Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Futu Holdings fourth quarter and full- year 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I'd like to turn the conference over to your host for today's conference call, Daniel Yuan, Chief of Staff and Head of IR at Futu. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and full- year 2021 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 beliefs regarding future events, which by their nature are uncertain and are outside of the company's control and 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 registration statement. With that, I will now turn the call over to Leaf. Leaf will make his comments in Chinese, and I will translate.
Thank you all for joining our earnings call today. 2021 marked another year of rapid client base expansion as we exceeded our full- year of paying client guidance by adding approximately 728,000 paying clients. This brings our total paying clients to over 1.2 million, translating to 141% growth year-over-year. We added 77,000 paying clients in Q4, with about 90% of new paying clients coming from Hong Kong and other overseas markets. Paying client retention remained around 97% despite the negative impacts from a series of headline news. Looking into 2022, we are guiding for 200,000 net new paying clients, representing 16% year-over-year growth in total paying clients. We will dynamically adjust our growth target subject to market conditions.
Among the net additions, we expect roughly one-third to come from the Greater China region, one-third from Singapore, and one-third from the U.S. and Australia. Our client assets were HKD 408 billion, up 43% year-over-year and down 4% quarter-over-quarter. While a tumbled equities market and some headline news weighed on total asset balance, outside inflows remained positive in each market, totaling more than HKD 10 billion. In Singapore, strong asset inflow pushed our client assets up by 26% quarter-over-quarter despite a negative mark-to-market impact on their holding. Total trading volume was HKD 1.2 trillion, flattish year-over-year. Due to fewer trading days in the fourth quarter, total trading volume slipped 9% sequentially despite a higher turnover of 3.1 x. Trading volume for U.S. stocks was HKD 777 billion, up 14% quarter-over-quarter.
Driven by surging trading volume in some U.S. tech names, higher U.S. options trading volume, and higher trading volume from Singapore clients. Trading volume for Hong Kong stocks was HKD 403 billion, down 33% quarter-over-quarter due to dampened market sentiments, especially around Chinese tech stocks. Our wealth management business maintained resilient growth, with total client assets reaching around HKD 19 billion, up 84% year-over-year and 6% quarter-over-quarter. In Singapore, we have established partnerships with 20 fund houses, and we will continue to expand our mutual fund product offerings and services in the quarters to come. In Hong Kong, we established new partnerships with four prominent asset managers, including Fidelity and AXA. As of quarter end, approximately 140,000, or 11% of our paying clients, held wealth management positions.
In the fourth quarter, we launched auto-rebalancing function for our mutual fund portfolio product and distributed a flagship multi-asset hedge fund managed by a leading global alternative manager. Private fund asset balance, as a result, grew substantially by 120% quarter-over-quarter. We believe alternative assets are an integral source of diversification for our high-net-worth clients during market turmoil, and we intend to onboard more private funds in coming quarters. As of year-end, Futu I&E had 236 IPO and IR clients and 400 ESOP clients. Up 125% and 152% year-over-year, respectively. We acted as joint book managers for several high-profile Hong Kong IPOs, including that of SenseTime, to which we contributed over 20% of the retail subscribers and retail subscription.
As of quarter end, over 800 companies, including more than 200 listed companies with market capitalization above HKD 10 billion, held enterprise accounts in our social community to interact with retail investors. Thanks, Leaf and Daniel. I'd like to invite our CFO, Arthur, to discuss our financial performance.
Thanks, Leaf and Daniel. Please allow me to walk you through our financial performance in the fourth quarter. All the numbers are in Hong Kong dollar, unless otherwise noted. Our total revenue was HKD 1.6 billion, up 35% from HKD 1.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020. Ending a strong year, as full- year 2021 revenue grew 115% to over HKD 7 billion. Brokerage commission and the handling charge income was HKD 857 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year and a decrease of 8% Q-over-Q. The increase was driven by higher blended commission rate of 7 basis points. The blended commission rate expands as commission rate for U.S. equity rose year-over-year, and the direct trading contributed a higher proportion of brokerage commissions.
The Q-over-Q decrease was mainly due to lower trading volume for Hong Kong stocks. Interest income was HKD 618 million, an increase of 83% year-over-year, and a decrease of 2% Q-over-Q. The year-over-year increase was driven by higher margin financing income as a result of higher daily average margin financing balance. Other income was HKD 128 million, down 2% year-over-year and a 23% Q-over-Q. The year-over-year and the Q-over-Q decrease was both primarily due to lower IPO financing service charge income. Our total cost was HKD 217 million, a decrease of 10% from HKD 242 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Brokerage commission and handling charge expenses were $88 million, down 34% year-over-year and 30% Q-over-Q. The expenses didn't move in line with our brokerage commission and handling charge income due to our upgraded service package with our U.S. clearing house and the lower IPO subscription fees. Interest expenses were $56 million, down 14% year-over-year and 25% Q-over-Q. The year-over-year decrease was due to lower IPO financing interest expenses, partially offset by higher interest expenses associated with our securities borrowing and lending business. Interest expenses declined Q-over-Q, primarily due to lower lender funding costs. Processing and servicing costs were $74 million, up 65% year-over-year and 9% Q-over-Q. The increase was primarily due to higher cloud service fees to support overseas market expansion and to process a larger number of concurrent trades.
As a result, total gross profit was CNY 1.39 billion, an increase of 47% from CNY 944 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. Gross margin was 87% as compared to 80% in the fourth quarter of 2020. Operating expenses was up 127% year-over-year, and that's 8% Q- over- Q to CNY 826 million. To break it down, R&D expenses were CNY 271 million, up 64% year-over-year, and the 21% Q- over- Q. The increase was mainly due to increase in R&D headcount as we continue to support new product offerings, invest in the U.S. self-clearing capabilities, and to customize products for international markets.
Selling and marketing expenses was HKD 337 million, an increase of 200% year-over-year and a decrease of 16% Q- over- Q. The year-over-year increase was due to higher marketing and branding spending, especially in international markets. The expenses declined Q- over- Q as performance marketing spending came down amid dampened market sentiments. G&A expenses was HKD 218 million, up 145% year-over-year and up 59% Q- over- Q. The rise was primarily due to increase in headcount for G&A personnel with the opening of more international office. As a result, our net income decreased by 6% year-over-year and 19% Q- over- Q to HKD 499 million. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 12.9% and the net income margin was 31%.
In addition to $300 million share repurchase program previously announced on November 3, 2021, which we have completed in open market transactions. Our board has authorized a new share repurchase program enable us to purchase up to $500 million worth of our ADS until December 31, 2023. We plan to fund this repurchase from our current working capital. That conclude our prepared remarks. We'd now like to open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to withdraw your request, please press the pound or hash key. Please stand by while we compile the question and answer roster. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and please ask one question at a time. Our first question comes from Katherine Liu from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question.
Hi, management. Thank you very much, management, for giving me this opportunity to ask a question. I'm Katherine Liu from Morgan Stanley. I have two questions. First, can management give us some guidance in terms of the year-to-date operation results in terms of, for example, like new client addition, geographical breakdown of client assets and also turnover rate? Second, this is about the overseas market. Can management give us some guidance in terms of their plan and target for the Australian market and how they compare the Australian market with Singapore market? Also, is there any update in terms of U.S. self-clearing progress and also the expectations on revenue or profit making? Thank you.
Thank you, Katherine. This is Arthur. Maybe I can answer your last question first, then I will leave the first two questions to Leaf himself. In terms of self-clearing, so far, we have already migrate dollar value around 40% of our U.S. stock holdings from our upstream business partners to our own clearinghouse endeavors.
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In terms of business update, our client addition kind of slowed down a little bit this year due to the negative kind of equities market performance and a less active IPO market. But what's positive around that is that we don't see any lingering impact from the headline news on our client attrition and retention. To break down among different markets, I think our client acquisition in the Greater China region was largely stable. Although we saw new competitors entering into the market, we still have a very leading market position, and when there is uncertainties around the market performance and regulations, we'll employ a more steady growth strategy. In terms of Singapore, we have seen very healthy net asset inflow, which offsets the negative mark to market impact from the equities market downturn.
Our client acquisition in Singapore also slowed down due to negative market performance. In terms of trading turnover, it was largely stable. In terms of net asset inflow, it has rebounded from the 4Q numbers. The overall client assets still trended down a little bit due to the negative mark-to-market impact. In terms of product offerings, in Australia, we've launched the U.S. stock trading, Australian stock trading as well as ETF trading. Going forward, we'll continue to enrich our product offerings. As Arthur already mentioned, so for our self-clearing business, we've migrated about over 40%, close to 50% of our U.S. stock holdings to our self-clearing business, and we already see zero cost funding that's brought about by our clearing business.
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I'd like to talk a little bit about the competitive dynamics in Australia. On one hand, you see those incumbent players like CommSec and ANZ. Their commonality is that their trading account is seamlessly integrated with the bank account, and the bank to broker transfer is thus very smooth and seamless. But the disadvantage is that they typically charge pretty high commission rates and charge a fee for the idle account. On the other hand, you see those online brokers like SelfWealth and Stake. Their advantage is they have pretty low commission rates. They have very straightforward trading interfaces, but they generally lack more sophisticated trading functions, technical analysis, other analytical tools and also a very vibrant community.
These online brokers, they still kind of have a smaller kind of client base right now, roughly around like 200,000. As for us, we think that we have advantages in terms of our product offerings and in terms of our tech capabilities. Since we've just entered into the market, it's difficult to gauge market potential and where we'll come to share more results about our Australian operations next quarter.
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Thank you. Next question from Leon Qi from Daiwa Capital. Please ask your question.
Hi. Thanks for allowing me to ask a few questions. This is Leon Qi from Daiwa. I have two questions today. First one is about your user mix and AUM mix geographically. I appreciate that management just mentioned a very clear guidance on user acquisition targeting 2022 and the specific regional breakdowns on it. If we just take a longer time horizon strategically for the next three years, would you expect the overseas markets, I'm referring in particular to the markets except for Mainland China, to contribute to a much larger proportion of the users and AUMs?
Appreciate if management could give us a very high level color on that over a longer timeframe. The second question is about your user acquisition costs. I understand your user acquisition has been very successful over the past few years. Given the dramatic change in the market conditions over the past few months, well, naturally a lot of customers and potential customers are becoming more cautious. Would you keep spending your user acquisition dollars in a way that has been similar over the past few years? Or you will be considering some changes in the tactics that you are doing in a market that is less exciting, at least for the moment.
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Thank you for the question. Maybe I take this second question first. I will also leave the first question to Leaf. In terms of the marketing expenses, you're right. It is highly correlated to the market conditions, as everybody can understand. For 2022, we do expect our CAC for each new paying client will be in the range of around HKD 2500 something. And internally, we will have different parameters to evaluate the effectiveness of the client positions. Not only just, you know, the CAC numbers for each new paying client, but also we will more focusing on the payback period for this CAC. i.e. the client's effective ARPU versus CAC ratios. Depends on different markets.
For these more mature markets such as Greater China, this payback period will be controlled in the range of six to nine months as always. For some new markets, such as Singapore, Australia and the U.S., etc., we are more generous in this ratio because we think in the early stage, the user engagement is still the most importantly the things we need to consider. Besides, you know, this ratio, we will also look at the other ratio, that is the new client asset acquisition cost, i.e. how much money we need to pay for they, you know, migrate incremental new assets into our platform.
On an apple-to-apple basis, if we do not consider the market fluctuations year-to-date or which may continue in the next couple of quarters, we do expect, you know, our new client acquisition amount, this client net asset new inflow will be increased by 20%-20% versus the number at the end of last year. Thank you.
I think in three years' time, we expect the ratio of our paying clients from mainland China, Hong Kong, and other overseas markets to be around one to three to six. From a client asset perspective, this ratio will look more like two to three to five. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
All right. Thank you. Our next question comes from Zoey Zong from Jefferies. Please go ahead with your question.
Thanks management for taking my questions. I have two questions. My first question is that when will we launch our digital currency trading services? My second question is that among our paying clients, how much were acquired via ESOP? Thank you.
Sure. I will take these two questions. For the second question, actually, the new paying clients contributed by the ESOP channel just account for less low single digits for the fourth quarter. Of course, you can understand, you know, the IPO situations, the markets was not very strong in the fourth quarter and also year-to-date as well. For the crypto business, we are still doing the feasibility studies and also certain you know the license application. Therefore, we have not confirmed, we do not have a confirmed time schedule yet.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Tony Yao from CICC . Please go ahead with your question.
Hi management. Thanks for taking my question. This is Tony Yao from CICC. Congrats to our strong results in this challenging market. I'd like to ask two questions. The first one is regarding our business in the U.S. I'd like to know what's new about our customer acquisition strategy in the U.S. market, and what's our next move for business growth in the mid- to long-term? Secondly, during our business expansion in 2022, are we still expected to see a rapid growth in employment related expenses, as we had already seen such increase last year? Thanks.
Thanks, Tony. Maybe I can share some colors on our initial thoughts for the headcount increase for 2022. My colleagues, Robin Xu, can give you some, you know, more colors on our U.S. operation, and the U.S. marketing strategy going forward. For the overall headcount in 2022, we do look for another 20% year-over-year growth. This growth will primarily be deployed into our R&D functions and also the international market development. The reason behind for, you know, putting more staff into the R&D is we want to do a very significant system migrations, i.e. from our current infrastructure building on language C++ to language Go. We will also adopt a more cloud-native technology in our infrastructure. We are dedicated to assign a special task force to develop these two areas. We do expect this migration will be complete toward the end of this year.
After this completion, we expect our IT efficiency will be enhanced by 20%-30% down the road, and such migration will ensure our system stability and the scalability in the next three to five years. At the same time, it will significantly enhance the system flexibilities and lower the IT spending in the IDC and also the server. This annual IT spending saving will exceed HKD 100 million starting from 2024. Thank you.
As our client acquisition picked up in the fourth quarter, I think on one hand, that's because we continue to invest to improve our product experience, and we want to improve the conversion rate from the app downloads to registration, from registration to account opening, and then from account opening to asset deposit. Another reason is that as our ad spending in the U.S. market increases, our brand recognition has also risen in the past couple of quarters as a result. I think we need more time to continue to improve our client acquisition efficiency in the U.S. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Emma Xu from Bank of America Securities with further questions.
I have a question regarding the newly announced U.S. dollar $500 million repurchase program. It accounted for roughly 85% of the cash outstanding by fourth quarter 2021. So, is it because you didn't see much cash needed or much working capital needed for future investment? Or do you think that you can continue to generate enough cash to fund investment in the future?
Sure. Thank you for your question. This is Arthur . I can answer this question. Since our IPO, we have conducted three rounds of equity financings. Alongside with these fundings from the share placement, together with our user revenue generated every year, you know. At the end of last year, you can see our total net assets reached over $2.7 billion. We do think, you know, our capability to continue to generate profit and free cash flow will remain robust in the next one or two years. Considering our current market conditions and, you know, the funding needs for the organic growth, we do think, you know, now we have some idle cash which can be deployed and utilized to reward our long-term shareholders.
Having said that, we will continue to closely monitoring the potential any merger and acquisition situation if peer and also the valuation be attractive. It will be, you know, a share repurchase program covering the next almost 18 months. It will be very dependent on the market conditions and also the opportunities whether we can, you know, come across. Thank you.
All right. Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I'll turn the call back to Daniel for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. That concludes our call today. On behalf of the Futu management team, I'd like to thank you for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or any of our investor relations representatives. Thank you and goodbye.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating.