On May 22, Fasthand Technology (01024. HK) released its first quarter financial report as of March 31, 2024. Data shows that Fasthand's revenue in the first quarter of 2024 is 29.4 billion yuan, up 16.6% year on year. The gross profit margin rose from 46.4% to 54.8%, and the adjusted profit was 4.39 billion, up 10347.6% year on year, a new quarterly high.
In terms of core data, the first quarter saw 394 million fast DAUs (average daily active users), up 5.2% year on year; MAU (average monthly active users) reached 697 million, up 6.6% year on year; E-commerce commodity transactions totaled 288.073 billion yuan, up 28.2% year on year.
The growth of advertising and e-commerce distribution are the main reasons for the growth of fast selling performance in this quarter.
The financial report shows that the online marketing service revenue of Fasthand in the first quarter of 2024 was 16.65 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 27.4%, accounting for 56.6% of the total revenue, and 51.8% in the same period last year. The "other income" including e-commerce sub commission and information service fees was 4.183 billion yuan, compared with 2.834 billion yuan in the same period last year, accounting for 14.2% from 11.2% in the same period last year. In addition, affected by the optimization of revenue structure, the revenue of fast hand live broadcast in the first quarter was 8.575 billion yuan, down 8% year on year, accounting for 29.2% of the total revenue, and 37% in the same period last year.
According to the analysis of Everbright Securities Research Newspaper, except for the Spring Festival, the overall growth rate of new user acquisition in the first quarter of fast hand fell slightly in the non user peak season. However, from the perspective of the industry as a whole, the advertising business grew rapidly.
QuestMobile data shows that in 2023, the cost of online advertising in China will increase by 32.5% year on year, much faster than other forms of advertising. It is expected that the market share of e-commerce advertising will continue to expand in the future. Taking Tencent as an example, the advertising revenue in the first quarter was 26.5 billion yuan, up 26% year on year, mainly due to the growth of advertising business of video number, applet and WeChat search, while the revenue of advertising was not disclosed separately in terms of bytes.
In e-commerce, since 2023, Fast GMV (total commodity transactions) has broken through the trillion mark for the first time, reaching 1.18 trillion yuan, becoming the fifth e-commerce platform to enter the trillion scale after Taobao, JD, Pinduoduo and Diaoyin. But in China, fast hand still faces great challenges. With the start of the battle for market share, from 2024, Alibaba, JD, Tiaoyin E-commerce and other platforms will actively seek changes and constantly adjust, which will also bring a more competitive environment.
In addition, the friction with the head anchor has become a problem that fast hand needs to face. On May 19, the official of Xinxuan issued an apology statement, saying that its anchor Simba made improper remarks on the express platform in the live broadcast on April 20. The official of Xinxuan Group apologized for this. This year, Simba studio has been banned for many times. The reporter learned that Fasthand has started to support the middle and waist anchors and reduce the influence of single head big anchors.
In terms of overseas business, in the first quarter, the average daily use duration of each active user in the Fasthand overseas core development region increased year on year and month on month, with the average daily active user in Brazil increasing by 13% year on year. Overseas business income reached 991 million yuan, up 193.2% year on year. The overall operating loss of overseas business decreased by 67.4% year on year.
At the financial report conference, Cheng Yixiao, the founder and CEO of Fasthand Technology, said that in the first quarter of this year, the number of daily average payment users of Fasthand's local life increased nearly 9 times year-on-year, and the number of daily average dynamic sellers and commodities on the supply side increased 29% and 38% month on month respectively.
As for the progress in the field of large-scale models, Cheng Yixiao said, "On the basis of data and model architecture optimization in the pre training stage, we have made the comprehensive performance of 175 billion large-scale large-scale language models after update iteration approach the level of GPT4.0."
At present, the big model technology of Fasthand is mainly focused on serving the internal ecological business, such as AI interaction, improving the response accuracy of Fasthand, and launching multiple rounds of dialogue and image text functions. In terms of digital people and AIGC in business scenarios, the capability of fast hand big model covers short video, live broadcast, intelligent customer service and other scenarios.
On the same day, Fasthand announced the launch of a new round of share repurchase plan. The announcement showed that the amount of shares to be repurchased by Fasthand in the next three years would not exceed HK $16 billion from the end of the 2024 General Meeting of Shareholders. Up to now, Fast Hand has used approximately HK $3.09 billion of repurchases, and repurchased about 61.74 million shares, accounting for about 1.4% of the total share capital.
Hong Kong shares closed today, with the express share price of HK $58.15, up 2.2%.
