PDD Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:PDD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jun Liu: This is Jun. Thanks, Ron. Let me take your question on global business. Well, for our global business, the idea is to leverage the supply chain expertise accumulated over the years to create a new form of channel and a shortened experience, which directly connects the factories with consumers, and is based on a flexible supply chain. Currently, consumers from over 40 countries with diverse cultural backgrounds are able to purchase directly from high-quality factories through our services. However, this is still in a very early stage. Many of our initiatives are in the beta testing phase. Our team is actually learning about the different markets and consumer needs around the world. It will be an iterative process that will be challenging, but at the same time, interesting. We look forward to working with our partners on this journey to make the lives of consumers around the world more enjoyable. Thanks.

Unidentified Company Representative: And, operator, I think we have time for one more analyst.

Operator: The next question comes from Ellie Jiang of Macquarie. Please go ahead. [Foreign Language]

Jun Liu: Let me translate myself. Two questions. First is on the revenue. It seems the company achieved very robust revenue growth of 94% year-over-year. What do you think contributed to this growth? What do you think you have done right in the past quarter? And how do you think about the growth sustainability into the fourth and next year? And then the next is about the margin. We noticed that your margin decreased on a year—over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis. What are some of the key investment areas that you are putting your resources into? Is this related to the competition? How is your global business impacting your profitability? And how should we think about the trend for the margin in the next few quarters? Thank you. [Foreign Language]

Jiazhen Zhao: Hi, this is Zhao Jiazhen. I will start by addressing the question about growth. [Foreign Language]

Jiazhen Zhao: As Lei mentioned earlier, our financial performance this quarter is the combined result of improving consumer sentiment and the execution of our high-quality development strategy. [Foreign Language]

Jiazhen Zhao: And in the past quarter, driven by consumption recovery, the Chinese economy grew at a rate that went over market expectations, which demonstrates the resilience of the Chinese economy. What we are seeing on our platform also confirms the potential of the consumer market. We have confidence in the Chinese consumption market. There remains much to be done to better serve the consumer demands. [Foreign Language]

Jiazhen Zhao: Although the industry players did not have any major promotions planned due in Q3, we still practise everyday low price philosophy and worked hard to provide consumers with a wider selection of quality products at affordable prices. And this is to deepen our cost savings value proposition. And while we serve the basic needs of our consumers, our cooperation with branded merchants also generated good results. During the national goods festival, we invested in coupons and also invested in platform resources to help more national brands to quickly gain popularity. In partnership with our platform, some brands were able to achieve multiple growth in the past year or two. [Foreign Language]

Jiazhen Zhao: We put in place the appropriate policies and offered platform resources to incentivize our merchants to work with us together on providing more savings and better services. We are very pleased to see growing trust in our platform and higher user activities, which in turn provide more sales opportunities for the merchants. And merchants in turn are naturally more willing to increase the investment on our platform. [Foreign Language]

Jiazhen Zhao: We have been saying that revenue is the natural outcome of the value we create for our ecosystem partners. We will maintain our strategic direction and focus on the execution of the high-quality development strategy. Instead of paying too much attention to short-term revenue trends, we will direct our attention to work on improving our core capabilities for serving the consumers and our merchants. Thank you.

Jun Liu: This is Jun. Thanks, Ellie for your question. I will answer your question about profitability. First and foremost, we are still in a development phase. Profitability in the short run is not our priority. Instead, our team is less focused on executing our high-quality development strategy, which we hope will increase the value of the platform in the long run. In the past quarter, guided by the high-quality development strategy, we stepped up our investment in key areas such as promotion activities and service upgrades to deepen our more savings and better services for merchants. We also further built on our supply chain capabilities and ecosystem improvements. We are seeing encouraging results from our execution and we will continue to invest firmly when we see good ROI potential.