管理層發言
Joining me today are Chief Executive Officer, Gaofei Wang; and our Chief Financial Officer, Fei Cao. The conference call is also being broadcast on the Internet and is available on Weibo's IR website. Before the management remarks, I would like to read the safe harbor statement in connection with today's conference call. During today's conference call, we may make forward-looking statements, statements that are not historical facts, including statements of our beliefs and expectations. 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 statements. Weibo assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements in this conference call and elsewhere. Further information regarding this and other risks is included in Weibo's annual report on Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. All the information provided in this press release is current as of the date hereof. Weibo assumes no obligation to update such information, except as required under applicable law. Additionally, I'd like to remind you that our discussion today includes certain non-GAAP measures, which exclude stock-based compensation and certain other expenses. We use non-GAAP financial measures to gain a better understanding of Weibo's comparative operating performance and future prospects. Our non-GAAP financials exclude certain expenses, gains or losses and other items that are not expected to result in future cash payments, are nonrecurring in nature, or are not indicative of our core operating results and outlook. Please refer to our press release for more information about our non-GAAP measures. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the lines for a brief Q&A session. With this, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Gaofei Wang.
Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I'll share with you highlights of Weibo's product and monetization in the first quarter 2026. On the user front, in March 2026, Weibo's MAU was 562 million and average daily users reached 254 million. Our MAU is still in a modest decline on both a year-on-year and a quarter-over-quarter basis. This is primarily driven by our strategic focus on enhancing the user experience and driving user retention. We have proactively rationalized our channel budget allocation, shifting our focus towards improving the conversion rate of newly acquired users into active users. Concurrently, driven by our recent efforts to optimize the information feed product experience for our core business, which includes engaged users and click-oriented users, coupled with the sustained growth in video content consumption on the platform, the scale and engagement frequency of our core users have maintained a solid trend. As a result, our DAUs achieved modest growth quarter-over-quarter. Our total net revenues for the first quarter reached USD 421.3 million, an increase of 6% year-over-year. Our total ad revenues reached USD 369.8 million, an increase of 9% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP operating income for the quarter reached USD 119.8 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 28%. Next, I will highlight Weibo's key developments in the first quarter across user growth and engagement, content ecosystem competitiveness and monetization. On user growth and engagement, in 2026, we will focus on improving user retention and building a high-quality, highly engaged and sustainable user growth framework. The information feed still remains in an optimization stage after the product update last year and related strategies began to deliver positive results starting in March, with content consumption and interactive measures among our core users beginning to improve. Meanwhile, the sustained growth in time spent on our video playback pages has served as a more solid foundation for the growth of our overall user time spent and retention. Moving on to the information feed product. In 2026, the strategy focuses on product optimization after the information feed upgrade, which aligns with our long-term direction. Building on Weibo's strength in social network and hot trend discussion, we will further enhance the distribution capabilities of Weibo's distinctive native content, establish a more stable and consistent content consumption experience and continue to strengthen users' trust in the information feed. Specifically, in the first quarter, we focused on a series of optimization initiatives aimed at balancing the distribution of social content, trending topics and vertical interest-based content. For Weibo's engaged core users, while ensuring their consumption of social content, we also prioritized improving recommendation efficiency for trending and interest-based content. Meanwhile, we further strengthened the distribution of content from authentic accounts, high-quality original content and reposted content, while stepping up our governance over low-quality and overly promotional content to enhance the consumption experience within our information feeds. These strategies were gradually rolled out throughout the first quarter and began to make positive impacts in March. Looking at the preliminary results, the scale, time spent and engagement model of the socially engaged users within our information feed have all shown month-over-month improvement, demonstrating that our strategy is more effective in retaining and serving this specific user cohort. These preliminary results have boosted our confidence to further advance the optimization of information feed products. In the second quarter, building upon the experience improvement for our socially engaged users, we will place greater focus on user groups that rely more heavily on the recommendation feed and have higher expectations for content matching efficiency. Through the continued optimization of product strategies and content matching algorithms, we aim to improve seamless content consumption for these users within the recommendation feed and further strengthen Weibo's competitiveness in recommendation-driven content consumption scenarios. Moving on to video. Our video business is set to serve as a crucial driver for increasing user time spent and retention throughout 2026. In the first quarter, we continued along the proven path established in the second half of 2025 and saw continued improvement in video consumption. During the first quarter, total time spent on the video playback pages achieved double-digit year-over-year growth, while also maintaining an upward trend quarter-over-quarter. Notably, the growth in per capita time spent on video playback pages was even more pronounced. Specifically, during the first quarter, our video business initiatives centered around two key aspects: distribution and supply. On the distribution side, we continued to optimize the recommendation conversion efficiency for videos across core scenarios such as information feeds and trending feeds. At the same time, we reduced the distribution rate of repetitive, low-quality and excessively commercialized content. This ensures that the growth in video watch time is increasingly driven by high-quality content and rising users' meaningful viewing behaviors. On the supply side, we further strengthened the supply of high-quality video content by investing more resources to attract high-quality video content creators and incentivize their content production. This includes celebrity and top KOL live vlogs, trending topic analysis, and derivative creation of popular content, all of which are distinctive to our platform and strategically steer our traffic distribution toward these high-quality offerings. In the first quarter, both the number of top-tier accounts — for example, the golden and orange verified accounts — publishing original videos and the number of original videos posted recorded double-digit year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, we are also exploring and validating the introduction of more diverse video content formats such as short plays and video podcasts. In the first quarter, leveraging the continued integration of our video AI large model, we further built on the platform strength in vertical IP by opening up AI creation tools to the creators, enabling them to produce derivative video content and expand IP-related content. As of April, we had made copyright materials available from over 20 top-tier TV drama and variety show IPs on the platform and have actively collaborated with partners to launch AI-driven content recreation initiatives, which have attracted nearly 3,000 creators and generated nearly 8,000 pieces of AI content. Meanwhile, we further enhanced Weibo's AI creation platform by providing creators with resources such as graphic text generation tools, trending topics creation tools, video generation capabilities, copyright material and campaign templates. This empowers creators with richer materials and inspiration, allowing them to translate their content expertise and creative ideas into publishable videos and text-based posts at a significantly lower cost. This, in turn, has helped improve content production efficiency for creators on Weibo. Moving on to content ecosystem competitiveness. Throughout 2026, we will continue to focus on our three core businesses: trending topics, social network and search, while further enhancing the health and core competitiveness of our content ecosystem. In the first quarter, our focus within the content ecosystem was on enhancing the quality of trending topic consumption, deepening community interactions and advancing our AI search capabilities. Through these efforts, we aim to significantly improve users' content consumption efficiency and their overall engagement experience on the platform. With respect to hot trends. In the first quarter, we focused on strengthening the influence and credibility of our trending list. We optimized the ranking mechanism, improved the quality of content presented on the list and enriched the content supply and discussion atmosphere on the landing pages. These efforts drove higher content consumption and more vibrant discussion under the hot trend scenarios. Compared with the fourth quarter last year, both average time spent and average discussion volume per user under the hot trend scenarios increased in the first quarter. The strength and stickiness of user engagement around hot trends further reinforced Weibo's competitive position as a go-to platform for hot trend discovery and public discussion. On social attributes, in 2026, we aim to deepen user engagement and increase revisit intention within interest-based communities, leveraging richer community engagement features and stronger interaction mechanisms. In the first quarter, the Super Topics community continued to enhance its product capabilities and standardized event-based operations across categories such as celebrities, IPs and sports events, which sustainably drove user engagement. As a result, both DAUs and engaged users of Super Topics recorded year-over-year growth. With AI further integrated into product development efficiency and content understanding, we will continue to center on core needs of users of community products, accelerating iteration of interactive community products and features and thereby further improving users' sense of research, social fulfillment and belonging on Weibo. On search products, as we continue to enhance our AI capabilities, in the first quarter, we upgraded our Weibo intelligent search function from a single-turn Q&A summary into an AI-powered multi-turn follow-up query capability that can understand multimodal content, including videos and images with text. Meanwhile, we integrated AI agent capabilities into key scenarios such as public figure search and hot trends search and conducted product experiments on search landing pages and comment sections. Leveraging AI agent capabilities will enhance the user search experience and efficiency and further reinforce Weibo's differentiated value proposition in the search market. Moving on to monetization. We have continued to execute on two key strategies that have underpinned our ad products and sales teams since 2025. First, driving broader adoption of Weibo's unique content marketing value across more industries and clients. Second, systematically improving ad conversion effectiveness by leveraging AI capabilities. In the first quarter, Weibo's ad revenues increased 9% year-over-year. Overall, we will continue to leverage differentiated strength in hot trends plus social plus content marketing across proven marketing scenarios such as new product launches, Chinese New Year campaigns, sports events and celebrity marketing, leading to growth across multiple key industries. By industry, the main growth contributors in the first quarter were verticals such as Internet services, Local services and Automobiles. The Internet services sector delivered robust year-over-year growth, primarily driven by incremental budget we captured from Internet service companies. For example, during the Chinese New Year period, various AI large language model players ramped up their marketing investment, leveraging Weibo's strong KOL ecosystem and professional discussion environment in the digital and technology verticals. We effectively fulfilled AI companies' market needs in areas such as new product launches, technology, education and word-of-mouth building, which resulted in a notable increase in related marketing revenues. We believe that as AI technologies and applications continue to evolve, AI-related content will become a major incremental driver of Weibo's content ecosystem. In May, the number of AI-focused professional content creators, the average daily number of AI-related hot trends and the discussion volume of AI content on Weibo all increased more than 30% compared with January this year. This technological transformation in AI has been continuously stimulating content creation and user discussion on our platform and will further build a flywheel between content ecosystem engagement and monetization growth. The Local services sector was also among the fast-growing sectors in the first quarter, supported by ongoing competition in food delivery as well as a seasonal boost from the Chinese New Year holiday. The automobile sector delivered double-digit year-over-year growth, primarily driven by favorable policies and new vehicle launches, relatively stable ad spend around new product launches, user reputation building and brand awareness. The handset sector recorded modest year-over-year growth in the first quarter. But looking ahead, market competition in the sector continues to intensify. Despite ongoing support from trade-in subsidies, rising chip and memory costs continue to put pressure on handset manufacturers' profitability, which may weigh on their ad budgets going forward. We will closely track new product launch cycles and client budget dynamics and optimize our sales strategy accordingly to ensure solid coverage of key clients. Among other verticals, the apparel and footwear sector achieved double-digit year-over-year growth in the first quarter, primarily fueled by the Winter Olympics, concentrated marketing campaigns by sports and outdoor-based brands and celebrity endorsement activities through which advertisers effectively leverage events and celebrity moments to improve brand awareness. As mentioned last quarter, we have seen a recovery trend in demand for celebrity and IP-based content marketing from certain brand advertisers. In the first quarter, this trend continued to play out in a number of key industries and campaigns with related revenues maintaining solid year-over-year growth and providing a meaningful supplement to our overall content marketing business. Celebrity marketing has always been a distinctive component of Weibo's content marketing capabilities. Over the past quarter, we focused more on enhancing service depth and ad placement efficiency for clients in this area. Based on clients' brand objectives, budget levels and target audience, we integrated Weibo resources in hot trends, IP, celebrities and KOL ecosystems to provide more tailored resource matching, content planning and campaign execution services. This initiative enables clients to effectively achieve brand exposure and user engagement. While our products and service capabilities are still being further refined, we have already seen encouraging execution results and positive client feedback in some pilot projects. Looking forward, we will continue to advance our celebrity and IP content marketing services, positioning them as a key component to deepen collaboration with brand advertisers and enhance our content marketing competitiveness while driving greater synergy with our overall ad product portfolio. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for the financial review.
Thank you, Gaofei, and hello, everybody. Welcome to Weibo's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Let's start with user metrics. In March 2026, Weibo's MAUs and average DAUs reached 562 million and 254 million, respectively. During the first quarter, we continued to focus on user quality, retention and engagement. MAUs saw more of a sequential decline, mainly reflecting our ongoing rationalization of channel investment and the transition from our information feed revamp. At the same time, DAUs remained resilient and improved slightly quarter-over-quarter, supported by better retention of core users, continued optimization of the homepage feed experience and improving video consumption. AI continued to serve as an important enabler across our product, content and monetization systems. On the monetization side, AI-powered targeting, bidding and ad creative generation continued to support promoted feeds and real-time bidding ad products. Internally, we are also expanding the use of AI tools to improve execution efficiency across product, operations and sales teams. Turning to financials. As a reminder, my prepared remarks focus on non-GAAP results. Monetary amounts are in U.S. dollar terms and all comparisons are on a year-on-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Now let me walk you through our financial highlights for the first quarter 2026. Weibo's first quarter 2026 net revenues were USD 421.3 million, an increase of 6% or 1% on a constant currency basis. Operating income was USD 119.8 million, representing an operating margin of 28%. Net income attributable to Weibo reached USD 91.9 million, and diluted EPS was USD 0.34. Let me give you more color on the first quarter 2026 revenue performance. We started the year with our advertising business returning to year-over-year growth, supported by improving demand from selected verticals and continued execution in content marketing and performance-based ad products. Weibo's advertising and marketing revenues for the first quarter 2026 were USD 369.8 million, an increase of 9% or 3% on a constant currency basis. By industry, our largest verticals were FMCG, e-commerce and 3C products in terms of growth. Internet services, Automobile and Local services were the major contributors. Advertising revenues from Internet companies increased primarily due to incremental advertising spend from leading players in the sector. The automobile sector also saw sustained growth, supported by the auto-related content ecosystem and ad spend from electric vehicles. For the handset sector, advertising revenues recorded modest growth, but we remain mindful that their marketing budgets may face pressure amid intensified competition within the handset market as well as rising component costs. As for areas facing headwinds, FMCG continued to face a year-over-year gap, although we saw sequential recovery as certain advertisers resumed spending in celebrity and KOL marketing campaigns. The online game sector was still on a descending trend due to lack of blockbuster releases this quarter. By ad product, promoted feeds ad was the largest, followed by social display and search and topic. Promoted feed delivered solid growth, benefiting from better ad matching in the revamped information feed, continued demand for Weibo's differentiated IP and content marketing solutions and a deeper AI integration in targeting, bidding and creative generation. These product improvements helped advertisers combine brand exposure with more measurable conversion objectives. Ad revenues from Alibaba for the first quarter were USD 43.3 million, an increase of 2% year-over-year or a decrease of 4% on a constant currency basis. The modest decline of revenues from Alibaba was primarily due to higher sales last year, which included one-off revenues from promotional ad budget for Alibaba's sponsorship of Spring Festival in 2025 and AI-related budget in the first quarter last year. Ad spend from Alibaba is highly correlated to its own marketing strategies, which may fluctuate with Alibaba's campaign priorities and product launch schedule. Value-added services revenues were USD 51.6 million in the first quarter, a decrease of 11% or 15% on a constant currency basis. The decrease was primarily attributable to declines in game-related revenue. Turning to costs and expenses. Total cost and expenses for the first quarter were USD 301.5 million, an increase of 13%, mainly due to higher ad production cost and marketing expense, partially offset by a decrease in general and administrative expense. During the quarter, we continued to make major investments in selected monetization-related initiatives primarily around advertising product capabilities, content marketing ecosystem and client service offerings. We will continue to manage the pace of these investments with ROI discipline and within a controllable budget framework. Operating income in the first quarter was USD 119.8 million, representing an operating margin of 28% compared to 33% in the same period last year. While operating margin declined year-over-year due to these investments, we remain focused on balancing near-term execution needs with sustainable profitability and healthy cash flow generation. Turning to income tax. Under GAAP, income tax expenses for the first quarter were USD 15.7 million compared to USD 24.3 million last year, mainly due to a decrease in deferred tax liability related to equity pickup adjustment. Net income attributable to Weibo in the first quarter was USD 91.9 million, representing a net margin of 22%. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow items. As of March 31, 2026, Weibo's cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled USD 2.59 billion compared to USD 2.41 billion as of December 31, 2025. In the first quarter, cash provided by operating activities was USD 164 million. Capital expenditures totaled USD 11.9 million, and depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to USD 15.5 million. Let me share some color on our shareholder returns. We have completed the distribution of the annual cash dividend for fiscal year 2025 with an aggregate amount of approximately USD 150 million in 2026. We will continue to take a disciplined approach to capital allocation, balancing shareholder returns with the financial flexibility needed to fund our long-term product, AI and content ecosystem initiatives. Overall, the first quarter was a quarter of continued transition and steady execution, while macro consumption sentiment and industry competition remain uncertain with initial signs of stabilization in core user engagement and advertising demand. We will continue to balance investment needs with operating efficiency and healthy cash flow generation as we build a more sustainable foundation for long-term development. Before turning to the Q&A session, let me provide a brief update on the ESG front. In April, we published our fifth ESG report, highlighting our efforts across social value, tech empowerment, information security, employee development, content ecosystem and green operations. MSCI also recently upgraded our ESG rating from BB to AA, recognizing our progress in sustainability, innovation and social responsibility. Please visit our IR website for more information. With that, let me now turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A session.
分析師問答
And now we're going to take our first question, and it comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies.
Based on the trend so far we see in Q1 and recent months, can management comment about Weibo's advertising outlook in Q2? In addition, can management also comment about our advertising strategies, any updates for the full year? And separately today on AI. Can management share about how it benefits advertising and monetization?
Thank you for the question. So first of all, let's talk about the overall recap of Q1 performance as well as the expectation for the rest of the year. First, we had year-on-year growth of about 9% in advertising revenue in Q1. In RMB terms, it was about 3% growth. In Q1, the advertising revenue growth was primarily driven by Internet software deployment, AI-related investments and other local lifestyle and automotive industry-related demand. In Q1, overall speaking, we had better-than-expected ad revenue growth in certain consumption areas. But if you look at key accounts across different verticals, we've seen some stress. For instance, automotive sales have experienced double-digit decreases. For handset manufacturers, revenue has also decreased because of higher memory and component costs, and many handset makers have had to adjust pricing. For e-commerce, profit pressure has been present as well. So even as our ad revenue grew, many of our customers have faced operational stress. Looking at Q2 and the future outlook, although we see stress in consumption industries, we are observing varied responses from different customers. In the automotive industry, while sales volume has declined in some cases, advertisers have not stopped promotional activities and continue to launch new products. This year we have seen more new product launches compared to last year, and we expect this trend to accelerate into Q2. Electric vehicle launches remain frequent, and Weibo is a natural ecosystem to drive discussion around technology and new energy topics. For the handset industry, it is difficult to predict second-half performance precisely. The industry experienced weaker sales volume in the first half of the year, but there are still frequent new product launches, especially in the medium- to high-end segments. We may see adjustments heading into the summer holiday period. Apple has proactively adjusted some pricing this year, which creates competitive pressure for some Chinese handset makers, and that could affect their ad budgets. As a result, our ad revenue and clients' ad budgets are primarily related to the frequency of new product launches and promotional cycles in different verticals, rather than being strictly tied to customers' near-term profitability. For other industries like e-commerce, local lifestyle and FMCG, we saw a high base entering Q2 and somewhat softer promotional intensity from some advertisers, including food delivery. FMCG faced comparative weakness year-over-year but has started to show sequential recovery as advertisers resume celebrity and KOL marketing campaigns. Looking to the second half of the year, we expect events such as the World Cup to create marketing opportunities. Regarding AI, as we've previously stated, AI is particularly effective for performance-based and effects-driven ads. AI has been useful in ad material generation, improving eCPM and recommendations. For generated ad materials, consumption rates have reached roughly 40% in some cases. In Q1, promoted feeds showed double-digit growth, aided by AI-driven improvements. Weibo is strong in brand and celebrity-based advertising, and we have seen solid adoption of AI among KOLs and celebrities for content and creative generation. AI facilitates content production for KOLs and reduces production costs. That said, in Q1 and Q2 we've also seen headwinds in public acceptance and adoption rate for AI-generated advertising content. We are not pushing massive commercialization at this stage; instead, we are conducting internal tests with KOLs and monitoring public acceptance before scaling broadly.
Now we're going to take our next question. Please give us a moment. The next question comes from the line of Jenny Huang from UBS.
Could you please share some updates on the impact of the state of events on user growth? Last quarter, you highlighted video strategy as a key focus for this year. Could you provide an update on the progress so far as well as the key priorities and targets for the next phase? And lastly, could you share the developments on the AI front in terms of user-facing products?
Okay, thank you for the question. First, regarding the information feed update, the upgrade was essentially completed around mid-Q3 of 2025. Prior to that, the feed was more heavily based on relationship-based recommendations. After the upgrade and adjustments, we have seen improvement in the front-end user experience. In Q1, we experienced some decline in MAU and DAU primarily due to strategic changes in channel placement and weaker handset shipments, which led to fewer pre-installs and lower acquisition in some channels. We also observed increased user acquisition costs given the hot season for AI application adoption and usage. However, we maintained strong engagement levels among social-based and click-based users. We expect to see continued improvement in total time spent and interaction volume after Q2. In the long run, our objectives with the feed update are twofold. First, we aim to fully release the value of Weibo to consumers by improving content discovery and depth of interaction through better algorithms. Second, we expect total video consumption — including time spent and overall video engagement — to increase as a result of the strategy. We also want to attract more bloggers and creators to open accounts on Weibo and produce more video content, which will help enrich supply and support monetization. On the video strategy itself, we've seen strong growth in the number of users consuming video content on Weibo and double-digit year-over-year growth in video time spent. On the supply side, our recommendation-based feed and new incentive programs are designed to attract external creators and bloggers to land on Weibo. By providing more resources and budgets, we hope to expand high-quality video supply on the platform. Regarding AI, we have invested heavily in R&D and in encouraging creators and users to leverage AI tools. When we launched Zhisou in 2025, we saw a boost in search volume. In Q1, interactive and dialogue-based search has gained traction, and after we enabled multi-turn interactive search in Q4, we observed 100% growth in users and adoption in Q1. However, the user base for these features is still small — around 1 million users — so there is substantial room to scale. In Q1, we targeted content creators by establishing an AI content creation center to help creators generate text, images and video content. Key creators have produced content through this center. We also collaborated with partners such as ByteDance and Qwen to enable video generation capabilities up to one minute in length; initially, this is being provided to selected certified users. Over time, we plan wider rollout after internal consolidation and additional testing.
Due to time constraints of today's call, we will not be addressing any further questions. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.