Kakaku.com Inc

TSE:2371

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Shonosuke Hata, executive]

Good afternoon. I'm Shonosuke Hata, President of Kakaku.com. I would now like to explain our financial results for the first quarter.

First, please refer to Page 3 of the presentation for an overview of our consolidated business results for the first quarter. Revenue was JPY 12,021 million and operating profit was JPY 4,012 million, which is a 26.5% increase in revenue and an 81.6% increase in operating profit compared to last year. Profit attributable to owners of the parent company for the year was JPY 275 million, an increase of 93.9% from the previous year. In the first quarter of last year, we were very much affected by coronavirus pandemic. So there are a few figures to refer to in comparison to last year. In the first quarter of this fiscal year, revenue progressed at a rate of 20.4%, and operating profit progressed at a rate of 17% compared to the disclosed forecast. Sales by each segment will be explained later in this presentation.

Next, on Page 4, a breakdown of consolidated operating expenses. First, in advertising expenses, T-point-related expenses in the Tabelog business increased and advertising expenses in the Kakaku.com business decreased. This refers mainly to a comparison with the first quarter of last year. So if you look at it in the comparison with the third and fourth quarter of the fiscal year just ended, you will see that both advertising and commission expenses decreased in line with the decline in sales of Tabelog. In addition, personnel expenses increased slightly in this first quarter. This is a result of the fact that hiring, including new graduates, went smoothly even under these circumstances.

Next, please refer to the graph and table on Page 6, which shows a quarterly trend by business. I will report on the sales of each of these later, but largely the sales ratio of new media and solutions and finance as a whole has increased to 23.7% in the first quarter. However, it does not mean that the sales of New Media and solutions and finance have grown dramatically, but is rather the result of the decline in sales of Tabelog.

Next, I will explain operating results by business segment. As you can see on Slide 7, compared to last year, Kakaku.com was down 9.1%. Tabelog was up 116.4%, and the New Media and Solutions and Finance was up 57.5%. Revenue for the Kakaku.com business decreased by 9.1% compared to the first quarter of last year, when online shopping sales grew significantly due to special demand following the declaration of the first state of emergency. As for Tabelog, sales were up by 116.4% compared to last year, when revenue from contracts with restaurants in April and May was almost 0. New Media and Solutions and Finance performed very well in the first quarter, mainly in the recruiting and real estate domains.

Now let's take a closer look at the Kakaku.com segment. First, on Page 8, you can see the sales trend of the shopping business compared to the first quarter of last year, which was marked by special demand, both durables and consumables saw a decline of 21.4% and 20.3%, respectively, on the right side, where it says comparison of customer referrals in the shopping business, the bar graph shows last year's and this year's demand as compared to pre-COVID demand that is in the first quarter of fiscal year ended March 2020, shown as a dotted red line. The number of customer referrals for laptop computers is decreasing, partly because of the ongoing shortage of semiconductors and sales of office chairs for which there was a special demand in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic last year are decreasing.

Next, Slide #9, the Service business. In the first quarter of this year, the personal finance category was down 3.8%. Telecommunications was down 8.3%, and automotive-related category was down 3.4%. Although the situation differs from municipality to municipality, this segment has been strongly affected by the ongoing state of emergency and sales associated with outing-related consumption have not increased easily.

Next, on Page 10, we have Kakaku.com's advertising business. As you can see in the graph on the left, banner and tie-in ads have increased by 29%. Although network advertising was down by 20.6%, overall advertising sales were up 17.8% compared to the previous year. If you look at the sales growth rate by manufacturer on the right, compared to the first quarter of last year, advertising sales from consumer electronics-related products increased by 36% and advertising sales from PC-related products increased by 11%. However, shortages of semiconductors, especially for PCs and home appliances continue to persist, and we expect the situation to remain unpredictable.

Next, I will report on the Tabelog business. On Page 11, you can see the number of fee-paying restaurants on the left side. This quarter was also affected by the declaration of the state of emergency, and the overall number of fee-paying restaurants has slightly decreased, including the expiration of contracts, however, if you look at the blue area at the top of this breakdown, you will see that the number of restaurants subscribing to the online reservation campaign plan has steadily increased from 10,300 stores to 10,900 stores in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter of last year. The number of online reservations on the right side shows that 4.19 million people made reservations online in the first quarter as people refrained from dining out due to the state of emergency declaration and the increase in the number of impacted people. This is a slight decrease from the fourth quarter of last year. And since this is partly due to seasonality, it is not possible to make a general comparison, but the situation is still weak. There were more than double the number of online reservations than in the first quarter of last year, but the number was slightly lower than in the second quarter of last year.

Page 12 shows the number of restaurants and ARPU for the fixed fee and performance-based fee contracts. The number of fee-paying restaurants is the same as the slide I just showed you on Page 11, broken down by fixed and performance-based portions. The ARPU for the fixed fee and on the right side is almost proportional to the number of online reservations that I just showed you on Page 11, although the parameters are slightly different. The fixed ARPU on the left side has increased slightly compared to the fourth quarter of last year. This indicates that contract cancellations for the JPY 50,000 and JPY 100,000 plans as well as downgrading has settled down and that the number of new contracts for JPY 25,000 plan increased more than those with JPY 4,000 to JPY 10,000 plan.

Next, on Page 13, are the results of the Tabelog advertising business. Sales increased 21% year-on-year, indicating a better trend than the first quarter of the previous year. However, as the number of advertisements placed was lower than in the second, third and fourth quarter of last year, we are still waiting for a recovery in the restaurant industry as a whole, as is the case with Tabelog overall.

Continuing on with New Media and Solutions and Finance on Page 14. This segment has been strong overall. Sales in the recruiting domain increased by 91.8%, shown in the blue area on the top in the graph, and sales in the real estate domain increased by 29.4%, both compared to last year. In terms of the Travel and Transportation domain, we are still far from a full recovery, but compared to the first quarter of last year, we saw an increase of 229%, which means that it is gradually returning. As for the Hobbies and Entertainment domain, although the revival of the entertainment industry, including movies, is still midway, sales were up 57.5% compared to the previous year, which is a gradual recovery even if it is not 100% compared to the previous year's level. As for the Finance segment, which is the insurance business of Kakaku.com Insurance, at the bottom of the graph, continued to perform well with a 21.5% increase over the previous year.

Next, on Page 15, I will explain about the Kyujin Box business. As shown in the graph on the left, the number of users and sales has continued to grow, not only compared to the previous year, but also to the previous quarter. However, the fourth quarter has seasonally high demand for jobs. So the increase remains small compared to that. This growth trend is clearly different from the fourth quarter of the year before last. And the first quarter of last year, as we see this business continue to grow beyond seasonality, the number of ad placements on the right side is also up 80.9% compared to last year. There are many factors at play here, but I hope you can understand that our sales activities and client acquisition are going very well.

Next, on Page 16, we have Sumaity, our real estate website. As for Sumaity, the graph on the left shows that sales increased by 29.4% compared to the previous year. The seasonal demand in the fourth quarter is particularly large for the real estate industry. So sales were lower than in the previous quarter, but the range was narrower than in previous years. Therefore, I think we can say that this first quarter was also very favorable. In addition, for Sumaity, revenue from search for rental apartments accounts for most of sales. However, we are now strengthening our business in categories other than renting, including the purchase of new and used houses, the sale of houses, rental management and property management. Sales in these categories have increased by 104.7% compared to the previous year.

Next is the Travel domain. Please have a look at Page 17 of the presentation. The Travel domain consists of LCL bus comparison sites, time design, which offers a dynamic packaging platform for booking hotels and flights and for travel and online travel media. The table on the left shows the sales trends of each business. Each of them has grown dramatically since the first quarter of last year, but if you compare these results with the year before last, you can see that the market has not yet returned to half of what it was. Even under these circumstances, for time design, shown at the right, the number of contracts with overseas hotels is steadily increasing. In the fourth quarter of last year, the number of contracted hotels was 118, but it has grown to 133 with the addition of 15 hotels in this quarter.

Continuing on Page 18, we have the Entertainment and Hobbies domain with eiga.com, gaie, Kinarino and web CG. Kinarino, second from the bottom in the chart on the left, increased by 27.6% compared to the previous year, which was very strong. The dark blue and light blue figures above are for eiga.com and gaie, which have increased by 99.7% and 124.6%, respectively. And if you combine them, sales were doubled from the previous year. However, compared to the year before last, the recovery is not yet complete. For movies, in particular, the release of major movies has been postponed for quite a while. So there are still many advertisements that have yet to materialize.

Finally, on Page 19, we have Kakaku.com Insurance. Kakaku.com Insurance has continued to see an increase in demand for online insurance policy comparison and applications resulting in a 21.5% increase in sales compared to last year. The graph on the right shows the number of online insurance consultations, which has grown about 7x compared to last year, partly due to the shift to a digital shift in the market and the fact that it was during the period of the coronavirus pandemic.

This concludes my overview of the results of the first quarter.

Moving on for future initiatives, please refer to Page 21, the section on Kakaku.com. Kakaku.com is continuing to make improvements to the site, expanding information and making it more convenient to use. In particular, from this fiscal year onward, we will enhance the functions of the website by adding information on eco-friendly and sustainable products, environmental labels and various other information as shown on the right, to make it easier for consumers to choose eco-friendly products.

Next, on Page 22, the initiatives for Tabelog. This chart is the same as the one we showed you last year, but we have made a lot of progress in the testing of Tabelog Mall for takeout and delivery in Tabelog, and we are getting ready to expand the scope of these services. In the area of procurement for restaurants, the number of restaurants using the service has increased considerably, and the business is expanding steadily, including the period under the coronavirus pandemic.

Then on Page 23 are the future initiatives for Kyujin Box. Kyujin Box has seen an increase in the number of users. However, the site itself is still incomplete in terms of the content we want to create. So there is still a lot of work to be done to make the site easier to use, more informative and improve the functions. This page shows that we still have a lot of work to do.

Moving on to Page 24. First, on the left side, as I mentioned earlier, Sumaity will expand its real estate information beyond the renting category to generate sales on that side as well. We are also working on improving the content of the site to make it even easier to use, for example, by identifying and consolidating multiple listings of the same property. On the right-hand side of this page for time design, in addition to the increase in the number of contracted partners, including overseas hotels, as I mentioned earlier, our current dynamic package solution currently consists of reservations at a single hotel and airline tickets, but we are going to increase combinations with other means of transportation, such as trains and buses. In addition to single hotels, we would also like to expand our product line to include different combinations of hotels for those who are staying for consecutive nights in a certain area.

Finally, please see the slide on Page 25, which shows the future initiatives of Kakaku.com Insurance. We would like to add more and more user-friendly content, applications and functions to promote the digital shift, such as the personalized insurance evaluation tool scheduled for release in the second quarter of this fiscal year. This is our business policy. This is not necessarily our only business policy, but we will continue to increase our portfolio of New Media and Solutions and Finance as we have in the past. Currently, the sales ratio for New Media and Solutions and Finance is already over 20%. However, if the Travel business and Tabelog recover from the effect of the coronavirus pandemic and our entire business becomes normalized, the ratio would still be slightly less than 20%. Therefore, we would like to increase sales in New Media and Solutions and Finance, mainly through Kyujin Box and Sumaity so that the ratio of this segment exceeds 20% even when the other businesses recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

This concludes my presentation on the results for the first quarter. Thank you.