Agora - Q1 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Agora, Inc.'s first quarter 2023 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there'll be Q&A session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd like to hand the conference over to the IR Director, Ms. Fionna Chen. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Fionna Chen (IR Director)

Thank you, operator. Good morning and evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Agora, Inc.'s first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Our earnings results, press release, earnings presentation, and explanatory note on certain reporting and disclosure adjustments, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our IR website at investor.agora.io. Joining me today are Tony Zhao, founder, chairman, and CEO; Jingbo Wang, our CFO. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings press release. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about our future financial performance and other future events and the trends. These statements are only predictions that are based on what we believe today, and the actual results may differ materially.

These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that could affect our financial results and the performance of our business, and which we discuss in detail in our filings with the SEC, including today's earnings press release and the risk factors and other information contained in the final prospectus relating to our initial public offering. Agora, Inc. remains no obligation to update any forward-looking statements we may make on today's call. With that, let me turn it over to Tony. Hi, Tony.

Tony Zhao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Thanks, Fionna. Welcome everyone to our earnings call. Before diving into our operational results for the quarter, I would first like to make a few remarks regarding recent changes in the organizational structure of our company. Since our inception nine years ago, we have mostly operated under the Agora brand globally. To better meet the requirements of our customers and compete more effectively in the unique markets we serve, we will now operate two independent divisions under the same holding company. Our Agora division will focus on our business in the U.S. and international markets, and our Shengwang division will focus on our business in the China market. Agora and Shengwang will each be run by a local management team and adopt local standards and best practices.

We have appointed Stanley Wei as Chief Operating Officer of Agora and Robbin Liu as Chief Operating Officer of Shengwang. We believe this strategic reorganization will allow us to optimally focus our resources on the specific needs and priorities of each business. Agora will focus on the acceleration of growth and on gaining market share in the U.S. and international markets, leveraging our leading technology and comprehensive product offerings. Shengwang will focus on enhancing our quality of experience advantage and improving the ease of adoption of our products, further strengthening our competitive position in the China market. By empowering the local management team of each division, we will be able to respond more quickly to the needs of our customers and become more agile as new opportunities emerge.

From this quarter onwards, we will report our revenue and operating metrics separately for Agora and Shengwang to help investors better understand the dynamics and our operational results in each of these markets. Our revenue for the first quarter was $15.1 million for Agora, up 10% year-over-year, and $21.3 million for Shengwang, down 14% year-over-year. Agora's revenue growth was primarily due to business expansion and usage growth in U.S. and the international markets. Shengwang's decrease in revenue was primarily due to the appreciation of the U.S. dollar, our disposal of Easemob's customer engagement cloud business, and decrease in usage from K-12 academic tutoring customers. After adjusting these factors, Shengwang's revenue would have increased by 3% compared to the same quarter last year.

As of the end of this quarter, we have nearly 1,500 active customers for Agora and nearly 4,000 for Shengwang, an increase of 31% and 2% respectively, compared to one year ago. Moving on to our product and technology updates. First, starting with Agora. The Flexible Classroom, our low-code aPaaS solution designed for building scalable and customizable online classroom, has continued to gain momentum in the U.S. and the global market as the demand for online learning continue to grow. Recently, the Flexible Classroom was named a finalist by 2023, The EdTech Award in the E-learning Blended/Flipped Solution or Remote Solution category. Previously, we mentioned our partnership with HTC to accelerate the adoption of real-time engagement in VR applications.

In HTC's VIVE ecosystem, developers use our Video SDK to power real-time collaboration between end users within virtual environments. Recently, we were recognized as a Webby Award honoree under the category of Metaverse, Immersive, and Virtual: Best Real-Time Experience for how our technology is used in HTC's VIVE Sync VR ecosystem. To further increase the value of our premium and enterprise support package for our customers, we have added integrations with Okta and Datadog. The Okta integration enables customer to manage the team members and access to Agora Console through Okta identity management tools. The Datadog integration with Agora Analytics enables customers to push analytics data, covering usage, quality, and performance directly to the Datadog platform for analysis and visualization. Moving on to Shengwang, we recently upgraded our real-time karaoke product.

When this solution was first launched in 2021, it could accommodate two users singing together at the same time. If a third user wanted to join, one of the two current users would have to give up the microphone. This limitation was mainly due to the technology challenge at the time of mixing multiple real-time soundtracks in a highly synchronous manner, and delivered output to all users with low latency. With our latest version, up to eight users can now sing together, which unlocks a wide range of new features for our customers applications. For example, all users in the virtual karaoke room can now participate in a singing battle or take random turns singing part of songs together. Empowered by our upgraded product, our customers can now replicate the in-person karaoke experience within their application.

Next, I would like to discuss the combination of generative AI and real-time engagement, and the enormous opportunity this co-combination holds for the future. Since the end of last year, the world has been captivated by the latest advance in large language model and generative AI. People widely believe that generative AI, despite being in its early stage, will drive significant paradigm shifts in many industries. Real-time engagement is no exception. Generative AI can empower customers to dramatically enhance end user experience in their applications, or create new use cases that were previously impossible. Let's look at some examples. The advent of powerful large language model has significantly improved the performance of chatbots in text format, as can be seen in the growing popularity of ChatGPT and AI-powered search engines. However, this is only the beginning.

As AI models continue to evolve and gain more powerful multimodal capabilities, they will become more adept at processing voice and video feeds and generating response in real-time. Using IoT hardware as input-output devices, people will have an all-powerful human-like AI buddy that can provide information, carry out tasks, or engage in casual chats, all through voice and video. Education is another industry where people have strong hopes that generative AI can help revolutionize experiences. By analyzing student data, AI-powered tutors can generate personalized learning plans and deliver learning content in an interactive manner, with everything tailored to best match a student's learning progress, pattern, and real-time feedback. In addition, AI tutoring can also provide affordable and tailored education opportunity to those who previously did not have access to a quality education.

There is also huge potential for generative AI to disrupt the social, entertainment, and gaming industry. A virtual matchmaker can do the job of making initial introduction and facilitating conversations just as well as a real person in a dating application. If you need to leave an interactive session for a short while or being disrupted by network connection, your digital twin can take over and continue the conversation. When you come back, a summary can be immediately available for you to catch up. For online social gaming, it will become almost impossible to tell if your teammates or opponents are real player or AI-controlled non-player characters. Looking at the examples above and many others, we see something in common. Generative AI can significantly expand the scope and opportunity of real-time engagement. Previously, real-time engagement largely took place among groups of people.

With the help of large language model, RTE can now occur between among people, digital twins of people, and fully virtual AI-based characters, opening the door to a much broader range of possible use cases. With greatly enhanced user experience, RTE will become more intelligent, immersive, and enjoyable. This trend will likely increase the overall usage of real-time engagement solutions multiple times and bring more business opportunities. We have been working closely with our customers to create pilot applications in certain verticals, and we will continue to monitor the latest developments, while assisting our customers in utilizing generative AI in their real-time engagement use cases. Before concluding my prepared remarks, I want to thank both Agora and Shengwang team for their hard work during this transitional period.

I believe this strategic reorganization will sharpen our identity and strengthen our position in both the global and China markets, and most importantly, allow us to serve developers and customers in a more agile and efficient way. With that, let me turn things over to Jingbo, who will reveal our financial results.

Jingbo Wang (CFO)

Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Let me start by first discussing certain reporting and disclosure adjustments in our financial results. I will review financial results for the first quarter and the outlook for the second quarter of 2023. Following our recent reorganization, Agora Inc. is now the holding company of two independent businesses, Agora and Shengwang, which will operate under their own unique brands and distinct legal entities, and will be run by separate local management teams. Beginning from the first quarter of 2023, we will report revenues separately for Agora and Shengwang, based on the legal entities with which customer enter into contracts. This differs from our previous practice, which was to separately report revenues for China and U.S. and international, based on geographies of usage. For example, certain Chinese customers offer the application that primarily target end users outside China.

Such revenues were previously included under U.S. and international. We now include such revenues under Shengwang to reflect the promise of contractual relationships. For the same reason, we will report number of active customers and Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate, or DBNRR, separately for Agora and Shengwang. Our definition of active customers remain unchanged. The calculation methodology of retention rate is same as expansion rate, which is the term we previously used. As almost all revenues generated from Agora customers are denominated in U.S. dollar, and almost all revenues generated from Shengwang customers are denominated in RMB, we calculate DBNRR in U.S. dollar for Agora and in RMB for Shengwang, instead of converting everything into U.S. dollars. Revenues for each month's Chat API business will also be included in calculating active customers and retention rate for Shengwang business.

A detailed explanatory note, including our recast historical results reflecting these adjustments, can be found on Investor Relations website. Moving on to our financial results for Q1. Agora revenues were $15.1 million in the first quarter of 2023, an increase of 10.2% year-over-year, and a decrease of 4.4% quarter-over-quarter. The year-over-year increase was primarily due to our business expansion and usage growth. The quarter-over-quarter decrease was primarily due to challenging macroeconomic environment. As we mentioned in previous earnings calls, the interest rate hikes, worldwide inflationary pressure, and tightening of intercapital funding starting from the second half of last year, have negatively impacted some of our customers' business and financial conditions, and their ability to raise funding, which led to reduced usage of our products and increased pricing sensitivity.

Shengwang revenues were $21.3 million in the 1st quarter of 2023, a decrease of 14.5% year-over-year, and a decrease of 12.3% quarter-over-quarter. The year-over-year decrease was primarily due to the disposal of Easemob's customer engagement cloud business, a decrease in usage from K-12 academic tutoring sector following regulatory change, and the depreciation of RMB against U.S. dollar. If we exclude these factors, revenue denominated in RMB would have increased 2.7% year-over-year. The quarter-over-quarter decrease was primarily due to the disposal of customer engagement cloud business, lower usage during Chinese New Year holiday for internet customers, and longer than expected sales cycle for traditional enterprise customers. Dollar-based net retention rate for Agora is 130%.

Dollar-based net retention rate for Shengwang is 92%, excluding revenues from the K-12 academic tutoring sector. Moving on to cost and expenses. For my following comments, I will focus on non-GAAP results, which exclude share-based compensation expenses, acquisition-related expenses, financing-related expenses, amortization expenses of acquired intangible assets, income tax related to acquired intangible assets, and impairment of goodwill. Non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter was 63.3%, which was 0.3% higher than Q1 2022, mainly due to the disposal of customer engagement cloud business, which had lower gross margin. As we mentioned in our previous earnings calls, we restructured and reduced our global workforce in Q4 2022. As a result, non-GAAP R&D expenses were $17.4 million in Q1, a decrease of 31.2% year-over-year.

Non-GAAP R&D expenses represented 47.8% of total revenue in the quarter, compared to 65.6% in Q1 last year. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses were $8.5 million in Q1, a decrease of 26.3% year-over-year. Sales and marketing expenses represented 23.4% of total revenues in the quarter, compared to 30% in Q1 last year. Non-GAAP G&A expenses were $6.9 million in Q1, a decrease of 7% year-over-year. G&A expenses represented 18.8% of total revenues in the quarter, compared to 19.1% in Q1 last year. Non-GAAP operating loss was $9.2 million, translating to a 25.4% non-GAAP operating loss margin for the quarter, compared to an operating loss margin of 49% in Q1 last year.

Adjusted EBITDA was -$6.4 million, translating to a 17.7% adjusted EBITDA loss margin for the quarter, significantly lower than the loss margin of 42.6% in Q1 last year. Investment loss was $4.4 million in Q1, primarily due to the fair value change in equity investments of $2.9 million, credit loss in debt investments of $1.2 million, as well as disposal loss of $0.3 million. Turning to cash flow. Operating cash flow was -$8.9 million in Q1, compared to -$15.9 million last year. Free cash flow was -$9.1 million, compared to -$17 million last year. Moving on to balance sheet.

We ended Q1 with $416.5 million in cash equivalents, bank deposits, and financial products issued by banks. Net cash outflow in the quarter was mainly due to free cash flow of -$9.1 million, share repurchase of $19.4 million, and cash paid in relation to headquarters project of $5.1 million. During Q1, we repurchased approximately 21.6 million of our Class A ordinary shares, equivalent to 5.4 million ADS for $19.5 million, representing 10% of our $200 million share repurchase program. As of the end of Q1, we had in aggregate repurchased approximately 57.4 million of our Class A ordinary shares, equivalent to 14.4 million ADS for $61.3 million.

Tony Zhao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Representing 31% of our share repurchase program. Turning to guidance. Recently, we saw increased uncertainties in macroeconomic conditions, such as foreign exchange rate, inflation, and interest rates, which may have greater than expected impact on our customers' business and in turn, add more uncertainty to our revenues. Therefore, starting this quarter, we'll be providing quarterly revenue guidance instead of full year guidance. For the second quarter of 2023, we currently expect total revenues to be in the range of $34 million-$37 million. This forecast reflects our current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. In closing, I want to express my deepest appreciation to both Agora and Shengwang teams for your hard work during this challenging period, and to our investors for your trust in our vision and our team.

Thank you everyone for attending the call today. Let's open it up for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Once again, that's star one one for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Yang Liu from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead, Yang.

Yang Liu (Executive Director)

Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. I have two question from my side. The first one is about the outlook. The number implies a largely static or slightest sequential decline in second quarter. Could management share more about the outlook for Shengwang and Agora differently, for the second quarter? Do you see further diverging of the growth trend or similar trend in the next few quarters for the two entities? My second question is regarding the AI impact to the company. Tony mentioned a lot in term of the product and the customer demand or use case driven by the new AIGC technology. But I'm wondering if there's any potential cost-saving room from the new technology. Thank you.

Tony Zhao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

All right. I'll talk about, discuss, you know, the demand from both markets. On Shengwang side, we can broadly put Shengwang's customer into three segments. You know, one is domestic digital native, and another is domestic digital transformation, and going overseas customers. On digital native customers, recently, demand remains soft, primarily due to macroeconomic challenges and regulation. However, on this segment, as I mentioned earlier, we also see large opportunities on generative AI-powered use cases that would take some time. On digital transformation side, recently, we saw long, longer sales cycle, but there is clearly a lot of unmet demand from traditional enterprises. We expect this segment to generate sustained growth for us. On going overseas customers, the overall growth momentum has been strong.

On Agora side, we see overall positive demand momentum in more developed market, especially on the following verticals: live streaming, e-commerce, creator and fans economy, sports live streaming, future of work. For emerging markets, we see pressure on our customers due to macroeconomic challenges and market competition, such as in South Asia and Southeast Asia. That's from the outlook of the demand side. Generative AI side, we actually, you know, have invested in this area for quite some time, you know, to help improve the audio-video quality. As I mentioned, large language model can actually help, you know, create more use cases in many verticals.

If your question is around reduce cost, I don't think it's, you know, going to hugely help us to reduce cost. In terms of disrupting, you know, like many business models, like in education, AI-powered, you know, tutor can be much cheaper than a real teacher, or, you know, a virtual celebrity or singer, can also be much cheaper, or virtual matchmaker, the same sense, or even in social space. As you can see, a popular character who's, you know, busy talking to, you know, people in one social platform, can be also a AI-powered person.

You know, to reduce the platform's, cost, to maintain and pay a real, you know, person, who's active on that platform. I think on those, it can hugely disrupt their business.

Yang Liu (Executive Director)

Yes. thank you.

Operator (participant)

Right. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Daley Li from Bank of America Securities. Please ask your question, Daley.

Daley Li (Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, thanks, management, for taking my question. I have one question regarding our international, the Agora business. For this quarter, it seems delivered quite solid growth. I know what's the key drivers for the growth, for example, regarding the volume and ASP, and what's the outlook for the volume and ASP going forward? Thank you.

Jingbo Wang (CFO)

As we explained in previous earnings calls, the market in China and the market in U.S. and other international markets are at different stage of development in term of adopting the RTE technology. China market is comparatively more mature. In the past 18, 24 months, we certainly see U.S. market catching up quite rapidly. For example, the live streaming commerce use case, that was already popular in China two years ago, and probably even earlier. That has really just taken off in the past 12, 18 months in the U.S., and that has driven a lot of new demand for technology. We have been expanding into more geographic regions, South Asia, Middle East, and even South America.

That explains the stronger growth momentum on the Agora side. Looking forward, as Tony just explained, in China, we do see more kind of macro challenges, the overall macroeconomic environment and also regulation, in term of the more traditional enterprise customers in China, we also see more budget constraints. Looking at the next few quarters, we are also more optimistic in terms of demand for the Agora side.

Daley Li (Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you, Jingbo Wang.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ethan Zhang from Nomura. Please ask your question, Ethan.

Bing Duan (Executive Director)

Hi, thank you, management, for taking my question. This is Bing Duan from Nomura. I have one question regarding the China market. As we noted that there are a few changes in the competition landscape, such as AliCloud's plan of spin-off and the recent price cuts from the large cloud companies like Alibaba and also some China's telecom operators. How do we see this impact our Shengwang business in China, such as the ASP and margins, and also about our future market share in China? Thank you.

Tony Zhao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

First of all, the public cloud price adjustment recently does not really relate to us and giving pressures to us. However, in China, as I mentioned earlier, the overall competition has remained strong for a long time, and the demand is actually, especially for domestic native part, is is actually soft. With this situation, we do proactively enhance our competitive edge, and sometimes we reduce our pricing on certain areas to increase competitive pressure and try to gain more market share. And for major public cloud, previously, also rolling out similar service in RTE sector, honestly, there's no one being left.

You know, everyone already released some similar product already. However, over the course of past, like two, three years, many of them, you know, have mostly exited the business. You know, they, you know, either stop really selling that product, or some already started a partnership with us and white label our product in their offerings.

Bing Duan (Executive Director)

Thank you, Tony Zhao.

Tony Zhao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone. To ask a question, please press star one one. I am showing no further questions. I'll now turn the conference back to Fiona for closing remarks.

Fionna Chen (IR Director)

Thank you, operator. Thank you, everybody, for joining our call today. Again, if there are any further questions, feel free to contact us. Also the presentation and the remarks of this call will be posted on our website. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Jingbo Wang (CFO)

Thank you. Bye-bye.