Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Limited (NASDAQ:KC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

However, I would say in terms of our overall deployment and response to this new era of AIGC, the results that we have achieved, including the contracts that we have signed, including the models, the solutions that we have launched are quite successful. In the longer — in the even longer term, we believe this will become — embracing the AI wholeheartedly will actually become the most of poor direction for Kingsoft Cloud and Kingsoft Group.

Nicole Shan: Operator, next question please.

Operator: Thank you. We’ll now move on to our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Timothy Zhao from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Timothy Zhao: [Foreign Language] Thank you management for taking my questions. I have two questions, one is regarding the gross profit margin as I see the gross margin of public cloud, enterprise cloud has been upward trend over the past few quarters and especially for enterprise cloud, the gross margin has achieved above 20% for the past two quarters. Could management further elaborate on the drivers for the gross margin behind that? And what is our updated view on the gross margin target for this year and in the mid-term? And secondly, and also regarding the enterprise cloud and the question is regarding the revenue, as I see the potential for the revenue has been in the declining mode slightly in the second quarter. Just wondering if there is any specific reason behind that and how should we look at the revenue trend into the second half this year. Thank you.

Henry He: Thank you, Tim, this is Henry. Happy to take on the first question and our CEO, Mr. Zou will take on the second one. So actually acknowledge the improvement of the gross margin of enterprise cloud business. Actually, there are few things we actually discussed this earlier about, you eventually see that trend, actually kept very stable and you see that improvement expansion, a few things, first of all is we talk about, is the right client selection process. So I think that actually the first and the beginning point that do the right business with right people and if you do look at our average revenue mix from enterprise cloud, we used to have some kind of heavyweights on the top clients with over RMB30 million or RMB40 million per contract.

But right now, we’re focused on the sweet spot around like RMB8 million to about RMB10 million per contract. So working on that range of the right clients, we have a better ability to control the cost and to make sure that all the receivables and cost control measures kind of actually finally deliver, I assume this is the first point. The second one is really about the repeating sales for the more standardized products. So we’re working very closely with our sales team and our R&D team as well. We will make sure that we not only work with one client or one product, but we want to — working with different clients with the same product. So I think that percentage, obviously, we didn’t disclose the number from last year to this year, the standardization of the products, services and solutions has been very important driver, that’s the second part and the third one is really about, I appreciate all the comments from the research analysts and our shareholders.

We’re actually moving up from the ICE TO PaaS level of services and in some cases, we’re actually working with client from SaaS level products, especially given the AI drivers and a new phenomenon. Hopefully we can actually go up a little bit, obviously it depends on different verticals on the right penetration of the PaaS and SaaS level product which actually never carry with some higher margin. So as a conclusion, Tim, we do believe we have a capacity and willingness to keep gross margin above 20% of the enterprise cloud services, including both Kingsoft and Camelot as well and given the right incentives for our solution and delivery team to control their own costs, which were actually embedded into their own budgeting and a bonus calculation, we hopefully have more internal measures to make sure this pressure has been moving down the chain, and make sure everyone working in Kingsoft Cloud actually pay attention on the bottom line.