Xin Fan
Thank you, Juliet, and thank you everyone for participating in our 2021 first quarter results conference call. I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Chen. 2021 is off to an excellent start for Bilibili. On March 29, we successfully completed our secondary listing of Hong Kong Stock Exchange, three years after we listed on NASDAQ. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our supporting shareholders as well as our talented content creators. Video users are the dedicated colleagues that helped make this happen. With our secondary listing, we see an opportunity to broaden our investor base and attract more high-quality shareholders. We also gain more strength in the capital markets, laying a solid foundation to better acute our growth strategy and tap into the massive video-based market in China in the coming years. After officially starting to the 200 million MAU Club in 2020, we continued the momentum, further increasing our influence among China's Gen Z+ cohort and expanding our user base. In the first quarter of 2021, our MAUs were up 30% to 223 million and our mobile MAUs grew by 33% to 209 million, both on year-over-year basis. And our DAUs reached 16 million, up 18% year-on-year. It's particularly impressive given last year's remarkable high base. As a testament to our rich offerings and engaged community, our users spent an average of 82 minutes per day on our platform in the first quarter. During this time, we roll out more premium content and the services and strengthened our commercialization capabilities while converting more traffic to paying users. Our MPUs grew to 21 million, increasing by 53% versus Q1 2020, and our paying ratio is a record high of 9.2% compared with 7.8% for the same period last year. Advertisers are widely turning to Bilibili as the destination to reach young generations. As a result, our ad revenue once again achieved accelerated growth, increasing by 234% year-over-year. On the back of this strong momentum, our total revenues reached RMB3.9 billion, up 68% and our gross margin improved to 24% from 23%, both compared with the same period of last year. Throughout the first quarter, we continued to increase our content offerings and enhance our market share as the go-to video community for Gen Z+ [Foreign Language] Gen Z+ is deeply influencing society as the mainstream ideals as well as driving all kinds of consumption in China. By offering diversified content in great brands and deals, we aim to further increase our market share among these core Gen Z+ user base, while expanding our appeals to all video users. We are confident we are on the right track to achieve our three-year user target. One of the primary drivers for our next wave of growth is encouraged by the increasing trend in visualization, where video has become the pervasive across many scenarios of daily life. As China's leading video community, we are the clear founder in transformative opportunity and we are only at the beginning stages of this rapidly growing trend. According to iResearch, China's video-based market will comprise nearly 1.2 billion video users as more than RMB1.8 trillion in revenues by 2025. Over the next few years, we are committed to capturing this exciting market opportunity with visualization as a tailwind to our growth trajectory. With that overview, I would like to go through our operations for the period in a bit more detail. Beginning with our content. Our PUGV community remains the center of our content ecosystem, representing 91% of our total video views for the first quarter. We had approximately 2.2 million content creators uploading 7.7 million videos per month, representing increases of 22% and 57% respectively, both year-over-year. We strive to create the ideal home for all video creators, where they can improve their ingenuity, build a fan base, and monetize their talent. We continue to invest in aggregate improvements to ensure that our content creators can easily locate the audience who most appreciate their work. In the first quarter, the number of content creators with over 10,000 followers increased 54% year-over-year. At the same time, our advertising platform, Sparkle, continued to connect more content creators with advertisers, while cash incentive programs supported over 375,000 content creators in Q1. We also maintained an upbeat and encouraged community utmost there that provide a supportive environment for life-long content creation. As a full-spectrum video community, we aim to offer a wider and deeper range of content to meet the growing demands of our users. In the first quarter, the most viewed content verticals on our platform were lifestyle, games, entertainment, anime and tech & knowledge. In recent quarters, we have seen increasing numbers of both content submission and video views about games, knowledge and anime-related content. Moving forward, we plan to further expand our content offerings in relationships, fitness, and automobile. These categories reflect the interest of Gen Z+ while also expanding our appeal amongst a broader audience. Turning to our OGV content. Supplementing our video content ecosystem, our OGVs provide an effective gateway that reinforce our leading verticals and explores new trajectories. For example, our investment in Chinese animation has become a huge problem for ACG categories, successfully attracting old users and new ones. Advancing our Chinese animation production capabilities in January, we are holding the animation [Foreign Language], one of the China's top anime studios with highly popular production, Heaven Official's Blessing, [Foreign Language] launching late 2020, continued to win over followers in the first quarter, reaching 370 million video views, over 6 million likes and collecting around 4.5 million [Foreign Language]. We also released multiple new original Chinese anime titles in April, including final chapter of [Foreign Language] which were immediately hit, trending our social media for weeks. Turning to our documentaries, variety shows and TV & movie categories. To satisfy users' diverging needs, we launched several hit production in Q1, including our highly anticipated New Year's Eve Gala, the most beautiful night of 2020, and the Bilibili Chinese New Year Gala. Our self-produced documentaries [Foreign Language] and our self-produced variety show, [Foreign Language] all of which were welcomed by our Gen Z+ users. In the second half of this year, we have planned to introduce two more self-produced music and dating-scene variety shows. These shows are geared towards users with relevant interest and to supplement the newer music and the relationships [Foreign Language] content ecosystem. Turning to our community. The bond that we created with Bilibili committee members remains strong despite the spike in the interactions and use that we saw in 2020, making the comparable base quite high. Our first quarter community activities continued to be robust. Daily video views were up 47% to 1.6 billion and the monthly interactions increased by 35% to 6.6 billion, both compared with Q1 2020. By the end of first quarter, we had 112 million official members, up 38% year-over-year and our 12-month retention rate remained around 80%. We are very proud of these metrics as they demonstrate the strength of our model, building our users and community growth. Now, let's look at our commercialization progress. Our diversified monetization strategy is working, growing each of our commercial avenues in the first quarter. We now have a robust line of revenue stream formed out of the solid mobile games business, driving VAS business as well as our rapidly growing advertising business. Starting with our games. Revenues from mobile games business was RMB1.2 billion in the first quarter, an increase of 2% year-over-year. At the end of April, we successfully launched and that excludes safe distributor of the mobile game, Guardian Tales [Foreign Language]. This driving ACG titles has won over millions of new followers, topping the iOS game download and the growth in chart four weeks after its release. On the existing games that we operate, including frequent order [Foreign Language] remain the popular among their followers during understand. As far our jointly operated games [Foreign Language], had another solid event in the first quarter, derived from classic anime IP, we also added [Foreign Language] to our jointly operated game library in January. With China's mobile games market expected to reach over RMB500 billion in 2025, according to iResearch, we strategically [Foreign Language] and the CMGE Technology Group, further strengthening our position in the game industry. Turning to our game pipeline. 12 of the games withhold exclusive license or have applied approvals for release. These include [Foreign Language], an exciting MMORPG, both are slated for launch in the second quarter. We continue to work with top developers to bring more jointly operated games to Bilibili users. These highly anticipated titles include Tencent's League of Legends in the mobile games as well as NetEase's Harry Potter. Turning to our VAS business. Our VAS services saw a rise in the first quarter with our premium members reaching a record high and the robust growth in the live broadcasting. Revenues for our VAS grew to RMB1.5 billion, an increase of 89% year-over-year. At the end of the first quarter, we had 16.1 million premium members representing a year-over-year growth of 48%. This is particularly impressive, again, given the high base in 2020, for comparison. It also shows that our core Gen Z+ demographics have spent powers and a high willingness to pay for high quality and premium content. As part of our video content ecosystem, we continue to build our game and entertainment content, addressing our users' diverse needs. We have won a number of high-quality e-sports content contracts, including live broadcasting rights of League of Legends World Championship and more recently, our cloud League of Legends Pro League in China. Additionally, our Wetuber [ph] and other entertainment live broadcasting continued to draw young users' attention, as we explore more ways to integrate live broadcasting content with our video platform. We see great potential to expand this business even further. Last, but not least, let's review our advertising business. Beginning with the success of our 2020 New Year's Eve Gala, a wider variety of advertisers come to Bilibili to reach their desired audience of young generation. Revenue from our advertising services was RMB750 million, up 234% year-over-year, representing our eighth quarter of accelerated growth for first quarter. The top five leading advertising verticals was games, digital and 3C products, food & beverage, e-commerce, and skincare & cosmetics, including improvements to ad distribution algorithms also supported our advertising business growth, as we continue to enhance our brand awareness, increase our influence among the Gen Z+ demographics and improve our ad products. We are confident that advertising dollars are sure to follow. Building on the momentum of last year. We are off to a great start in 2021. Our financial and operational accomplishments across our content, community, and commercialization to Q1 place us on firm footing to achieve our next phase of growth. We entered a new era where the transformation to visualization is taking shape as we speak. As a full spectrum video community and the go-to platform for the Gen Z+ demographics, we have reached a new starting point from which to grow, riding the visualization wave we will continue to invest in our content ecosystem and enhance our brand among the rising and massive video market, where we're established leaders and continued to gain market share. This concludes Mr. Chen's remarks. I will now provide a brief overview of our financial results for the first quarter of 2021 and outlook for Q2. Total net revenues for the first quarter were RMB3.9 billion, up 68% from the same period of 2020. We continued to see a more balanced and diversified revenue mix. Our total net revenues breakdown by revenue stream were approximately 30% mobile games, 38% VAS, 18% advertising, and 14% e-commerce and other business. Cost of revenues increased by 66% year-over-year to RMB3 billion. Revenue sharing costs, a key component of cost of revenues, were RMB1.4 billion, also a 58% increase from the same period in 2020. Gross profit increased by 77% year-over-year to RMB937.9 million. Our gross margin improved to 24% in the first quarter compared with 23% from the same period last year. Total operating expenses were RMB1.97 billion, up 83% from the same period in 2020. Selling and marketing expenses was RMB1 billion, representing a 65% increase year-over-year. The increase was primarily attributable to the increased channel and marketing expenses associated with our app and brand as well as increase in sales and marketing personnel by allocating resources to build our brand and a few more broader audience. We achieved substantial growth in 2020. We believe the FX will be even further reaching with positive impact of the market over the long run. This is a continuation of the momentum we achieved in 2020 and we can already see the benefit of strategy through our broadened user base demographics, content, and overall industry leadership. We plan to continue building on this track in 2021 to further strengthen and expand our virtuous growth cycle. G&A expenses was RMB389 million, representing a 127% increase year-over-year. The increase was primarily due to increased headcount in general and administrative personnel, increased share-based compensation expenses, higher rental expenses and other G&A expenses. R&D expenses were RMB580 million, representing a 95% increase year-over-year. This increase was primarily due to increased headcount in research and development personnel and increased share-based compensation expenses. Net loss was RMB905 million for the first quarter of 2021, compared with RMB539 million in the same period of 2020. Adjusted net loss, which is a non-GAAP measure that excludes share-based compensation expenses and amortization expenses and income tax expenses related to intangible assets acquired through business acquisitions, were RMB666 million compared with RMB475 million in the same period of 2020. Basic and diluted net loss per share were RMB2.54. Adjusted basic and diluted net loss per share were RMB1.87. As of March 31, 2021, we had cash and cash equivalent, time deposits, as well as short-term investments of RMB37 billion compared to RMB12.8 billion as of December 31, 2020. With that in mind, we are currently projecting net revenues for the second quarter of 2021 to be between RMB4.25 billion and RMB4.35 billion. Thank you for your attention. We would like now to open the call to your questions. Operator, please go ahead.