Bilibili Q2 2022 Q&A Session Transcript

Q&A(Question-and-Answer Session)is a session after the company's prepared remarks where institutional investors and analysts ask management questions. In this dialogue, you may find some valuable information that might affect the stock price in the following weeks.

Now let's look at some key points from $Bilibili Inc.(BILI)$$BILIBILI-SW(09626)$ Q2 2022 Q&A Session Transcript

Q:So my question is on the user side. BILI's MAU have surpass over 300 million this quarter. And we also noticed that, in the second quarter, the DAU actually outgrows MAU, and the average time spent per user also grow quite nicely. So I was wondering, what's the driver behind? And also what's management's expectation for the DAU and MAU metrics for the second half and also in 2023?

A:I will share 3 points. As you may all aware, there has been a significant change of macro environment globally. However, we think the fundamentals of Bilibili remain unchanged. Here are 3 points that's supporting our growth.

Videolization, for a start, is a global phenomenon. And we think the videolization movement will continue for 3 years at least. And this will also support Bilibili's growth, not for just 1 year, to 2 years, 3 years, as this will continue to support us.

The second thing is the young generation needs their own culture and entertainment content. We have half of our users are below 25 years old. Why they're using Bilibili? Because we are providing their own cultural and content product.

Third point is the consumption upgrade is still the largest driving force within the consumption sector, and the content consumption will be a major part of it. The Z generation, the Z+ generation, are more willing to spend their money into spiritual and cultural products, cultural consumption.

I believe Bilibili is on the front line of this movement. That's why these 3 points is supporting our continued sustainable growth in the future.

As you mentioned, indeed, for the past 2 quarters, our DAU growth rate has outpaced the MAU growth rate. That's because we have keep emphasizing that we will focus on the quality of the growth, which means the DAU and engagement level, time spent.

And not only our DAU has surpassed the MAU growth rate, our daily user time spent has also improved sequential year-over-year for many quarters. And our daily video views grew over 80% and our user engagement, multiuser engagement numbers, has also grown significantly. So this is a very healthy model that the video views and engagement outpaced the DAU, and the DAU itself outpaced the MAU, means the community has become more sticky and engaged.

On top of spending our money more wisely, we believe that our business model, which is the content ecosystem-driven business model, is more healthy.

As for our content categories, it has been very healthy across different verticals. Our traditionally strong anime, music, food, it's growing very healthily. We are also witnessing a lot of new category expansion. Because we have such a healthy ecosystem, you can continuously discover new content creator, very high-quality content. And we have many, many new titles that went viral. For example, the phenomenal Second Uncle PUGV has been a perfect example of how Bilibili can continuously create high-quality content. And you can discover very talented content creator on our community.

And secondly is our multi-scenario, multi-content category approach, is also helping us to grow healthily. As you may see from our platform, the PUGV live broadcasting, OGV and even the newly emerged Story Mode, they are all growing very nicely. And we are actively supplementing those video scenarios that's helping our users become more engaged.

Here, I wanted to lastly to -- wanted to really emphasize our MAU target, which is 400 million by end of next year. And we won't be achieving this number just for the sake of achieving a number, but we will be more focused on the quality of the user growth. As you can see, we're putting more emphasis on the DAU growth. We wanted to achieve a healthy and sustainable growth going forward. Thank you.

Q:My question is regarding the progress on Story Mode. The viewership has shown strong growth. Can management give more colors of the positioning and the strategy of the Story Mode? And how is the progress on Story Mode, like its ecosystem and the commercialization?

A:For the past 2 quarters, we've seen a lot of attention being placed on the Story Mode. Indeed, we have delivered a very outstanding result of how Story Mode expanding its traffic. And the reason why behind that is partially because this is from 0. We're growing this from 0. However, I wanted to emphasize here is that overall -- our overall traffic is also growing very significantly. And Story Mode is the incremental traffic add on to our total traffic. For example, if you look at the total VV, we grew by 83% year-over-year. And the PUGV video views also grew over 50% year-over-year. Our Story Mode rose 400% from a very low base. But I just wanted to emphasize, this is indeed a very nice incremental traffic growth to our ecosystem. But don't forget, our overall traffic is also growing very nicely.

Here, we always talked about the strategy of growing multi-scenario, multi-content category, and Story Mode is the representation of that strategy. And Bilibili's video ecosystem is a comprehensive, full bodied, well-rounded content ecosystem that centers around PUGV. And along with live broadcasting, story and our smart TV application, all of that is a natural extension of our original PUGV ecosystem, whether it's adding a new scenario for users' fragmented time or allowing the original content creator to become live broadcasters, this comes from the original PUGV ecosystem.

As for the Story Mode, we believe it's a very important supplement to our original content ecosystem. This product satisfy users' on-the-go entertainment needs for their fragmented time and satisfies users' kill-time need for a 1- or 2-minute video. Probably there's 10 times of that need will come up during the day. And combined together, it would be a certain longer period of time.

And more importantly, we believe the Story Mode has been very beneficial for us to improve the engagement level of those users that are less active. Some of them might think some of the video on Bilibili is too long or is more difficult to comprehend. The launch of Story Mode is helping them to quickly adapt into the Bilibili community, to help them understand, to give them a quick start to blend into our community.

Additionally, Story Mode has been very beneficiary to the newly joined content creator or the content creator with fewer followers. In the past, for them to grow their followers, they have to spend a lot of time to create high-quality, longer period of PUGV. Now we are providing there a new option to create a lighter, shorter creation. And this smaller creation comes together, will help them to grow their followers more quickly.

We are also noticing that this launch of Story Mode is helping those content creators who originally are good at creating short-form videos, are providing them additional opportunity to grow and expand their influence on Bilibili. In the second quarter, we've noticed that the number of content creators who achieved 1 million followers, 60% of them will benefit from the traffic growth of Story Mode.

Lastly, I wanted to emphasize that even though it's a shorter, vertical video, but if you browse through the content, you can tell immediately this is Bilibili featured, high-quality video. The algorithm, the recommendation system behind the Story Mode, is identical to the PUGV algorithms. We put same amount of weighting and emphasize the content quality and users' positive feedback towards the content.

And additionally, our users are very inclined to engage within the Story Mode. From -- the data shows that the user who cast light in the Story Mode has been significantly higher than the Story Mode total percentage of revenue. That means that our users are recognizing the quality of the Story Mode videos. I believe, in the future, they will be definitely very typical and very popular Story Mode video born and went viral in the space, and there will also be original Bilibili Story Mode video content creator emerging. And we are already noticing that. For example, the content creator named [Shenchen Za Wuxing], would be a perfect example for the Story Mode typical high-quality content creator.

Q:And my question relates to advertising. Given the macro headwinds and the resurgence of COVID-19, what measures do we take to make the advertising business grow? And how does management think about the trend of the advertising scene in the second half of the year? Also a follow-up question on Story Mode. We have launched advertising. How much utilization in Story Mode since April? So could you share more details about it?

A:A combination of global macro economic challenges and repeated COVID outbreaks in China are not only causing significant impact on our advertising industry in the short term, but also will be a lasting impact in the next 1 to 2 years. We've noticed that the budgeting is shrinking, advertisers have become more conscious when thinking about investing in brand advertising. And emerging industries are also struggling. So all of these factors are actually the status quo. At the same time, we've also noticed that the platform with high user value and high conversion efficiencies will stand out. However, it will still be tougher to do business, especially in ad business, if we are comparing to 2021 or prior years.

Within this challenging macro environment for Bilibili's ad business in the second quarter, we grew our business 10% year-over-year. We are one of very few names that achieved year-on-year growth in the advertising sector and also achieved a market share gain.

What we'll do to cope with this change, we believe in every crisis lies great opportunity. In cope of the current challenges and opportunities, we raised our strategy for the next 3 years, which is growth-centered; community-prioritized; and content ecosystem plus commercialization, dual-engine powered. This is the first time we're putting commercialization and community ecosystem at an equally important position.

We have completely integrated the live broadcasting and video community on the organizational structure level and achieved live broadcasting plus video all in one structure. This helped us to create a closed loop ad in multi-scenarios. At the same time, we further integrate our commercialization system with our content ecosystem. Namely, we created two middle platforms, plus two business center structure.

The two middle platforms, two business center. One is a large middle platform serving all commercialization efforts with the goal of improving traffic-linked monetization efficiency. This will be the infrastructure of our ad business and will also empower many income business segments. Another one is a smaller middle platform. Its main purpose is to serve and help our content creator to increase their earning power and improve their overall earning experience. And the two products will be, investors are familiar, Sparkle ad platform and the live video e-commerce product. And above mentioned adjustment will help our team bond together on a strategic thinking and execution level to create barrier-free self-reinforcing and positive cycle that stimulates our content ecosystem, user growth and business growth.

Our advertising methods will be further iterated in the second half of this year, but the two following things will remain unchanged. One is focused on the infrastructure. Strengthen this construction of our algorithm and data power, optimizing -- optimize the realization of different scenarios and help improve efficiency of our products. We'll also look to build a scientific marketing system that's based on data construction. And the second thing remains unchanged, is to provide a well-rounded one-stop solutions for industry verticals, such as games, e-commerce, FMCG and automotive industries and et cetera. So that's the key accounts and industry -- different industry budgets we can fully absorb.

To see the trend for the second half revenue trajectories, we do expect that the overall app grossing will grow about 20% year-over-year in the third quarter, thanks to the ad efficiency improvement and the iteration of our integrated marketing solutions. And for the second half of this year, we do notice that the budget from brand advertisers remain largely uncertain due to the macro environment. However, our multi-scenario ad approaches, including the Story Mode ad, transaction-based ads, will help us to gain new market share.

In Q3, we are looking to further open our ecosystem with our industry partners. We have already established initial partnerships with e-commerce platform, like Taobao, Tmall, Jingdong, Pinduduo. And we'll make active trial in models like making sales recommendation in our native ads and context transaction execution. Going forward, we'll also conduct various collaboration with brand advertisers and consumer goods players. In the short term, we can -- we believe we can achieve revenue growth driven by products like [Sparkle Story] and [Project Takeoff]. In the mid- to longer term, the above-mentioned collaboration will help us to establish a commercial environment and build user consumption behavior we believe we want it to. This can help us to create an ever-growing commercialization environment within our ever-growing content ecosystem.

From an industry perspective, we will remain our edge in leading verticals, such as games, 3C and digital products, food and beverage, skin care and cosmetics. Among which, we believe we have standout in the mobile games, automotive and digital products. We've seen that in the first half of this year, our mobile games -- ad revenue from mobile games sector grow near 90% year-over-year, and ad revenue from automotive industry grew over 110% year-over-year.

Rui Chen

[Foreign Language] You mentioned about the Story Mode. Indeed, it's a new ad scenario, and it's incremental traffic growth for our company. And we've also witnessed that the eCPM for Story Mode ads is also much higher compared to the traditional text and picture-based ads. This will help us to grow our advertising revenue in the short term. But if we look at a longer period of time, from 2023 to 2024, '25, the ad business growth will largely depend on our ability to build a well-rounded ecosystem that's ecosystem-based, industrialized, integrated marketing solution.

Under the current challenging macro environment, we still hope and believe our ad revenue growth can be as healthy and as sustainable as our user and community growth. We are also confident to deliver and achieve win-win situation with our business partners. Thank you.

The above Q&A are highlights that are edited for brevity.Click here for the full Bilibili Q2 2022 Earnings Call Transcript.​​​​​​​​​​

If you want to know more details,you can click here to re-watch the  Bilibili Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call​

# Q2 Earning Season

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