Earnings Call Transcript - WDH 2026-06-16

Tracy Lee, Head of Investor Relations

Good morning, everyone. This is Tracy Lee from Waterdrop Investor Relations. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to Waterdrop's first quarter 206 earnings conference call. All parties today are in listen-only mode in our English line. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. Please note that discussion today will come to forward-looking statements made into the State Harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities and Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements accepted with risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include but not limited to those online in our public findings with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required in the applicable law. Also, this call includes discussion of certain net debt matters. Please refer to our earnings release for reconciliation between NANGEAP and GAP. Joining us today on the call are Mr. Shen Peng, our founder, chairman, and CEO, Mr. Yuan Wei, director and GM of insurance business, Ms. Xu Xiaoying, head of finance department, and Ms. Li Jiewu, board secretary. We will take questions in the mentoring line at the end of the conference call. Now, let's invite our CEO, Shantong, to start. Dear investors and investors, thank you for joining Waterdrop's first quarter 206 earnings conference call. In the first quarter, we continued our last year's growth momentum, with total revenue of 1.24 billion yuan at 64.8% year-over-year, and net profit attributable to ordinary shareholders of more than $98 million. Since the first quarter of 2022, we have maintained gap profitability for 17 consecutive quarters. By segment, our insurance business continues its user acquisition strategy with insurance-related income at 74.1% a year. As this capability has been validated, we sharpen our focus on user experience while continuing to optimize our traffic channels and user-targeting efficiency. The Crafani business agreement stable, having raised medical funds for accumulative 3.75 million patients by the end of the Q1. And our digital clinical trial solution business is the standard enrollment growth, with more than 15,500 patients enrolled to date. On technology front, we are accelerating our shift toward an AI-native company. As of March 31, 2006, we had filed 75 LN-related patent applications, including nine international ones, and were recently granted two more national invention patents in intelligence, semantic, understanding, and the multimodal recognition. This technology will be progressively applied to the insurances narrow, such as intelligent customer service and claims, improving service quality and efficiency. On capital returns, we continue to share our growth with our shareholders. In early May, we completed our fifth cash dividend since our IPO, totaling approximately $10.8 million. Our share repurchase program also continued steadily by the end of May 2006, we had repurchased approximately $61.8 million ADS in open market for about $120 million. As of the end of May 2006, cumulative cash dividends and share repurchases since IPO has totaled approximately $170 million. dollars. Meanwhile, we remain committed to giving back to society as the end of the Q1 of the WaterDrop charity platform has partnered with 119 public charitable organizations and launched over 15,500 charity programs. Looking ahead, we aim to seize industry opportunities and to make growth our top priority this year. Building on our proven user-targeting capabilities, is we will increase in marketing investment further. For 2016, we are targeting approximately 40% top-line growth with operating profit scale is expected to remain broadly stable. We expect this current investment to allow greater profit potential in the coming years. And the user-based extension will further support the company's long-term development. And that covers our overall performance in Q1. Next, I will walk through each of the business segments in detail. Hello, everyone. This is Gamble A. Let me walk you through the progress of the insurance business. In the first quarter, insurance-related income reached $1.15 billion at 74.1% year-over-year, with operating profit of 150 million yuan. The operating margin of Q1 is 13.3%. The year-over-year top-line growth mainly reflects the continuation of our last-year user acquisition strategy. In the first quarter, we continued to set up public domain user targeting and increased our investment in traffic and AI, driving significant premium growth. And on a quarter-over-quarter basis, while the income declined, our insurance operating margin rose by 2 percentage points. This was mainly because we proactively cut some lower ROI channels during this quarter. At the same time, we are actively expanding into other high-quality traffic channels while running our mature ones with refined operations, enhancing our traffic infrastructure, and optimizing our model to drive a continuing improvement in ROI. On the supply side, we are committed to giving users more diverse product offerings, which continue to earn user recognition. During this quarter, FIP from our pre-existing condition products rose 24.3% per year, and And the disability insurance products contributed $89 million in FITs. At the product level, we continue to iterate. For example, we upgraded our inclusive cancer worry-free medical insurance, expanding the coverage for out-of-the-hospital prescriptions and related medical devices, as well as a range of advanced cancer therapists. We also recently launched the Shou Hulu 2 focused cancer-specified disease product with a singular health disorder and a lower-the-bar to lifelong cancer protection. On the survey side, we took multiple steps to improve the customer experience. We launched a dedicated customer complaint hotline to make it easier for users to raise concerns. And we also connect the payment channels with our customer service system, expanding frontline operations and enable faster refund processing. And for elderly customers, we simplify procedures for the children acting on their behalf and introduce a faster track service channel. Together, this initiative upgraded our access service capability. We also continue to apply our LRM capabilities and AI tools to streamline the workflow and improve operating efficiency. The user-facing AI applications contributed approximately $87 million in incremental premiums in Q1 at 17.7% sequentially. Through real-time support on our mini-programs, WeChat, phone calls, and WeCom, including our AI Pro insurance and AI medical insurance experts, WeCom AI, and other tools. Our frontline consultants, Kuei.ai, have handled more than 10,000 underwriting inquiries to date. In late March, we began internal data testing of the Cloud Co-Pilot on CRM and WeCon, bringing together our product knowledge base, the CRE.AI, and the other two agents tools, so our consultants can get instant answers on products in writing and other common questions, with less of switching between the systems and documents. Co-pilot also supports the self-lead review, top-track replay, and refinement, and performance analytics. In after-south service, our AI user service agent, now in regular operations, supports more than 1 million service interactions per month. And the AI service quality co-pilot continues to deliver efficiency of more than twice the manual-only basis through this baseline. On the AI infrastructure side, our local platform, WaterDocs.ai, now offers more than 30 purpose-fueled agents, each tailored to a specific scenario for our internal team and external clients in all the user-facing work. So, that concludes our insurance business update for the first quarter. Thank you, Randa. And now, next, I will walk you through our first quarter performance on our body and healthcare business. As of the end of March 2006, approximately 494 million people had cumulatively donated a total of 73.5 billion to 3.75 million patients through the WaterDrop Medical Profunding platform. This quarter, we pursued the two priorities for WaterDrop Medical Profunding, the AI capability viewing and the better service in linguistics diverse regions. For AI reviews, we complete quarterly upgrades involving towards an AI-assisted model without compromising risk control quality. Our risk model can structure the content material quickly and apply the preset rules for preliminary screening, short-term intake, and first-class review and treat our risk specialist for complex cases. Secondly, we improve the service for patients in linguistically diverse communities, including areas where a minority language available is spoken. And this quarter, we systematically refine our service workflow and adapted the review standard to their real needs. We added the minority language specialists to work alongside our existing campaign consultants on upfront consultation and the document guidance and the dispute resolution and reducing the communication costs caused by language barriers. In addition, we set up a dedicated service team in which the translator and the risk control specialist can track each case end-to-end and promptly resolve the Botan Act, ensuring a strict risk control compliance while respecting local culture sensitivities. Turning to our healthcare business, we sustained high-quality growth with our LLN application across the core business scenarios. We partnered with 243 pharmaceutical companies and zeroes and initiated services for 128 new programs. Our e-bank platform single-quarter patient enrollment rose to 16% year-over-year. And the newly signed product in this quarter increased 53%, reflecting the wider partnership coverage and the deeper client engagement. And after the end of the first quarter of 2006, the platform had cumulatively enrolled over 15,500 patients. In January, our intelligence to our patient matching technology secured a national invention patent, which is the first of this kind in China. This quarter was focused on building our upstream data structuring capability and connecting it with a matching engine. Across part of our service workflow, the platform has now established a standardized pipeline from the data structuring to intelligent project matching, promptly generating suitability recommendation against the trial protocol. Supported by these AI capabilities, we continue to build our case library, medical case library, and complex indications and rare chances with a more balanced mix across therapeutic areas, strengthening the foundation for sustainable medium to long growth. And that covers our core funding and the healthcare business. And hello everyone, this is Xu Xiaoying. I will now hear through our financial headlines for the first quarter of 2006. Before I go into details, please be reminded that all members quoted here will be in R&D, and please refer to our earnings release for detailed information on our financial performance on both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter businesses respectively. In the first quarter of 2006, 40-October revenue reached $1.24 billion at 64.8% year-over-year, sustaining a rapid growth. In fact, second, the insurance-related income contributed approximately $1.15 billion at 74.1% year-over-year, while the non-insurance business together accounted for about 7.8% of the revenue, with corresponding 30 fees of approximately $60.73 million and digital clean control solution income of approximately $24.2 million. Thanks to cost, our total operating cost and expenses for this first quarter were approximately $1.16 billion at about 71.5% year-over-year. Operating costs for this quarter reached $487 million at 30.1% year-over-year. Driven by our business extension, costs rose by $38.9 million. A thousand marketing expenses reached $541 million, a significant increase from $172 million in the same period last year. and reinforced traffic channels rose by approximately $361 million year-over-year. Generally, a lower 11.5% year-over-year increase and the technology by the shareholder cash equivalent to short-term investments and other cash positions totaled about approximately $2.88 million. On the capital return 6,120 million U.S. dollars continues to strengthen our long-term