Waterdrop - Q2 2023

Transcript

Yee Hui Ching (Investor Relations)

Good morning, everyone. This is Xiaojin Niu from Waterdrop Investor Relations. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to Waterdrop's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. I'll participate in a listen-only mode in our English line. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. To note that discussions today will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those outlined in our public filings with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable law. Also, this call includes discussion of certain non-GAAP measures. Please refer to our earnings release for the reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP.

Joining us today on the call are: Mr. Shen Peng, our founder, chairman, and CEO; Mr. Yang Guang, co-founder, director, SVP, and GM of International Business; Mr. Zhu Zhetao, GM of Crowdfunding and Pharmatech Business; Mr. Chen Rui, Board Secretary. I would be happy to take some of the questions in the narrative line at the end of the conference call. Hello, everyone. This is Shen Peng. Thank you for joining our second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Since the second quarter, in insurance and the pharmaceutical industry, due to the gradual enforcement of regulations, transparency, and standardization have significantly improved, effectively enhancing user experience and satisfaction. This has also led to compliance and user-endorsed companies to embrace new growth opportunities. In this setting, the company proactively complies with regulatory requirements, responds actively to market demand, continually innovates products, and optimizes service consolidation by targeting age in niche sectors.

Regardless of the challenging external environment, the management firmly commits to adhering to long-term values and maintaining a user-centric approach to secure greater market space. In the second quarter of 2023, the company continues to focus on creating value for all users and keep pursuing healthy health needs. The financial performance remains so far, with our revenue reaching CNY 679 million. Carrying over its profitability for the last five quarters, the net profit reached CNY 21.7 million, demonstrating the sustainable and high-quality development of the company's operations. With sustained positive net profits, the company maintains ample cash reserves. As of the end of June, the company held a total of CNY 3.4 billion in cash equivalents and short-term investments. Abandant cash reserves help the company to face uncertain environments with more confidence and support long-term planning and layout for the future growth.

All of our business models achieve strong performance in the future and consolidate our leading positions and influence in the industry. First of all, Waterdrop Insurance Marketplace remains symbiotic and user-centric and enhances business vitality. While securing diversified customer acquisition channels, we also deepen product innovation thanks to the efforts of our colleagues. Both FYP and revenue make sequential growth, and they continue to contribute a stable net profit to the company. In terms of digital clinical trial solution business, due to our excellent performance, the E-Find Patient Platform gains recognition from both domestic and international partners. We continue to expand disease types and accelerate drug development for pharmaceuticals, and we also made significant progress in CRO due to digital clinical trial solution income of CNY 29.4 million and achieving a significant year-on-year growth of 167%.

In addition, by iterating algorithm capabilities and risk management mechanisms, our Waterdrop medical crowdfunding platform firmly adheres to transparent operations and lives up to every ounce of compassion. Meanwhile, we enhance service quality, propel a service-oriented consultant model, and embody the principle of user-first, service-first. Along those business developments, the company continues to invest in research and development. In future, the company continues to upgrade technologies like intelligent chatbots, deploying AI in various sectors, including operations, sales, and claims, which strongly accelerated operational efficiency. The company persists in exporting technology to empower the industry. In the complex and ever-changing macro environment, the company must confront challenges while actively fulfilling CSR. As of June 30, 2023, the Waterdrop Charity platform has collaborated with about 110 public charitable organizations to carry out projects in serious illness assistance, emergency disaster relief, and educational support.

The platform has raised about $1.3 billion in raised contributions from more than 65 million donors. We also continue to fund ESG initiatives and strive to achieve mutual sustainable development between the company and society. We benchmark domestic and international ESG standards to establish a top-down governance framework and publish the 2022 ESG report. The report summarizes our company's management and performance in areas like company governance, participation in multilevel medical support systems, technology innovation, green and low-carbon initiatives, and public success. This demonstrates the company's commitment to high-quality and sustainable development. In terms of share repurchase, as of the end of August 2023, the company has cumulatively repurchased 37.5 million ADSs in the open market, with cash for a total consideration of approximately $86.1 million. We also want to announce the extension of the repurchase plan. We have received approval from all of directors.

Within the next 12 months, the company will repurchase shares in the open market for amoount not exceeding $15 million. This decision is based on the company's firm confidence in our own values and long-term sustainable development. Meanwhile, this share repurchase will be used for ESOP, which will further motivate our employees. Above is a brief review of our business performance in future. As they face the challenging external environment, they stay solidly confident in ourselves and the industry. This refers to the latter half of this year. Our strategies include: firstly, driven by AI and digital transformation, the insurance business will continue to be centralized, striving to achieve long-term healthy and stable development. Meanwhile, it will continue to enhance team efficiency, consolidate the business foundation, and provide users with professional and thoughtful service.

Secondly, the crowdfunding business will continue to adhere to user-first and iterating service models, driving the industry towards high-quality development. We will also adhere to transparent operations and implement strict risk management while actively fulfilling CSR. Thirdly, leveraging big data, the Pharmatech business will continue to increase industry penetration globally and actively explore new models in order to construct a new long-term growth engine. Fourthly, the company will make use of its ample cash reserves and take cooperation and investment opportunities around insurance and the healthcare sector. Last but not least, the company will accelerate technology empowerment and enhance AI abilities to build core technology competitiveness, thereby supporting the implementation of long-term strategies and empowering the industry. The company will make use of its ample cash reserves and seek cooperation and investment opportunities around insurance and the healthcare sector.

In conclusion, the company will continuously develop long-term net profits, keep creating user values, strengthening their sustainability in an organic growth, and continually expanding business boundaries. We'll continue to bring insurance and healthcare services to bear through technology. And now I'll give you an update on our insurance business. In the second quarter, in order to enhance service experience and business healthiness, the company committed to user-centric and high-quality development and continued to explore new service models. During the quarter, we achieved $219.7 million in first-year premiums, marking a 30% sequential growth. Insurance-related revenue reached $597 million, reflecting 11% Q3 growth. Short-term insurance achieved a FYP of $1.6 billion, marking a 30% sequential growth. On one hand, the company further developed our content-based user acquisition capability.

In Q2, we increased our brand awareness through client innovation and spreading high-quality content across multiple platforms, leading to a sequential growth in the number of new users. On the other hand, this captured creating our investment customer base, leveraging AI ability. The company continuously increased the quality of renewal rates, leading to over 90% of short-term insurance renewal rates. Long-term insurance achieved a FYP of CNY 590 million, representing a 29% sequential growth. The long-term insurance brokerage income increased by 38% sequentially. As long-term insurance products continue to expand, the proportion of life insurance premiums within the long-term segments has risen to 37%. During this quarter, the scale and predictability of the capital of the long-term insurance team grew crucially, leveraging their maturity. The company's constantly elevated service model focused on private domain scenarios and intensified user adaptation, which led to a 33% of FYP from private domain operations.

The company also strengthened its quality control over policy issuance, leading to a sustained improvement in the first-year retention rate for marketing products. In Q2, Waterdrop continues to explore new brokerage channels to facilitate its sustainable business growth. For our online brokerage channel, FYP experienced a 113% sequential growth. With a declining interest rate, the company developed a new brand, New Insurance, which focused on family insurance and life insurance to serve younger users in the first and second-tier cities. Sequentially, the number of users for family insurance grew by 260%. Due to high-quality content and segment marketing, the cost per lead decreased by 25%. Moreover, the team improved their service process and now can control users' first-time response within 20 minutes. This led to a Q2 increase of 29% in productivity per lead and 30% in productivity per capita.

In terms of upline agents, as the market rebounds and the team matures, we achieved a remarkable 206% YOY growth in ISRP. We continue to enhance product offering and operational capabilities. We further upgraded our BD system, refining functional models and optimizing the experience for both agents and clients. We elevated the recruitment standards and challenged new developments and actively explored agent IP. The average productivity per active agent increased by 201% YOY. The average number of long-term insurance policy per active agent increased by 48% YOY. During the second quarter, Waterdrop Insurance Marketplace continued to enrich its product offering and tailor product targeting specific user groups. For individuals interested in long-term production and innovation medical treatment products, we launched the Blue Ocean Lifetime Health Insurance.

This policy allows users to take escrow over fixed medical services at an affordable price and quickly provide an option for users to transfer from short-term medical insurance directly to a 20-year long-term medical insurance, thereby maximizing the user coverage. Targeting elderly, we introduced the Shouhuxing in June. This product is the first in China to cover 10 common serious illnesses among the elderly, including malignant tumors. It was listed in the unlimited product innovation list by the 2023 China Insurance Industry Influence Ranking. For sub-healthy individuals, we continued to iterate our Blue Ocean series, which is the first domestic health insurance leading healthcare declaration. In future, this product series achieved a FYP of over CNY 100 million. Additionally, we actively explore multi-channel sales of maternity and infant insurance and insurance covering medication, outpatient, and emergency, which saw a sequential increase in FYP.

In terms of users with pre-existing conditions, we continue to rate products to find innovation. For example, we designed the Waterdrop Care 3 series, which can cover cancer recurrence and the FYP of the existing series above the related cancers and recurrent leukemia ranks first in the industry, receiving high recognition from patients. In terms of surgical accident insurance, we offer a solution across 20,000 departments in 32 hospitals, which helps patients against post-operative risks. As a technology company, we continue to develop our insurance technology. In the second quarter, we increased AI investment, enhancing the team, and upgraded our AI-empowered dialogue chatbots into the basic short-term insurance service scenarios. The chatbots can now communicate with users for more than 20 minutes. We have integrated the chatbots into various business scenarios, including operations, sales, and claims. This integration has effectively accelerated service products and saved human costs.

In terms of technology exports, we continue to strive for excellence with exporting comprehensive solutions. We improved the usability and configurability of both self-management and self-tool models. Additionally, we collaborated with three new partners to accelerate the industry transformation towards digital intelligence. This concludes my briefing on the insurance business. Let me hand over to Zhu Zhetao for an update on our medical crowdfunding and digital clinical trial solution business. Thank you, Shen Peng. As of June 30, 2023, a cumulative total of 439 million people donated more than CNY 60 billion to over 2.95 million patients through Waterdrop Medical Crowdfunding platforms. The financial users and crowdfunding amounts continue to grow. This quarter, Waterdrop Operational Transparency Committee focused on the authenticity of asset claims in crowdfunding cases, continuously enhancing the governance and transformation of consulting services.

In terms of case authenticity, in order to reduce the risk of an inaccurate financial situation of crowdfunding patients' families, the committee established a specialized case authenticity control, which introduced the concept of crowdfunding and the net worth and family income in the description of patients' family financial situations. We upgraded to a more accurate assessment of the reasonable target crowdfunding amount, not only adding application information and more convincing content, but also incorporating AI capability to identify false information for further improvement of its controllability. Moreover, this approach allows for better communication between the crowdfunding cases and the donors. This shows the platform's commitment to authenticity. The committee also initiated a specialized governance targeting crowdfunding conversion behavior, which helps strengthen non-compliance conduct, such as increasing penalty for violations, implementing a nationwide self-inspection mechanism, combining AI abilities targeting high-risk scenarios.

Meanwhile, we introduced conversion service principles, such as the full principle of service system and the aidance of service, so strengthening proactive service awareness of consultants. And helping them better address patient needs is establishing accordingly serviced standards throughout the entire process of crowdfunding initiation, publication, withdrawal, and fund utilization. Additionally, we introduced a new consulting service evaluation system based on our user satisfaction. In terms of the transformation of offline consulting service, we successfully piloted an expanded service-oriented consultant model in Changsha and Wuhan, resulting in a significant increase in net promoter scores within hospitals. We established a strategic partnership with several local hospitals, enabling service-oriented consultants to provide assistance to both nursing staff and patients.

On one hand, our consultants assist nursing staff with administration tasks, such as handling team reminders, organizing patient visits and providing emotional support to learn the daily workload of nursing staff, enabling them to offer better medical care to patients. On the other hand, concerning patients, the role of consultants extends to a wider range of activities, like providing general advice during hospitalization, offering guidance and accounting, interpreting and applying full medical insurance policies, applying for assistance and charitable care initiatives, and so on, truly embodying the concept of "do the first, serve the first." In terms of digital clinical trial solutions, the business continued to show strong growth, leveraging its outstanding performance capabilities. The E-Find platform successfully enrolled over 900 patients in Q2. Marketing marked a sequential growth of 33%. We collaborated with 132 pharmaceuticals and CROs globally, made an increase of 11 partners sequentially.

These figures enhanced the score of recognition by our clients. As the platform's influence grew, it continued to strengthen collaboration with domestic pharmaceuticals while deepening the partnership with leading multinational pharmaceuticals worldwide. In Q2, the platform launched about 80 new products. Along with the proportion of products with MNC increased, the platform also achieved cooperation intention with two top 20 MNC pharmaceuticals, officially kicked off the supply process, and it successfully launched products in Q4. In terms of recruiting disease, the platform further expanded in the field of chronic disease. In addition to diseases like psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, and asthma, it extended to urticaria, hepatitis B, arteritis, adenomyosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. While ensuring product quality, the platform's fulfillment capabilities continued to grow. In Q2, the platform's CRO business achieved significant progress by signing a groundbreaking four-product CRO project.

The project provides comprehensive clinical trial service encompassing data advice, medical service, data management, statistical analysis, project management, patient reservoir, patient recruitment, patient management, and their pharmacoeconomic analysis. These achievements enhance the platform's capability for end-to-end operations in clinical trials. Meanwhile, the platform is actively exploring patient integration, leveraging its online operational abilities to assist partners in optimizing patient filtering, patient education, medication management, and patient data research insights in other opportunistic activities. With regards to R&D in the medical area, we continue to operate our medical data center, which is now capable of completing first-level filtering for 10 different types of medical materials, aiding approximately 600 new medical field categories.

At the level of extracting drug information, such as for liver cancers, the system is now capable of automatically extracting information as to disease staging, clinical staging, TNM staging, and other relevant details, providing a strong data foundation for better customer service. Thank you for listening. I will now hand over to Yang Guang to discuss our second quarter financial performance. Thank you, Zhu Zhetao. Hello everyone. I will now walk you through our financial highlights for the second quarter. Before I go into detail, please be reminded that all metrics included here will be reported under GAAP. Please refer to our earnings release for detailed information on our financial performance on both the year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis, respectively. In the second quarter, all business lines were steadily recovering, demonstrating strong resilience.

The company's revenue was CNY 679 million, slightly lower compared to CNY 700 million in Q2 of 2022, an increase of 12% comparing the CNY 606 million for the Q1 of 2023. Among them, insurance-related income was CNY 597 million, representing a sequential increase of 11.0%. Platform service fees were CNY 44.7 million, representing a sequential increase of 6.0%. Digital clinical trial division income was CNY 29.4 million. It has increased by 28.9% sequentially and achieved a significant year-on-year growth of 157%. The company's overall operating costs and expenses had increased by 32.1% year-over-yearand decreased by 20.9% Q2. Operating costs increased by 36.2% year-over-year to CNY 333 million for Q2 of 2023, compared with CNY 245 million for the Q2 of 2022, which was probably driven by two aspects: a CNY 73.2 million increase in cost of referral and service fees, and a CNY 8.9 million increase in cost of patient recruitment consultant teams.

On a quarter-over-quarter basis, operating costs increased by 34.3% in this quarter, primarily due to a CNY 60.9 million increase in cost of the referral and service fees. S&M expense increased by 41.6% to CNY 205 million in this quarter, as compared with CNY 144 million for Q2 of 2022 and increased by 18% compared with CNY 173 million for the first quarter of 2023. Both worldwide and Q2 increases were primarily due to the increase in third-party traffic channels. G&A expenses were CNY 96 million in this quarter, which remained stable on a quarter-over-quarter basis. R&D expense increased by 23.1% to CNY 86.7 million year-over-year and increased by 10.2% on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Both the Q2 and worldwide increases are mainly due to the increase in R&D costs of human resources.

In this quarter, the company introduced segment reporting information for the first time, breaking down our revenue and profitability into three segments: insurance, crowdfunding, and others. In summary, the insurance segment had an operating profit of CNY 99.8 million, while the crowdfunding segment increased by CNY 64.1 million operating loss, and the other segment increased by CNY 47.9 million operating loss. It is worth noting that the company's overall profit is solely driven by the insurance segment. The net profit attributed to Waterdrop in Q2 was CNY 50.3 million. The net profit was CNY 21.7 million, and it will have generated net profit over the past six quarters. As of the end of June 2023, the company had a combined cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments of CNY 3.4 billion, indicating sufficient cash reserves. Overall, the business performance in Q2 was stable. Looking ahead, we will continue to focus on user value and sustainable high-quality development.

I'm operator. Good luck. We will conclude today's panel call.