Earnings Labs

Sunlands Technology Group (STG)

Q1 2022 Earnings Call· Tue, May 31, 2022

$3.21

+0.00%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to Sunlands’ First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today’s conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host today, Yuhua, Sunlands’ IR Representative. Please go ahead.

Yuhua Ye

Analyst

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Sunlands’ first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The company’s financial and operating results were issued in our press release via newswire services earlier today and are posted online. You can download the earnings press release and sign up for our distribution list by visiting our IR website. Participants on today’s call will be our CEO, Mr. Tongbo Liu; and our CFO, Selena Lu Lv. Management will begin with prepared remarks and the call will conclude with a Q&A session. Before I hand it over to the management, I would like to remind you of Sunlands' Safe Harbor statement in relation to today's call. Except for the historical information contained herein, certain of the matters discussed in this conference call are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current trends, estimates and projections, and therefore, you should not place undue reliance on them. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. For more information about potential risks and uncertainties, please refer to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Tongbo Liu.

Tongbo Liu

Analyst

Thank you, Yuhua. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Sunlands first quarter 2022 conference call. We are shaken by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the geopolitical conflicts. We are all facing huge macro-economic uncertainties. In tough times, I believe -- we believe the key to [indiscernible] is to remain focused on cost efficient spending and profitability, which will help us [indiscernible] get us through this difficult period. To that end, we continue to execute our business goals and profitability strategy during the first quarter. Thanks to our strategic efforts, we are pleased to have carried our momentum in 2022 with our first quarter net profit hitting a new high of RMB179.4 million, a significant improvement compared to a net loss of RMB53.3 million in the prior year period and 19% higher quarter-over-quarter. As we're focused on healthy and sustainable growth, we stepped up our cost management [indiscernible] and emphasized student acquisition efficiency. As such, we reduced our general and administrative expenses by 9.1% year-over-year. We also strategically scaled back on our marketing activities, as evidenced by a 51.4% year-over-year decrease in sales and marketing expenses. This led to 19.5% and 34.2% year-over-year decrease in new student enrollments and gross billings, respectively. We should note, however, as a percentage increase in our new student enrollment and gross billings are much smaller than our percentage savings in marketing spending, which is due to our improvement student acquisition efficiency as we made efforts to captivate new students and increases their lifetime value and stickiness by holding our course offerings to cater to our students different -- differentiated learning needs. Our balanced growth was also driven by our extensive premium course resources, which continue to effectively fulfill our students' learning demands. During the first quarter, we forge ahead amidst [ph] a challenging macro environment, optimizing our…

Selena Lu Lv

Analyst

Thank you, Tongbo. Hello, everyone. We are excited to start year with encouraging first quarter results. Our net revenues reached RMB613.3 million during the quarter, above the top end of our guidance range despite an 11.7% year-over-year decrease. As we remain unwavering regarding many important sustainable growth instead of blind pursuit of scale expansion to meet the existing complex macro-economic environment. Meanwhile, we continue to manage our costs responsibly, thanks to which our operating expenses in the first quarters declined by 48.1% year-over-year. As a result, we suspend our profitability in this quarter with net profit margin reaching 29.3%, representing a substantial 37 percentage points increase year-over-year. Notably, we also maintained positive operating cash flow in the first quarter at RMB10.1 million. We are confident that our improved operational efficiency and profitability combined with our unremitting efforts to diversify course offerings, and enhance service quality will drive our future growth, while creating additional value for our students, employees and shareholders. Now, let me walk you through some of our key financial results for the first quarter of 2022. All comparisons are year-over-year and all numbers are in RMB, unless otherwise noted. In the first quarter of 2022, net revenues were RMB613.3 million, a decrease of 11.7% year-over-year. Cost of revenues decreased by 9.1% to RMB96.7 million in the first quarter of 2022 from RMB106.4 million in the first quarter of 2021. The decrease was primarily due to declined compensation expenses related to our cost of revenues personnel and reduced insurance related costs incurred for our integrated online education service package purchased by students. Gross profits decreased by 12.1% to RMB516.6 million from RMB587.9 million in the first quarter of 2021. In the first quarter of 2022, operating expenses were RMB345.8 million, representing of 48.1% decrease from RMB666.6 million in the…

Operator

Operator

Q - A -

Yuhua Ye

Analyst

Again, thank you everyone for joining this call. We look forward to speaking with you again soon. Good day and good night.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the earnings conference call. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you, and have a wonderful day. [No formal Q&A for this event.]