360 DigiTech, Inc. (NASDAQ:QFIN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Karen Ji: Thanks, Yada for your question. So I want to highlight the major growth driver for our business. Actually, we have over 40 million users with approved credit lines and over 20 million borrowers. So you can see that we have over 20 million users who never borrowed the money from us. In terms of new customers, actually we have 3 million to 4 million new customers acquired basically every year. So it’s very crucial for us to spend more time making more efforts in terms of engaging our existing users. And we believe this will be a major driver for the growth of our business in the future.

Wu Haisheng:

Karen Ji: From a marketing budget perspective, actually we allocate budget to existing users and new users. For existing users, we will spend money to reach out to them and use some offers to call back them, use some better offers to call them back to and we’ll also improve the user experience of those broadly defined SME borrowers to keep them active on our platform. So we will keep our budget for the engagement of all the existing users.

Wu Haisheng:

Karen Ji: Okay. For the new users, we will expand our network to cooperate with more platforms in terms of the embedded finance business model because our pricing is already below 24%. So it brings us opportunities to connect with more quality platforms to serve a larger number of customer base. So in terms of the market spending, considering the recovery €“ credit needs recovery in terms of the user’s activeness, actually we will €“ first, we’ll prioritize our work to increase the credit utilization for those new users first and then we will consider to expand our marketing, expanding to acquire new users. Hope it clarifies your question.

Operator: Thank you for the questions. Next question, we have the line from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong: Thanks management for taking my questions. My question is about competition. Going into the future, in terms of the pricing side, how should we think about the competition with friends or social media? Thank you.

Wu Haisheng:

Karen Ji: First of all, we think we are quite differentiated from the traditional banks and large Internet platforms in terms of the pricing. Actually we enjoy a absolute competitive edge in terms of serving the pricing segment between 18% to 24%. So we don’t believe that we will have a head-to-head competition with those large platform or traditional banks. On the contrary, we think we can provide additional value to them by cooperating with those platforms.

Wu Haisheng:

Karen Ji: So because of this differentiation points, we realized that a lot of Internet giant’s platforms, they want to expand their outreach to different type of customers. So because of our core competence can help them to expand their customer base and increase their credit product, the loan volume to serving their credit product to their users. So we believe this is what we can €“ the additional value can provide to those platforms. Yes. I hope this answer your questions, Thomas.

Operator: Thank you for the questions. Next question comes from the line of Hans Fan from CLSA. Please go ahead.

Hans Fan: So this is Hans Fan from CLSA. I got question related to the loan outlook, because the management was mentioning about the €“ this year is going to be a better part in the second half. So I was wondering that what’s the sort of lending pace across different quarters. And also in terms of the split between capital heavy and platform services, how do we think about the split this year? Do we have a target for the split in the longer run? Thank you very much.

Wu Haisheng: