Yiren Digital (YRD) 20 Nov 242024 Q3 Earnings call transcript

Good day, and welcome to the Yiren Digital Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Keyao He, IR Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Today's call features the presentation by the Founder, Chairman and CEO of CreditEase, our CEO; Mr. Ning Tang; and our CFO, Mr. Yuning Feng, there will be Q&A section after the prepared remarks.

Before beginning, we'd like to remind you the discussions during this call contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such statements. Further information regarding future risks, uncertainties or factors is included in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as required under the relevant laws.

During the call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures and supplemental measures to review and assess our operating performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP.

For information about these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings press release. I will now pass it on to Ning for opening remarks.

Thank you all for joining our earnings conference call today. I'm pleased to report a stable and healthy quarter with concrete business development and a strategic exploration driven by our quality over quantity strategy.

This quarter's results underscore our consistent focus on sustainable, high-quality growth.

Before I go into our operational details, I'd like to share some highlights from this quarter.

First, our financial services business made notable improvements in asset quality, thanks to our continued focus on strong risk management and the borrower optimization.

Second, we've been proactively exploring new online business models for our insurance division and have seen visible progress driving an increase in sales and retirement theme insurance products. At a tech-powered platform, Yiren Digital prioritizes the use of technology and digital capabilities to enhance our business model.

Our growing online business model is expanding from financial services to the insurance brokerage space.

Third, our growing investment in AI is already bearing fruit with proprietary AI occasions now largely integrated into our daily operations, driving efficiency and improving customer experience. Altogether, these efforts are laying a solid foundation for the next phase of Cayman quality growth, loan bag that will continue to drive value for our shareholders in the years to come.

Now let me go through our key business highlights.

First, regarding our financial services business, the third quarter of 2024 saw continued growth with total loan volumes reaching RMB 13.4 billion, a 36% increase year-over-year. The number of borrowers stayed relatively stable quarter-over-quarter at RMB 150 million, a 24% growth compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, our lending platform, Yi Xiang Hua remains highly popular with monthly active users staying steady at around 4.5 million a 52% year-over-year increase. Growth has been primarily driven by strong demand for our small revolving loan product, and an increase in repeat borrowing from high-quality customers.

As I mentioned earlier, we have enhanced the quality of our customer base by focusing on higher-quality customers with stronger repayment capabilities and better risk profiles. And now those new customers are contributing to a growing proportion of repeat loans, becoming an important growth driver. Over 60% of the loans facilitated during the quarter came from repeat borrowers, up 5 percentage points from the previous quarter.

As our efforts to upgrade our customer segments is success in phases, we are now focusing on increasing the repeat oil rate among existing customers while maintaining a balanced mix of new and returning customers. Furthermore, as a result of our customer quality upgrade and highly effective AI-driven risk management. We've seen significant improvements across various risk indicators, confirming the effectiveness of our approach. In the fourth quarter, our FPD 30s rate dropped by 32 basis points to a record low.

As of September 30, 2024, delinquency rates for the 1- to 30-day 31 to 60 days and 60- to 90-day buckets fell by 10, 20 and 30 basis points quarter-over-quarter, respectively.

Additionally, M1 recovery rates rose by 1.2 percentage points, reaching an all-time high. The shift in our borrower structure establishes a solid foundation for our sustainable growth.

On the funding side, we made essential progress in expanding our funding partnerships by the end of the third quarter of 2024, we have added nearly 20 new funding partners for the year. Meanwhile, our funding cost saw another 64 basis points reduction quarter-over-quarter.

Moving on to our international business.

Our growth momentum remains strong. In the Philippines, both loan volumes and revenues posted double-digit increase quarter-over-quarter.

We also began optimizing our customer base there. Well, iterating our product offerings, and we expect these efforts to positively impact the profitability in the fourth quarter of this year. On our AI strategy, we made substantial progress with 6 proprietary AI systems now, supporting customer acquisition, customer service, asset management and collections in our daily operations. I will now highlight several updates to demonstrate this progress.

Firstly, for our domestic business operations, AI has significantly enhanced our collection and quality assurance processes.

As of the end of third quarter, 77% of day 1 overdue cases were covered by AI robots rerouting in labor cost savings of nearly RMB 2 million in Q3 alone. Meanwhile, to ensure the high professionalism of our services, we deployed 20 AI models for quality assurance in loan collections and 8 AI models for quality assurance in customer service with the collection models achieving over 96% accuracy.

Additionally, we strengthened our AI term pool by hiring over 50 professionals specializing in AI development, data science and modeling further enhancing our digital capabilities.

Secondly, in our overseas operations, we fully developed and refined our AI-powered ID verification model in the Philippines, achieving an accuracy rate of nearly 95% in the third quarter with performance now stabilizing.

Moving to our insurance brokerage business. The overall industry has faced the profitability pressure due to regulatory changes including lower interest rates and the policy of unified commissions and fees in reporting and underwriting. Despite these challenges, our total premiums this quarter recovered to RMB 1.35 billion, a 27% quarter-over-quarter increase. The rebound was partially driven by our online business initiatives.

As I mentioned earlier, we've made progress in customer acquisition through social media, supported by AI-generated content during the quarter.

New policy premiums from social media channels contributed RMB 7.5 million at RMB 7.1 million. This is a promising start. And we also built a dedicated team to focus on private traffic operations, driving efficient customer acquisition and conversion.

Additionally, we are working on creating more synergies between our lending platform and insurance services by offering customized insurance products to our borrowers, and we expect to see growth from these efforts in the fourth quarter. In the consumption and Lifestyle Services segment, our total GMV was RMB 508 million for the quarter, a 10% year-over-year decline.

As our customer base evolves, we are refining our product range to better serve our evolving demographics.

Looking ahead, we plan to introduce more high-quality tailored products to meet their specific needs. In summary, our priority remains ensuring long-term sustainable growth. In times of external uncertainty and the market fluctuations, it is critical to stay focused on maintaining the quality of our business.

We will continue to expand our online operations and enhance synergies across our businesses while further investing in R&D and increasing AI penetration. Furthermore, regarding our AI development, I would like to reiterate that we have been executing our AI strategy through the AI lab, which incubates invest in and provide value-added services to AI start-ups targeting enterprises, developers and consumers.

We have made several early-stage investments this year, and we are exploring business cooperation with them.

Additionally, I'm pleased to share that the commercialization of our proprietary AI systems is already underway, and we expect to see corresponding revenue reflected in our P&L in the near future.

Now I will pass it to Yuning, who will go through our financial performance.

Thank you.

So hello, everyone. I'm [indiscernible] , I will only focus on our key financial highlights. Please refer to our earnings release and IR deck for further details. Those are available on our website.

First of all, we are glad to have delivered a healthy quarter with stable financial performance. In the third quarter of this year, our total revenue reached RMB 1.5 billion, up 30% year-over-year. In the Financial Services segment, total loan participation continues to grow steadily, reaching RMB 13.4 billion, up 36% year-over-year. This is primarily driven by strong demand for our small devotion products and the rising repeat borrowing from our high-quality borrowers. Revenue from our financial services business increased 25% year-over-year to RMB 836 million, maintaining a healthy and steady growth rate, in line with our quality over quantity business guideline given external graduations. In the insurance sector, our gross written premiums were RMB 1.4 billion, down 5% year-over-year up 27% quarter-over-quarter. The annual decrease was primarily due to a significant decline in our life insurance sales resulting from regulatory changes and product adjustment. The quarterly rebound was driven by our online insurance sales as our ongoing online initiatives continue to progress we expect further recovery in our overall insurance volume in 2025.

So earlier this year, the guaranteed return on life insurance product was further capped at RMB 2.5 under the new regulation following a rate reduction from 3.5% to 3% last August, which has further impacted the overall profitability of life insurance sector in China. Moreover, the ongoing invitation of the unified commission and fees and reporting and underwriting regulation is adding pressure to commission rate industry-wide. Consequently, the third quarter this year revenue from the Insurance segment were RMB 85.5 million, down 68% year-over-year. In the consumption and lifestyle segment, the total GMV for this quarter stood at RMB 508 million, a decrease of 10% year-over-year. The decline was due to already high product penetration among existing customers and our strategic reduction in product offering as we move up market with our customer base.

As our customer demographic involved, we are strategically phasing our order product offering and doing new product tailored to their specific profiles and needs.

On the expense side, sales and marketing spend increased 71% year-over-year to RMB 336 million. This annual growth was mainly fueled by the swift expansion of our financial services segment and enhanced marketing efforts focused on attracting new and high-quality customers. Research and development expense increased 287% year-over-year to RMB 151 million due to our ongoing investment in enhancement technology advancement and hiring of AI talent. Origination, servicing and other operating costs decreased 16% year-over-year to RMB 206 million. This was mainly because of the decrease in the insurance business volume, which resulted in lower China rebates and associated segment costs. G&A expense increased 50% year-over-year to RMB 80 million. The annual growth was mainly due to the increase in incentive on assets and employee benefits. The allowance for the contract asset and receivable was RMB 95 million, up 31% year-over-year. The increase was mainly driven by growth in our loan volume facilitated. Provision for contingent liability this quarter increased to RMB 272 million from RMB 11 million in the same period of 2023. This is a result of continued growth in loan volumes and our new restating model, which requires substantial upfront provision according to the current accounting standard.

However, this relation will be periodically recognizing in the P&L as guaranteed service fee over time. In other words, there is a time difference in revenue recognition under this product model.

However, from a loans lifetime perspective, profitability will be -- will show better performance compared to loans under a non-risk taking model. In the third quarter, the revenue from guaranteed service reached RMB 137 million, so which is 5x that in the same period last year.

Now on the bottom line, net income of this quarter was RMB 355 million decreased 66 -- 36% year-over-year. The decrease of net income due to 3 reasons: so firstly, as noted earlier, overall profitability in the insurance business decreased.

Secondly, marketing expense and R&D expense rose as we continue to invest in attracting new high-quality borrowers from our financial service business and investing in developing our in-house AI capabilities.

Thirdly, significant upfront provision has been set aside as we increased loan volume and are risk-taking models.

Regarding cash flow.

So as our loan facilitation business continue to grow and our loan balance expense are funding sources, which are banks, financial institutions, et cetera, and associated guaranteed companies a request that we provide strategic deposit of common practice in the industries.

This quarter, we made a onetime deposit payment based on our current loan balance, resulting in a notable decrease in our operating cash flow. We generated approximately RMB 50 million net cash from our operations this quarter. But looking ahead, cash flow is expected to return to normal level next quarter.

On the balance sheet side, our cash and cash equivalents remained strong at RMB 3.7 billion, though reflecting a notable decrease. This change related to our long-term investment in business expansion and potential license acquisition, which are still in progress.

We will close more details once the deals are secured.

Now regarding shareholder returns.

Firstly, for share buybacks. In the third quarter of this year, we allocated USD 3 million to repurchase shares in the public market.

As of September 30, 2024, the company has purchased approximately $5 million ADS in the open market while total approximately USD 16.5 million, excluding commissions under the 2012 -- 2022 share repurchase program.

Additionally, we distributed a cash dividend in October under our semiannual dividend policy with a total payout ratio of 40% of our earnings for the first half of 2024.

Lastly, on our business outlook, based on our assessment of current business and marketing conditions, we expect our revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 to stand between RMB 1.3 billion to RMB 1.5 billion with a healthy net profit margin. This represents our current preliminary assessments, which may be subject to change and uncertainties. This concludes our remarks.

So.

Operator, we will open for Q&A section.

[Operator Instructions]

And our first question today comes from Chris Wu with Lake Capital.

Looking at the financial results, we have actually seen your loan volume or by 3.5% quarter-to-quarter and it's going a bit down from last quarter, which is 9%. And may we know where -- why is there a slowdown? And then also going into Q4, have you seen any further pickup in credit demand and loan application in October and November? And any updates on your new customer acquisition strategy?

I'll take the first crack and Yuning can add to it, please. I mean we see this demand for credit remains high. And -- but it's a very like uncertain market conditions. And we are focused on this quality -- first, our quality over quantity strategy, which makes it amount to do greater risk management. That's where you see our results are very encouraging.

Going forward, we will maintain this strategy, but we are also working harder on bringing in more higher-quality customers with reasonable customer acquisition cost associated with it.

So Yuning, please add to it.

So yes, I think we are expecting that in Q4, we are still carrying on our strategy in our customer acquisition strategy.

As we are a 100% online business model.

So this year, we are in operation with TikTok, Douyin and WeChat and co-build and AI-driven real-time analysis model which efficiently screen and qualified borrower based on their credit score and inquire qualified borrowers that as year come -- as this year comes NIMS, I think in Q4, we are expecting the cost of customer acquisition, still a little bit high in this quarter as we see a lot of competition from the market and also to manage our risk level.

So we will see how Q2 goes out. But to summarize, I think we are still keeping a steady strategy and we're trying to acquire new customers at a reasonable price cost and trying to enlarge our -- expand our repeat borrowing pool.

So that's the answer.

Yes. The idea is we keep our risk management really robust at the trial best to grow. And we have confidence we will have a relatively high growth in the quarters to come.

Does that answer your question. Do you have any further questions?

Yes, sure, sure, sure.

Let me follow up. It's encouraging to know that we are maintaining a healthy momentum and also to care for the risk management at the same time. Perhaps the next interesting aspect to look at is AI. Since we are seeing that you are increasing your investment in AI and hiring quite a number of professionals, could you explain what makes you competitive in the AI space especially given that we have so many AI-native companies in the market? And could you also tell us more about the AI systems that will be commercialized as you mentioned in your remarks?

And so we are not a LLM company.

We are an application of AI company position.

So we have -- like use cases, we have data accumulated through all the years.

And so we are uniquely positioned, therefore, to really build like credit-related, like models insurance-related models.

So this is our edge as an AI application company. And as I reported early on, AI models systems have been built across our business like front end to like back end.

And so like customer acquisition, marketing intelligence like risk assessment like customer service, like collection, so on.

So many of the modules based on our preliminary market research are very workup in the marketplace.

So we are working on monetizing these valuable assets. Yuning, can you add to it?

Yes, Tango.

So as we mentioned in the -- early in the call, we have developed 6 major AI systems that support our business operations.

I think while-- some of them are quite mature in use in our day-to-day business, some are in early development.

So we are evaluate which one to maybe can use to in our for our business partners.

Some can be used in our peers, some are maybe in financial institutions. We're trying to -- well, the system actually wouldn't be the developers are mostly in-house use, but we are commercializing it to make it more useful in the market and trying to well developed business in our -- especially in our peers and the financial institutions.

I think we are going to see some progress in the near future, maybe in 6 months to a year.

Let me add 2 things, if I may. One is that finance-related like exchanges interactions need to be, in many cases, very precise.

So we are prudent in developing and utilizing AI models, knowing that generative AI has certain forthcoming.

So we use like REG, so on to mitigate that. But still, certain models are still in the lab phase, and they haven't been fully used. But many others are in greater yes deployment stage and ready for external commercialization.

Secondly, I'd like to add that the overseas market can be quite good places for AI because they are -- is like China 5, 10, even 15 years ago.

So using AI, we can just leapfrog right? Like in China, we've experienced like Internet, mobile Internet, big data noted graph so on to AI, different phases of AI until today, generative AI. But in some overseas markets, like in the Southeast Asia in South America so on.

So these markets are really ideal for AI deployment.

Of course, we will be careful also in terms of risk management compliance so on. I'd like to just add these 2 points.

We hope that answers your question, Chris. And thank you very much for your questions.

This concludes our question-and-answer session.

If you have any further questions, please contact the company's IR team for assistance. Today's conference has now concluded. We thank you all for attending today's presentation.

You may now disconnect your lines, and have a wonderful day.