability in the midterm. We believe these strategies will lead to a U-shaped recovery. And we remain patient in terms of preparing ourselves for this recovery and delivering sound operating and financial results. Now I would like to share some updates for the fourth quarter. On the macro environment, we saw that the operating environment for SMBs remained challenging during Q4 although they are having signs of recovery in the midterm since the change of zero COVID policy on December 7, 2022. The company PMI was 49% in October, decreased to 47.1% in November and further decreased to 42.6% in December. Nominal GDP in the fourth quarter grew at only 2.9% year-over-year. Our SBO segment was hit particularly hard as a result. With the adjustment…

Thank you, Y.S. I will now provide more details on our Q4 and full year 2022 results and our operational focus for this year. Please note all figures are in renminbi unless otherwise stated. The challenging macro environment has adversely affected our top line and bottom line financial performance for the fourth quarter and full year 2022. Our revenue in Q4 declined slightly to CNY 12.3 billion, down 6.6% compared with Q3. In aggregate, 2022 full year revenue was CNY 58.1 billion, a 6% decline compared with 2021. Due to a further spike in our credit impairment loss in the fourth quarter, which reflected the impact of a challenging macroeconomic environment for both our customers and operations, we made a net loss of CNY 0.8 billion in Q4, while the full year net income declined 47.5% year-over-year to CNY 8.8 billion. Similarly, asset quality metrics in Q4 worsened across the board with DPD 30+ and DPD 90+ reaching 4.6% and 2.6%, respectively, increasing from 3.6% and 2.1% compared to Q3. Our credit impairment loss increased from CNY 4 billion in Q3 to CNY 6.3 billion in Q4, reaching an aggregate of CNY 16.6 billion for the full year of 2022. We have also seen continued deterioration in our C-M3 ratio, which worsened by 21 basis points compared to Q3 and reached 1.0% in Q4 as compared to 0.5% in Q4 2021. In spite of the challenges we faced in Q4, there are some bright spots in our performance. For instance, our funding costs in Q4 declined by 33 basis points compared with a year ago as we were able to tap public trust funding. As Y.S. mentioned, our consumer finance business saw steady growth in 2022, and credit performance for our consumer finance was healthy and in line with the…

Thank you, Greg. I will now provide a closer look into our fourth quarter results. Please note, all numbers are in renminbi terms, and all comparisons are on a year-on-year basis unless otherwise stated. In the fourth quarter, our total income decreased to CNY 12.3 billion and the total expenses grew to CNY 12.9 billion. The increase in total expenses were primarily driven by the increase in credit impairment costs, while our operating-related expenses actually decreased by 20.8% to CNY 6.6 billion. For the full year of 2022, we recorded CNY 58.1 billion in total income and CNY 8.8 billion in net profit. Next, let's have a closer look at our total income. First, as Y.S. and Greg mentioned before, our performance took a hit from the sluggish macro conditions in China, resulting in a 22.2% decrease in our top line performance in this quarter. As we are dedicated to building up a more sustainable business model, the total income mix of our credit enablement business continue to involve. During this quarter, while platform service fees decreased by 33.5% to CNY 5.9 billion, our net interest income grew 3.2% to CNY 4.4 billion, and our guarantee income grew by 2.2% to CNY 1.7 billion. As a result, our technology platform-based income service fees as a percentage of total income decreased to 47.7% from 55.8% a year ago. In addition, due to the increase in the consumer finance loans, our net interest income as a percentage of total income actually increased to 35.5% from 26.7% a year ago. Furthermore, as we continue to better utilize our guarantee company's abundant capital to bear more credit risk by ourselves instead of by our P&C insurance partners, we generated more guarantee income, reaching 13.6% of our total income compared with 10.3% a year ago.…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Yada Li of CICC.

This is Yada from CICC. I have 2 questions for today. First, I was wondering, when will the market see the U-shaped recovery? And among the expansion of new loan sales and improvement of credit impairment losses, which one should the market expect first? And my second question is in regards to the improvement in credit risk after the COVID pandemic, are there any positive signs of loan recovery collection and customer management? And is there any improvement in borrowers' willingness to repay after reopening? And what are the main causes if we still find some of the borrowers fail to repay? That's all.

Thank you, Yada. So let me answer your question. When to see U-shaped recovery and then you are asking, among new loan sales, while credit impairment improves, which one we expect to see first, and then you also asked that whether we are seeing any signs of recovery inflection and there was a reason for our borrowers failing in their repayment. So over recovery, it depends on, yes, our U-shaped curve. It depends on the recovery of overall economy or, in particular, SBO economy, and the outcome of negotiation with credit enhancement partners, as Greg said, which can largely affect our net margin. Although we see that in some industries, like travel, accommodation or restaurants, we see the sign of the initial improvement, but in overall, it's too early to say when a notable recovery will arrive with supporting numbers. New loan sale expansion and improved incremental credit impairment loss, I think they will come at a similar time, but new loan sales expansion will precede. We are monitoring all indicators of loan -- the credit performance, like net flow rate, and will be delinquency rates. And for each segment, region and industry, when we see the impairment seasonal, then we expand with targets expanding loan volume growth while credit performance impairment will follow as it carries a lag effect. And for your second question, yes, we see some positive signs of consumption and travel boom, but knowing that activity sector got seriously hit during the last year, it'll take -- I believe it will take more time to show obvious recovery. And then it's not because -- and the reason our customers failing in repayment is not because they are unwilling to repay, but their ability to repay the loan got damaged last year the most. So they'll obviously pay. We believe we'll gradually return to normal post-reopening. So it will take a bit of time, but trends are -- I think we are sure about that.

Our next question comes from Richard Xu of Morgan Stanley.

I've got 2 questions. So I understand basically the company is trying to use more guarantees rather than insurance CGI, insurance guarantees. So any long-term target in terms of the split between guaranteed by your guarantee company versus insurance? Any time line target on that as well? Second question is, recently, there's some news on CBIRC, well, a crackdown on some of the loan brokers. I don't know if there's any impact on our business. And how do we separate typical -- the loan brokers essentially targeted by the new regulatory scrutiny at the moment versus our agents on the ground? Yes, 2 questions.

Let me address our first question, and then Greg can take the second. I think you are aware that our CGI premium level remains high to now. That affects our new business net margin. We have been negotiating with our credit enhancement partners, but we have not made a clear progress in lowering our CGI premium rate so far. And as they price the rates based on historical loan vintage performance, right -- and then that was affected by the macro environment last year. So if we do not make good progress, meaning that if we do not find -- the CGI class in the future is not commercially attractive for us, then we can increase our risk-bearing portion and reduce our cooperation scale with CGI partners. Now we are discussing with funding partners. And as Greg mentioned, already a large number of our funding partners have agreed to switch to new CGI models in which we provide a full partner of credit enhancement. And then if you see how much net assets we have under our guarantee company, we already have almost CNY 50 billion net asset under our guarantee company, which can provide 10x leverage support. So in other words, about CNY 500 billion new loan sales. So I believe overall direction is clear. We will have less dependence on CGI partners. Because of the price issue, we will take more self-guarantee portion from 30% to above 50% or going forward even higher. That's possible. But we don't have any time line that we provide today. But I think we adhere to that.

Great. Richard, on your second question, I think you're reflecting an announcement that came out with the CBIRC this past Friday with regards to loan brokers. I think 2 points to make. The first is our core business itself is operated under the guarantee license. And so our sales force is able to find clients, introduce those to the banks, and the banks then make their judgment on providing a loan. So as such, we are really not acting as a broker with our funding partners. I think that is really the most critical point. The second point is if you look at the apparent reasons for the CBIRC to raise this, is there have been examples where there have been third-party agents without a license who have basically been either packaging customer information to make a loan look like it's to be used for business purposes, but that is used for other purposes and/or external brokers working with banks to charge customers other intransparent fees, therefore increasing total cost. So that is an area that we really don't touch. We do operate through our guarantee company. And when we do our business, at the end of the day, the banks are able to collect and see all information they need to determine the use of funds for the loan, be that secured or unsecured. So this is something that we will nonetheless keep a close eye on. The banks, the funding partners themselves will be going through a process, which goes from March until September to review. And certainly, if there's any higher standards or anything in our process we would need to uplook, we would do so. But we don't anticipate a major issue there, Richard.

Next question comes from Alex Ye of UBS.

Okay. My question is on pricing and take rate, so I will separate them into 2 parts. First is on the short-term outlook. So how should we expect the pricing trend going forward? And if you -- if we take into account the pricing and CGI cost, how does the take rate outlook look like for the rest of 2023 and in terms of the trajectory of that take rate recovery? And second, from a medium-term perspective of, say, in the next 1 to 2 years and after your U-shaped recovery did do materialize, so after that, what is a sustainable level of take rate that we should target at? And in the past, I remember management used to give high-level guidance of targeting a pretax margin of 3.5% to 4.0%. I'm wondering, is that still a reasonable target?

Thank you, Alex. I think the view on pricing which today for new unsecured loans is just below 20%. I think it's about 19.7%. This pricing will largely remain stable in 2023. If you look at that headline pricing over the last couple of quarters, it's come down a little bit. But the reason for it coming down is really because of the way we prioritize our business focus. So we are prioritizing, as Y.S. said, serving customers who rate R1 to R4 in the better-performing regions. And those rated customers have traditionally had slightly better pricing. So what you see in our pricing on the APR side as it comes down a bit, it continues to represent the improvement in our overall customer mix. So we will not -- even though CGI pricing remains elevated, that really is reflecting the history of the macro economy over the last 12 months. But because of that, we're not going to change our customer focus to then try and drive up higher pricing because we really want to stay focused on those higher-quality customers. So the key for us to return to the historical level of net margins of pretax 3% to 4% is really doing 2 things. One is making sure that the new customers that we're acquiring and building out in the R1 to R4 rated group achieve what we believe to be the reasonable and targeted performance. And that is something that we've seen over the last couple of quarters to be largely intact. It's now a matter of continuing to build up that business in line with the speed of the economic recovery. That's point one. Point two, to achieve that historical level of 3% to 4% is indeed, as Y.S. just laid out, optimizing the mix of our credit guarantee versus credit insurance, right? Because if the credit insurance partners continue to charge a high amount, that reduces the net margin in the business model. So the transition to a higher percentage of our self-guarantee is the key to us achieving that historical level, which we do intend to achieve over the medium term. I think if you were to press on the number you asked medium term, the answer to that question is yes. Is that a 2023 or 2024, that we would see that more as likely as a 2024 event for the portfolio as a whole because we need to be -- that new business build up and replace the legacy business as it matures.

Our next question comes from Emma Xu of Bank of America.

I have 3. The first one is about your loan growth. What's your loan growth plan in the coming quarters? And what are the assumptions underpinning the current growth plan? The second one is about your cost. Are there room for you to continue optimizing costs, including funding cost, sales and marketing costs and other operating costs? And the third one is about your dividend policy. We note that you changed your dividend policy. So could management comment on the change and its impact to the shareholders?

Sure. So on the first 2, and I'll ask David to also elaborate on the third point, on loan growth, what we're really looking at is the overall improvement of the key lead indicator C-M3, right? So what we've seen is that being elevated through Q4, not increasing as fast as what we've seen in some of the other previous quarters but nonetheless remaining at a higher level. So while we continue to prioritize new loan growth at the moment to the best customer segments in the best regions, broader loan growth will depend upon us seeing a more across-the-board improvement in some of those lead indicators. So we hope that, that improvement will be something that we see in the next 1 to 2 quarters, right? As we see that improvement, we will then uptick in our overall loan growth. But as Y.S. said, our bias at the moment is to go for quality over volume. And so that's something that we will probably have that stance, I think, through Q1 and into Q2. But indeed, if we see that improvement then in the second half, there will be more opportunities to enhance that relative loan growth. On the cost side, we have been optimizing starting in Q4. It goes through into Q1 in terms of optimizing lower productivity sales force, reducing some management layering and indeed optimizing mid- and back-office costs. All of the execution of this is happening really mostly in Q1, a little bit into Q2. There's a little bit of room to optimize. I think it's something that really is in line with our overall business growth. But in terms of funding costs, we're probably not going to see a huge optimization in the near term on that front even though we have seen improvement there over the last couple of quarters. On dividend, just a high-level comment, which is that for the last 2 years, we basically have announced a dividend policy of 20% to 40%. This time, we basically kept within that range. Cash dividend for the full year of 2022 is 40%. So the overall range hasn't changed. What we did modify slightly is that for 2021, our dividend id out in 2 halves. And so what we have done is saying for the full year of 2022, we will take it to a total of 40%. The dividend that was paid out in the first half of 2022 was really based at 32%. And so we had basically brought it at par across the entire year of 40%. I don't know, David, if you want to add any other comments on the dividend policy.

Yes. Greg has given pretty comprehensive comments on the dividend. Yes, it is -- nothing changed in that the frequency of dividend paying money is not changed. The range, the dividend payout ratio that's approved by the Board didn't change of 20% to 40%. The subtle change is really on how to calculate on a semiannual basis or on a full year basis. That is the subtle change. This subtle change, we believe, will leave management more flexibility, and we are able to develop greater value to our shareholders. So I believe it is positive to all shareholders.

There are no further questions. This concludes our Q&A session for today. I'll now hand the call back over to our management team for closing remarks.

Thank you. So this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining the conference call. If you have more questions, please do not hesitate to contact the company's IR team. Thanks again.

Thank you. That concludes today's call. Thank you, everyone, for attending. You may now disconnect.