Financial Services Association, May 23 (Reporter Xu Cihao) After the Hong Kong stock market yesterday (22nd), Kuaishou announced its results report for the first quarter of this year.

According to financial reports, Kuaishou achieved revenue of 29.41 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 16.6% over the previous year, better than the estimated 29.04 billion yuan; net profit was 4.1 billion yuan, with a loss of 876 million yuan for the same period last year; and adjusted net profit of 4.388 billion yuan, compared to only 42 million yuan in the same period last year.

It is worth mentioning that after Kuaishou announced its results for the first quarter of 2024, it officially announced the launch of a new round of stock repurchase plans. The plan is to repurchase shares with a total amount of not more than HK$16 billion over the next three years after the 2024 shareholders' meeting.

It is worth mentioning that Kuaishou's HK$4 billion repurchase plan launched in May last year will expire at the shareholders' meeting in June this year. Up to now, the company has repurchased HK$3.09 billion worth of Class B shares and repurchased about 61.74 million shares, accounting for about 1.4% of the total share capital.

As for the actual implementation of the new repurchase plan, Kuaishou Chief Financial Officer Jin Bing said at this performance point meeting that it will be determined based on comprehensive considerations based on the capital market environment, and that the company will rationally arrange the pace and intensity of share repurchases to continuously improve shareholder returns.

The average daily payment for skits increased by more than 4 times over the same period last year

Specifically, Kuaishou's online marketing services, live streaming, and other services (including e-commerce) contributed 56.6%, 29.2%, and 14.2% to revenue, respectively.

Among them, online marketing service revenue increased 27.4% year on year to 16.7 billion yuan, and the number of active marketing customers increased nearly 90% year over year. Paid skit marketing in the media information sector was continuously optimized through self-built links to meet the increase in supply and demand brought about by policy incentives, leading to a year-on-year increase of more than fourfold in the average daily paid consumption of skits in the first quarter of 2024.

“In the all-media information industry, we achieved closed-loop operation of our own links in the skit industry at the end of last year, which has also led to a monthly increase in the marketing consumption of paid skits. We hope to replicate industries such as mini-games and novels this year.” In a conference call held on the evening of May 22, Cheng Yixiao, founder and CEO of Kuaishou Technology, said.

Furthermore, in the first quarter of this year, Kuaishou e-commerce's GMV increased 28.2% year over year to 288.1 billion yuan, and monthly active e-commerce buyers increased 22.4% year over year to 126 million yuan. Thanks to the focus on categories that meet the needs of core user groups, including fresh food and personal care, Pan-Shelf GMV accounted for about 25% in the first quarter of this year. The average daily sales rate in the Pan-Shelf Market was over 50% year-on-year, and the average daily buyer growth rate was over 60% year-on-year.

In terms of user size, the average daily active users of the Kuaishou app increased 5.2% year over year to 394 million, and monthly active users increased 6.6% year over year to 697 million.

Although the financial report did not mention the specific situation of the local lifestyle business, Cheng Yixiao, founder and CEO of Kuaishou Technology, said that in the first quarter of this year, the average number of local lifestyle daily payment users increased nearly 9 times over the same period last year; the number of merchants and products on the Q1 day increased 29% and 38%, respectively.

Overseas revenue increased 193.2% year over year

Notably, Kuaishou has accelerated markedly in overseas markets.

Financial reports show that in the first quarter of 2024, Kuaishou's overseas operation efficiency continued to improve. Revenue increased 193.2% year over year, reaching 991 million yuan. Among them, marketing revenue increased nearly threefold year over year. In Brazil in particular, daily active users (DAU) increased 13% year over year, and each daily active user spent more than 75 minutes per day.

As early as 2016, Kuaishou launched the international short video platform Kwai, which has been launched in regions such as Russia and South Korea. In 2017, Kuaishou's international team was set up and officially began independent operation. In October 2017, Kwai surpassed 10 million downloads in Korea, ranking first in the video editing app download ranking for eight consecutive days.

Since then, international businesses such as Kwai have undergone many adjustments. In 2018, Liu Xinhua, the head of internationalization, left his job. In 2019, Kuaishou also decided to restart the international project, led by Cheng Yixiao.

In 2022, Kuaishou International Division made a series of organizational restructuring and established an international commercialization department. To this end, Cheng Yixiao proposed a phased, sub-regional, and differentiated approach to find room for long-term stable development of overseas business, and identified Brazil and Indonesia as priority regions for commercialization.

Since this year, Kuaishou has also accelerated its overseas layout. Kuaishou Chief Financial Officer Jin Bing recently said at the Saudi Capital Market Forum that Kuaishou plans to set up an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia soon, and emphasized the market potential of the Middle East, North Africa, and Brazil.

Furthermore, Southeast Asia has also become one of Kuaishou's target markets. Jin Bing pointed out that these regions have a large population, strong purchasing power, and are also willing to accept new businesses, ideas, and models.

“Going out to sea is definitely a process of finding increments. This process is definitely useful for Kuaishou.” An internet analyst, who did not wish to be named, told the Financial Federation reporter that Kuaishou is indeed more careful when going overseas. Going overseas requires the company owner to personally watch. “It's remote controlled domestically, so it's not easy to go overseas.”

The overall performance of the big model is close to the level of GPT 4.0

In a conference call held in the evening of the same day, Cheng Yixiao explained that in the first quarter of this year, Kuaishou steadily promoted the iterative improvement of the performance of the self-developed big model and accelerated the application of the big model in various business scenarios.

“On the basis of data and model architecture optimization in the pre-training phase, we have achieved a technical breakthrough in learning RLHF through feedback, making the comprehensive performance of 175 billion large-scale language models close to the GPT 4.0 level after being updated and iterated.” Cheng Yixiao revealed.

According to reports, this year Kuaishou clarified the big model application strategy of “upgrade understanding,” “do a good job of interaction,” and “explore and generate”, and has made considerable progress in understanding the content of the global big model, AI interaction, and digital humans and AIGC in business scenarios.

In terms of understanding the content of the global big model, Kuaishou's multi-modal big language model helps the platform to deepen understanding of short videos and live streaming content, understanding comment areas, and exploring user behavioral interests, so as to better recommend natural content, marketing content, and e-commerce content.

In terms of AI interaction, it focuses on the usefulness of “AI Xiaokuai”. Kuaishou has greatly improved the response accuracy rate and launched multiple rounds of dialogue and graphic functions. In the first quarter, the user penetration rate of “AI Xiaokuai” increased dramatically. The peak number of users using “AI Xiaokuai” in a single day exceeded 1.5 million. It is reported that more than 1 million Kuaishou users interact in the comment area every day.

In terms of digital people and AIGC in the business scene, Kuaishou's financial report revealed that the peak daily consumption of AIGC marketing materials in the first quarter exceeded 10 million yuan, and the large model capabilities covered various scenarios such as short videos, live broadcasts, and intelligent customer service.

Cheng Yixiao said that the deep integration of big models with short video and live streaming business scenarios has also strengthened the company's R&D investment in big models.