KE Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BEKE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
KE Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BEKE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript March 15, 2024
KE Holdings Inc. isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for KE Holdings, Inc.'s Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today's call, including the management's prepared remarks and question-and-answer session, will all be in English. Simultaneous interpretation in Chinese is available on a separate line for the duration of the call. To access the call in Chinese, you will need to dial into the Chinese language line. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Ms. Siting Li, IR Director of the company. Please go ahead, Siting.
Siting Li: Thank you, operator. Good evening, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to KE Holdings, Inc. or Beike's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings conference call. The company's financial and operating results were published in the press release earlier today, and are posted on our company's IR website, investors.ke.com. On today's call, we have Mr. Stanley Peng, our Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Tao Xu, our Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Peng will provide an overview of our strategies and business development, and Mr. Xu will provide additional details on the Company's financial results. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call as we will make forward-looking statements.
Please also note that Beike's earnings press release and this conference call include discussions of unaudited GAAP financial information as well as unaudited non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's press release, which contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures. Lastly, unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in RMB. For today's call, management will use English as main language. Please note that the Chinese translation is for convenience purpose only. In the case of any discrepancy, management statements in their original language will prevail. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Stanley Peng. Please go ahead, Stanley.
Stanley Peng: Thank you, Siting. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining Beike's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call. 2023 was a fruitful year for Beike, not just in terms of business growth, but more importantly, in our organization strength, which foster our team's deeper sense of purpose and buyer dedication in us to move forward and embrace more possibilities. Over the past few years, we have made a series of priority adjustments in our strategy and business operations in the face of challenges. We are gearing up for “crossing the next mountain” to capitalize on the promising residential market with a technology-driven one-stop residential services platform for better living. These efforts have created more hope for our future.
Scale-wise, our One Body business has substantially outperformed the market, with our new initiatives are taking off. For profitability, our One Body business has reached historical highs and new initiatives have seen significant improvement in core cities. We have achieved breakthroughs in at least 5 cities in terms of integrated One Body to win business model with service consolidation and end-to-end appearance optimization. More importantly, our organization gain, unity and cohesion. The synergistic development in 2023, guided by the One Body, Three Wings strategy has laid a solid foundation for our company. It has fostered a shared understanding within our organization. We are more certain of the path ahead and our steps are firmer. Now let's take a more detailed look at our performance in 2023.
Overall, we achieved strong results in the turbulence market. For full year 2023, we recorded a GTV of RMB3.14 billion on our platform, up 20% year-over-year GTV of existing home transactions grew by 29% year-over-year, with notable market penetration improvements in most of the core cities. Full year GTV of new home transaction rose 7% year-over-year, significantly outperforming the market as compared with a year-over-year decline of 6% in China total new home GTV according to the NBS and a decline of 18% in GTV of CRIC's top 100 developers. As for our new initiatives, pro forma contracted sales of our home renovation and furnishing services sold over 93% year-over-year. The number of units managed by our big rental services surpassed 210,000.
Our full year total revenue increased by 28% year-over-year to RMB77.8 billion. It's the second highest level of the cost, with more than 20% attributable to our new initiatives. Regarding operation, operating efficiency, we have been reducing costs and enhancing efficiency while controlling risks over the past 2 years. It did cause a lot of sacrifices internally. These efforts paid off in 2023 as evidenced by the record high profitability we set across our existing and new home transaction sources as well as for the group as a whole. We have also seen great improvements in our earnings quality and operational cash flow. Our achievements in 2023 have given us greater safety margins and bolstered our confidence. Next, we maintain our solid strides in our One Body business in 2023 with some proactive actions to drive growth in the second half.
By the end of 2023, our platform served a total of 43,800 connected stores, which of 42,000 active stores, up 12% year-over-year. The notable agents connected to on our platform was close to 428,000, and a number of active agents rose by 15% year-over-year to 397,000. Also, service providers on our platform achieved substantively improvements in efficiency and income as well as the 44% of per store revenue increase for Lianjia stores excluding Beijing and Shanghai, and a 31% increase for connected stores on a year-over-year basis. Moving to our new initiatives. At the heart of our achievements in scale this year, their progress, we affirm that we are headed in the right direction. We also get a clear picture of where we fall short, and the vast potential for improvement in these sectors.
Our home renovation and furnishing services achieved greater breakthroughs in 2023. Beyond the numbers, what matter most is that we gain much deeper industry understanding and knowledge base. First, we developed a deep outstanding of customers’ mindsets. Their happiness, pain points and frustrations deeply motivating us to iterate our business models in line with the customer perspective. Past industry products emphasized a good centric installation process with logic similar to assembling a computer. Understanding our customers allows us to take initiatives from a human perspective, evolving our business logic and restructuring processes based on real customer needs, thereby creating competitive barriers and stickiness. We also understand that hunter-like sales model, commonly used as the early development stage of low frequency industries is not as sustainable.
Only by keeping our roots, communities, winning long-term customer fast, customer recognition and word of mouth reference can be increased the transaction frequency and density. Now, turning to our Beike rental services, as it grew rapidly throughout 2023. New problems began to emerge at a faster pace, requiring a higher business sensitivity and accelerated model integration. We were successful on both fronts. Our Carefree Rental model recorded over 200,000 manager units, up from 70,000 in 2022, and our centralized long-term apartment rental services have managed over 10,000 units by the end of 2023 from 5,000 in 2022. We are evaluating meanings of rental orders on our platform every year from conventionally lower value-added rental brokerage services to higher value-added long-term rental property management services.
The call behind us is, first, our understanding to the added value, which our homeowners and tenants' needs and the ability to serve. Second, our ability to control risks, which requires high operation efficiency. In 2023, we upgraded rental products to enhance value proposition to homeowners and strengthening risk control, and we redefine the roles of our key service providers. All of these efforts helped create a sustainable business model to emerge. Only by advancing our understandings of the fundamentals can we truly drive industry progress. For 2024, our goal is to achieve growth with stability, focus on quality and efficiency, and make decisions on long-termism. Strong balance between business growth and risk control is a fundamental challenge for every organization in our approach we need to respect the law of the market in the same way farmers honor the law of nature.
We also must protect our sittings from storms to ensure a fruitful harvest. Over the past 2 years, we focused on mitigating risks and reducing uncertainties and meet external turbulence. This has significantly improved our safety margins and deepened our roles in the industry. On top of that, our future developments will come from innovation as we face a different environment now, with new changes, we need to find new solutions. The first challenge lies in shifting our priorities. For our One Body business, scale and agency income will win the most important factors. Now, efficiency and agents’ have become more important. As known, our ACN resource allocation mechanism help us within a large pool of talent, which form our competitive investors in the past.
However, going forward, this advantage is scale may not be the key to help us meet customer demand or benefit the shareholders. As our agents mature, their needs are also changed from high income to work-life balance. As we navigate these challenges, we have already seen our frontline teams taking steps ahead. Let me share a few examples. Our platform showcased many distinguished home brokerage brands, large franchise brands like Fu Fang, they have plenty of their store count from 100 to 1,000 within 5 years. Their strategy focused on differentiated urban coverage and in-depth exploration in lower-tier market. Every aspect from store location selection and development planning to internal communication and team building follows a skillfully designed top-down approach.
We are also honored to connect with a boutique franchise brand like Qingdao YouYiJia Real Estate, who have achieved full growth since joining Beike in 2019, defying the market trend, their growth strategy emphasized on collaborating with store owners and agents with quality services and rich experiences, especially those having rather hard times by efficiently leveraging brand resources. They are active in service model innovations. They serve the first transaction under our Youxianmai model, helping customers lock in new homes before old homes were sold. On the store front, we placed a strong emphasis on the large store strategy, which demand excellent leadership and management skills from store operators, taking our Lianjia branch of Lingnan Bridge Metro Station in Shanghai, as example.
The store managers set clear plans for starting the operations, making each core business line led by the agent top in the corresponding business to ensure robust and comprehensive customer services during key services stage, such as face-to-face consultations with homeowners, the manager also helps the team to cultivate awareness of developing into homeowners' needs and developing a methodology with it to further strengthen the leadership skill of store operators, managing large stores, Lianjia has launched the Store Leadership Development Program SLDP this year. The three-year program aimed to reshape store manager's leadership model through operating planning, quality assurance, efficiency improvement, talent growth, team management and so on.
By setting up a comprehensive certification system linked to career development and award incentives, SLDP aims to nurture versatile managers for the industry. On the agent side, our dedicated agents have been instrumental in introducing numerous innovation initiatives to enhance service quality and efficiency. We always say closing a transaction is just the beginning of a service case. This is not just a slogan. Our agent from Shanghai, Lianjia Peilin Zhu set a good example, she delivered a special photo album for homeowners upon property handover. The album documented details of the apartment during this agent's housing maintenance period, helping home sellers keep a good memory of their past home, inspired by Peilin’s idea. We have introduced the Peilin Album album company-wide at Lianjia, honoring the handover of home with this precious memories.
This example of our ongoing exploration of a new path for quality and efficiency, growth with deepening our marketing presence going forward, the advancement and wide spread adoption of technology may be the key. As such, in 2024, we need to open our minds in understanding the relationship with agents and technology, embrace and create changes. New media is another powerful force. We want to better deploy and leverage. Finally, business model innovation is another possible solution. In an effort to advance our on-store residential services model for better living, we explore initiatives such as membership system and flagship stores. These mechanisms will foster deeper synergies under the One Body, Two Wings strategy, energizing our business holistically.
-- giving Beijing is our mother ship and stand at the top of scale in many ways, we believe it's both the best innovation ground, and we plan to conduct more efficiency and model improvement trails there. For our emerging business, our main focus in 2024 is on quality. For home renovation and furnishing, the new -- the next step is to continually enhance our understanding of our customer needs. This involves deepening our capabilities in quality, products, process innovation, technology, and supply chain management, thereby cultivating customer trust and driving future business growth. For Beike Rental Services, there's a huge market demand. Operationally, we establish a solid foundation on our store – our next step strategy is clear: enhancing efficiency through managing individual service capabilities varies, improving occupancy rates and profitability, and elevating service quality by various dedicated roles.
What's more important for this business is to explore innovative model that balance risk and return better than we can replicate them, look to long-term growth prospects while safeguarding our bottom line. In terms of technology, we have the strongest data assets and the richest offline scenarios in the living industry, digitalization and technology hold the greatest potential to solve the long-term efficiency issues for agents. In 2024, we will further advance the digital digitalization across our business and in the industry, conduct more in-depth exploration and produce around technology-driven initiatives. Regarding quality, for us, it sets up limits on how much we can be motivated by our customers and represent our business bottom line.
In 2024, we are doubling down on quality, exploring ways to enhance our ability to improve quality and create value through products, services, operations and commitments. For example, we are innovating supervisory systems and products to remove barriers between customers and our platform, making sure we are always open to hearing from our customers. These quality-centric products and capabilities represent the real value to our customers and the business, also namely long-termism, capabilities led the possible customer feedback to continually motivate us while turning customers’ satisfaction into our driving force to improve and evolve our organization. That's the real power of focusing on quality. Lastly, we never stop thinking forward.
If we could stand in 20 years behind and look back to today, what strategies might not work anymore and what new wins will open up our mind to reflect and address these core long-term issues is a major task for us in 2024. We’re on solid growth with ample opportunities to meet our mark-to-market in a vast residential sector, backed by team vicinity and trust from slow battles fought together. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on the sales and hence, encouraging, supporting and learning from each other, and growing together by lending strength to one another. We are increasing resembling an invincible team. 2024 is about welcoming new possibilities and challenges, which when guiding us towards more promising opportunities and helping us across next mountain.
Thank you next, I would like to turn the call over to our CFO, Tao Xu to review our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 financials. Thank you.
Tao Xu: Thank you, Stanley. In 2023, the Chinese growth market deepened with the transformation. So the year started with a concentrated release of untapped demand before moving to gradual normalization middle year. A transient rebound followed in the second half of 2023, built by enticing support policies. The existing new home market shows the differentiating performance with later being affected by the risk associated with the real estate developer stat and limited effect of supply, resulting in continued weakness in supply and demand. In contrast, both GFA and GTV of existing home transaction increased significantly year-over-year, showing homebuyers' preference for rapidly available home. This is an inevitable trend that China's real estate market approaches maturity.
Houses are returning to their original purpose of providing a comfortable living environment, bringing earth closer to the vision of joint living. Business involving actual environment, our performance in 2023 demonstrated remarkable resilience guided by our goal of achieving high-quality groups, our series of measures to reduce costs, enhance efficiency and mitigate risk have brought us to significant operating leverage. Our full year revenue reached RMB77.8 billion, up 28.2 percentage points year-over-year. Revenues from existing and the new home transaction services grew by 15.9% and 6.7% year-over-year, respectively. Our home transaction services maintained steady growth with a solid foundation. Revenue from our home renovation and furniture, emerging and other services become new engine growth contributed 24.7% of the total in 2023, an increase of 11.7 percentage points from 2022.
Subsequently, revenue from the home renovation and furnishing business was RMB10.9 billion, rising by 74.3% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Our profitability also increased substantially in 2023. Contribution margin grew by 7.3%, to 47.2% for the existing home transaction services, and a 2.9 percentage points to 26.66% for the new home transaction services, both setting new historical highs. Our adjusted operating expense ratio dropped by 2.1 percentage points year-over-year with an adjusted operating margin of 11.2% for the year. Our adjusted net margin increased by 7.9 percentage points to reach 12.6%, bringing our full year adjusted net income to RMB9.8 billion. Earnings cost improved meaningfully as well. We realized a net operating cash inflow of RMB11.2 billion in 2023, 1.14x of adjusted net income for the year.
And DSO fell by 50 days year-over-year to 55 days. We believe we have delivered commendable results in 2023. Turning to our performance in Q4. Our top line and bottom line each grew by double digits on a year-over-year basis. The revenue for the quarter increased by 20.6% year-over-year to RMB28.2 billion, between the top end of our guidance, primarily attributable to the better-than-expected performance for our new home transaction services, home renovation and emergency services. Our gross margin reached 25.5%, up 1 percentage point year-over-year. Our GAAP net income rose by 80.2% year-over-year to RMB670 million, and our non-GAAP net income increased by 10.8% year-over-year to reach RMB1.71 billion. For home transaction services, the fourth quarter witnessed a pronounced the contrast of performance between new and the in-home market nationwide.
The existing home market has seen a year-on-year increase, driven by the lower base effect caused by year of 2022's pandemic, and an increased activity in the existing home market in second and third tier cities. Sequentially, the existing home market has been relatively stable since October, benefiting from favorable policies and increasing market maturity. Revenue from existing home transaction reached RMB6 billion, up 14.6%, with GTV reaching RMB468.1 billion, up 30.1%, both on a year-on-year basis. Notably, GTV served by connected stores showed even more robust growth at 41.1% year-over-year. Our strategic functions through more connected store and the positive performance from the second-tier cities and the below in new home market, fueled by the increased proportion of GTV served by the connected stores.
Meanwhile, this structure change contributed to a lower growth in revenue in GTV for existing home transaction services. The contribution market for the new home transaction services reached 44.5%, circling by 7.4 percentage points year-over-year, mainly attributable to the low base in the same period of 2022, where operations were nearly impossible because of the pandemic. The contribution margin grew by 4.1 percentage points quarter-over-quarter, primarily due to the bonus issued in Q4. In terms of new home transaction services, as I mentioned, the national new home market remained sluggish. CRIC shows the sales from the top 100 developers declined by 32% in Q4 year-over-year, and increased by 12% quarter-over-quarter. The industry is still undergoing process of supply construction and the risks being cleared.
While maintaining our risk threshold, we proactively and strategically expand our channels in Q4. Our new home GTV reached RMB238 billion, dropped by 9.7% year-over-year and grew 23.9% sequentially, significantly outperforming the market. Revenue from the new home transaction was RMB7.6 billion, down 8.5% year-over-year, and up 28.2% sequentially outpacing GTV growth. This is a reflection of our steady condition capability in a market downturn. The contribution margin for new home transaction services slightly increased year-over-year, maintaining a high level of 26.4%. Our ability to grow contribution margin despite the decline in the revenue is another testament to our operational resilience. In Q4, the percentage of commission income from SOE developers rose from 46% in Q3 to 53% in Q4.
Projects with the Commission in Advance model also remained at a high level, accounting for 53% of total commission revenue. I would like to emphasize that, we have never and will never compromise on risk control to outperform the market. Revenue from home renovation and furnishing, emerging and other services grew by 106.6% year-over-year in Q4, accounting for an increased portion of our total revenue at 32.6%, significantly increased by 13.5 percentage points from the same period of 2022. Our home renovation and furnishing business continued to grow at a fast pace, with further breakthroughs in both scale and efficiency. In Q4, contracted sales reached RMB3.9 billion, up 99.7% year-over-year at 19.7% quarter-over-quarter. Revenue reached a new high of RMB3.6 billion, increasing 73.9% year-over-year.
The percentage of contracted sales contributed by our home transaction services continued to increase to about 47% of total GTV in Q4, further demonstrating the synergy between our housing transaction and other residential services. Moreover, our home renovation and furniture business has grown more diverse, with furniture and home furnishing, sales reached RMB1.15 billion in Q4, accounting for around 29% of total contracted sales, making a 3.4 percentage improvement from the same period of 2022. In Q4, our net revenue from emerging and other service increased by 169.3% year-over-year, under 21.2% quarter-over-quarter to RMB2.9 billion, primarily propelled by the rapid expansion of our rental property maintenance services. Our store costs were RMB727 million, remaining almost stable in Q4 compared with the same period of 2022.
Other costs rose subsequently to RMB548 million year-over-year due to the increase of human resources-related costs, maintenance costs of the rental property management services and the share-based compensation expenses. As a result of our increased operating leverage, our gross profit grew by 25.7% year-over-year, reaching RMB5.1 billion. Our gross margin ticked up 1 percentage point year-over-year to 25.5%. While falling by 1.9 percentage points quarter-over-quarter due to lower contribution margin of the existing home transaction and a smaller proportion of revenue from this business. In terms of expenses, our GAAP operating expenses for Q4 totaled RMB5.3 billion, up 43.5% year-over-year. Specifically, G&A expenses rose by 47.7% year-over-year to RMB2.6 billion, mainly due to an increase in provision for buyback from 1 single developer for new home transaction services, and the increase in personnel costs.
With regards to the new home receivable provisions, we have done a more cautious assessment of the realization value of the single collateral assets provided by Sunac earlier for its unpaid amount to Beike. This asset is expected to be impacted by over 50%. Based on this, in the fourth quarter, we made additional provision for bad debt amounting to around RMB400 million, which represents the over 50% provision on set receivable and other outstanding amounts corresponding to this collateral asset. As a result, apart from Sunac’s portion of secured receivables, the average provision ratio for the bad debt related to receivables from 68 high-risk developers on our platform has exceeded 95%. Sales and marketing expenses grew by 56.1% year-over-year to RMB2.1 billion.
The rapid development of our full service renovation business led to a fast parallel increase in our sales and marketing expenses. The increase was a result of the right marketing expenses in our housing transaction services business. R&D expenses grew by 4.9% year-over-year to RMB534 million, mainly due to the salary increase of the R&D personnel. On the profitability front, GAAP income from the operations amounted to a loss of RMB173 million in Q4, compared with RMB387 million from the same period of 2022. GAAP operation margin was negative 0.9% compared with 2.3% from Q4 of 2022. Non-GAAP income from operations was RMB856 million, compared with RMB1.34 billion from the same period of 2022. Non-GAAP operating margin was 4.2% compared with 8% from Q4 of 2022.
The year-over-year reduction in operating margin was mainly due to a higher operating expenses ratio. In Q4, GAAP net income was RMB670 million, up 80.2% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income was RMB1.71 billion, a year-over-year increase of 10.8%. Moving to cash flow and the balance sheet metrics. We realized a net operating cash inflow of RMB1.77 billion in Q4. New home DSO for Q4 was only 43 days, dropping below 50 days for the first time. This is a testament to our effective risk control. On top of approximately US$173 million we spent on the share repurchase this quarter, our total cash liquidity which excludes customer deposit payable, still amounted to RMB79.1 billion, remaining at a high level. While we achieved excellent results in 2023, we also placed a great emphasis on shareholder returns.
We spent approximately US$718.7 million in a strong buyback program and fully canceled all purchased shares. The total number of the repurchased share accounted for around 3.7% of the company's total share before the start of buyback program. We also initiated our fourth special cash dividend of around US$200 million during the year. On the basis of such positive shareholder returns, we'd like to announce our fourth final cash dividend plan, which has been approved by the Board at US$0.117 per ordinary share or US$0.351 per ADS to holders of ordinary shares and holders of ADS of record as of April 5, 2024, respectively. The amount paid for the final dividend will be approximately US$400 million, which will be funded by our surplus cash on our balance sheet.
As of year-end, our total shareholder return for 2023 significantly exceeded our net income, accounting for around 159% of our net income for the year. In addition, we are developing a long-term, proactive, stable total shareholder return plan, aiming to share the value we create with our long-term shareholders. In doing so, we aim to provide our shareholders with certainty of returns in an uncertain external environment. Market confidence has yet to recover in 2024. Despite market uncertainties, we remain undeterred and will continue to strive for excellence as our One Body, Two Wings business develop at a fast pace, gradually forming a positive cycle of scale, efficiency and quality, while required to strengthen our financial prudence, improve resources allocation and refine our operations.
So in terms of the financial strategy, we will continue to enhance the financial infrastructure of business and provide comprehensive support through our financial expertise. We remain on well-being in efforts to prevent risks and establish regulations. For our new home transaction services, we will proactively control risks and strictly follow developer ranking and accounts receivable management. Regarding to our new business, including home renovation and furnishing and the rental property management, as we see the rapid function, we will replicate our solid integrated business and the financial system, management capability from our primary business to the new business. This will improve financial process automation rates and bolster data analysis and possessing the ability for those business lines.
In addition to actively rewarding shareholders, we consistently prioritize the safety of our reforms in cash management. We meticulously select on the right assets and establish clear investment strategy and the risk preference. Currently, the majority of our cash investments are in deposit-based products. We believe our excellent financial management capability will serve as a safeguard for the healthy growth of the organization, helping us to navigate through cyclical fluctuations and overcome challenges, enabling more organic and efficient business development. Furthermore, our proactive shareholder returns were all long-term investors, who have accompanied us on this journey to better sharing the fruits of the company's growth. Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Timothy Zhao with Goldman Sachs.
Timothy Zhao: My question is regarding the home renovation and furnishing business, as I noticed, the 2023, you had a very strong growth year in this business line. Can management further elaborate what is the driver behind? And what are the key operating metrics that you are focusing on? And in 2024, what is your key focus in the operation of this business?
See also 10 Best Mid-Cap Dividend Aristocrats To Buy and Top 20 Mineral Importing Countries in the World.
To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.
