Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for 36Kr Holdings Incorporation's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to your host, Jing Li, IR manager of the company. Please go ahead, Jing. Tha nk you.
Thank you very much. Hello, everyone, welcome to 36Kr Holdings first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. The company's financial and operational results were released early today and have been made available online. You can also view the earnings press release by visiting the IR section of our website at ir.36kr.com. Participants on today's call will include our Co-Chairman and CEO, Mr. Dagang Feng, and our Vice President of Finance and Capital Markets, Mr. Lin Wei. Mr. Feng will start the call by providing an overview of the company and performance highlights of the quarter in Chi nese, followed by an English interpretation. Lin Wei will then provide details of the company's financial results before opening the call for your questions.
Before we continue, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company's results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in the company's prospectus and other public filings as filed with the U.S. SEC. The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law. Please note that 36Kr's earnings press release and this conference call include discussion of unaudited GAAP financial measures as well as un audited non-GAAP financial measures. 36Kr's press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to the unaudited GAAP measure.
Please note that all amount numbers are in CNY. I will now turn the call over to our Co-Chairman and CEO, Mr. Dagang Feng. Paul, please go ahead.
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Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today.
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As we venture further into 2021, China's economy is gearing up for a new normal after steadily emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, we are steadily regaining growth momentum and focusing on our core competitiveness as a leading platform for new economy growth-focused business content and service offerings in China. With continued long-term investment in our content, product, and technology, we believe we are well-positioned to seize the immense commercialization opportunities in the digital transformation of traditional enterprises, the rise of enterprise service markets, the further integration of private equity and public equity markets, and the shift toward short form video across digital content industry for the unlocking values of our customers, users, and investors.
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During the first quarter, we once again delivered record-setting performance in total user traffic, with average monthly PVs jumping to a new high of 829.3 million, representing a 75% year-over-year increase and a 32% sequential climb. This strong metric represents a 12th consecutive quarter of PV growth, underscoring our exceptional ability to generate new economy content appealing to a broader and growing audience base.
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Echoing the growth in our traffic and user engagement, demand for advertisers continued to demonstrate growth momentum in the first quarter. We are delighted to achieve a 55% year-over-year jump in advertising revenue amid increase in both the number of advertising customers and average revenue per advertising customer compared with the same period of 2020.
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Our existing and emerging advertising segments both recovered at a fast pace, propelling us toward a more comprehensive marketing service model. In addition to multinational corporations. Domestic brands and internet giants. Our advertising clientele have covered more verticals such as healthcare, artificial intelligence, and social networking. We are pleased to see 36Kr is increasingly become the go-to partner for fast-growing new economy companies as well as elite brands.
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During the first quarter, we continue to refine our content platform and our product offerings, which are the foundation of our commercialization. Our content platform strategy remains intact as we are dedicated to further strengthening our content quality, depth, and diversity through both PGC and UGC. Our professional produced content continues to enjoy high popularity and unparalleled word-of-mouth effect. We publish a number of insightful analysis reports, timely market updates as well as thought-provoking editorials and commentaries every single day. As a content platform, we also endeavor to attract and cultivate more quality content creators and continuously expand our content genre in order to cover more niche markets and a broad user demographics.
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In addition to our proprietary platform, we continue to leverage external resources to expand our user reach. We now work with almost all major third-party platforms, including WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and most recently, Xiaohongshu. In the first quarter, there were over 160 pieces of content published on 36Kr WeChat official accounts that have gained readership of over 100,000 times each. In addition, our newly launched WeChat account, O'YOUTH, customized for the younger generation and their lifestyle and business trends, is well received by the audience, with a fast-growing number of followers.
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Furthermore, we are enhancing our capabilities in video and audio content forms to broaden our offering matchups and resonate with a wider user base, especially the younger generation. During the first quarter, our live streaming and short-form video content initiatives continued to see additional user traffic growth. Specifically, our self-produced video content gained further traction with over 4.4 million followers on the third-party traffic platforms at the end of first quarter, up 53% sequentially. We attracted more than 647,000 followers on Bilibili, with our video content garnering over 16 million total views. On Douyin, our Kr Finance account attracted around 3.6 million followers, spurred by our high performance trend-setting video content. Recently, we also created a content distribution account on Xiaohongshu, and we are excited to have witnessed fast follower growth on this new channel as our short-form video content continues to gain popularity.
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In terms of commercialization of video content, we have entered into collaborations with a variety of elite brands, including Yili, Ping An, Huawei, and HP for video marketing services. Moreover, we are expanding our audio-based content, integrating multiple forms including text, image, video, audio, and live streaming, all of which are aimed to providing customers with a comprehensive array of content marketing solutions.
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On the product front, in the first quarter, we continued to upgrade our 36Kr APP in an effort to cultivate our organic and proprietary user growth. We added new iOS desktop widget features to the 36Kr APP, providing users with a more accessible and easy-to-use way to discover and browse content. We also enabled a new tab function on our 36Kr APP for users to access live streaming content on our own mobile APP to deliver a smoother content viewing experience across our platform. For the first quarter of 2021, the average content consumption per person on the 36Kr APP increased by nearly 40% on a year-over-year basis.
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Last but not least, we recently launched a brand new public equity markets product. Over the years, 36Kr has accumulated rich experience and expertise in serving new economy companies and private equity market participants. It's a natural extension to provide services for the professional public equity markets sector, and building on our proven accomplishments, we believe we can replicate this success with relevant public equity market content and grasp new opportunities in this tremendous market. Our content and service offerings across pre and post IPO companies exhibited rapid growth with positive market feedback. This strong performance reinforces confidence in our ability to drive growth in this promising field.
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I'd like to share some color on progress we have made with new initiatives across the enterprise services business space.
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We are excited to have made meaningful strides in our enterprise service review portal, beta launched last year in a bid to build a digital destination to discover and select enterprise services in China. The review portal has showcased over 3,000 enterprise service applications as of March 31st, 2021. More specifically, the review platform launched a ranking of business intelligence software on a rolling basis in spring 2021, featuring leading companies and industry experts in the BI space and prompting comments on various BI products from hundreds of enterprise customers. We also arranged exclusive meetings for BI software brands and enterprise customers to facilitate potential procurement transactions.
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In addition, we are working diligently to extend our value added enterprise service offerings to more cities and regions in China to ride the wave of digital transformation. We are confident that our geographic expansion initiatives will bolster our ability to scale up our enterprise services, especially in partnership with local governments and value chain resources. In this spirit, during the first quarter, we pivoted to develop the collaborative opportunities between enterprises and local governments in Henan, Shandong, and Hunan. To date, we have expanded our footprint into top cities, including emerging megacities like Hangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Guangzhou, and we plan to expand to more provinces over time.
These efforts supported our capabilities to build up a multi-faceted and dynamic enterprise service ecosystem, inspiring new economy driven development across the nation through our engaging and valuable content, as well as our comprehensive service offerings.
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The development of the internet in China has been slowly changing its economic system as digital technologies have been redefining more and more economic activities. This includes digital information, digital merchandise, and digital finance, as well as an increasing share of business activities going digital. The Covid-19 crisis has especially accelerated digital transformation across a wider range of business activities. We believe that within the next 20 years, all economic activities will irreversibly go digital. Our internet companies and traditional companies will irreversibly evolve to new economy companies. We see huge opportunities emerging in the digital transformation journey across the world. Keeping this in mind, we are poised to step up our strategic efforts to grasp the growth potential.
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On May 11th, we hosted our China Fund Partners Future Summit in Shenzhen, attracting hundreds of mainstream investment institutions, which included first-tier LPs, international investment bankers, and globally well-known LP funds. This flagship summit featured a keynote on the dynamic opportunities and challenges facing venture capital and LP markets, bringing insights to our customers and users. On May 12th, also in Shenzhen, we hosted the 2021 WISE Innovation Leader Conference, dozens of industry KOLs, leading companies, and analysts attending the event, focused on themes surrounding new technology, new consumer, and new healthcare sectors.
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Moving on to our subscription services. With a firm commitment to serving the six major communities of China's new economy, our subscription services have successfully engaged enterprises, governmental agencies, and capital across the country. For example, our iconic membership product, Ali, Speedway Star Class, brings direct resource support from the government for startups. This type of support was put in practice during the first quarter in Tianjin and Fujian, Guangdong.
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In summary, looking ahead to 2021, we believe demand for 36Kr and its diverse service offerings from a growing base of new economy participants will continue to thrive in the fast-evolving digital business context. As a go-to content and service platform in the Chinese new economy space, we will continue to diversify our products and service offerings as well as boost our community and user base. While exploring new growth avenues to enhance monetization, we are confident that our long-term fundamentals position us well to forge ahead in new business development.
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With that, I'll now turn the call over to our VP of Finance and Capital Markets, Ms. Lin Wei, who will discuss our key financial results. Please go ahead, Lin.
Thank you, Paul. Hello, everyone. Our first quarter results got the year off to a solid start. As Feng mentioned earlier, the rebound in market demand underpinned a strong 58% year-over-year growth in our advertising revenues in the first quarter. As we continue to shift our resources and focus towards higher margin businesses, we saw substantial year-over-year increase in both gross profit and gross profit margin. Net loss narrowed substantially in this quarter compared to the same period of last year. Going forward, we remain dedicated to building on our content strengths and growing monetization channels to seize immense new economy opportunities. I'd like to walk you through more details on our first quarter 2021 financial results.
Online advertising services revenue increased by 58% to CNY 33.2 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to CNY 21 million in the same period of last year. The increase was primarily attributable to the strong recovery and growth of market demand in the first quarter of 2021. Enterprise value-added services revenue were RMB 6.9 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB 42.8 million in the same period of last year. The decrease was primarily because we continuously shifted our focus toward higher margin businesses, and starting from this quarter, we ceased to act as a principal in certain low gross margin businesses and only acted as an agent. As a result, revenues of such businesses were recognized on a net basis from this quarter onwards.
To increase comparability of operating results and help investors better understand our business performance and operating trends, we introduced the gross transaction value as a supplemental metric to describe our business. Gross transaction value of enterprise value-added services was CNY 32.5 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to CNY 42.8 million in the same period last year. Subscription services revenue increased by 154% year-over-year to CNY 3.4 million. The increase was primarily attributable to the growth in institutional investor and enterprise subscription services. Total revenues were CNY 43.5 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to CNY 65.2 million in the same period of last year. This is mainly due to the aforementioned change of revenue recognition for our enterprise value-added services, where there's a CNY 25.6 million variance between net revenues and gross transaction value.
If you do the math, you will see actually our overall business trend is upward and demonstrated solid year-over-year growth. Cost of revenues decreased by 66% year-over-year to CNY 20.2 million in the first quarter of 2021. The decrease was primarily because we continuously shifted our focus toward higher gross margin businesses, as we mentioned earlier in the enterprise value-added service section. Gross profit was RMB 23.4 million in the first quarter of 2021, representing a 329% increase year-over-year. Gross profit margin was 63.7% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to 8.4% in the same period of last year. Operating expenses were RMB 64.8 million in the first quarter of 2021, representing a 37% decrease year-over-year.
This was mainly due to the decrease in G&A expenses in the first quarter of 2021. Sales and marketing expenses were RMB 35.7 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB 34.9 million in the same period last year. G&A expenses were RMB 20.2 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB 59.3 million in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily attributable to the decrease in the allowance for doubtful accounts and share-based compensation expenses. Research and development expenses were RMB9 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB8.5 million in the same period last year. The increase was primarily attributable to the increase in payroll-related expenses, partially offset by the decrease in share-based compensation expenses.
Share-based compensation expenses recognized in cost of revenues, sales and marketing expenses, research and development expenses, as well as G&A expenses totaled RMB2.7 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB13 million in the same period of last year. Net loss was RMB40.5 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB95.9 million in the same period of last year. Non-GAAP adjusted net loss was RMB37.8 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB82.9 million in the same period of last year. Net loss attributable to 36Kr Holdings ordinary shareholders was RMB 39.5 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB 95.4 million in the same period of last year.
B asic and diluted net loss per share were both RMB 0.038 in the first quarter of 2021 compared to RMB 0.093 in the same period of last year. As of March 31st, 2021, the company had cash equivalents, and short-term investments of RMB 174.1 million compared to RMB 209.2 million as of December 31st, 2020. The decrease was mainly attributable to an equity investment we made in the first quarter of 2021 with a total cash consideration of approximately RMB 30 million. This concludes our prepared remarks today. We will now open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. Participants who wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the pound or hash key. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, if you wish to ask a question to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your question in English. Thank you. Once again, it's star one on your telephone to ask your question. Thank you. We have the first question from the line of Vincent Yu from Needham & Company . Please go ahead. Vincent, your line is open. You can ask your question now. Once again, Vincent from Needham & Company, your line is open. You can ask your question now. Thank you.
Thank you management for taking my question. I have two questions. First question is, can management share the comment on overall market recovery in first quarter 2021 and have we seen any chance that we can share for the rest of the year? Second question is, can I share a comment on the client's spend with 36Kr? It was mentioned that some international clients have reduced their spending. Have they returned and how is the overall spending and engagement by clients this quarter? Yes. Thank you management.
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As the worst of the pandemic appears to be behind us, we are seeing solid economic recovery and greater improvements across various industries. More specifically, a few new economy companies spearheaded the growth in the aftermath of the pandemic. As such, our advertising business gathered strong momentum in the first quarter, with year-over-year revenue growth of 58%. Advertising services for new economy customers continued to grow, both in terms of number of advertising customers and average revenue per advertising customer. We achieved more than 100% growth each in advertising services for several verticals, such as consumer and lifestyle, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and healthcare. In particular, advertising services for healthcare customers delivered explosive growth. We are actively managing to tap into rising opportunities in the artificial intelligence and healthcare space and attract new customers.
Looking forward to 2021, we expect advertisement demand from branded customers, especially multinational brands, to increase compared with last year.
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Okay, I'll do a quick translation. We categorize our advertising customers into traditional customers and new economy customers. The multinational companies account for the majority of traditional customers. In the first quarter, we saw average revenue per traditional customer increase 11% year-over-year. Since the first quarter is traditional slow season for advertising demand, we expect average revenue per traditional customer to see substantial year-over-year growth in the following quarters. Along this global recovery from the pandemic, we saw advertising demand from multinational customers rapidly rebound. We also saw stronger growth in advertising needs from domestic new economy companies, such as those in the new consumer and AI sectors.
Meanwhile, we are making progress in improving our advertising products, such as video advertisement to attract more customers. Some consumer brands have higher interest in this kind of product, as they would like to reach out to more new customers with exposure to 36Kr's video content. The additional customers who are rebuilding their brands expect to complete a transformation of brand identity by leveraging 36Kr's video advertising products. In this regard, 36Kr has become an important partner for traditional brands that are in their transition towards new economy companies. Thank you.
Thank you. We have our next question from the line of John Ding from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good evening, management. I have a question here on behalf of Kenneth Fong . Can you comment on this quarter's gross profit margin in relation to the business change in nature and also the outlook for the GPM in 2021? I understand the circumstances that they've changed the accounting recognition to the net basis and also the business for enterprise value-added services is shifting from the role of principal to the agent. Thank you, management.
Hi, John. This is Lin. I will take your question. Yes, you can see that our Q1 gross margin actually was a substantial increase compared to the same period last year. Our gross margin climbed to 64% this quarter compared to 8.4% last year. I think there are a couple of reasons here. First of all, obviously, we have been shifting our focus towards higher margin businesses, as was said earlier, and also we implementing some cost control measures. Altogether, this helped our gross profit and gross profit margin to increase. Secondly, as you also mentioned that starting from this quarter, we starting to recognize net revenue for our enterprise value-added services. This will not affect our gross profit, but it will definitely help increase our gross profit margin to some extent.
I also want to highlight that, as you mentioned, yes, we changed the revenue recognition for our enterprise value-added services revenue from this quarter onward. Actually, if you take that into consideration and if you do the math, you will see that our overall business trend is upwards compared to the same period last year and have demonstrated solid growth. The reason, as we explained in our earnings release as well as in our prepared remarks, is because we shifted our focus and resources to higher margin business. As a result, for some lower margin businesses, we only act as an agent and where previously we act as a principal in these businesses. That's why we started to recognize net revenue for those businesses.
Also for your question on the outlook of gross margin trend for the remainder of the year 2021, I can assure you that our gross margin will be on a continuous improvement trend for the rest of the year. Hope this answers your question. Thank you.
Sure. Thank you. That's very helpful .
Thank you. We have our next question from the line of Shahan Zhao from CICC. Please go ahead.
[Non-English content] I will translate myself quickly. Could the management share more color on the details and future strategy of the new product, such as enterprise service review portal? Thank you.
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Okay. I'll do a quick translation. Our enterprise service review portal has been our latest attempt in the field of enterprise value-added services. We beta launched it last year in our B2B digital destination to discover and select enterprise services in China. The review portal has showcased more than 3,000 enterprise service applications, many in the field of BI, CRM, and collaborative tools. This year, we expect more enterprise service suppliers to come to our platform. By addressing enterprises' digital transformation demands, we aim to further leverage our stellar brand , high-quality content offerings, and data insights to provide enterprise service providers with a platform to acquire customers. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Can we move to the next question?
Yes, please.
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Jay Deng from GH Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Just management for the same question. I have one question here. How is the process of public equity markets for us? Thank you.
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We recently launched a brand new public equity markets product, providing thought-provoking editorials and commentaries, insightful analysis reports, and premium offline activities to participants in the public equity markets, including pre-IPO companies, listed companies, funds, and securities companies. Our public equity markets product has gained popularity since its launch, which proves our ability to drive growth in this promising field. We are confident this new product will become a classic product in content and service offering field, which strengthens our current content and service offerings in the private market, and extends to a broader field. We believe in the great potential in the public equity markets. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Can we move to the next question?
Yes, please.
Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Peipei Qiu from Industrial Securities. Please go ahead.
[Non-English content] I'll translate my question. Her management, I have a question about the short video business. Could you explain more about the monetization from your short video infrastructure, and is it a combination of advertising and enterprise service? Thank you.
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I'll do a quick translation. We launched our short-form video initiatives within a year, we are happy to see that we are gaining a growing number of followers on our accounts on Bilibili, Douyin and recently in Xiaohongshu. I'll share some numbers of our current short-term videos. During the first quarter, our self-operated video content gained over 4.4 million followers on the third-party traffic platform at the end of the first quarter, up 53% sequentially. We attracted more than 647,000 followers on Bilibili, with our video content gathering over 16 million total views. On Douyin, our Kr Finance account attracted around 3.6 million followers through our high-performance trend-setting video content. Recently, we also created a content distribution account on Xiaohongshu. Currently, we have cooperated with some A-list brands, for example, like Ali, Ping An, Huawei, and HP.
Our current monetization model for our short-form video is mainly advertising, but we will expand our current services to a more comprehensive service, including training and consulting services for our customers to better serve their needs in this new economy content space. Thank you.
Can we mute? Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Li from AMTD. Please go ahead.
Hey. Hello. Thanks for taking my question. I want to know more about the enterprise services, how the progress of your offline activities and which industry will be the most attractive or the popular this year. Thanks.
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Okay, I'll do a quick translation. Our offline events are recovering rapidly. Recently in May, we successfully hosted China Fund Partners Future Summit and the 2021 WISE Innovation Leader Conference in Shenzhen, where we discussed investments and financing trends in the private and public equity markets, as well as the latest industry trends in three major fields, including 5G technology, new consumer, and healthcare. We also made the events accessible via livestream and received positive feedback and recognition from many event attendees. We see various sectors picking up digital transformation, including digital information, digital merchandise, digital service, and digital finance. We think within the next 20 years, most of the business activities will irreversibly go digital. As the broader business development goes digital, it will generate tremendous opportunities.
Moving to the hot industries, we think new consumer is the most hot industry and has attracted a lot of attention from the capital. 5G technology, healthcare, and new infrastructure healthcare are gaining lots of attention across capital markets. 36Kr stands at the frontier of new economy focused information, and remains committed to providing more value to new economy constituents with high-quality content offerings and value-added services. We think we can provide better services to our clients and customers in the new economy digital space. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. As there are no further questions now, I would like to turn the call back to the company for any closing remarks. Thank you.
Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact 36Kr's investor relations through the contact information provided on our website.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you.