Q1 2024 Full Truck Alliance Co Ltd Earnings Call

Participants

Mao Mao; Head of IR; Full Truck Alliance Co. Ltd.

Hui Zhang; CEO, Chairman and Founder; Full Truck Alliance Co. Ltd.

Simon Cai; CFO; Full Truck Alliance Co. Ltd.

Eddy Wang; Analyst; Morgan Stanley & Co LLC

Jiulu Li; Analyst; China International Capital Corporation Limited

Charlie Chen; Analyst; China Renaissance Securities Hong Kong Ltd

Bruce Mi; Analyst; UBS Investment Bank

Brian Gong; Analyst; Citigroup Inc.

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to Full Truck Alliance's first-quarter-2024 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded.
At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mao Mao, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Mao Mao

Thank you, operator. Please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements relating to the company's future performance, which are intended to qualify for the Safe Harbor from liability, as established by the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, assumptions and other factors. Some of these risks are beyond the company's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those mentioned in today's press release and discussion.
A general discussion of the risk factors that could affect FTA's business and financial results is included in certain filings of the company with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information, except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for comparison purpose only. For a definition of non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results, please see the earnings release issued earlier today.
Joining us today on the call from FTA's senior management side are Mr. Hui Zhang, our Founder, Chairman and CEO; and Mr. Simon Cai, our CFO. Management will begin with prepared remarks, and the call will conclude with a Q&A session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, a webcast replay of this call will be available on FTA's Investor Relations website at ir.fulltruckalliance.com.
I will now turn the call over to our Founder, Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zhang. Please go ahead, sir.

Hui Zhang

(spoken in foreign language) (Interpreted)
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on our first-quarter-2024 earnings conference call. Entering 2024, we continued to steadfastly promote the digital and intelligent transformation of the logistics industry by enhancing logistics efficiency and reducing costs for tens of millions of small- and medium-sized shippers, we empower enterprises with greater logistics competitiveness and improved profitability. With our core cost-savings value proposition and consistently optimized product experience, our network effect is growing stronger at both ends, that is for both truckers and shippers. This leads to continuous improvement in fulfillment efficiency and further propels our growth flywheel.
In the first quarter, we delivered nearly 30% year-over-year growth in fulfilled orders, again, significantly outpacing the single-digit growth of the broader road-freight market, reflecting the ongoing shift from the traditional offline solutions of [equivalent] truckers and contracted shipments to innovative digital and intelligent logistics platforms.
Since the first quarter, we have achieved continued improvement in key operational metrics as evidenced by our new-user growth, high quality trucker supply and enhanced monetization efficiency. As we strive to become the one-stop shipping platform for tens of millions of small and medium sized shippers, new-user acquisition remains a priority. As such, we continue to strengthen awareness of FTA's cost-saving benefit for freight shipping.
In addition, we refined our operational process for user acquisition and initial fulfillment, adding significant momentum to new user groups. Our average shipper MAUs reached 2.14 million, an increase of 22.3% year-over-year. The strong demand from direct shippers continued to drive rapid order growth across our platform with direct shippers contributing to 47% of total fulfilled orders in the quarter. While ensuring an ample supply of truckers, we significantly improved the quality and efficiency of our trucker supply during the quarter through initiatives such as the trucker credit rating and premium cargo billing function.
At the same time, we saw truckers become more dependent on our platform as their wallet share grew significantly. As we continued to expand our high-quality transportation capacity, our fulfillment rate amounted to 33.5% in the first quarter, up nearly 6 percentage points year over year to an all-time high. In terms of monetization, we comprehensively optimized our monetization strategies this quarter, positioning us for healthy and rapid top line growth. These achievements further underscore our unparalleled irreplaceable value to both truckers and shippers.
Our robust business growth translated into an exceptional financial performance that went beyond expectations with revenues increasing by 33.2% year over year to RMB2.27 billion in the first quarter. Non-GAAP adjusted net income increased by 46.9% year over year, reaching RMB760 million. I'd like to highlight that our revenue mix continued to improve as transaction service revenues surged by more than 60% year over year, accounting for 30% of our total revenue for the first time, a significant milestone.
In the first quarter, the premier emphasized in the government work report the imperative to take steps to reduce logistics costs. Looking ahead to 2024, the reduction of logistics costs as an important measure to optimize economic efficiency will garner even greater attention and support. Leveraging this favorite dynamic, we will further propel the logistics industry by advancing digitalization, smart innovation, and environmental sustainability, ultimately creating greater value for our users and the industry as a whole.
Thank you, everyone. Let me pass the call over to our CFO, Simon, who will provide an update on our first-quarter business progress and financial results.

Simon Cai

Thank you, Mr. Zhang, and thanks, everyone, for taking the time to join our earnings conference call today. I'll start with an overview of our operational highlights and provide an update on our first-quarter financial performance.
We started the year off well with a solid performance in the first quarter. Our fulfilled orders increased by 29.6% year over year to RMB39.3 million, again significantly outpacing the single-digit year-over-year growth of the broader road-freight market. We attribute this sustained strong year-over-year order growth to our ongoing user base expansion and matching efficiency improvement.
Sequentially, the number of fulfilled orders declined in the first quarter due to the off-season effect of the Chinese New Year in line with previous seasonal patterns. Our fulfillment rate reached all-time high of approximately 33.5% in the first quarter, an increase of nearly 6 percentage points year over year and approximately 1.4 percentage points quarter over quarter. This was mainly attributable to contributions from our rapidly growing direct shipper base.
Despite a slight shortage of truckers due to the Chinese New Year holiday, our platform's overall order structure continued to improve as the scale of direct shippers expanded. The order contribution from our 688 member shippers and non-member shippers reached 47%, making a historical high. In addition, user growth on both sides, along with efficiency enhancement driven by platform-wide service upgrades, drove an increase in direct shippers' fulfillment rate, boosting our first-quarter average fulfillment rate to new highs. We're confident that we can sustain this growth momentum as we move through the rest of the year.
Turning to our user base, strong execution of our user acquisition strategies has yielded positive results. Our average shipper MAUs reached 2.14 million in the first quarter, up 22.3% year over year, but down slightly from the previous quarter due to the Chinese New Year holiday. The year-over-year increase was primarily driven by growth among our 688 member shippers and non-member shippers, who are mostly low- and medium-frequency direct shippers.
Since March, the average daily number of new shippers fulfilling orders has steadily increased over the time, peaking at a daily average of more than 10,000 new additions. We expect this vigorous growth trend in our shipper user base to persist throughout this year. Additionally, our high-frequency shippers activity remained robust with our shipper member 12-month-rolling retention rate remaining above 80% in the first quarter.
On the trucker side, as transaction volume on our platform expanded in the first quarter, the number of active truckers fulfilling orders through FTA over the past 12 months reached 3.91 million and our supply of truckers remained plentiful. Additionally, our next month's retention of truckers who responded to orders increased to 90%, approximately 5 percentage points higher than the comparable period in prior years.
As a leading road-freight platform, our broad trucker and shipper user base supported by vast transaction data and powerful algo has created a dual-growth flywheel and a huge competitive advantage. As a result, we expect our user stickiness to consistently increase.
Turning to our transaction service. As we mentioned on last quarter's earnings call, we renamed our transaction commission revenue stream to transaction service starting this fiscal year to better reflect the nature of our revenues and the company's latest business developments in our financial reports. Transaction service includes all monetization revenues generated from truckers relating to freight matching services, including monetization revenue generated from truckers in our intra-city business that were previously classified under freight listing and value-added services.
Under the new reporting measures, revenues from transaction service surged by 61.5% year over year to RMB690 million in the first quarter. This growth was primarily fueled by three drivers: the solid expansion in the number of fulfilled orders; the increased monetization order penetration ratio; and the elevated monetization rate.
As of the end of first quarter, our total commissioned-city count increased to 234. Meanwhile, we also stepped up stress testing across our commissioned areas. This included increasing commission rate for high-quality orders and implementing our round-the-clock commission strategy nationwide by the end of the first quarter. We no longer reduce commissions as matching time extends or commission waivers mechanism applies exclusively to low-quality orders.
With the implementation of these refined commission rules, our first-quarter revenue from transaction service covered more than 77.4% of fulfilled orders, an increase of approximately 8 percentage points year over year from last year's 69.3% order coverage on a comparable basis. Under the new calculation approach, our monetization amount per order, including transaction, commission and trucker membership fee increased to RMB22.7 from RMB20.4 a year ago.
Before going over our financial results, I'd like to provide a brief update on our share repurchase program. On March 13, we announced an extension of our one-year share repurchase program totaling USD500 million initiated in March 2023. It has now been extended until March 12, 2025. Since the announcement, we have repurchased approximately 500,000 ADS shares, totaling approximately USD3.78 million. In addition to the annual cash dividend of USD150 million paid in April, we will also continue to evaluate share repurchase program as part of our comprehensive shareholder return initiatives going forward.
Now, I'd like to provide a brief overview of our 2024-first-quarter financial results. Our total net revenues in the first quarter were RMB2.2687 billion, representing a 33.3% increase year over year, primarily attributable to an increase in revenues from freight matching services. Net revenues from freight matching services, including service fees from freight brokerage models, shipper membership fees from listing models and trucker monetization revenues, including commissions and membership fee from transaction services were RMB1.8697 billion in the first quarter, representing an increase of 33.5% year over year, primarily due to continued growth in revenues from the freight brokerage service and a steady increase in the transaction service.
Revenues from freight brokerage service in the first quarter were RMB965.2 million, up 24.9% year over year, primarily attributable to an increase in transaction volume due to the continued growth in user demand. Revenues from the freight listing services in the first quarter were RMB213.5 million, up 6.7% year over year, primarily due to a growing number of total paying members.
Revenue from the transaction service in the first quarter were RMB691 million, up 61.5% year over year, primarily driven by an increase in order volume, monetization penetration and the per-order transaction service fee. Revenues from value-added services in the first quarter were RMB399 million, up 32.3% year over year. This increase was due to a growing demand from truckers and shippers for credit solutions and other value added services.
First-quarter cost of revenues was RMB1.0319 billion, compared with RMB849.4 million in the prior year period. The increase was primarily due to an increase in VAT-related tax surcharges and other tax costs net of grants from government authorities. These tax-related costs net of government grants totaled RMB908 million, representing an increase of 18.5% from RMB766.4 million in the same period of 2023, primarily due to the expansion of transaction activities involving our freight brokerage service.
Our sales and marketing expenses in the first quarter were RMB340.1 million, compared with RMB245.7 million in the same period of 2023. The increase was primarily due to an increase in advertising and marketing expenses for user acquisitions, as well as higher salary and benefits expenses.
General and administrative expenses in the first quarter were RMB264.5 million, compared with RMB179.5 million in the same period of 2023. The increase was primarily due to higher share based compensation expenses. R&D expenses in the first quarter were RMB247.7 million, compared with RMB229.9 million in the same period of 2023. The increase was primarily due to higher share-based compensation expenses as well as an increase in salary and benefits expenses.
Income from operations in the first quarter was RMB312.2 million, an increase of 88.3% from RMB165.8 million in the same period of 2023. Net income in the first quarter was RMB586.4 million, an increase of 42.5% from RMB411.4 million in the same period of 2023.
Under non-GAAP measures, our adjusted operating income in the first quarter was RMB485.4 million, an increase of 78.2% from RMB272.4 million in the same period of 2023. Our adjusted net income in the first quarter was RMB756.4 million, an increase of 46.9% from RMB514.8 million in the same period of last year.
Basic and diluted net income per ADS were RMB0.56 in the first quarter, compared with RMB0.38 in the same period of 2023. Non-GAAP adjusted basic and diluted net income per ADS was RMB0.72 in the first quarter, compared with RMB0.48 in the same period of 2023. As of March 31, 2024, the company had cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, short-term investments, long-term time deposits and wealth management products with maturity over one year of RMB27.5 billion in total, compared with RMB27.6 billion as of December 31, 2023.
For our second-quarter-2024 business outlook, we expect our total revenues to be between RMB2.65 billion and RMB2.72 billion, representing a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 28.3% to 31.7%. This forecast reflects company's current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change and cannot be predicted with reasonable accuracy as of the date hereof.
That concludes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the call to Q&A. Operator, please go ahead.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Eddy Wang, Morgan Stanley.

Eddy Wang

(spoken in foreign language) Thank you, management for taking my question. My question is about the fulfilled orders. In the first quarter, we see that the fulfilled order growth was around 30% year over year, once again, surpassing the growth rate of the overall road freight market. What are the key factors driving this sustained growth, order volume? And given this trend, I just want to hear your expectation for the order volume growth in the second quarter. Thank you.

Simon Cai

Thank you, Eddy. I'll address the rest of the questions directly in English. So we're very pleased to see our first-quarter order volume growth outpacing the industry growth rate of 5% year over year by almost 25 percentage points. Considering that the pandemic's impact is gone and the user demand that accumulated due to the travel restrictions was fully released by the second quarter of last year, we believe that our sustained growth in other volumes since the beginning of this year is mainly attributable to the ongoing increase in our market share gain in the road-freight sector.
Specifically, the strong growth momentum in order volume in the first quarter was driven by three main factors: The continued expansion of user scale at both ends; the increased activity among existing users as a result of our enhanced product features and services; and the incremental volume contribution from our new business. In terms of user scale, the number of shippers continued to grow steadily during the quarter with an average monthly active shippers increased by over 22% year over year, showing an accelerated growth trend, compared to previous quarters.
And since March, the daily number of new shipper registration has continued to increase. Also, as we enhance user acquisition efficiency and also strengthen personalized customer service for new users, we're driving more and faster conversions from new user registration to fulfillment. And more importantly, direct shipper has been a major contributor to this new user growth, bringing high-quality orders to our platform.
And regarding product optimization, we have added multiple new functions on the trucker side. Using big data analytics, the platform identifies and labels high-quality orders and matches them with truckers via a bidding process. Among the truckers who are qualified to bid and those with higher credit ratings have a better chance of winning the bid incentivizing those truckers to stay active on our platform to achieve higher credit ratings. And this has created a virtuous cycle within the trucker ecosystem leading to more effective tiered management of truckers, greater activity among high-quality truckers, and ultimately, better fulfillment efficiency.
And in addition, our new businesses, namely large-ticket LTL and intra-city services, both of them continue to experience very rapid order volume growth during the quarter. We believe that the online penetration of these new businesses, particularly the LTL business, remained relatively low. Given our unique user advantages in the sector, we see significant growth potential in the LTL sector.
And looking ahead to the second quarter, despite the high base effect of the post-pandemic reopening in the prior year period, we remain very optimistic about maintaining steady, high-quality growth in order volume. We're also confident that the year-over-year growth rate in the second quarter will be in the range of mid-20s.

Eddy Wang

Thank you, Simon Cai. And congratulations, and do your best. Thank you.

Simon Cai

Thank you.

Operator

Jiulu Li, CICC.

Jiulu Li

(spoken in foreign language) The performance rate reached an all-time high of 33.5% in the first quarter, up nearly 6% year over year and 1.4% sequentially. What are the key drivers behind this growth? And what are your expectations for the fulfillment rate in the coming quarters? Thanks.

Simon Cai

Thank you, Jiulu. Although the first quarter is typically the off season due to the Chinese New Year holiday, our platform once again achieved a record fulfillment rate. We believe this success is largely due to our continuous optimization of user structure and dynamic product strategy adjustments.
In terms of user structure, the order contribution from direct shippers reached 47% in the Q1. That's up 3 percentage points year over year, while the fulfillment rates of both low and medium frequency direct shippers averaged over 50% in the quarter. Given small- and medium-sized direct shippers' higher fulfillment tendency and favorable pricing, this favorable shift in order mix also boosted our overall fulfillment rate.
In addition, our enhanced order distribution strategy also played a role in this quarter as the platform's scale effects increased. For example, we efficiently identified medium- to low-quality order posting and grant truckers who responded to those orders' priority access to high quality orders in their next transactions. We also provided these truckers with monetary incentives such as commission waiver and cash subsidies to encourage them to willingly fulfill orders of all quality levels.
And furthermore, for truckers who are not picky about orders or who are in a hurry to depart, we also slightly increased the exposure rate of long-tail order posting through the recommendation features on our app, ensuring a steady improvement in the overall fulfillment rate of the platform. Looking ahead, we aim to onboard more shippers and truckers and foster greater supply and demand to facilitate more matches and optimize the trucker cargo supply demand balance. We will also continue to encourage shippers to use product models like entrusted shipment and tap and go, which both higher trucker acceptance rates and consistently enhance our product features to drive higher fulfillment rates.

Operator

Was there a follow-up, Jiulu?

Jiulu Li

No. Thank you very much. Very clear.

Operator

Charlie Chen, China Renaissance.

Charlie Chen

(spoken in foreign language) Since last year, the platform's tiered trucker rating system has shown promising initial results with consistent improvements. Could you please elaborate on the key strategies and focuses of trucker operations now? Thank you.

Simon Cai

Thank you, Charlie. Since the pandemic restrictions were lifted last year, our transportation capacity supply has remained sufficient. Our monthly active number of truckers who responded to orders consistently remained above 3 million in the first quarter. Trucker operations have always been a key focus of our platform. As such, we categorize truckers into three distinct groups based on their user profiles, the new truckers, active truckers and inactive truckers and implement tailored strategies to each of these groups.
For new truckers, our platform guides them to appropriate orders through product optimization, trucker community operations and easier access to high quality orders for qualified truckers. In addition, we closely monitor new truckers’ fulfillment rate in the first three trials. For existing active truckers, we focus mainly on traffic management, where we deploy targeted operation for different tiers of truckers. These initiatives have effectively cultivated a mindset for quality transactions among truckers. And by leveraging truckers' credit rating and activity metrics, we motivate truckers to increase their transaction frequency, ensuring robust capacity supply across the platform.
For those dormant inactive truckers, we proactively offer incentives such as gift packages for returning truckers and compensation coverage for unsatisfactory experience, encouraging them to resume business on our platform. Moving forward, we are confident that our proven and refined operational strategies will continue to deliver rewarding experiences for truckers on our platform and allowing them to maximize their earnings.

Charlie Chen

Thank you, Simon.

Simon Cai

Thank you.

Operator

Bruce Mi, UBS.

Bruce Mi

(spoken in foreign language) Thanks, management for taking my questions. So I have one question, so could you please provide us an update on our user acquisition progress during the Q1? And what is the company's user acquisition strategy for 2024? Thank you.

Simon Cai

Thank you, Bruce, and welcome to the call. The first quarter, as you know, is typically a slow season in terms of user acquisition. Our user base, however, continued to grow rapidly on both sides in the first quarter of 2024. Currently, average daily new shipper registration exceeded 20,000, while trucker averaged over 10,000 daily registrations. The strong user growth momentum was primarily driven by our effective user acquisition strategies through a combination of online promotions, truck sticker advertising, offline promotions and branding campaigns, we have meaningfully increased our brand visibility and awareness, expanding our platform's user community.
Our recently, relaunched truck sticker advertising model involving outfitting truck exteriors with (inaudible) branded advertising is one noteworthy example. This promotional campaign has greatly amplified our brand feasibility has trucks travel intra-city routes and operating in logistic parts.
In 2024, we'll continue to integrate online and offline user acquisition channels for optimal impact with a focus on online channels. We will allocate over half of our user acquisition budget to online initiatives to reach potential users more efficiently and attract more shippers and truckers, propelling the expansion of our logistics service network.

Bruce Mi

Thank you, Simon.

Operator

Brian Gong, Citigroup.

Brian Gong

(spoken in foreign language) I will translate myself. In the first quarter, revenues from transaction service or commission revenue surged by 61.5% year on year. What are the drivers behind this growth? Are there any adjustments to your commission strategy this year? And how should we look at the revenues trending in the coming quarters? Thank you.

Simon Cai

Thank you, Brian. In terms of our other coverage, this quarter, we rolled out the commission model in 30 new cities, scaling up the total commission city count to 234. Additionally, beginning in the first quarter, we further optimized our commission rules. For example, we eliminated the rule of commission decay based on matching durations, so that commissions better reflect order quality. Commissions on high-quality orders are unaffected by matching duration, while low-quality orders are labeled as commission free.
As a result, the total monetized order volume surged by nearly 45% year over year, increasing the monetized order penetration ratio to approximately 77%, that's up about 8 percentage points year over year. And in terms of monetization amount per order, the first-quarter average amount including trucker membership fees for intra-city services and commission per transaction stood at RMB22.7, that's an increase of approximately 11% year over year on a comparable basis. This increase was primarily attributable to our refined monetization strategies.
By leveraging big data analytics and identify high-quality order postings and increase their commission rates, we boosted average monetization efficiency per order across the platform without compromising the user experience. Looking ahead, we will continue to optimize our commission strategy and consistently explore high-quality transactions, monetization potential to maximize this revenue stream, ensuring robust and long-term advancement of our transaction services. And we believe our platform's current monetization level is still relatively conservative, and that there's ample room for us to unlock the further monetization potential.

Brian Gong

Thank you.

Operator

And that concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional or closing comments.

Mao Mao

Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at Full Truck Alliance directly or TPG Investor Relations. Our contact information for IR in both China and the US can be found in today’s press release. Have a great day.

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Portions of this transcript that are marked (interpreted) were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call. The interpreter was provided by the company sponsoring this event.