Yiren Digital Ltd. (NYSE:YRD) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Let me ask this, though, after that in the detail because I’ve been an investor for a long time, and I’m frustrated. This stock should be $6 or $7, minimum, if not a lot higher. But on June 30, the PRC is going to be looking at companies that are capital light and are doing lending as you do and maybe make some changes and what have you. Since you have so much capital and you have a small loan book, do you keep your loans on your balance sheet?

Na Mei: Yes, I’ll answer your question. Yes, actually, for our lending business, we have the two models. One model is used our guaranteed income, it means like the hiring model. So the hiring model, the long — is in our balance sheet, as you know. Yes, the second model is highly — it’s a life model that we decide to just do the performance and promotion and reference asset sales channel to our funding partner. And we just worked out our consulting revenue on funding partner and we don’t have any guarantee responsibility. And for this model, the loan volume is now in our balance sheet. And now, we have both two of this model. And so for the first model, if we take the guaranteed responsibility, so lowering our balance sheet.

Unidentified Analyst: I think that’s really the issue that to be licensed to make loans, one has to take some of the risk. And I’m seeing some of your former competitors or maybe competitors, whether it’s XYF, QFIN, FINV, in particular, is keeping more of the loans on the balance sheet besides just being capital-light. Now as far as having all that huge cash balance you have, I see that you had a lot of income — investment income. Was that just interest on your cash balance, which you should be getting these interest rates have risen and that should be a large part of some of your income?

Ning Tang: Na, are you taking this question?

Unidentified Analyst: Yes. I mean you have a lot of cash, $700 million. What sort of interest are you earning on that?

Na Mei: Okay. Yes, you can see we have about RMB5.9 billion attached deposits in our balance sheet. For our balance sheet — for our cash basis, so we have — actually, we have one, the profit is we have deposits and profit is our funding partner to make our financial products on the financial income, the first income. The second is actually we add — from this year, we also, for our cash usage, for example, we have corporate, we trust companies to set up trust line for our own product in Hexiang. There are some figures for your — for reference in the first quarter. Our own money set up the track the loan has already about RMB300 million for our loan volume. And the transaction amount expected to about RMB600 million by the end of the second quarter.

So, we can use our own money to service our own product and we’ll profit from the — own profile in Yi Xiang Hua. Of course, we’re still planning other U.S. next thing such as Tang Ning mentioned in our script. We have overseas strategy. We’ll also use our own money to expand overseas opportunity. And there is some pre-expenditure on our overseas [indiscernible] business strategy. And also, we’ll use our cash to — cash on proper technology innovations, as Tang mentioned that we will set our AI lab, and I hope there will be more expenditure in the future as technical. And also, generally, we have — as a management, we have tried our best to seek more opportunity to increase our fund return ratio and keep our stable profit.