Kingsoft Cloud Q4 2024 Earnings Report $14.22 +1.57 (+12.41%) Closing price 04/11/2025 04:00 PM EasternExtended Trading$14.13 -0.09 (-0.63%) As of 04/11/2025 07:53 PM Eastern Extended trading is trading that happens on electronic markets outside of regular trading hours. This is a fair market value extended hours price provided by Polygon.io. Learn more. Earnings HistoryForecast Kingsoft Cloud EPS ResultsActual EPS-$0.05Consensus EPS -$0.11Beat/MissBeat by +$0.06One Year Ago EPS$0.08Kingsoft Cloud Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$2.23 billionExpected Revenue$2.11 billionBeat/MissBeat by +$123.40 millionYoY Revenue Growth+29.60%Kingsoft Cloud Announcement DetailsQuarterQ4 2024Date3/19/2025TimeBefore Market OpensConference Call DateWednesday, March 19, 2025Conference Call Time8:15AM ETUpcoming EarningsKingsoft Cloud's Q1 2025 earnings is scheduled for Wednesday, May 28, 2025, with a conference call scheduled on Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 8:15 AM ET. Check back for transcripts, audio, and key financial metrics as they become available.Conference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptPress Release (8-K)Earnings HistoryKC ProfilePowered by Kingsoft Cloud Q4 2024 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMarch 19, 2025 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 6 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Kingsoft Cloud's Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Nicole Shan, IR Director of King Speaker 100:00:44Please go ahead. Speaker 200:00:46Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. KingsoftCloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year twenty twenty four earnings release was distributed earlier today and is available on our IR website at ir.ksyuan.com as well as on global newswire services. On the call today from Kingsou Cloud, we have our Vice Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zou Tao and the CFO, Mr. Speaker 200:01:10Henry He. Mr. Zou will review our business strategies, operations and the company highlights followed by Mr. Huo, who will discuss the financials and the guidance. They will be available to answer your question during the Q and A session that follows. Speaker 200:01:23There will be consecutive interpretation. Our interpretations are for your convenience and reference purpose only. In case of any discrepancy, management statement in the original language will prevail. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this conference call contains forward looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended and as defined in The U. S. Speaker 200:01:45Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relate to Yiwen's stated involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward looking statements. Further information regarding this and other risks, uncertainties or factors are included in the company's filings with the U. S. SEC. Speaker 200:02:21The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable law. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all financial figures mentioned during this conference call are not made in RMB. It's now my pleasure to introduce our Vice Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zou. Please go ahead. Speaker 300:06:12Hello, everyone. Thank you and welcome all for joining KingsoftCloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year twenty twenty four earnings call. I am Zou Tao, CEO of Kingsoft Cloud. This quarter, our high quality and sustainable development strategy continued to bear fruitful results. Our non GAAP operating profit achieved profitability for the first time and a series of our key financial performance measures reached all time highs. Speaker 300:06:42First, our revenue growth rate has climbed to a new level. Building Speaker 100:06:46on Speaker 300:06:47the 16% year over year growth in Q3, we achieved total revenue of RMB2.23 billion this quarter, doubling year over year growth rate to 30%, leading the industry's growth rate. Among this, public cloud revenue grew by 34 year over year and enterprise cloud revenue grew by 23% year over year, achieving a balanced development with dual growth engines. Second, our profitability improvement accelerated. This quarter, we achieved both revenue growth and profitability improvement, marking a turnaround from the company's long standing history of operating losses and marching towards the goal of net profit breakeven. Non GAAP operating profit turned positive for the first time with non GAAP operating margin reaching 1.1% representing a 12 percentage point improvement compared to a loss of 10.9% year. Speaker 300:07:54Non GAAP gross profit reached a record high of RMB427.7 million, up 63% year over year. Non GAAP gross margin was 19.2%. Our non GAAP EBITDA margin also reached a new high at 16% representing a year over year increase of 17.7 percentage points and a sequential increase of 6.3 percentage points. These are gratifying results of our comprehensive efforts to improve revenue quality, optimize business structure and implement multiple cost reduction and efficiency enhancement measures simultaneously. Third, we continue to lead our transformation with AI. Speaker 300:08:42This quarter, our AI related business achieved a gross billings of RMB474 million, representing nearly 500% year over year growth and 31% year over quarter over quarter growth. Its contribution to public cloud revenue further increased to 34%. Fourth, as the sole strategic cloud platform of the Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem, we continue to fully embrace the opportunities brought by the AI era within the ecosystem. Thanks to the unique historical opportunities driven by Xiaomi EV mobile phones, IoT devices, smart manufacturing and WPS AI initiatives, this quarter our revenues from Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem amounted to RMB493 million, up 78% year over year with its share of total revenues further increasing to 22%. Now let me walk you through the key business highlights for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. Speaker 300:12:00In terms of public cloud services, revenues reached RMB1.4 billion this quarter, representing a year over year increase of 34%. Capitalizing on the opportunities presented by Xiaomi's human, car, home, smart ecosystem and the WPS AI penetration as the sole strategic cloud platform within the Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem, we are seeing strong growth potential in the AI era. In December 2024, the shareholders approved a significantly increased revenue contribution from Xiaomi and Kingsoft from 2025 to 2027 to a total of RMB11.3 billion, representing 10 times the amount in 2023. This quarter revenue from Xiaomi and Kingsoft increased by 76% year over year, and we're steadily advancing and executing our business cooperation as we expect the growth momentum to continue in 2025. Meanwhile, our AI related business continues to gain momentum as well. Speaker 300:13:06This quarter, the gross billing of AI related business reached RMB374 million, increasing by 31% sequentially and contributing 34% of public cloud services revenue, leading the industry. Both Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem and external AI customers increased their usage, And we made breakthroughs in customer acquisition including large language model customers and expansion in use cases including AI application for Internet company customers. In the era of AI cloud computing with in-depth industry insights, advanced R and D investments and substantial computing power, we have been highly praised in terms of customer service, technology capabilities and quality assurance by our customers and industry experts. Moreover, our competitive strengths have gained recognition by top peer in the industry. In this wave of intelligent computing cloud, the company's market share and industry reputation have significantly improved, securing a top position in the industry. Speaker 300:15:34Me one one one Operator00:17:28Speakers, you may proceed. Speaker 300:19:09In terms of enterprise cloud services, revenue amounted to RMB822 million, increasing by 22.7 year over year. In public services space, we promote solutions with standardized operations, leveraging a foundation of model capabilities, big data and collaborative office tools. This quarter, we completed the construction of the Wuhan Optics Valley cloud platform, where as a joint operating partner, we will be fully responsible for the original informatization, operation and maintenance, strengthening the management and application development of data resources, so as to achieve the unified planning, construction and management of digital optics value. In digital healthcare space, in December 2024, we completed a significant milestone of the system construction of Yichang Central Hospital and the KGX, which stands for Kingsoft Cloud DataX data middle platform, has been put into operation. We adopted a cloud native microservice architecture to solve the multi campus business collaboration and real time data integration difficulties of Yichang Central People's Hospital with a unified data platform supporting more than 800 data operations. Speaker 300:20:24In addition, in collaboration with Kingsoft office, we jointly developed an electronic medical record product based on WPS, which has supported 61 medical departments daily operations of the hospital. In terms of product and technology, we uphold the principle of building success based on technology and innovation, focusing on delivering best in class customer experience across our core product offerings. This quarter, we continued to enhance the product capabilities of our intelligent cloud computing services. We launched the ninth generation cloud server, which efficiently supports high performance computing use cases such as AI, machine learning and inference. It also effectively meets the demands of large scale databases, real time data analysis and have strengthened data security and encryption processing. Speaker 300:22:42We officially released our proprietary training and inference platform, namely Xingliu Platform, which supports customers' need for development, training and customizing images. Meanwhile, our intelligent computing network has significantly reduced the troubleshooting time for large model training from hours to minutes, ensuring service stability. We will continue to strengthen our intelligent cloud computing products and technologies to provide customers with stable and fast computing services. In addition, both our public cloud and enterprise cloud solutions use cases have achieved compatibility with DeepSeq. In summary, led by the high quality and sustainable development strategy, our fundamentals have substantially improved and we have entered into a new era of healthy growth. Speaker 300:24:27Looking ahead, we aim to simultaneously expand our revenue scale and improve profitability, deepen cooperation with Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, comprehensively understand and explore AI opportunities, thereby continuously creating value for our customers, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders. I will now pass the call to our CFO, Henry, to go over our financials for the fourth quarter twenty twenty four. Thank you. Speaker 100:25:03Thank you, Mr. Zhou, and thank you all for joining the call today. We are very pleased to conclude 2024 with strong financial performance. I will now walk you through the financial results for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. I would like to highlight the following four areas of the progress. Speaker 100:25:23Regarding the performance of this quarter, first of all, we overturned from loss to profit in non GAAP operating profit for the first time since our inception in 2012, demonstrating our strong execution in our high quality and sustainable development strategy in the past two years. Second, our revenue has been growing for three consecutive quarters year over year. And this quarter, we outpaced all other listed public Internet cloud companies and achieved a very good speed growth rate of 30% in total revenue, reaching RMB2232.1 million. Third, our AI gross billing increased by around 500 percent year over year to RMB474 million, accounting for as high as 34% of the public cloud revenue. It has achieved a three digit year on year growth for six consecutive quarters. Speaker 100:26:28Fourth, last December, our shareholders approved the revenue from connected parties of Xiaomi and Kingsoft Group for next three years of RMB11.3 billion, around 10 times over the revenue of 2023, providing solid support for company's revenue and profit growth. We believe we are well on track to support ecosystem's fast growing demands and build up solid cloud infrastructures to support ecosystem AI development. Particularly in this quarter, we are very pleased to see that our revenue from Xiaomi and Kingsoft increased by 76% year over year, verifying the effectiveness of our ecosystem strategy. In terms of outlook, we have been firmly executing our AI strategy as a Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem strategy. Going forward, we're expecting our improvements in both revenue scale as well as profitability. Speaker 100:27:29First of all, we believe the revenue growth of our both public cloud and enterprise cloud will accelerate in 2025. Second, we expect our profit profile will continue to expand and we expect to deliver a positive non GAAP operating profit in the full year of 2025. Now let me dive into the details of our financials. Total revenue of this quarter were RMB 2,232,100,000.0, reflecting a 29.6% year over year increase. Of this, revenues from public cloud services were RMB 1,409,800,000.0, up 34% from RMB1052 million in the same quarter last year. Speaker 100:28:17This growth was primarily driven by a significant increase in AI related business. Qoo's growth billing reached RMB474 million. Revenues from enterprise cloud services reached RMB820.3 million, up from RMB670.3 million in the same quarter last year, primarily driven by increased demand in select verticals and growth in the Camelot IT services. Total cost of revenues was RMB 1,806,200,000.0, up 22.9% year over year, which was in line with our revenue expansion. IDC costs dropped by 2.6% year over year from RMB740.4 million to RMB121.5 million this quarter, reflecting the strategic scaling down of our CDN services and better rack utilization. Speaker 100:29:14Depreciation and amortization costs increased from RMB146.9 million in the same period last year to RMB343.1 million this quarter, mainly due to the depreciation of newly acquired GPU servers. Solution development and service costs rose by 10.8% year over year from RMB502.9 million to RMB557 million, driven by expansion in Camelot personnel to support revenue growth. Fulfillment costs and other costs were RMB102.4 million and RMB82.2 million this quarter respectively. We have recorded a higher growth rate in our gross profit than the industry. Our adjusted gross profit for the quarter were RMB427.7 million, up 63 increase year over year with an adjusted gross margin of 19.2%. Speaker 100:30:14On the expenses side, excluding share based compensation and impairment of long lived assets, our total adjusted operating expenses were RMB447.4 million, a decrease of 9.8% year over year and a 9.1 quarter over quarter, of which our adjusted R and D expenses were RMB169.6 million, narrowed by 27% from last quarter. Adjusted selling and marketing expenses were RMB107.8 million, down from RMB110.6 million last quarter, representing 4.8% of total revenues. Adjusted G and A expenses were RMB169.1 million, slightly increased compared with last quarter due to fluctuations of credit loss. Our adjusted operating profit for the quarter turned into profit was RMB24.4 million, compared with a negative RMB187.6 million in the same period of last year. Our non GAAP EBITDA profit was RMB359.7 million compared with negative RMB27.7 million in the same quarter last year. Speaker 100:31:33Our non GAAP EBITDA margin achieved 16.1% compared with negative 1.6% in the same quarter last year. We believe that our strong commitment to AI cloud computing development, strategic adjustments of business structure and our strict control over costs and expenses bear fruits and we are all well on track to further improve our profitability as well as scalability. As of 12/31/2024, our cash and cash equivalents was totaled RMB2648.8 million, providing a strong liquidity position to support operations and AI investments. Meanwhile, with healthy accounts receivable arrangements for AI business in this quarter, we have achieved a net inflow of operating cash flow reaching RMB570.2 million. We are able to generate cash internally and organically and support part of our further capital expenditure. Speaker 100:32:37Looking ahead, we remain committed to the principle of high quality and sustainable development. We expect accelerated revenue growth on annual basis and a higher and a more stable profitability in the coming years. Thank you. Speaker 200:32:55This concludes our prepared remarks. Thanks for your attention and we are now happy to take care of questions. Please ask your question in both Mandarin, Chinese and English if possible. Operator, please go ahead. Thank you. Operator00:33:08Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Xiaodong Zhang from CICC. Please go ahead. Your line is open. So thanks management for taking my questions. Operator00:34:29And my first question is regarding the industry outlook. So could management share your views on how the recent industry trends in AI are impacting the supply and demand structure and also the market landscape of the cloud computing industry? And what opportunities and challenges does Kumpo cloud face? And secondly, could management provide an update on the capital expenditure plan and what measures will the company take to address the possibly more stringent supply side restriction? Thank you. Speaker 300:39:16Okay. Allow me to quickly translate. So Mr. Doutao mentioned that DeepSeq by itself is still a general large language model. But the reason that it has caused such widely received discussion is because it has proved that the technology company in China can also achieve such impact in the world, can also achieve such height in terms of technology and the product and therefore has helped the revaluation of Chinese technology companies. Speaker 300:40:00And secondly, as we all know, the fact of DeepSeq the advantage of DeepSeq is that it's greatly decreased the deployment cost and this for Kingsoft's cloud is also a beneficial factor as we have seen that this round of deep sleep heat has also caused the Kingsoft's cloud share price to increase a lot. So I have actually talked about this back in 2023, where I used to say that the events of AI has essentially removed the glass ceiling of cloud business. And therefore, the release of DeepSig R1 actually will accelerate the deployment of large language models in China. And therefore, more enterprises and more individuals will start to use large language models. And then therefore, it is a wider pushing kind of power for the advancement and development of AI and the cloud industry in China. Speaker 300:41:12And think of the cloud as active and proactive participants of the market will definitely benefit from it. So in summary, I would say that this is essentially a broader sort of education to individuals and industries about the strategic value of large language models and of AI. So and therefore, people are increasingly getting to know Kingsoftcloud as well in that regard. And secondly, as our SAP, Liu Tao mentioned, so from technology perspective, the events of DeepSeq has achieved optimization and optimization in engineering methodologies, which enabled the lowering of costs and increasing the penetration of applications. We have been seeing a lot of potential customers, both from the government and enterprises, as well as from the Internet space, have increasing application and adoption of AI and DeepSeq models. Speaker 300:42:20And secondly, the DeepSeq success has essentially increased the application of enhanced learning in the large language model and AI industry in China in general. So we are seeing increasing competition and increasing technological improvement in the AI space in China. So that includes enhanced learning as well as multi model use cases. Thank you. Speaker 100:42:55Thank you, Sophia. This is Henry. Happy to answer your second question regarding the capital expenditures. I understand it's a very important one for many of the investors and analysts. So probably there are probably a few points I want to address here. Speaker 100:43:10First of all, before I go into the numbers, I want to mention our total investment into AI is comprised by two parts. First part is our OpEx, which primarily spending to the data centers, which include the racks rentals, electricity payments and other related expenses. And on this part, Kingsoft Cloud adopt a very efficient asset light model, which means that we don't have to spend huge amount of money upfront to build the warehouse and the real estate properties ourselves, but we have a very good partnership with long term arrangements, for example, with telecom companies and other IDC companies, which can reduce our leverage and increase efficiency. So it is the first part. And the second part, which is our capital expenditures, we buy efficiently, acquire the necessary computing powers, I. Speaker 100:44:08E, the servers and other network equipments. So basically, it's A plus B. So I can share some numbers. In the past four quarters, we have already spent on the Part A, which is OpEx on the data centers, around RMB2.9 billion on AI data center. And we spent on the Part B of the capital expenditures around RMB5 billion to RMB6 billion to acquire the necessary computing equipment and the network equipment. Speaker 100:44:41So if you're putting those two numbers together, in addition to the research and development investments as well, so in the past probably four quarters, we spent around RMB 8,000,000,000 to RMB 10,000,000,000 in total. Going forward, I think for the entire investments into the capital expenditures and also the OpEx going forward, I think the RMB 10,000,000,000 total AI investment for the full year 2025 is just a start. So my third point is given the strong important support from our shareholders, including both Xiaomi and Kingfao Group as we have already disclosed and approved by the shareholders in December 2024, we have arranged the leasing and other off the balance sheet arrangement to support our ongoing and growing investment into AI on both OpEx and CapEx. And we also want to remind the audience is that existing cash on our balance sheet, it is not the limit of our capacity into AI investment because of the leasing and other alternative financing arrangements we arrange directly with our shareholders. So I think we are in a good position with a strong demand. Speaker 100:46:02We basically can on par to increase the investment. And I think given the revenue growth rate, we have already delivered above the industry average. I think our spending will also catch in pace and maybe also accelerated and above industry average going forward, especially for 2025. Thank you. Speaker 200:46:23Thanks, operator. Next question please. Speaker 400:46:26Thank you. Please stand by. Operator00:46:30Our next question comes from the line of Brian Gung from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Speaker 500:47:27Regarding the expectation for 2025 revenue growth, could you kind of share your thoughts and break down the drivers? And like how much growth we expect for AI related revenue? And how much revenue contribution from Xiaomi and Kingsoft Group. And our second question is regarding margin with our margin performed quite well in the first quarter and imagine the share you are saw on our long term profitability trend? Thank you. Speaker 100:48:11Thank you, Brian. This is Henry. Happy to share some color. So as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, I think a few things I just want to emphasize. First of all, in Q4 twenty twenty four, the 30% top line on the Y o Y growth has exceeded even the top players in the industry. Speaker 100:48:32I think that demonstrates all the verticals, including both public cloud and enterprise cloud and within the public cloud, AI and the non AI are all growing at a very healthy rate. Without these fundamental support, it is very difficult to achieve that high growth rate. So that's actually the first point I want to mention. The second part is given we already completed our business strategy adjustments in the first half of twenty twenty four, we do have a very healthy split and the mix of the client structure. And as you may know that, for example, the CDN business used to contribute much higher rates and right now is only probably 10% to 15% or even lower going forward in terms of how you're looking at that. Speaker 100:49:21So I think our growth has been built on a very solid foundation. So that's why in the prepared remarks, I also mentioned that the growth rate, the keywords for 2024 is acceleration on a full annual basis. And AI is going to be a very important driver, but other verticals, as I mentioned, in different product lines will contribute healthy growth going forward as well. So it is actually the first question I just want to share. The second part regarding the margin, while we don't have the official guidance for the margin, but as you can see, our gross margin has been improving very consistent for the past few quarters. Speaker 100:50:02And also I also want to mention our operating cash flow in the past three quarters starting from Q2 twenty twenty four has been also positive as well. That is going to be a very important leading indicator for our margin expansion. And given the AI contribution of entire margin profile, especially for the EBITDA and OP side, we think the EBITDA and operating profit will grow at more fast pace compared with the gross margin. And we're happy to see that our EBITDA margin actually already exceeded the industry average and maybe on the top tier of industry peers. So I think the EBITDA margin improvements, which is also a leading indicator of the OP cash as well as the free cash flow, will drop down to the operating profit side. Speaker 100:50:50So I think our intention from management is two things. First of all, our intention is to keep a healthy steady pace of margin expansion for all three key indicators from gross margin, EBITDA margin and OP margin. And the EBITDA margin and the OP margin will be accelerated and improved a little bit faster than the gross margin. And the third point, given the cash flow is also important and we are going to keep a very close eye on cash flow margin expansion that will also give us a good momentum and support to recycle the cash to input the investment into the new incremental AI investment. I think these are probably the few points I just want to mention. Speaker 100:51:30Thank you, Speaker 500:51:31Thank you. Operator00:51:39We'll now move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Linlin Yang from GF Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Speaker 400:52:41My first question is about the AI inference. How do you think about the demand of AI inference and how much contribution of will it be? And my second question is, after the equipment in the legacy public cloud business is fully decreased, will it continue to generate revenue? What is your outlook for this part? Operator00:53:15Thank you. Speaker 300:55:58Okay. Allow me to very quickly translate. So for those demands of inference outside of the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, what we have been seeing is, on one hand, as I was responding to the DeepSig question earlier, the event of DeepSig obviously accelerated the application of large language models and AI to various sectors. So we have been seeing a huge amount of increasing in customer numbers as well as the strong desire and willingness for them to adopt and apply AI applications. However, on the other hand, while if you look at the number of the amount of actual business, for example, for one single customer, we might be needing a cluster of 128 units or two fifty six units or even five twelve units cluster. Speaker 300:56:52This kind of single customer demand, we have not been seeing yet. So in summary, the trend of penetration of AI and Deepstick is very clear for inference, but we think it still might take some time for that to be shown on the financial statements. Now secondly, for your question about the inference demand within the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, the answer is that it's going to be very strong. Essentially, all of the products and services across the Xiaomi ecosystem, including the cell phones and IoT, including the electric vehicles, all of them are going to be supported by AI and large language models. And for on the Kingsoft side, regardless needless to say, actually the Kingsoft office of AI, the WPS AI user account has also been increasing quite strong. Speaker 100:57:49Thank you, Yanli. So regarding your question of asset and depreciation, this is Henrik. I'm happy to offer also some colors. So I think first of all, if our audience and investor do some analysis and a comparison, Amazon, AWS, including Google and Microsoft, are all using five years of DNA policy for the servers and computing powers. So Kingsoft Cloud, we are conservative in terms of managing the financial policies. Speaker 100:58:24So right now, regarding regardless of the servers type and equipment, we are using four years of DNA policy, which means that we basically if we compare with five year, we actually overestimate certain costs. In turn, there is a potential to release certain profitability down the road. So that's actually my first point. My second point is, in the late of twenty twenty three and early twenty twenty four, we already at that time forecast that the industry will have a major shift from the traditional ICE to the AI cloud. So by that time, we did a full run of internal review of the asset distribution and our internal resources, and we decided to really filter out certain assets from CPUs and the traditional assets. Speaker 100:59:17So we did the asset impairments and the sum of the changes on provisions of asset valuation. And right now, all the assets on the balance sheets, including the $5,000,000,000 capital expenditures required for the computing power in the past few quarters, which currently sitting on our balance sheets are all healthy and the revenue and the profit generating assets and it actually can match with our revenue incremental opportunities. So I think right now we do have a kind of healthy asset balance sheets on the left hand side and also have a good potential to improve the shareholder return and the profitability and the cash on the return, especially OP cash on the return on the right hand side. So we think we are in a very good balance on the left to the right and we can improve the foundation of our business model and efficiency going forward. Thank you. Speaker 201:00:12Thank you. Operator01:00:19Our next question comes from the line of Wenting Yu from CLSA. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Speaker 401:01:03I'll translate the question. We've seen that prices for high performance AI service have been falling in 2024, while inference service are relatively well supplied. And how will this affect our pricing strategy for GPU cloud revenue and its impact on our AI cloud revenue and earnings? Thank you. Speaker 101:01:25Thank you, Wenqing. First of all, thanks for the very good question. And as you know, on this quarter, we delivered probably I say probably, I put a big disclaimer, but maybe true, the highest growth rate in the industry for all the public companies in the Internet sector, which has cloud business. And number two, given the gross profit, we already reached in probably also on the top tier across all leading players on this quarter. So you may understand that we want to remain relatively consciousness about our business' secrecy and very sensitive information. Speaker 101:02:07So we don't want to hurt investor interest because we share too much information on our success tips. So on that backdrop, what I can share is, I think we do have a higher margin compared with traditional CPO centric ICE services. So I think it's kind of first topic first point. The second point is, depends on the client demand. We do have a good mix of all kinds of different computing formats, which can fit into the client demands. Speaker 101:02:39And we're charging them as the demand goes up. So it's a supplydemand, which actually favor Kingsoft Cloud as a very important supplier in this current market. And number three is, the pricing on the GPU, as you know, it actually linked to a core production requirements of all our major clients. They use AI and computing as the important production and productivity tools and important embedded functions in their workflow. So in that sense, as you understand, it's always about value. Speaker 101:03:16So I think our value proposition has been lifted from a traditional ICE services, which may have a limited ceiling of profitability to a much higher potential in the current market because the GPU because of the GPU AI services become so important for our client internal workflow and for their final product. So they are willing to pay a much higher fees and the pricing because of the necessity of the technology value. So putting all things together, as I mentioned, I think we do have a very different pricing model for the AI related services, which are higher than the CPU and the traditional AI. And then we already shipped our strategy from a traditional IT cloud services company to AI cloud and the solution services company going forward. So I think that's actually providing very fundamental different changes and approach for the pricing. Speaker 101:04:07But as I mentioned, because the pricing is so sensitive and right now we are doing so good compared with industry average, so we don't want to say too much regarding our strategy because it is a business confidential as you may understand. Thank you. Speaker 201:04:24Thank you, Wenping. This concludes our earnings call today. Thank you all once again for joining us. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Speaker 201:04:36Have a nice day. Operator01:04:39This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.Read moreRemove AdsPowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallKingsoft Cloud Q4 202400:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2xRemove Ads Earnings DocumentsPress Release(8-K) Kingsoft Cloud Earnings HeadlinesKingsoft Cloud Reports Stable Share Capital for March 2025April 7, 2025 | tipranks.comKingsoft Cloud Holdings: Likely Needs More Time To Cool OffMarch 29, 2025 | seekingalpha.comURGENT: This Altcoin Opportunity Won’t Wait – Act NowMy friends Joel and Adam have a simple motto: "For us, it's always a bull market." That’s because their 92% win rate trading system is built to profit in any market – whether Bitcoin is mooning, correcting, or chopping sideways. No more guessing. No more stress. Just precision trades that put you in control.April 12, 2025 | Crypto Swap Profits (Ad)Kingsoft Cloud (KC) Achieves First-Ever Profit as AI Cloud Revenue Soars 500%March 26, 2025 | insidermonkey.comKingsoft Cloud’s Earnings Call: Record Growth and ProfitabilityMarch 22, 2025 | msn.comKingsoft Cloud reports Q4 EPS (RMB 0.05) vs. (RMB 0.08) last yearMarch 21, 2025 | markets.businessinsider.comSee More Kingsoft Cloud Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like Kingsoft Cloud? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on Kingsoft Cloud and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About Kingsoft CloudKingsoft Cloud (NASDAQ:KC) provides cloud services to businesses and organizations primarily in China. The company's products portfolio includes cloud products, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) infrastructure, platform as a service (PaaS) middleware, and software as a service (SaaS) applications that primarily consist of cloud computing, network, database, big data, security, storage, and delivery solutions. It offers research and development services, as well as enterprise digital solutions and related services. The company also provides public cloud services to customers in various verticals, including video, e-commerce, intelligent mobility, artificial intelligence, and mobile internet; and enterprise cloud services to customers in financial services, public service, and healthcare businesses. Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Limited was incorporated in 2012 and is headquartered in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.View Kingsoft Cloud ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Earnings By Country U.S. Earnings Reports Canadian Earnings Reports U.K. Earnings Reports Latest Articles Why Analysts Boosted United Airlines Stock Ahead of EarningsLamb Weston Stock Rises, Earnings Provide Calm Amidst ChaosIntuitive Machines Gains After Earnings Beat, NASA Missions AheadCintas Delivers Earnings Beat, Signals More Growth AheadNike Stock Dips on Earnings: Analysts Weigh in on What’s NextAfter Massive Post Earnings Fall, Does Hope Remain for MongoDB?Semtech Rallies on Earnings Beat—Is There More Upside? 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There are 6 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Kingsoft Cloud's Fourth Quarter and Full Year twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Nicole Shan, IR Director of King Speaker 100:00:44Please go ahead. Speaker 200:00:46Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. KingsoftCloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year twenty twenty four earnings release was distributed earlier today and is available on our IR website at ir.ksyuan.com as well as on global newswire services. On the call today from Kingsou Cloud, we have our Vice Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zou Tao and the CFO, Mr. Speaker 200:01:10Henry He. Mr. Zou will review our business strategies, operations and the company highlights followed by Mr. Huo, who will discuss the financials and the guidance. They will be available to answer your question during the Q and A session that follows. Speaker 200:01:23There will be consecutive interpretation. Our interpretations are for your convenience and reference purpose only. In case of any discrepancy, management statement in the original language will prevail. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this conference call contains forward looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended and as defined in The U. S. Speaker 200:01:45Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relate to Yiwen's stated involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward looking statements. Further information regarding this and other risks, uncertainties or factors are included in the company's filings with the U. S. SEC. Speaker 200:02:21The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable law. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all financial figures mentioned during this conference call are not made in RMB. It's now my pleasure to introduce our Vice Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zou. Please go ahead. Speaker 300:06:12Hello, everyone. Thank you and welcome all for joining KingsoftCloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year twenty twenty four earnings call. I am Zou Tao, CEO of Kingsoft Cloud. This quarter, our high quality and sustainable development strategy continued to bear fruitful results. Our non GAAP operating profit achieved profitability for the first time and a series of our key financial performance measures reached all time highs. Speaker 300:06:42First, our revenue growth rate has climbed to a new level. Building Speaker 100:06:46on Speaker 300:06:47the 16% year over year growth in Q3, we achieved total revenue of RMB2.23 billion this quarter, doubling year over year growth rate to 30%, leading the industry's growth rate. Among this, public cloud revenue grew by 34 year over year and enterprise cloud revenue grew by 23% year over year, achieving a balanced development with dual growth engines. Second, our profitability improvement accelerated. This quarter, we achieved both revenue growth and profitability improvement, marking a turnaround from the company's long standing history of operating losses and marching towards the goal of net profit breakeven. Non GAAP operating profit turned positive for the first time with non GAAP operating margin reaching 1.1% representing a 12 percentage point improvement compared to a loss of 10.9% year. Speaker 300:07:54Non GAAP gross profit reached a record high of RMB427.7 million, up 63% year over year. Non GAAP gross margin was 19.2%. Our non GAAP EBITDA margin also reached a new high at 16% representing a year over year increase of 17.7 percentage points and a sequential increase of 6.3 percentage points. These are gratifying results of our comprehensive efforts to improve revenue quality, optimize business structure and implement multiple cost reduction and efficiency enhancement measures simultaneously. Third, we continue to lead our transformation with AI. Speaker 300:08:42This quarter, our AI related business achieved a gross billings of RMB474 million, representing nearly 500% year over year growth and 31% year over quarter over quarter growth. Its contribution to public cloud revenue further increased to 34%. Fourth, as the sole strategic cloud platform of the Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem, we continue to fully embrace the opportunities brought by the AI era within the ecosystem. Thanks to the unique historical opportunities driven by Xiaomi EV mobile phones, IoT devices, smart manufacturing and WPS AI initiatives, this quarter our revenues from Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem amounted to RMB493 million, up 78% year over year with its share of total revenues further increasing to 22%. Now let me walk you through the key business highlights for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. Speaker 300:12:00In terms of public cloud services, revenues reached RMB1.4 billion this quarter, representing a year over year increase of 34%. Capitalizing on the opportunities presented by Xiaomi's human, car, home, smart ecosystem and the WPS AI penetration as the sole strategic cloud platform within the Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem, we are seeing strong growth potential in the AI era. In December 2024, the shareholders approved a significantly increased revenue contribution from Xiaomi and Kingsoft from 2025 to 2027 to a total of RMB11.3 billion, representing 10 times the amount in 2023. This quarter revenue from Xiaomi and Kingsoft increased by 76% year over year, and we're steadily advancing and executing our business cooperation as we expect the growth momentum to continue in 2025. Meanwhile, our AI related business continues to gain momentum as well. Speaker 300:13:06This quarter, the gross billing of AI related business reached RMB374 million, increasing by 31% sequentially and contributing 34% of public cloud services revenue, leading the industry. Both Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem and external AI customers increased their usage, And we made breakthroughs in customer acquisition including large language model customers and expansion in use cases including AI application for Internet company customers. In the era of AI cloud computing with in-depth industry insights, advanced R and D investments and substantial computing power, we have been highly praised in terms of customer service, technology capabilities and quality assurance by our customers and industry experts. Moreover, our competitive strengths have gained recognition by top peer in the industry. In this wave of intelligent computing cloud, the company's market share and industry reputation have significantly improved, securing a top position in the industry. Speaker 300:15:34Me one one one Operator00:17:28Speakers, you may proceed. Speaker 300:19:09In terms of enterprise cloud services, revenue amounted to RMB822 million, increasing by 22.7 year over year. In public services space, we promote solutions with standardized operations, leveraging a foundation of model capabilities, big data and collaborative office tools. This quarter, we completed the construction of the Wuhan Optics Valley cloud platform, where as a joint operating partner, we will be fully responsible for the original informatization, operation and maintenance, strengthening the management and application development of data resources, so as to achieve the unified planning, construction and management of digital optics value. In digital healthcare space, in December 2024, we completed a significant milestone of the system construction of Yichang Central Hospital and the KGX, which stands for Kingsoft Cloud DataX data middle platform, has been put into operation. We adopted a cloud native microservice architecture to solve the multi campus business collaboration and real time data integration difficulties of Yichang Central People's Hospital with a unified data platform supporting more than 800 data operations. Speaker 300:20:24In addition, in collaboration with Kingsoft office, we jointly developed an electronic medical record product based on WPS, which has supported 61 medical departments daily operations of the hospital. In terms of product and technology, we uphold the principle of building success based on technology and innovation, focusing on delivering best in class customer experience across our core product offerings. This quarter, we continued to enhance the product capabilities of our intelligent cloud computing services. We launched the ninth generation cloud server, which efficiently supports high performance computing use cases such as AI, machine learning and inference. It also effectively meets the demands of large scale databases, real time data analysis and have strengthened data security and encryption processing. Speaker 300:22:42We officially released our proprietary training and inference platform, namely Xingliu Platform, which supports customers' need for development, training and customizing images. Meanwhile, our intelligent computing network has significantly reduced the troubleshooting time for large model training from hours to minutes, ensuring service stability. We will continue to strengthen our intelligent cloud computing products and technologies to provide customers with stable and fast computing services. In addition, both our public cloud and enterprise cloud solutions use cases have achieved compatibility with DeepSeq. In summary, led by the high quality and sustainable development strategy, our fundamentals have substantially improved and we have entered into a new era of healthy growth. Speaker 300:24:27Looking ahead, we aim to simultaneously expand our revenue scale and improve profitability, deepen cooperation with Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, comprehensively understand and explore AI opportunities, thereby continuously creating value for our customers, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders. I will now pass the call to our CFO, Henry, to go over our financials for the fourth quarter twenty twenty four. Thank you. Speaker 100:25:03Thank you, Mr. Zhou, and thank you all for joining the call today. We are very pleased to conclude 2024 with strong financial performance. I will now walk you through the financial results for the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. I would like to highlight the following four areas of the progress. Speaker 100:25:23Regarding the performance of this quarter, first of all, we overturned from loss to profit in non GAAP operating profit for the first time since our inception in 2012, demonstrating our strong execution in our high quality and sustainable development strategy in the past two years. Second, our revenue has been growing for three consecutive quarters year over year. And this quarter, we outpaced all other listed public Internet cloud companies and achieved a very good speed growth rate of 30% in total revenue, reaching RMB2232.1 million. Third, our AI gross billing increased by around 500 percent year over year to RMB474 million, accounting for as high as 34% of the public cloud revenue. It has achieved a three digit year on year growth for six consecutive quarters. Speaker 100:26:28Fourth, last December, our shareholders approved the revenue from connected parties of Xiaomi and Kingsoft Group for next three years of RMB11.3 billion, around 10 times over the revenue of 2023, providing solid support for company's revenue and profit growth. We believe we are well on track to support ecosystem's fast growing demands and build up solid cloud infrastructures to support ecosystem AI development. Particularly in this quarter, we are very pleased to see that our revenue from Xiaomi and Kingsoft increased by 76% year over year, verifying the effectiveness of our ecosystem strategy. In terms of outlook, we have been firmly executing our AI strategy as a Xiaomi Kingsoft ecosystem strategy. Going forward, we're expecting our improvements in both revenue scale as well as profitability. Speaker 100:27:29First of all, we believe the revenue growth of our both public cloud and enterprise cloud will accelerate in 2025. Second, we expect our profit profile will continue to expand and we expect to deliver a positive non GAAP operating profit in the full year of 2025. Now let me dive into the details of our financials. Total revenue of this quarter were RMB 2,232,100,000.0, reflecting a 29.6% year over year increase. Of this, revenues from public cloud services were RMB 1,409,800,000.0, up 34% from RMB1052 million in the same quarter last year. Speaker 100:28:17This growth was primarily driven by a significant increase in AI related business. Qoo's growth billing reached RMB474 million. Revenues from enterprise cloud services reached RMB820.3 million, up from RMB670.3 million in the same quarter last year, primarily driven by increased demand in select verticals and growth in the Camelot IT services. Total cost of revenues was RMB 1,806,200,000.0, up 22.9% year over year, which was in line with our revenue expansion. IDC costs dropped by 2.6% year over year from RMB740.4 million to RMB121.5 million this quarter, reflecting the strategic scaling down of our CDN services and better rack utilization. Speaker 100:29:14Depreciation and amortization costs increased from RMB146.9 million in the same period last year to RMB343.1 million this quarter, mainly due to the depreciation of newly acquired GPU servers. Solution development and service costs rose by 10.8% year over year from RMB502.9 million to RMB557 million, driven by expansion in Camelot personnel to support revenue growth. Fulfillment costs and other costs were RMB102.4 million and RMB82.2 million this quarter respectively. We have recorded a higher growth rate in our gross profit than the industry. Our adjusted gross profit for the quarter were RMB427.7 million, up 63 increase year over year with an adjusted gross margin of 19.2%. Speaker 100:30:14On the expenses side, excluding share based compensation and impairment of long lived assets, our total adjusted operating expenses were RMB447.4 million, a decrease of 9.8% year over year and a 9.1 quarter over quarter, of which our adjusted R and D expenses were RMB169.6 million, narrowed by 27% from last quarter. Adjusted selling and marketing expenses were RMB107.8 million, down from RMB110.6 million last quarter, representing 4.8% of total revenues. Adjusted G and A expenses were RMB169.1 million, slightly increased compared with last quarter due to fluctuations of credit loss. Our adjusted operating profit for the quarter turned into profit was RMB24.4 million, compared with a negative RMB187.6 million in the same period of last year. Our non GAAP EBITDA profit was RMB359.7 million compared with negative RMB27.7 million in the same quarter last year. Speaker 100:31:33Our non GAAP EBITDA margin achieved 16.1% compared with negative 1.6% in the same quarter last year. We believe that our strong commitment to AI cloud computing development, strategic adjustments of business structure and our strict control over costs and expenses bear fruits and we are all well on track to further improve our profitability as well as scalability. As of 12/31/2024, our cash and cash equivalents was totaled RMB2648.8 million, providing a strong liquidity position to support operations and AI investments. Meanwhile, with healthy accounts receivable arrangements for AI business in this quarter, we have achieved a net inflow of operating cash flow reaching RMB570.2 million. We are able to generate cash internally and organically and support part of our further capital expenditure. Speaker 100:32:37Looking ahead, we remain committed to the principle of high quality and sustainable development. We expect accelerated revenue growth on annual basis and a higher and a more stable profitability in the coming years. Thank you. Speaker 200:32:55This concludes our prepared remarks. Thanks for your attention and we are now happy to take care of questions. Please ask your question in both Mandarin, Chinese and English if possible. Operator, please go ahead. Thank you. Operator00:33:08Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Xiaodong Zhang from CICC. Please go ahead. Your line is open. So thanks management for taking my questions. Operator00:34:29And my first question is regarding the industry outlook. So could management share your views on how the recent industry trends in AI are impacting the supply and demand structure and also the market landscape of the cloud computing industry? And what opportunities and challenges does Kumpo cloud face? And secondly, could management provide an update on the capital expenditure plan and what measures will the company take to address the possibly more stringent supply side restriction? Thank you. Speaker 300:39:16Okay. Allow me to quickly translate. So Mr. Doutao mentioned that DeepSeq by itself is still a general large language model. But the reason that it has caused such widely received discussion is because it has proved that the technology company in China can also achieve such impact in the world, can also achieve such height in terms of technology and the product and therefore has helped the revaluation of Chinese technology companies. Speaker 300:40:00And secondly, as we all know, the fact of DeepSeq the advantage of DeepSeq is that it's greatly decreased the deployment cost and this for Kingsoft's cloud is also a beneficial factor as we have seen that this round of deep sleep heat has also caused the Kingsoft's cloud share price to increase a lot. So I have actually talked about this back in 2023, where I used to say that the events of AI has essentially removed the glass ceiling of cloud business. And therefore, the release of DeepSig R1 actually will accelerate the deployment of large language models in China. And therefore, more enterprises and more individuals will start to use large language models. And then therefore, it is a wider pushing kind of power for the advancement and development of AI and the cloud industry in China. Speaker 300:41:12And think of the cloud as active and proactive participants of the market will definitely benefit from it. So in summary, I would say that this is essentially a broader sort of education to individuals and industries about the strategic value of large language models and of AI. So and therefore, people are increasingly getting to know Kingsoftcloud as well in that regard. And secondly, as our SAP, Liu Tao mentioned, so from technology perspective, the events of DeepSeq has achieved optimization and optimization in engineering methodologies, which enabled the lowering of costs and increasing the penetration of applications. We have been seeing a lot of potential customers, both from the government and enterprises, as well as from the Internet space, have increasing application and adoption of AI and DeepSeq models. Speaker 300:42:20And secondly, the DeepSeq success has essentially increased the application of enhanced learning in the large language model and AI industry in China in general. So we are seeing increasing competition and increasing technological improvement in the AI space in China. So that includes enhanced learning as well as multi model use cases. Thank you. Speaker 100:42:55Thank you, Sophia. This is Henry. Happy to answer your second question regarding the capital expenditures. I understand it's a very important one for many of the investors and analysts. So probably there are probably a few points I want to address here. Speaker 100:43:10First of all, before I go into the numbers, I want to mention our total investment into AI is comprised by two parts. First part is our OpEx, which primarily spending to the data centers, which include the racks rentals, electricity payments and other related expenses. And on this part, Kingsoft Cloud adopt a very efficient asset light model, which means that we don't have to spend huge amount of money upfront to build the warehouse and the real estate properties ourselves, but we have a very good partnership with long term arrangements, for example, with telecom companies and other IDC companies, which can reduce our leverage and increase efficiency. So it is the first part. And the second part, which is our capital expenditures, we buy efficiently, acquire the necessary computing powers, I. Speaker 100:44:08E, the servers and other network equipments. So basically, it's A plus B. So I can share some numbers. In the past four quarters, we have already spent on the Part A, which is OpEx on the data centers, around RMB2.9 billion on AI data center. And we spent on the Part B of the capital expenditures around RMB5 billion to RMB6 billion to acquire the necessary computing equipment and the network equipment. Speaker 100:44:41So if you're putting those two numbers together, in addition to the research and development investments as well, so in the past probably four quarters, we spent around RMB 8,000,000,000 to RMB 10,000,000,000 in total. Going forward, I think for the entire investments into the capital expenditures and also the OpEx going forward, I think the RMB 10,000,000,000 total AI investment for the full year 2025 is just a start. So my third point is given the strong important support from our shareholders, including both Xiaomi and Kingfao Group as we have already disclosed and approved by the shareholders in December 2024, we have arranged the leasing and other off the balance sheet arrangement to support our ongoing and growing investment into AI on both OpEx and CapEx. And we also want to remind the audience is that existing cash on our balance sheet, it is not the limit of our capacity into AI investment because of the leasing and other alternative financing arrangements we arrange directly with our shareholders. So I think we are in a good position with a strong demand. Speaker 100:46:02We basically can on par to increase the investment. And I think given the revenue growth rate, we have already delivered above the industry average. I think our spending will also catch in pace and maybe also accelerated and above industry average going forward, especially for 2025. Thank you. Speaker 200:46:23Thanks, operator. Next question please. Speaker 400:46:26Thank you. Please stand by. Operator00:46:30Our next question comes from the line of Brian Gung from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Speaker 500:47:27Regarding the expectation for 2025 revenue growth, could you kind of share your thoughts and break down the drivers? And like how much growth we expect for AI related revenue? And how much revenue contribution from Xiaomi and Kingsoft Group. And our second question is regarding margin with our margin performed quite well in the first quarter and imagine the share you are saw on our long term profitability trend? Thank you. Speaker 100:48:11Thank you, Brian. This is Henry. Happy to share some color. So as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, I think a few things I just want to emphasize. First of all, in Q4 twenty twenty four, the 30% top line on the Y o Y growth has exceeded even the top players in the industry. Speaker 100:48:32I think that demonstrates all the verticals, including both public cloud and enterprise cloud and within the public cloud, AI and the non AI are all growing at a very healthy rate. Without these fundamental support, it is very difficult to achieve that high growth rate. So that's actually the first point I want to mention. The second part is given we already completed our business strategy adjustments in the first half of twenty twenty four, we do have a very healthy split and the mix of the client structure. And as you may know that, for example, the CDN business used to contribute much higher rates and right now is only probably 10% to 15% or even lower going forward in terms of how you're looking at that. Speaker 100:49:21So I think our growth has been built on a very solid foundation. So that's why in the prepared remarks, I also mentioned that the growth rate, the keywords for 2024 is acceleration on a full annual basis. And AI is going to be a very important driver, but other verticals, as I mentioned, in different product lines will contribute healthy growth going forward as well. So it is actually the first question I just want to share. The second part regarding the margin, while we don't have the official guidance for the margin, but as you can see, our gross margin has been improving very consistent for the past few quarters. Speaker 100:50:02And also I also want to mention our operating cash flow in the past three quarters starting from Q2 twenty twenty four has been also positive as well. That is going to be a very important leading indicator for our margin expansion. And given the AI contribution of entire margin profile, especially for the EBITDA and OP side, we think the EBITDA and operating profit will grow at more fast pace compared with the gross margin. And we're happy to see that our EBITDA margin actually already exceeded the industry average and maybe on the top tier of industry peers. So I think the EBITDA margin improvements, which is also a leading indicator of the OP cash as well as the free cash flow, will drop down to the operating profit side. Speaker 100:50:50So I think our intention from management is two things. First of all, our intention is to keep a healthy steady pace of margin expansion for all three key indicators from gross margin, EBITDA margin and OP margin. And the EBITDA margin and the OP margin will be accelerated and improved a little bit faster than the gross margin. And the third point, given the cash flow is also important and we are going to keep a very close eye on cash flow margin expansion that will also give us a good momentum and support to recycle the cash to input the investment into the new incremental AI investment. I think these are probably the few points I just want to mention. Speaker 100:51:30Thank you, Speaker 500:51:31Thank you. Operator00:51:39We'll now move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Linlin Yang from GF Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Speaker 400:52:41My first question is about the AI inference. How do you think about the demand of AI inference and how much contribution of will it be? And my second question is, after the equipment in the legacy public cloud business is fully decreased, will it continue to generate revenue? What is your outlook for this part? Operator00:53:15Thank you. Speaker 300:55:58Okay. Allow me to very quickly translate. So for those demands of inference outside of the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, what we have been seeing is, on one hand, as I was responding to the DeepSig question earlier, the event of DeepSig obviously accelerated the application of large language models and AI to various sectors. So we have been seeing a huge amount of increasing in customer numbers as well as the strong desire and willingness for them to adopt and apply AI applications. However, on the other hand, while if you look at the number of the amount of actual business, for example, for one single customer, we might be needing a cluster of 128 units or two fifty six units or even five twelve units cluster. Speaker 300:56:52This kind of single customer demand, we have not been seeing yet. So in summary, the trend of penetration of AI and Deepstick is very clear for inference, but we think it still might take some time for that to be shown on the financial statements. Now secondly, for your question about the inference demand within the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, the answer is that it's going to be very strong. Essentially, all of the products and services across the Xiaomi ecosystem, including the cell phones and IoT, including the electric vehicles, all of them are going to be supported by AI and large language models. And for on the Kingsoft side, regardless needless to say, actually the Kingsoft office of AI, the WPS AI user account has also been increasing quite strong. Speaker 100:57:49Thank you, Yanli. So regarding your question of asset and depreciation, this is Henrik. I'm happy to offer also some colors. So I think first of all, if our audience and investor do some analysis and a comparison, Amazon, AWS, including Google and Microsoft, are all using five years of DNA policy for the servers and computing powers. So Kingsoft Cloud, we are conservative in terms of managing the financial policies. Speaker 100:58:24So right now, regarding regardless of the servers type and equipment, we are using four years of DNA policy, which means that we basically if we compare with five year, we actually overestimate certain costs. In turn, there is a potential to release certain profitability down the road. So that's actually my first point. My second point is, in the late of twenty twenty three and early twenty twenty four, we already at that time forecast that the industry will have a major shift from the traditional ICE to the AI cloud. So by that time, we did a full run of internal review of the asset distribution and our internal resources, and we decided to really filter out certain assets from CPUs and the traditional assets. Speaker 100:59:17So we did the asset impairments and the sum of the changes on provisions of asset valuation. And right now, all the assets on the balance sheets, including the $5,000,000,000 capital expenditures required for the computing power in the past few quarters, which currently sitting on our balance sheets are all healthy and the revenue and the profit generating assets and it actually can match with our revenue incremental opportunities. So I think right now we do have a kind of healthy asset balance sheets on the left hand side and also have a good potential to improve the shareholder return and the profitability and the cash on the return, especially OP cash on the return on the right hand side. So we think we are in a very good balance on the left to the right and we can improve the foundation of our business model and efficiency going forward. Thank you. Speaker 201:00:12Thank you. Operator01:00:19Our next question comes from the line of Wenting Yu from CLSA. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Speaker 401:01:03I'll translate the question. We've seen that prices for high performance AI service have been falling in 2024, while inference service are relatively well supplied. And how will this affect our pricing strategy for GPU cloud revenue and its impact on our AI cloud revenue and earnings? Thank you. Speaker 101:01:25Thank you, Wenqing. First of all, thanks for the very good question. And as you know, on this quarter, we delivered probably I say probably, I put a big disclaimer, but maybe true, the highest growth rate in the industry for all the public companies in the Internet sector, which has cloud business. And number two, given the gross profit, we already reached in probably also on the top tier across all leading players on this quarter. So you may understand that we want to remain relatively consciousness about our business' secrecy and very sensitive information. Speaker 101:02:07So we don't want to hurt investor interest because we share too much information on our success tips. So on that backdrop, what I can share is, I think we do have a higher margin compared with traditional CPO centric ICE services. So I think it's kind of first topic first point. The second point is, depends on the client demand. We do have a good mix of all kinds of different computing formats, which can fit into the client demands. Speaker 101:02:39And we're charging them as the demand goes up. So it's a supplydemand, which actually favor Kingsoft Cloud as a very important supplier in this current market. And number three is, the pricing on the GPU, as you know, it actually linked to a core production requirements of all our major clients. They use AI and computing as the important production and productivity tools and important embedded functions in their workflow. So in that sense, as you understand, it's always about value. Speaker 101:03:16So I think our value proposition has been lifted from a traditional ICE services, which may have a limited ceiling of profitability to a much higher potential in the current market because the GPU because of the GPU AI services become so important for our client internal workflow and for their final product. So they are willing to pay a much higher fees and the pricing because of the necessity of the technology value. So putting all things together, as I mentioned, I think we do have a very different pricing model for the AI related services, which are higher than the CPU and the traditional AI. And then we already shipped our strategy from a traditional IT cloud services company to AI cloud and the solution services company going forward. So I think that's actually providing very fundamental different changes and approach for the pricing. Speaker 101:04:07But as I mentioned, because the pricing is so sensitive and right now we are doing so good compared with industry average, so we don't want to say too much regarding our strategy because it is a business confidential as you may understand. Thank you. Speaker 201:04:24Thank you, Wenping. This concludes our earnings call today. Thank you all once again for joining us. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Speaker 201:04:36Have a nice day. Operator01:04:39This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.Read moreRemove AdsPowered by