Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Ltd

NASDAQ:KC

Earnings Call Analysis

Company's Strong Fiscal Year Caps with AI Focus

In 2023, the company doubled its adjusted gross profit to RMB 860 million and significantly improved its margins, with a full-year adjusted gross margin of 12.2%, up 6.8 percentage points from 5.4% in 2022. The fourth quarter saw revenues surge to RMB 1.72 billion, up 66% quarter-over-quarter, alongside a record high adjusted gross margin of 15.2%. Normalized adjusted EBITDA improved to negative 3.4% for the year, marking a significant recovery from negative 8.9% in 2022. The company's strategy to optimize revenue mix and enhance cost controls has led to sustained profitability improvements. It has secured a loan facility agreement for AI business development, reflecting long-term confidence and commitment to innovation.

Kingsoft Cloud's Strides in Profitability and Innovation in 2023

Kingsoft Cloud has reported a year of progressive achievements in 2023, characterized by a substantial improvement in adjusted gross margins, climbing to 12.2%, a notable rise from the previous year's 5.4%. The company recorded a near doubling of its adjusted gross profit to RMB 860 million from 2022's RMB 445 million. A significant betterment was also observed in normalized adjusted EBITDA, improving from negative 8.9% in 2022 to negative 3.4%. The focus on technological innovations, strategic business adjustments, and embracing the AI era has laid a strong foundation for sustainable development aimed at continuing profitability improvements.

Fourth Quarter Reveals Sustained Growth and Strategic Adjustments

The fourth quarter of 2023 was particularly impressive, with a 66.0% quarter-over-quarter revenue increase, totaling RMB 1.72 billion. The adjusted gross margin for this quarter rose by 3.1 percentage points to 15.2%, marking an ongoing trend of enhancement for the sixth consecutive quarter. In the public cloud segment, revenues climbed by 3.5% quarter-over-quarter; however, excluding the CDN business, this growth was a robust 11.8%. A strategic restructuring of the CDN business saw a nearly 10% quarterly revenue decrease, effectively reducing reliance on the largest CDN customer to 12% of total revenue. Enterprise cloud services also saw a revenue increase of 10.2% quarter-over-quarter, with significant contributions from public service space, healthcare, and financial services, hinting at a well-diversified and resilient business model.

Financial Steadiness and Operational Efficiency in Q4 2023

The strength of Kingsoft Cloud’s operations is notable in its financial results for Q4 2023, where it achieved an adjusted gross profit of RMB 262.5 million, a 55.8% growth year-over-year. The company's normalized adjusted EBITDA margin improved considerably from a negative 10.2% in the previous year to a negative 1.6%. With a meticulous approach toward cost control and project quality, the company witnessed decreased costs across various segments, reflecting diligent expense management and contractual renegotiations aimed at elevating profit margins and operational efficiencies.

Optimistic Outlook for Margin Expansion and AI Development in 2024

Looking forward to 2024, Kingsoft Cloud’s strategic priorities are set to drive continued margin expansion and leverage growth opportunities in AI. The margin improvement drivers include changes in CDN business mix, renegotiated supplier contracts, and procurement of high-quality projects. These initiatives are expected to contribute to gross margin improvements, with the company aiming for quarter-over-quarter expansion. Additionally, the pursuit of operational excellence is set to narrow EBITDA margin losses, with a focus on human capital cost management and internal efficiencies. The company's proactive AI investments, supported by a RMB 1.5 billion loan facility from Kingsoft Corporation and capital expenditure of RMB 1,415.8 million, demonstrate a strong commitment to positioning itself at the forefront of the AI revolution, with a continuous positive trend in profitability anticipated larger than RMB 60 billion in 2024.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Kingsoft Cloud's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Please note that, today's conference is being recorded.I would now like to hand the conference over to Nicole Shan, IR Manager of Kingsoft Cloud. Please go ahead.

[Nicole Shan, executive]

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. The Kingsoft Cloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year earnings release was distributed earlier today and is available on our IR website at ir.ksyun.com, as well as our GlobeNewswire services.On the call today from Kingsoft Cloud, we have our Vice Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zou Tao; and CFO, Mr. Haijian He. Mr. Zou will review our business strategies, operations, and the company highlights; followed by Mr. He, who will discuss the financials and guidance. They will be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session that follows.There will be consecutive interpretations. All interpretations are for your convenience and reference purposes only. In case of any discrepancy, the management's statement in the original language will prevail.Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.These forward-looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.Further information regarding this and other risks, uncertainties or factors are included in the company's filings with the U.S. SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable law. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all financial figures mentioned during this conference call are denominated in RMB.It's now my pleasure to introduce our Vice Chairman and CEO, Mr. Zou. Please go ahead, Zou.

[Tao Zou, executive]

[Interpreted] Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining Kingsoft Cloud's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings call. In 2023, we continued to uphold the principle of high quality and sustainable development and accomplished significant achievements. For the full year of 2023, adjusted gross margin was 12.2%, a significant increase of 6.8 percentage points, up from 5.4% in 2022.Adjusted gross profit was RMB 860 million, almost doubling the amount of RMB 445 million in 2022. Normalized adjusted EBITDA was negative 3.4%, another significant improvement from negative 8.9% in 2022.During the year, we start to building our success based on technology and innovations, forging our reputation throughout the entire business process, enhancing our operations management, and building inner strength. We have been strategically adjusting our business mix and proactively embracing the new AI era, therefore laying solid foundations to long-term sustainable development in 2024 and beyond.Now, I will walk you through the business highlights for fourth quarter 2023. This quarter, we achieved dual improvement in both our revenue and profitability measures. In particular, total revenues reached RMB 1.72 billion, increasing 66.0% quarter-over-quarter. Adjusted gross margin recorded a major increase of 3.1 percentage points quarter-over-quarter to 15.2%, marking the sixth quarter of consecutive improvement.Adjusted gross profits reached RMB 262 million, increasing 55.8% year-over-year. Normalized adjusted EBITDA margin was negative 1.6%, representing a significant improvement of 8.5 percentage points year-over-year.In terms of public cloud services, revenues were RMB 1.05 billion, representing an increase of 3.5% quarter-over-quarter. Excluding CDN business, public cloud revenue increased by 11.8% quarter-over-quarter. We bear fruits on our 3 priorities for public cloud services, namely the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, AI business, and CDN strategic adjustments.First of all, as the sole strategic cloud platform within the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, we continue to serve the demands in the ecosystem well, especially with respect to the highly visible and tangible demands in training and inference from Xiaomi EV and WPS AI, seizing opportunities in structural industry trends. This quarter, revenues contributed by Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem reached 16%, representing an increase of 5 percentage points year-over-year.Secondly, we vigorously developed our AI business with remarkable agility to emerging industry trends. Besides the AI opportunities from the Xiaomi and Kingsoft ecosystem, we have been fully penetrating leading independent AI companies in China, providing long-term secured high-performance computing power, which is highly sought after in the market.Our AI business represented approximately 8% to our public cloud revenues, or an increase of 82% quarter-over-quarter. Besides, we have signed a loan facility agreement with Kingsoft Corporation, obtaining a credit line of RMB 1.5 billion, dedicating to the development of AI business.Thirdly, we continued to push forward our strategic adjustments of CDN business. This quarter, CDN revenue decreased by nearly 10% compared to last quarter, and CDN revenue as a proportion of total revenue has decreased to approximately 23%. The revenue share of our largest CDN customer was 12% in this quarter. Top customer concentration has been fundamentally alleviated.Moving on to enterprise cloud services. Total revenues were RMB 617 million, increasing by 10.2% quarter-over-quarter. In public service space, we actively seized opportunities of public services cloud and SASAC cloud. We implemented standardized operation and maintenance with core components such as large language model, big data, and workspace collaboration, targeting use cases in public service and enterprise application domains.With Beijing, Wuhan, and Zhuhai as our bases, we have built benchmark projects radiating to other large and medium-sized cities. This quarter, we successfully joined hands with Shenzhen State-Owned Assets Cloud to facilitate the digitalization and intelligent evolution of local state-owned enterprises.In healthcare space, we continued to promote the 5 business models and make new breakthroughs. Inheriting and developing experience from the cooperation with Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, we replicated and scaled our medical digital capabilities to more renowned hospitals, including Wuhan Union Hospital, Zhongnan Hospital affiliated to Wuhan University, and the Fuwai Hospital affiliated to Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.In financial services space, we continued to deepen our business cooperation with large state-owned banks, improving our big data products and service capabilities, and win the bid of big data platform projects for leading state-owned banks and trusts.Turning to Camelot, during the quarter, Camelot exhibited stable and healthy revenue and profitability, signing up 4 new customers while maintaining robust relationships with existing major clients.In terms of product and technology, we uphold our principle of building success based on technology and innovation, delivering best-in-class customer experience across our core product offerings.In computing space, we continue to upgrade our core products, focusing on improving stability and domestic environment compatibility. This quarter, we launched our elastic bare-metal compute product, EPC X7, with significantly improved computing, memory, network, and storage performance.In storage space, to better serve high-performance use cases, such as decoupling of computing and storage, AI, computer graphic rendering. We have released the extreme version of object storage service, equipped with high-performance, dynamic scaling, and out-of-the-box features.In big data space, we upgraded our cloud-native Lakehouse platform with maximum throughput improvement by 4x for batch processing tasks, better supporting use cases of autonomous driving, AI, and data models.In enterprise cloud space, our Galaxy Stack platform ranked in the market leader quadrant of both the private cloud market and the private cloud system platform market. In the research report released by CCID Consulting, a great recognition of the products and services capabilities.This quarter, Galaxy Stack platform released another update version, adding 6 cloud products and more than 100 functions, perfecting the comprehensive enterprise cloud system which powers our end-to-end service of cloud building, cloud migration, cloud usage, and cloud management.In terms of AI, our MassMutual Trust dedicated zone solution was awarded the most innovative AI solution by China Internet Economy Forum 2023. Our AI product center deepened research cooperation with Kingsoft Office to strengthen model research capabilities and serve enterprise use cases.Moving on to talent strategy, Wuhan Research Center has been quickly expanding. By the end of 2023, total employees in Wuhan exceeded 500, accounting for 1/3 of total R&D teams, and half of them hold graduate degrees. Our Beijing-Wuhan dual R&D center strategy attracts talent for our long-term development and ensures R&D intensity as we stick to our build success based on technology and innovations principle, while managing R&D expenses effectively.In summary, we have achieved great milestones in executing high-quality and sustainable development strategies, with our profitability measures improving continuously. Looking forward, we will keep our original aspirations and long-term strategies to create value to our customers and society through our business services, embrace AI opportunities, and continue to improve our profitability.Leading with increasing management efficiency, we will keep imposing strict cost and expense control, enhance talent training, and expansion of Wuhan Research Center, and further improve the company's operating efficiency.I will now pass the call over to our CFO, Henry, to go over our financials for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023. Thank you.

[Haijian He, executive]

Thank you, Mr. Zou. Thank you. And I welcome everyone for joining the call. Now, I will walk you through the financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023. Upholding the strategy of a high-quality and sustainable development, we are pleased to close the year 2023 with meaningful milestones on enhancement of revenue quality, margin expansion, and operating efficiency. For the fourth quarter, we deliver another quarter of steady profitability improvement. Our adjusted gross profit continued to grow for the sixth consecutive quarter and achieved RMB 262.5 million, increased by 55.8% year-over-year, representing adjusted gross margin of 15.2%, which is a record high for the company and significantly improved 3.1 percentage points compared with last quarter.Our normalized adjusted EBITDA narrowed from negative RMB 216.3 million in the same period of last year and a negative RMB 44.1 million in the last quarter to negative RMB 27.7 million this quarter.As a result, normalized adjusted EBITDA margin further narrowed from negative 10.2% in the same period last year and a negative 2.7% in the last quarter to negative 1.6% this quarter. Our total revenue were RMB 1,722.5 million this quarter, increased by 6% sequentially. Of which revenues from public cloud services were RMB 1,052 million, representing an increase of 3.5% compared with RMB 1,016.6 million in the last quarter. The increase was primarily due to the expansion from AI-related revenues and partially offset by our strategic scaling down of our CDM business by approximately 10% quarter-over-quarter, contributing around 23% of total revenues.Revenues from enterprise cloud services were RMB 670.3 million, representing an increase of 10.2% from RMB 608.5 million in the last quarter, as more projects are scheduled for delivery towards the end of the year. We continue to enhance our cost control measures. Especially in Q4, we refined the procurement process of CDM business. Total cost of revenues decreased by 25.4% year-over-year to RMB 1,469.3 million.IDC cost decreased significantly by 30% year-over-year from RMB 1,057.6 million to RMB 740.4 million this quarter. The decrease was in line with our adjustments with CDN services. Depreciation and amortization cost decreased by 39.2% from RMB 241.7 million to RMB 146.9 million. The decrease was mainly due to previous impairments of our long-lived assets.Solution development and services costs increased by 8%, from RMB 465.8 million to RMB 502.9 million this quarter. This increase was mainly due to business expansion of Camelot. Fulfillment costs and other costs were RMB 9.4 million and RMB 69.7 million this quarter, which are in line with our enterprise cloud project quality control strategy.Adjusted growth profit of this quarter increased by 55.8% year-over-year to RMB 262.5 million, representing adjusted growth margin of 15.2% this quarter, compared with 7.9% in the same period of last year and 12.1% last quarter, making another record high, as well as a sixth consecutive quarter of steady margin improvement.In terms of expenses, excluding share-based compensation and impairment of long-lived assets, our total adjusted operating expenses were RMB 494.8 million, decreased by 32.2% year-over-year, and 1.9% from last quarter, of which our adjusted R&D expenses were RMB 162.5 million, decreased by 13.2% from last quarter.As we continue to focus on utilizing our Beijing Wuhan dual research center and welcome new graduate campus recruiting employees, adjusted selling and marketing expenses were RMB 106.7 million, representing a decrease of 6.5% from RMB 114.1 million last quarter.Adjusted G&A expenses increased by 11.1% from RMB 203.1 million last quarter to RMB 225.6 million. The increase was mainly due to the year-end payment to vendors. As of December 31, 2023, our cash and cash equivalents and long-term investments amounted to RMB 2.3 billion, providing us sufficient liquidity for operations. We have entered into a loan facility agreement with Kingsoft Corporation with a cap of RMB 1.5 billion. It will dedicatedly support our AI business development and it will demonstrate the confidence and commitment of our ecosystem in bringing the future of AI.The capital expenditure for this quarter was RMB 1,415.8 million as we invested in our infrastructure to build a sustainable AI business. Our operating cash flow once again recorded a net inflow reaching RMB 16.8 million. Since the second quarter this year, we have been generating net inflow for 3 consecutive quarters. It resulted from our margin improvements as well as our enhanced internal cash management.For the full year 2023, our total revenue was RMB 7,047.5 million. Non-GAAP gross profit increased to RMB 859.9 million in 2023, almost doubled from RMB 445.2 million in 2022.Non-GAAP gross margin increased to 12.2% in 2023 from 5.4% in 2022. Such increases was primarily because of optimization of revenue mix and our effective cost controls, testifying the success of our high-quality and sustainable development strategy.Non-GAAP EBITDA was negative RMB 242.1 million compared with negative RMB 726.2 million in 2022. Non-GAAP EBITDA margin was negative 3.4%, compared with negative 8.9% in 2022.Looking ahead, we believe the positive trend in profitability will persist as we continue to pursue a high-quality and sustainable development strategy and unlock synergies within the Xiaomi and Kingsoft Group ecosystems, as well as integrate our AI technology and ecosystem in the new era. Thank you.

[Nicole Shan, executive]

This concludes our prepared remarks. Thank you for your attention. We are now happy to take your questions. Please ask your questions in both Mandarin and English, if possible. Operator, please go ahead. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We are now going to proceed with our first question. And the questions come from the line of Xiaodan Zhang from CICC.

[Xiaodan Zhang, analyst]

[Foreign Language] My first question is regarding the AI strategy. So, the company has been actively investing in AI for the past year. Could management give us some color on the market competency of your AI-related products and solutions, as well as on this year's CapEx plan and revenue expectations?And my second question is on our gross margin. So KC has achieved significant gross margin improvement last year, partially attributable to the change in your revenue mix. So as your CDM business adjustment is approaching the end, what do you think of the gross margin improvement pace going onward?

[Haijian He, executive]

[Interpreted] I think in terms of the margin expansion, I think there are 3 fundamental drivers for the margins. I think you point out correctly, the first one obviously is the continuous mix change of the CDM business versus others. So, as you see that the CDM business itself actually going through a cycle, but right now we are in a kind of more stable period that we are going to see a potential stability to CDM revenue contribution as well as the client usage pattern that will contribute naturally to a margin expansion. I think that's contributed 1/3 of the margin improvement.The second thing I also want to mention, probably you didn't notice, I want to point out is So our measures and the new management initiatives, for example, including renegotiation, the supply chain contracts with our suppliers to cutting down the cost basis, that actually is not happening on 1 day or a single month of the year, as you can expect. It actually spent over, for example, the full year from last year, right, and those contracts and the repricing on a cost basis will be effective on a rolling basis, right, from January to December of last year. And you're actually extrapolating those trends towards 2024. Those good benefits and the positive impact from the renegotiation and the lower-cost basis will actually carry the continuous benefits to our margin and cost into 2024. I think that part will contribute in the second 1/3 of the margin expansion.The third is also you probably didn't notice is really about we actually as Tao Zou mentioned in the prepared remarks is getting the better quality of the projects, not only about the cloud project itself but also on the enterprise side as well as those verticals, including the financial service healthcare and certain high quality public cloud projects as well. And those projects as we signed the contract some of them are doing it by clause. And that will be unleashed and delivered in 2024.And in history, especially in 2023, we're actually seeing the good experience and good trends that those enterprise cloud projects, the single-level contract revenue contribution has expanded from, let's say, mid-single digits in history a few years ago to double-digits. And right now, we are seeing those trends actually continue to be improved. So the enterprise cloud margin expansion and high quality initiatives and the strategy we set since 2022 has already seen some good results. So this part actually contributing the last 1/3 of the margin expansion.So to conclude, I think we do see a positive trend even though I understand, Xiaodan, your concern may be in Q4. You do see a very good Q-on-Q jump of the margin about 3 percentage points, but I think we are in a very good momentum and in a confident way that in Q1 and going forward, given the 3 reasons I just mentioned, our gross margin will continue to be seeing a good result going forward.

[Tao Zou, executive]

[Interpreted] So, allow me to also translate for the first question. So the first question is about the competitiveness of our AI products. So as you correctly commented, indeed in the last year, we have comprehensively worked very hard on expanding our AI business. However, it would be hard and less prudent for me to directly comment on the competitiveness of our AI products versus other of our peers. However, I would say that because of our unique positioning of our neutrality and independence, we have, if you look at it from the results, we have become a preferred choice of cloud service provider by a large amount of independent AI, large language model AI companies. And that is exactly because we don't do our large language model and build our large language model ourselves. And therefore, in this round of opportunities, we have seen as a result, we are already covering a significant number of independent AI companies becoming our customers.And you also asked about the future investment in terms of CapEx. I would say that, the rule of thumb is we will be continue to investing based on the demand and the pipeline of the customers we have. However, the specifics, as regards to the specific amount and specific dollar amount and the tempo of such investment, it's relatively difficult for me to comment at this stage.

[Nicole Shan, executive]

Operator, please go ahead.

[Operator]

We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Daley Li from Bank of America Securities.

[Huiqun Li, analyst]

[Foreign Language] I have 2 questions. The first one is about the AI business. Could you share some color about the supply and demand trend recently? And how do we see the growth drivers for the AI public cloud business going forward and the key drivers?And secondly, my second question about the margin trend. Looking into 2024, how do we see the margins, such as the adjusted EBITDA margin and some costs, like the share-based competition cost trend?

[Tao Zou, executive]

[Interpreted] Yes, you mentioned that the situation of demand for GPU chips more than supply, which has been the key thing for last year. And that is why during the past year, we have also been trying our best to meet the client's, our customers' demand. Well, the situation this year, there's some changes, right? On one hand, the reduction of some made-in-China chips have been alleviating to some extent of the issue. However, we have also seen other factors, especially geographic tension factors, deteriorating the situation.So overall speaking, we see that since the AI market is still booming and demand continues to increase, the overall theme of the demand and supply balance is still that the demand is largely exceeding the data of the supply. And we do not expect that kind of relationship to have any material change in the near-term future.Now, in terms of our responses strategy to this situation, on one hand is that, we're working with some of the firms that have computing powers within China to building a dedicated computing power zone together. And the second thing that we do is to follow up with new products that are within the compliance premises that are allowed to supply in China market.And in terms of growth drivers, there are basically 2 types of growth drivers. One is old comers, the existing or let's say old customers, which are mainly characterized by the independent AI large language model customers that we have been serving recently. And the second type is new customers, which are typically not the independent AI large language model companies. However, those companies that are ready to leverage the capability of large language models to empower their existing business, for example, EV customers.Currently, we see that the growth driver coming from existing customers to taking a high proportion. However, we do expect that in the future, the potential for new customers' demand has higher growth potential. And Mr. Liu Tao, our SVP, also added that, there are several types of growth drivers. One is the Internet companies training their own models and using their in-house models and by using the inference capability of the computer power to use their in-house models. And secondly is the advance and the launch of Sora that leading to a wave of demand coming from the video side of things. And the third part would be the new companies like Mr. Liu Tao mentioned, EV, autonomous driving kind of demand. Thank you.

[Haijian He, executive]

[Interpreted] So I will take on the second question. I appreciate your notice on the expansion on the margin side. So I think there are a few kind of major directions we're trying to achieve going forward at the same time. First of all, is we're too aiming to keep a Q-on-Q expansion on the growth margin side. So this actually is driven by the cost cutting on the supply chains and the better automation on the resources we have and cutting certain loss-making computing regions and certain disposal for certain equipments that we don't think are fitting to today's client requirements. So all the combination of actions were contributing to the margin expansion of the growth margin.And as I explained to the first question, those efforts have already been in place and we're going to see those impacts will be gradually delivered going forward next few quarter as well. So the first, as I mentioned, is really about expansion on a Q-on-Q basis on the gross margin.So the second part is really about narrow and better managing the expenses and operation expenses, including, for example, the better management of the human capital costs, including the internal efficiency and the streaming line, all the internal management initiatives, that were actually well contributing for the expansion of the EBITDA margin.So as you can see, our expenses between the line of the gross margin and the EBITDA margin continue to optimize and reduce as well in the past few quarter's. So that has proven the management team has already got some good experience and practiced those skills pretty well, and we think we can carry on that in the next few quarters. So our second aim is to improve the EBITDA margin on a continuous basis. So we are confident to see as we make our efforts, our EBITDA margin will be getting to approaching the break-even in a short term of time.And the third is we're also adding to another KPI for ourselves in terms of internal management. We're trying to not only making the EBITDA margin break even, but we're also trying to make the company with the better quality of revenue and a continuous optimized revenue mix and picking the right clients and also expanding the AI exposures. We'll be in a very good position to have the possibility to see a good trend of OP margin expansion as well. So I think these are the 3 goals we are trying to achieve in 2024.While we are not in a position today to give a clear guidance about the timing of the EBITDA margin break-even as well as the profitability on OP margin side, we are confident to say that all initiatives in place will see that in good results going forward in the next few quarters probably we can observe.And to a question with the SBC cost. One thing I want to note is that, based on the accounting rules, the SBC cost was booked based on the share price at the time when the ESOP and the shares was granted to the employees, not on the vesting period of time. So when the share price was high, those costs will be booked and amortized in the next few years. So I don't think given the volatility of the capital markets for many of the shares today, The SBC line is reflecting the true value, i.e., the market value of the ESOP value we granted to the employees. So those values will need to be revisited and recalculated, if you want to do a model.But putting all things together, the company has adopted a very prudent way of granting and investing the shares, as you may see from the announcements. And also we're extending third investing schedules to keep the company employee working a bit longer and with a better incentive. So as you can see, from 2022 to 2023, our SBC cost has declined from roughly RMB 360 million in 2022 to drop about half to RMB 180 million in 2023.So I think we are with a prudent attitude from issuing, granting, and investing the ESOP. And I think going forward, you're going to see a better and a narrower line between the GAAP and non-GAAP margin as well.

[Nicole Shan, executive]

Thanks, operator. We'll invite the last question, please.

[Operator]

We are now going to proceed with our last question. And the questions come from the line of Eunice Liu from Goldman Sachs.

[Yucen Liu, analyst]

[Foreign Language] I will quickly translate myself. Could management talk about the strategic planning for enterprise cloud in 2024? And the second question is, we have seen some news of peers' price competition in public cloud in early 2024, and could management tell us more about the latest competitive landscape and also Kingsoft cloud's comparative advantages?

[Tao Zou, executive]

[Interpreted] I think that is a very good question. And we have been conducting internal discussions around exactly the question you raised. So, a few opportunities I would like to share with you. The first one is you might have noted that recently a large number of digital asset companies across China has been established. And that basically led to a wave of state-owned asset companies migrating onto cloud and using more cloud.And the second, which I think is probably a large opportunity that is happening this year, is the measure of digital assets showing on the balance sheet. And we should call this year of 2024 to be the first year of this opportunity because of the government policy recently promulgated. We have also been making communications with the Shanghai Digital Asset Exchange, and also with professional parties, for example, like auditing firms.We do think that it represents a significant opportunity for cloud service companies and for us, because all of these digital assets will be running on the cloud infrastructure and digital assets and those data assets cannot run by itself. So in our words, it's the integration of cloud service and digital assets. So all this whole chain of data production, of data transaction, et cetera, are going to be supported by the cloud, and therefore all of this represents opportunities for us. So, it's not opportunity with respect to any particular industry, but a general, probably a larger opportunity that we can expect to see in recent years.So the second question relates to the price competition in the market. So I would like to share with you 2 of my core views. The first one is we have actually been experiencing price pressure since the day of our founding. Every year we have been seeing different kinds of price pressure coming from various of our peers in different kinds of products. However, at the end of the day, we do not really see any of those price cuts by our peers have any material or significant impact to the market. And from our own performance results, we have also achieved for 6 consecutive quarters of profitability improvement.Now, I would like to say that, we think the reason for that is pricing obviously is one important factor for customers to consider. However, it is far from the most important factor. And from our own experience, and also as evidenced by our achievements in the past 6 quarters, focusing on the satisfaction of customers is actually the most important thing.And I would also like to say that, my view about this kind of large amount of price cuts by our peers is more towards the end of marketing and PR measures. In fact, some of these price cuts are based on catalog price. However, a lot of the transaction price that cloud service providers have agreed with potential customers are already deeply discounted and already way below the price cut level that we are seeing today.And also, our SVP, Liu Tao also added that, this round of price cuts from up here mainly focuses on the customers, which are relatively small in scale and are paying their cloud usage fees on an annual basis and this group of customers actually do not overlap with the customers that Kingsoft Cloud enjoys. And therefore, it does not have any material impact to our pricing strategy or our business performance.

[Nicole Shan, executive]

Thank you. Operator?

[Operator]

We have no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand back to Nicole Shan for closing remarks.

[Nicole Shan, executive]

Thank you once again, for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Have a nice day. Thank you.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you, and have a good day.[Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]