Futu Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:FUTU) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call November 19, 2024 7:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Daniel Yuan - Head, Strategy & Investor Relations
Leaf Li - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Arthur Chen - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Cindy Wang - China Renaissance
Chiyao Huang - MS
You Fan - CICC
Charles Zhou - UBS
Emma Xu - Bank of America Securities

Operator

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Futu Holdings Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host for today's conference call, Daniel Yuan, Chief of Staff to CEO, Head of Strategy and IR at Futu. Please go ahead, sir.

Daniel Yuan

Thanks, operator, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter 2024 earnings results.

Joining me on the call today are Mr. Leaf Li, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Arthur Chen, Chief Financial Officer; and Robin Xu, Senior Vice President.

As a reminder, today's call may include forward-looking statements, which represent the company's belief regarding future events, which by their nature are not certain and are outside of the company's control. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. We caution you that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. For more information about the potential risks and uncertainties, please refer to the company's filings with the SEC, including its annual report.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Leaf. Leaf will make his comments in Chinese, and I will translate.

Leaf Li

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] Thank you all for joining our earnings call today. We wrapped up the quarter with 154,000 net new paying clients, up 138% year-over-year and flattish quarter-over-quarter. Our total paying clients reached approximately 2.2 million, up 33% year-over-year. Three quarters into 2024, we have acquired 487,000 paying clients, and we expect full year growth to comfortably exceed our guidance of 550,000, thanks to resilient growth in established markets and strong momentum in newer ones.

[Foreign Language]

[Interpreted] As we continue to iterate on various client acquisition strategies and launched effective campaigns amid elevated market sentiments, client acquisition accelerated in Hong Kong and Singapore, which collectively contributed to over one-third of new paying clients. Three quarters in a row, Malaysia remained the top contributor of new paying clients among our southern markets. We're committed to further elevating our brand image in Malaysia and we've broadened product offerings to enhance our value proposition as a one-stop investment platform. In Japan, we made steady progress on client acquisition despite dwindling interest in Japan equities among retail investors amid market pullback in the third quarter.