Zhihu Inc. (ZH) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

May 25, 2022 8:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator:

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Zhihu Inc. First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Jingjing Du, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Jingjing Du

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 financial results conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Zhou Yuan, our Chairman and CEO of Zhihu; and Mr. Sun Wei, our CFO.

Before we start, we would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from those mentioned in today's announcement and this discussion. The company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information, except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for comparison purposes only. For a definition of non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results, please see our earnings release issued earlier today. In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our website at ir.zhihu.com.

I will now turn the call over to Mr. Sun Wei, our CFO.

Sun Wei

Okay. Thank you, Jingjing. I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Zhou Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zhihu. Thank you for joining Zhihu's first quarter 2022 earnings call. In April, we successfully completed our dual primary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, marking another key milestone following our listing on the NYSE last year. Our dual primary listing further demands our solid foundation for the sustainable and the long-term growth of the company.

In the first quarter, aligned with our community ecosystem comes first strategy. We continue to cultivate fulfilling content in various verticals. Our sense of fulfillment approach and algorithm combined with refined analysis of the needs and the characteristics of our core user groups has continued to enhance our understanding of users and help us more precisely meet their needs. At the same time, our iterated tools, creator operations and support helps further encourage content creation.

The combined effect of the above, effectively work to boost the sustained vitality and the rational prosperity of our community ecosystem. During the first quarter, our average MAUs grew by 19.4% year-over-year to RMB101.6 million, with over 96% being mobile MAUs. Affected by our strategy of creating a better community ecosystem, starting from January, we have continued to improve user experience by optimizing recommendation algorithm. We have also actively implemented initiatives to better manage content which is incompatible with our sense of procurement content standards, including content that is filed, irrelevant and friendly and spending content. As a result and as anticipated, we saw a slight pullback in overall user growth in the first quarter compared with peak levels in previous quarters. However, at the same time, we witnessed notable growth in user engagement and the retention due to the enhanced user experience on our platform.