Kanzhun Limited (NASDAQ:BZ) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Timothy Zhao: Thank you management for taking my question and congrats on the solid result and the strong outlook for the first quarter. I have two questions. First is about technology innovation, including the recent AIGC (ph) technologies. And considering the R&D expenses account for around 20% of the revenue in 2022. How should we think about in which areas that we are planning to invest in 2023 in terms of R&D investments? And what do we think about the impact from these technologies on the online recruitment model and on improving the efficiency of human capital allocation? And secondly as we understand the marketing campaign around the FIFA World Cup has finished, could management share anything that you have observed about the marketing outcome and what is your pace on marketing and branding that we are thinking for this year? Thank you.

Jonathan Peng Zhao: About your first question regarding our R&D investment this year. As always, we will continue to enhance the technology investment this year, but we haven’t taken too much into the consideration of all those potential AIGC application scenarios and model — modeling, training and etcetera. We are actively looking at that, but haven’t done that for our annual budgeting. So in our normal plan, the major expense will be for better and even more expensive engineers and computer scientists. And also we will increase our input in hardware, which we have been — we have — we will pay more notice into this. But as I just said, we haven’t considered too much about all those AIGC and — and related technologies. And but I’m confident and to say that we have enough capability and — and ambitious to — to invest further invest into this technology as a — as a large company.

And we are absolutely capable and we’ll do that. And about your second question regarding our big event of the sponsorship of FIFA World Cup, I can say that the result, the outcome is — in accordance of our expectations. So we — the — the very robust user growth in the first two months of this year, we have witnessed is quite efficient within the digital marketing, which results in very cheap customer acquisition cost per person. This is not because the market has offered a lower price or more we have find out some new technology for marketing, but mainly because the — the very high exposure of our marketing campaign during the last — last one month, last year has been quite successful. So our brand recognition has been improved. And — and this effect to reduce our digital marketing spend will continue to benefit us during this year.

Phil Yu Zhang: So I would like to add a little bit to this marketing expense question. So I think that’s first of all, in terms of the user growth, 2023 would be — we consider this would be a good year of user growth. And you know that we use branding as performance based traffic acquisition, advertisement as an approach to acquire new users. And nowadays we put more resources towards the branding over the performance. So the branding percentage branding related expenses, their percentage continues to rise within our overall marketing expenses. And this trend will continue. And we think that looking ahead for 2023 there — there is no other big branding events ahead. So overall our — like growth user growth strategy or user growth target for 2023 won’t affect our overall margin.

And I also need to mention that our margin is more, you know, linear or more related to our top line growth. So we expect that if the revenue can grow higher and faster, then we would like to see further margin expansion for 2023. So, so far we think that we are, you know, holding positive views toward this trend. So we believe that margin should be improving for 2023.