Kanzhun Ltd Q1 FY2025 Earnings Call

Thank you, operator. Good evening, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me today are our Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Mr. Jonathan Peng Zhao; and our Director and CFO, Mr. Phil Yu Zhang. Before we start, we would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements, which are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors not under the company's control, which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different. The company cautions you not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and do 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 purposes 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. In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our website at ir.zhipin.com. Now I will turn the call to Jonathan, our Founder, Chairman and CEO.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our company's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. On behalf of our employees, management team, and Board of Directors, I would like to extend our sincere gratitude to our users, investors, and friends who have continuously believed in and supported us. In response to key investor concerns, I would like to report on a few main topics. First, we have remained focused on driving profitability with encouraging results. Second, regarding the ongoing tariff war, which is a concern for many. My observation is that its impact on our business has not intensified. Third, we have continued to make solid progress on the AI front. Let me start with an overview of our financial performance. In the first quarter, the company achieved a GAAP revenue of RMB 1.92 billion, up 13% year-on-year. Our net income reached RMB 510 million, reflecting a 112% year-on-year growth. The various uncertainties of recent years have prompted the company to formulate a strategy, which is to focus intensely on very few high-impact priorities to enhance operational certainty. Based on this, at the end of last year, we clearly proposed to guarantee profits. Excluding other income such as wealth management income, our adjusted operating income was RMB 690 million for the first quarter. Adjusted operating margin was 36%, up 13 percentage points year-on-year compared to 23% in the same period last year. Overall, this achievement demonstrated the company's capability to implement strategic goals and exceptional operational leverages. Increasing profitability involves both cost control and revenue growth. With respect to cost, there are two things worth mentioning. First is the decrease of SBC expenses. Our share-based compensation expenses this quarter were down by 10% quarter-on-quarter. As a proportion of revenue, this represents a narrowing of nearly 4 percentage points year-on-year. We have previously predicted that the longer-term passes since the IPO as well as the growth of our revenue, the impact of SBC expenses on profits will decline in both absolute value and percentage. This trend will continue. Second is the improvement of marketing efficiency. From January to April this year, the company added over 15 million verified new users. In the first quarter, the average verified and monthly active users on the BOSS Zhipin app reached 57.56 million, up 24% year-on-year. Post-Chinese New Year, monthly active users in March approached 65 million. The average number of achievements per user continued to increase both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. We maintained robust user growth despite the decrease in marketing expenses, benefiting from the two-sided network effects of our model and our continued focus on improving user satisfaction. Our core revenue growth drivers are still the growth of users and the increase in penetration rate. Therefore, revenue growth and user growth showed a highly correlated structural change. First, blue-collar new users accounted for over 45% of our total users in the first quarter, driving their shares of revenue up to more than 39%. Second, alongside the higher growth rate of new users among Tier 3 and lower-tier cities, the revenue contribution from Tier 3 and below goes up by 3 percentage points to over 23%. Third, revenue from enterprises with fewer than 100 employees hit a record high contribution for the period due to the higher growth rate of smaller-sized companies. Many people are concerned about the impact of the tariff war. We also take it seriously. So far, our overall conclusion is with regard to the job seeking and equipment supply and demand relationship, no severe impact of the war has been observed so far. In general, we have observed that hiring demand from enterprises has continued to show recovery trends since the Chinese New Year. From January to April, average new job postings grew 17% year-on-year, while the paying ratio improved sequentially, boosting total paid enterprise customers in the 12 months ended March 31 to 6.38 million, up 12% year-on-year. From an industry perspective, recruitment demand for blue-collar workers represented by urban service sectors such as catering and retail has been continuously and steadily rebounding since April. Manufacturing recruitment has demonstrated resilience despite the impact of tariffs with the number of new job postings maintaining year-on-year growth in April. Meanwhile, recruitment demand for white-collar positions has also stabilized and begun to recover, with industries such as advertising, professional services, Internet, finance, and automotive leading in year-on-year growth rate. Since last quarter, the market has been very concerned about AI. We also attach great importance to AI in our own daily operations over the recent three years. In this quarter, we continue to deepen the application of AI technology and expand the scale and penetration rate of AI testing users. Now allow me to expand on our AI developments. We'll break it down into three key aspects: AI for job seekers, AI for recruiters, and AI for management. First, AI for job seekers. The first item is the gray scale testing also known as phased rollout we mentioned in our last earnings call, which is after our user conducts their search, we do not only need to give the result but also provide an explanation by AI about why the result is what it is. Initial outcomes showed promising results and we have now rolled out to all users. The second aspect of AI for job seekers, which we also mentioned during our last call, is our AI-powered interview robot designed to help users practice interview skills. Our experiments have shown that it can significantly enhance recommendation systems’ understanding of individual user behaviors and the outcome is quite significant. Now we have officially launched it for all students and young people with up to three years of work experience. Moving on to AI for recruiters. One is the application of AI technology which has, to some extent, supported our exploration in closed-loop services. The result is in the first quarter, the number of enterprises for which we provided placement services grew by about 30% quarter-over-quarter. We are now starting to see some improvements. The other one is an AI agent, which can interact with users. That agent can guide enterprise users to communicate their personalized recruitment demand and proactively search for suitable candidates across the platform. The agent is still evolving, but we have witnessed that this agent can effectively improve matching accuracy. Enterprise users who have used the agent are seeing a 25% increase in achieving their recruitment results. That said, we remain extremely cautious about broadly expanding the role of robots to somehow even partially replace human recruiters. Our current strategy is as follows: First, we place no limits on building the core member capabilities. Second, we are extremely prudent about when and how readily we will deploy the robots. Third is AI for Management. First, I'm going to talk about two things. The first thing involves the reform of weekly reports. Now after one finishes their weekly report, we have our proprietary AI system to help create a concise summary version, which can still be revised by you. That way, you have two reports sent to your supervisor. One is the summary created by AI plus modified by you. The other one is your original report. Until now, the supervisor's behavior is trying to check the summarized report first, then move on to the longer one. So that's just some basic applications today. The value to help realize the value is, the AI will analyze your historical weekly reports and also read across weekly reports from related departments. If there are too many projects that have not closed the loop, or if the content is empty, or there are too many big words, the AI will remind you. This is a supplement to human capabilities. The second application for AI in management is regarding talent evaluation. When we merely rely on humans for performance appraisal, even so-called 360 degrees, there might be interference from two noisy sources. The first source is forgetfulness; for example, a person's previous contributions will be downplayed, while recent performance will be more important, which is quite human nature but might not be appropriate as a long-term evaluation. The second thing is also according to human nature; managers will see what others want them to see and may consciously or unconsciously alter their subordinates' information before presenting it upward. However, AI is objective; under the premise of protecting employees' privacy and dignity, AI can see the objective changes in past performance data. AI will not favor an employee because it likes their character, nor will it evaluate them negatively because it dislikes the employee. So AI is neutral and impartial in terms of human resource applications. To summarize, for AI for job seekers, enterprise users, and management, each of these three aspects is equally important. To sum up, the first quarter of 2025 was solid. Overall, we are positive about the year ahead, and we will continue to work hard. That concludes my part of the call. I will now turn it over to our CFO, Phil for the review of our financials.

Thanks, Jonathan. Hello, everyone. Now let me walk through the details of our financial results for the first quarter of 2025. We are delighted to report a solid start to the year, characterized by continuous expansion in our user base and engagement and sustainable revenue growth. In this quarter, our revenues reached RMB 1.9 billion, representing a 13% year-on-year growth. We experienced a decent spring recruitment season with continuous improvement in enterprise hiring demand, evidenced by the growth of our cash collections, which has bottomed out from the last quarter. Revenues from key accounts and small-sized accounts both contributed to higher growth rates in the quarter. Our paid enterprise customers grew by 12% year-on-year to 6.4 million in the trailing 12 months ended March 31, primarily driven by the growth of enterprise users. The paying ratio among active enterprise users increased sequentially, as the supply-demand situation of the labor market improved from the previous quarter. ARPPU increased by 5% year-on-year, mainly due to the expansion of payment amounts from key accounts. Moving to the cost side, total operating costs and expenses decreased by 8% year-on-year to RMB 1.5 billion in the first quarter. Share-based compensation expenses dropped by 13% year-on-year and 10% quarter-over-quarter to RMB 252 million, shrinking for the third consecutive quarter. Excluding share-based compensation expenses, adjusted operating costs and expenses decreased by 6% year-on-year to RMB 1.2 billion. Our adjusted operating margin reached 36%, up 13 percentage points year-on-year, showcasing our disciplined cost control and high operating leverage, despite Q1 normally having the lowest margin within the full year due to seasonality. Cost of revenues increased by 5% year-on-year to RMB 311 million this quarter. Gross margin went up by 1.1 percentage points to 83.8% compared to the same period last year, as a testament to our AI arbitration to improve our operating efficiency. Sales and marketing expenses decreased by 15% year-on-year to RMB 491 million during this quarter, primarily due to decreases in advertising and marketing expenses and employee-related expenses. However, our strong brand recognition enhanced marketing efficiency, and superior user engagement guaranteed that we can still maintain robust user growth momentum. Our R&D expenses decreased by 9% year-on-year to RMB 424 million in this quarter and was relatively stable sequentially. This decrease was primarily driven by lower employee-related expenses and reduced public cloud expenses related to AI. Our G&A expenses were RMB 266 million in this quarter, remaining relatively stable, both year-on-year and quarter-over-quarter. Our net income reached RMB 512 million in this quarter, up 112% year-on-year, while adjusted net income increased by 44% to RMB 764 million. Net margin improved to 26.6%, up 12 percentage points year-on-year, while our adjusted net margin increased to 39.7%, up 8.6 percentage points year-on-year. Net cash provided by operating activities reached RMB 1.0 billion in this quarter, up 11% year-on-year. Our cash position totaled RMB 14.8 billion as of March 31, 2025. Our strong cash generation and robust cash position provide financial flexibility to execute growth initiatives and enhance shareholder returns. And now for our business outlook. For the second quarter of 2025, we expect our total revenues to be between RMB 2.05 billion and RMB 2.08 billion with a year-on-year increase of 7.0% to 8.5%. Please note, this growth rate will also bottom out this quarter, driven by improved cash generation. That concludes our prepared remarks. And now we would like to answer questions.

We will now take our first question from Eddy Wang from Morgan Stanley.

I have two questions. First, can you provide a summary of how hiring demand has changed over the past months from the beginning of the tariff war until it began to ease? Are there any recent indications of recovery in current demand? My second question is regarding the macro weakness that followed last May's graduation season, which impacted recruitment demand. How does the recruitment demand trend in April and May this year compare to the same time last year? Have there been different trends across various industries and business sizes? Will these trends persist into the graduation season in June and July?

Thank you for your question. Regarding the first one about the tariff war, we are still analyzing the dynamics of supply and demand from both job seekers and recruiters. This is crucial for our platform. Overall, the improvement and recovery of recruitment trends continue to hold true. As we mentioned in our prepared remarks, the impact of the tariff war on our overall supply and demand relationship remains limited. We have a diverse distribution of industries and locations, and the export-related sectors contribute only a small share in terms of revenue and job postings. For example, from April to May, both new and active job postings have shown solid growth rates, without significant pullbacks compared to March. In export-related industries affected by tariffs, we did see some initial slowing in growth rates at the beginning of April, but they have rebounded since mid-May. Regarding the overall recruitment market, the supply and demand ratio has continued to improve this year. If we compare the period after May this year to the same later period last year, we observe a better growth trend, especially post-Labor Day and after the spring festival. The new job postings and the number of recruiters have shown a positive sequential trend since April. Particularly in the blue-collar sector, especially urban services, we have seen a continued year-on-year growth rate increase from March to May. As for predictions for the June and July graduation season, it's difficult to say with certainty, but I believe it should be fine based on current indicators. That wraps up my response to your question, Eddy. Now, operator, let's proceed to the next one.

Our next question comes from the line of Timothy Zhao from Goldman Sachs.

I have two questions. First, we know that the company has been testing AI features for both enterprises and job seekers. Can management share the feedback received so far and the plans for launching the AI monetization features? Secondly, given the current macro environment, the monetization rate, and user growth, how does management view the RMB 3 billion non-GAAP operating profit target for this year? As we look to the second half, what strategies do we have in place to ensure this RMB 3 billion target is achievable, and what is the potential for long-term margin expansion? Additionally, can management outline our plan for capital allocation?

Thank you for your question. I will address the first one about AI, while our CFO will tackle the second question regarding the margin. To summarize on AI, our phased AI product testing has garnered positive feedback, as we've previously indicated. We remain cautious about our use of AI, and I believe that analysts and investors who are familiar with our approach understand our stance. Some of our tested products are now accessible to all users, and this rollout is gradual. Regarding monetization, I’d like to share two data points. For recruiters utilizing our AI recruitment feature at scale, engagement efficiency has risen by 25% with the same number of conversations. Additionally, the AI communication assistant has managed over 9 million conversations during our extensive testing phase. Job seekers who interacted with the AI communication assistant saw a 15% increase in their achievement rate. Essentially, our AI products can enhance efficiency, elevate user experience, and save time. However, we are still exercising caution. Therefore, I believe our approach to the monetization of AI will be measured and gradual, but we expect some positive outcomes.

So I'd like to answer the profitability and margin question. As Jonathan mentioned in the prepared remarks earlier, even under current conditions with many external uncertainties, the company's overarching goal for this year is to secure a solid bottom-line growth first, then try our best to grow faster with our business. In the first quarter, we had a good start, and we managed to reduce costs to improve overall efficiency across most cost and expense items. Our marketing fees dropped in absolute terms versus last year, but we still achieved satisfactory new user growth. We had higher revenue, but the sales growth was considerable. Headcount for R&D, administrative costs, and operational functions remained stable. Our internal AI tools kicked in for the platform's operation and verification jobs, which has led to an improvement in our gross margin. You should know that our margin in the first quarter is the lowest due to seasonality, but with all the measures mentioned above, there is still room to improve in the second half of the year. So we are confident about our RMB 3 billion non-GAAP operating profit target for the full year. This is a comment on profitability and margin. Regarding the shareholder return topic, the company currently has more than USD 2 billion cash and equivalents on hand. We consider shareholder returns a very important topic, and we like to do whatever fits us. Currently, our share repurchase program is still ongoing, and we definitely will continue. At the same time, we are studying and assessing other means to increase our shareholder return. So please stay tuned. We would like to approach this step by step.

Okay. That's our answer to those two questions. Operator, let's move on to the next question.

Next question comes from Wei Xiong from UBS.

First, with the increased use of AI in the human resources sector, are we noticing any changes or anticipating shifts in the competitive landscape? Can we utilize AI to enhance our service offerings? Secondly, could management provide more updates on our blue-collar recruiting business? What are the key performance indicators for this year, and how are we progressing with new businesses like placement services?

About your first question regarding AI's impact on the competitive landscape, my perspective is cautious. Currently, for this generation of AI technology and the applications we see in the market, there haven't been any groundbreaking or disruptive changes. The competitive environment remains stable. However, I predict that if there emerges a new generation of AI products within global human resource industries that could transform the landscape, it would be driven by advancements akin to the 1.5 or 2.0 generation of AI. Up to now, we haven't witnessed any revolutionary shifts in the industry, and we continue to prioritize AI and related investments highly. For example, since 2023, we have invested over RMB 1 billion in chips, which enables us to carry out self-driven research and have a small-scale impact. In terms of AI science, we maintain a small lab for pre-training our own models and replicating open-source models. We are confident that our business scenarios can effectively leverage AI technology. Unlike the initial excitement and uncertainty during the emergence of ChatGPT, we now have more confidence in AI's ability to support our business. Additionally, online recruitment platforms have aimed for closed-loop placement services for a long time, and now, thanks to AI, we are confirming our capability to achieve these services at scale. In the blue-collar sector, new user contributions exceed 45%, and revenue contributions surpass 39%. We are also seeing growth in revenue from third-tier and lower cities, making this increasingly important for our daily operations. In summary, our service and product offerings will become more straightforward moving forward. We are devoting significant resources and time to the placement business, particularly in the blue-collar sector. The key focus is on ensuring efficient and reliable outcomes. If AI applications truly help enhance these two aspects, we are optimistic about future prospects, which is why we are continuing to invest in this area.

Operator, I think that's the last one due to the time constraint.

Thank you. Yes. Due to time constraint, that concludes today's question-and-answer session. So at this time, I'll turn the conference back to Wenbei for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. If you have any further questions, please contact our IR team directly.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect your lines.