Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Yiren Digital First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Lydia Yu. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Operator. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Today's call features the prepared remarks by the founder, chairman, and CEO of CreditEase, and our CEO, Mr. Ning Tang, and our CFO, Ms. Na Mei. Mr. Edward Wong, Head of our Consumer Finance, will join the presenters in the Q&A session. Before beginning, we would like to remind you that discussions during this call contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company results may be materially different than those expressed today. Further information regarding future risks, uncertainties, or factors is included in our filings with the U.S. SEC. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as required under the relevant law.
During this call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures and supplemental measures to review and assess our operating performance. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. For information about these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings press release. I will now pass it on to Ning, our CEO, for opening remarks.
Thank you all for joining our earnings conference call today. First, an update on our insurance brokerage business. Total gross premiums reached more than RMB 923 million, up 15% year-over-year, of which life and property insurance policies contributed 57% and 43% respectively. The increase was mainly driven by life insurance policies, which increased 28% year-over-year, significantly outpacing China's life insurance industry premium growth of 8.9%. Our strategy to drive rapid business growth continues to be product innovation, customization, agent development, and digitization. We are invested in our agents and have established programs to help them improve professional skills, to enable them to broaden their service scope, to cross-sell and upsell products and services, matching customers' evolving needs throughout their entire life cycle.
We noted initial success this quarter with a significant uptick in first-year life insurance premiums from existing property insurance policyholders. On property insurance, as mentioned on our last call, as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure development strategy, China's outbound investment and construction projects are expanding at a fast pace, bringing new scenarios for insurance protection and coverage. Hex iang, leveraging its advantages in product development, professional risk management expertise, reinsurance qualifications, as well as partner is now providing reinsurance for overseas construction insurance policies. We estimate the potential market size for this insurance segment to be at least RMB 10 billion. In the first quarter, total premiums for this product segment grew close to 30% quarter-over-quarter. We expect to see a continued increase over the rest of the year. Next, on the credit side.
In the first quarter of 2023, total loan volume was RMB 6.4 billion, representing a 39% increase year-over-year. Total number of borrowers in the quarter increased 71% from prior year to 872,000. The increase was primarily driven by our revolving loan product, Yix iangh ua, which actually saw volume increase 88% from prior year due to increasing demand. MAU on our Yix iangh ua platform is reaching close to 2.2 million users as of quarter end, increasing 8% from prior quarter. As our active user base on the platform continues to expand, we have also seen an uptick in our revenue from electronic commerce services, which we consider as risk-free revenue and includes services like recharging online video and streaming accounts and topping up phone credits.
These e-commerce services also present an opportunity to establish our own membership ecosystem, enhancing customer loyalty and engagement. On the funding front, as the number of our funding partners continue to grow, and we continue to diversify our funding sources, we noted a 16% decrease in institutional funding costs this quarter from prior year. On asset quality, we maintained a conservative risk management policy this quarter amid a slower than expected macro recovery, and we noted an improvement in delinquencies, with FPD 30+ delinquency rates improving to a historic low of 0.6%, compared to 0.7% last quarter. This quarter, we started to execute on our international expansion strategy, in which we hope to leverage our extensive expertise in the consumer finance sector to promote greater financial inclusion.
I'm very excited to report that we have completed establishing a wholly-owned subsidiary in the Philippines, which owns an online lending license and financing license from the nation's Securities and Exchange Commission. We recently beta launched under the brand, Easy Peso, and have experienced a substantial surge in demand since then, already accumulating over 190,000 registered users on our app. As of today, we have completed the facilitation of the first loan on the platform, and is conservatively controlling our scale while focusing first on refining and enhancing our risk models. We see enormous demand for financial services in these underserved emerging markets, we expect international markets to become a new growth driver for our business. Going forward, we plan to accelerate our pace of penetration in the Philippines, while investing in operational flows to increase automation and enhance cost efficiency.
At the same time, we will also start evaluating potential opportunities in other regions around the world. Recently, we've been witnessing the rise of ChatGPT and the generative AI technology, and we believe that the application of generative AI can disrupt and bring sweeping changes to the financial industry. This quarter, we established an AI Lab that will be focusing on utilizing ChatGPT, large language models, and generative AI technologies to develop applications in each of our business sectors. For example, using personalized chatbots to provide 24/ 7 customer service for our borrowers, or utilizing technology to help our agents increase cross-selling and upselling. With the launch of our AI Lab, we aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our operations, enhance user experience, and drive business growth. Lastly, I would like to say a few words about the management transition we have announced.
George is stepping down as CRO, and on behalf of the board, I would like to express my sincere thanks to George for his outstanding contributions to the company throughout these years. Concurrently, the board has selected Ms. Yang Bin to serve as the company's Chief Human Resources Officer. Together, we are excited to propel the company to new levels of success. With that, I will now pass it to Na, who will go through the financials for this quarter.
Thanks, Ning, and hello, everyone. On this call, I will only focus on the key financial highlights. Please refer to our earnings release and our deck for further details. In the first quarter of 2023, our total revenue reached RMB 986.3 million, representing a 14% increase year-over-year, and a slight decrease of 9% from prior quarter. The quarter-over-quarter decline was mainly driven by changes in our loan volume. Our total facilities this quarter was RMB 6.4 million, representing a 39% year-over-year growth and a 5% decline by prior quarter. The quarter-over-quarter change can be due to adjustments in product mix. Basically, we actually make adjustment to our small business loans, while we enhance ongoing growth in our small working loan sector.
Insurance has become a key revenue driver, contributing close to 20% our net revenue this quarter. Therefore, from starting from this quarter onwards, we'll be disclosing separate total gross premiums and the revenue from our insurance broker business. In the first quarter this year, gross rating premiums reached RMB 923.4 million, representing a 15% increase year-over-year, and a 31% decline from prior quarter. The quarter-over-quarter decline was mainly attributable to a decline in policy renewal, which impacted by timing of the first year premiums. Revenue from insurance broker business, which RMB 196.4 million for this quarter, representing an increase of 27% year-over-year, and remaining stable from prior quarters.
As the portion of our first year premium and the life insurance policy were both higher this quarter, thereby although with a revenue taking rate of a broker business increased accordingly. On the expense side, sales and marketing expense decreased to 40% to RMB 106 million from the same period last year, due to the optimization of our cost structure for our offline business and increase in portion of our revolving loan to existing customers. On the other hand, original and service cost increased to 31% year-over-year to RMB 200 million, mainly drive by increase of organization and the service costs related to our insurance broker business. Quarter-over-quarter, original and the service expense as a percentage of revenue for the insurance sector has remained stable at 15.8%. G&A decreased by 21% year-over-year to RMB 93 million.
Allowance for counter assets and the receivable was RMB 45 million for this quarter, remaining stable and the profit 0.7% of loan facility. Onto our bottom line, we continue to deliver a strong profit of RMB 427 million this quarter, increased 131% year-over-year, and representing a net income margin of 53%. We generated a profit RMB 390 million cash from operating in fourth quarter, an increase of 40% from prior quarter. Our total cash and cash equivalent was RMB 5.1 billion by the end of this quarter, compared to RMB 4.3 billion as of the year end of last year. With the gradual recovery of our macroeconomics, we will proactively seek out opportunities to allocate resources to new initiatives and the strategic investment, harbor technology innovation and foster business growth.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, we deployed around $2.5 million to pay back our shares in the public market. As of March 31st, 2023, the company has accumulated, deployed around close to $3 billion for our share repurchase program. Based on our assessment of business and the market condition, we've had our total revenue in the second quarter of this year is to be RMB 0.9 billion-RMB 1 billion, with that profit margin expected to remain stable. Of course, this is the price of cover and the preliminary review, which is subject to change and uncertainty. With that, we conclude our closed remarks. Operator, we'll now open for questions. Thank you.
Thank you. 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 cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Bruce Oren from New Haven Fund. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. First, I'd like to congratulate you on another outstanding quarter. I have two quick questions. Can you provide insight into whether the PRC government regards financial institutions like Yiren Digital favorably or unfavorably in the current political and economic climate? My second question is, are you considering offering a dividend to shareholders? Thank you.
Thank you for your question. Hello? Yeah, now, please go ahead.
Okay, Tang Ning, I think I can answer the second question, so the first question.
Go ahead. Go ahead, please.
Okay, okay. I will. Okay, thank you. I will answer the second question about our dividend and its line. Yes, you can see, we have purchased our share purchase supply from the last December of last year, and by now we have accumulated about $3 million to perform our share purchase. By now, for our management, for our cash deposits, we're mostly focused on seek of more opportunity to use our cash deposits to serve our own business and hope our business have the stable and growth, and have growth, and also want to increase our fund return ratio for now. By now, I can say the company has no different supply currently. For this question, can Tang Ning, if any abandonment to the question?
Okay, let me cover the first question. Thank you for your compliment, and we will continue to try our best, first of all. Regarding macro conditions, it's like you must know that the past several years, things have been quite dynamic. Y eah, for this sector, a lot of changes and, but now things have become much more stabilized. Yeah. The economy is recovering from the pandemic. Really, consumption is encouraged. Small business is encouraged. After the past few years of yeah, the dynamic period, we feel that recent macro environment is rather conducive to what we are doing. Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Matthew Larson from Fincadia. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking my call. Again, a terrific quarter. If I could give some advice to you all to bring greater recognition of your company. You know, you're trading at essentially 1 times earnings. If you make $0.70 a quarter, we can do the arithmetic, that's $2.80 a year, and that's greater than what the stock is trading at. Plus you have cash. I see your balance grew in north of over $700 million, and that's several times what your market cap is. I've got a couple questions. I mean, first of all, the news release should have said earnings up 100%, you know, versus just reporting the earnings. I mean, that catches people's eyes.
You mentioned in your report, an artificial intelligence initiative. If you would just say something like, you know, we embrace, you know, we've initiated an AI initiative, and we expect it to expand our business significantly. I mean, that alone would come up on people's screens, for U.S. investors as, you know, a rationale to invest in your company. If they computed the numbers and saw how undervalued you are versus your balance, versus your book value and your cash balance, I think that could get it higher. I assume you want your stock to go higher.
I mean, frankly, I worked at Morgan Stanley when you guys went public back in December 2015, when you were a peer-to-peer lender, and you exited that area because the government did not, the PRC government frowned upon that, and you've done a great job doing so, and you're making plenty of money. I think you got to get the word out there and being more detailed and frankly, a little more hyperbolic, you know, a little more, you know, animated in your news releases, I think would gain attention. Let me ask this though, after that, in detail, because I've been an investor for a long time, and I'm frustrated. This stock should be, you know, $6 or $7 minimum, if not a lot higher.
On June 30th, the PRC is going to be looking at companies that are capital light and are, you know, doing the 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?
I'll answer your question. Actually, for our lending business, we have the two model. One model is use our guarantee income. It means like the highway model. For the highway model, the loan value is in our balance sheet, as you know. The second model is the hiring, is the light model. That means that we just do the performance and the promotion and the reference as a sales channel to our funding partner. We just got our consulting revenue from our funding partner, and we don't have any guarantee responsibility. For this model, the loan volume is not in our balance sheet. Now we have both the two of this model. For the first model, if we take the guarantee responsibility, the loan will in our balance sheet.
All right, because I think that's really the issue, you know, to get licensed to make loans, one has to take the, some of the risk. 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 a balance sheet besides just being capital light. 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. Hello?
Na, are you taking this question?
Yeah. I mean, you have a lot of cash, RMB 700 million. What sort of interest are you earning on that?
Yeah, you can say we have.
I'm sorry?
Na, please go ahead.
Okay. Yeah, you can say we have the, we have about RMB 5.9 billion attractive deposits in our balance sheet. For our balance sheet, for our cash uses, we have, actually we have one, the profit is we have to deposit and cooperate with our funding partner to make some financial products to earn the financial income, the first income. The second is actually with as, from this year, we also for our cash usage, for example, we have cooperated with our trust companies to set up a trusted line for our own product, Yixianghua. There are some figure for your reference in the first quarter. Our own money set up the trust loan has already lent about RMB 300 million for our loan volume.
The transaction amount is targeted to about RMB 600 million by the end of the second quarter. We can use our own money to service our own products, and we are profit from the our own product like Yixianghua. Of course, we're still planning other investment initiatives, such as as Tang Ning mentioned in our script. We have overseas strategy. We'll also use our own money to explore the overseas opportunity. There's some expand data on our overseas go after the business strategy. Also, we will use our cash to attaching process on technology, innovative technology, as Tang Ning mentioned, that we have set up our AI Lab, and hopefully we are more expand data in the future as the technical.
Generally, we have, as a management, tried our best to seek more opportunities to increase our fund return ratio and keep our stable profit. Yeah.
Okay.
Let me add that it's really great to meet an old friend. You know, the past few years have been not easy for us and all the stakeholders around. I feel bad about, yeah, have not been able to, you know, produce great returns for some of the people who have trusted us. We will continue to double our efforts to do a good job. Yeah, I take your advice on making things more eye-catching, so on.
We didn't so highlight the AI initiative because we've seen many people just use it as like a marketing slogan, but we hope to really, yeah, utilize it in our daily work and achieve good, better numbers first. W ell, the point is well taken. We'll be more proactive in terms of communicating. Let me say a few words, I mean, about our strategy and how to win, you know, in the coming years, since you mentioned, like the stock price and so on.
I mean, the domestic lending business is high growth and profit- generating, although it's not top scale yet, but we are catching up. I believe in a few years time, we will be able to largely catch up. At the same time, we've been trying to do a very good job in insurance, yeah, which we like, and yeah, we've built a very good foundation for insurance. I think that will be a key differentiator. Another key growth driver strategy for us is some folks have done some work outside of China with yeah, some progress.
We believe, you know, after the pandemic, the field is good for us to get in, to do a good job outside of mainland China, and we've got started in the Philippines, but more to come. These are the building blocks, but we will try and do more, although we have no clear ideas other than utilizing AI as a tool to do the above things better.
We should have more ideas about how to really build the business. Thank you.
Okay, thanks for that oversight. I mean, literally, your stock should be a lot higher. I just think, like a lot of companies from the PRC, they fall below the radar because people in the U.S. have become disenchanted with a lot of companies. Yours, you know, it just trades well below your liquid assets. Now, you would in the past mention a share buyback, which would be very accretive, and it certainly would be helpful. I noticed that none were shares that looked like were purchased in the first quarter. You obviously have the money to do so. I mean, you could easily buy back $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million worth of stock. It would reduce your float, but, you know, what do you have to lose?
The stock is trapped in the $2 range. Do you expect to buy back any shares if you're not gonna do a dividend this quarter?
Na, you will take this question? I believe we keep doing share buyback.
Yeah, as I mentioned before, we perform our shares buyback from the December last year after the board approved. By now, we have used about $3 million to perform this purchase.
Was that $3 million? I'm sorry, Na. Did you say 3?
By today, we have used about $3 million to perform this. We will keep on our share buyback program because we have approved the $20 million amount from our board approved. We can use this approved amount step by step. That's generally, we'll keep on our share buyback until we use the rest amount. I think we will keep on this currently, the rest of this year.
Because the stock price is so low, you don't even have to be that sensitive to stock price. I mean, you could pay up, you know, to $3 or $4 a share. If you just put a bid in the market for 5 million shares, it would not only alert the investment community that there's a serious buyer, but it would be very accretive to you, since your book value is many times where it's trading at. It's a plus plus. I mean, with all the money you have, I can't imagine t here's too many better investments than your own stock.
Yeah, I know your concern, and thank you for your comments. I ask maybe some more further information to you about why how we perform our share buyback. Every day, the company can perform this shares amount is based on the U.S. rules regularly. As we agreed with our broker, actually, we have now, as you mentioned, seriously, pay back. We have automatic about our share purchase. As we communication with our broker, of course, our broker performs the share pay back based on the regular top. Yeah, we have to pay , we have purchases the largest amount according to the listing rule. You know, we are not seriously to pay back just because we must comply the rule basically.
We have the limited amount every day we can purchase from the market. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah, I know you're constricted by volume, but all right.
Yeah.
Listen, keep up the good work. I think you just got to get the message out to more investors because again, AI is a marketing tool by many companies, but you guys have been using some form of AI for years. That's how you make your credit decisions, you know, by using algorithms and things like that. I think you should promote it because it's valid and make it very clear that you've doubled your earnings year-over-year, and that you have, you know, complete upside. I think that a news release such as that would generate some interest here. Thank you for your time, and keep up the good work.
Thank you for the advice.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.