2024-12-11 AppLovin Corporation (APP) CEO Adam Foroughi Hosts Nasdaq London Investor Conference (Transcript)

2024-12-11 AppLovin Corporation (APP) CEO Adam Foroughi Hosts Nasdaq London Investor Conference (Transcript)

AppLovin Corporation (NASDAQ:APP) Nasdaq London Investor Conference December 11, 2024 3:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Adam Foroughi - CEO
Matt Stumpf - CFO

Conference Call Participants  
电话会议参会人员  

Matthew Cost - Morgan Stanley  
摩根士丹利的Matthew Cost  

Matthew Cost  

Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for being here. My name is Matt Cost, the Morgan Stanley U.S. Internet team, thrilled this morning to be joined by Adam Foroughi, the CEO of AppLovin; and Matt Stumpf, the CFO. Guys, thanks so much for being here.  
是的，非常感谢。谢谢大家出席。我是摩根士丹利美国互联网团队的Matt Cost。今天早上非常高兴能邀请到AppLovin的首席执行官Adam Foroughi和首席财务官Matt Stumpf。各位，非常感谢你们能来到这里。  

Adam Foroughi  

Yes. Good morning.  
好的，早上好。  

Matt Stumpf  

Thanks for having us.  
谢谢你邀请我们。  

Question-and-Answer Session  
问答环节  

Q - Matthew Cost  
提问 - Matthew Cost  

Awesome. So I'm going to let you guys carve up the answers to the questions as you see fit, so don't feel like excluded, either one of you, as I go through them.  
太好了。我会让你们自行决定如何回答这些问题，所以在我提问时，你们任何一位都不用觉得被忽视。  

So let's start high level here. So we've seen an extraordinary inflection in the growth of your business over the past two years. And I want to pose a question that I hear from investors quite often as they're ramping on your company. What have you built in AppLovin that's driven this outperformance? And what differentiates it from your competitors?  
让我们从整体层面开始。过去两年里，你们的业务增长出现了非凡的拐点。我想提出一个我经常从投资者那里听到的问题——他们在加深对你们公司的了解时会提到：AppLovin中有哪些构建，驱动了这份出色表现？以及和竞争对手相比，你们的差异点在哪里？  

Adam Foroughi  

So I talk a lot about culture, and I think this is one of the main differentiators. And our culture seems to me to be different from a lot of other technology companies that have scaled. And it's predicated on a concept that I've built multiple companies, and I want to work with builders. And people who build companies tend to want to work at small early-stage businesses. And I never understood why these same people who have exceptional ability end up churning out of companies when those companies scale. Why does companies become less efficient when they scale? Why is there more process when companies scale?  
我经常谈到企业文化，我认为这是我们的一大主要差异点。在我看来，我们的文化与很多已经实现规模化增长的科技公司都不同。这源于这样一个理念：我创办过多家公司，我想和那些“建设者”一起工作。而那些真正建设公司的人往往喜欢去小型的早期公司。我一直不明白，为什么同样这群优秀的人才在公司发展到一定规模时就会离开？为什么公司做大后效率往往会下降？为什么公司规模越大流程越多？  

So we wanted to build a culture that inspired that same entrepreneurial spirit as it scaled, and that is predicated on building a team of doers, getting process out of their way and allowing them to execute as if the company was still 10 people. And we pride ourselves on being able to do this now at a very large scale.  
所以，我们想打造一种文化，在公司扩张的过程中依然能激发同样的创业精神。其前提是组建一支实干型的团队，尽量减少流程阻碍，让他们可以像公司还只有十来个人时那样去执行。我们很自豪现在能够在大规模下依然保持这种状态。  

Matthew Cost

Great. So, Matt, you've been asked a lot of times about the path forward for the core gaming ads business. And you've referred to kind of a 20% to 30% growth target over a multiyear period going forward. So that's a fair bit faster than the mobile games market itself is growing from a consumer spend perspective. So take us behind the scenes for a few minutes and talk us through the moving pieces to get to that figure. So how do you build to 20% to 30% growth?
好的。Matt，你被问过很多关于核心游戏广告业务未来发展的问题。你曾提到在未来的多年度里，业务有望实现大约20%到30%的增长。与从消费者支出的角度来看移动游戏市场本身的增速相比，这是一个相当快的数字。能不能给我们一些幕后视角，向我们解释一下有哪些因素促成了这个增长目标？你们是如何实现20%到30%增长的？

Matt Stumpf

Yes, sure. So before we dive into the 20% to 30%, I think it's really important to address this point that we've heard from some investors out there. I think most of the investor communities kind of work past this, but we still hear it occasionally, this misconception about how we can grow faster than the TAM. And one important thing that you need to understand just about the ecosystem where we live is that our customers are arbitrage marketers. So they're setting return goals, and we're finding users that are hurting those return goals.
好的，当然。在深入讨论那20%到30%之前，我认为有一个问题非常重要：我们从一些投资者那里听到过这样的看法，我想大部分投资界人士已经不再纠结这个问题了，但偶尔仍能听到——即我们是如何实现超过整体市场规模（TAM）增长的。这需要先理解我们所处的生态系统：我们的客户是“套利营销”型的广告主。他们会设定回报目标，而我们要做的就是帮助他们找到那些影响其回报目标的用户。

So the more users that we can find for these advertising customers that are driving the returns for them, the more scale of spend we're going to have. And so that then is driving TAM growth over time. As we're finding more users, as our technology improves, then the TAM is actually growing as a result.
因此，我们能为这些广告主找到越多能带来回报的用户，他们在我们平台上的投放规模就会越大。而这也会在一定程度上推动TAM随时间增长。随着我们能找到的用户越来越多，技术也不断进步，TAM实际上也就随之扩大了。

And the 20% to 30% long-term goal of growth, how we think about that on the existing business, the 20% to 30%, is really driven by two components, the first being reinforcement learning of our technology. So these AI systems are always learning. So as we show transactions, the system is learning from what happens within that transaction, what the user behavior is and whether or not it's driving a result at the end of the day. And that -- all that information is fed back into the system and it's learning and that's determining the future behavior of what the system is doing. So that reinforcement learning is driving on average about 5% per quarter.
至于我们对现有业务提出的长期20%到30%增长目标，实际上由两个主要部分驱动：第一部分是我们的技术中的强化学习。我们的AI系统始终在学习。当系统推动每一笔转化时，它会从该转化过程中用户的行为以及是否最终带来结果中不断汲取信息。所有这些信息都会被反馈到系统中，系统据此学习并决定未来的行为方式。就这个层面而言，强化学习平均每个季度会带来大约5%的增长。

And then the second component are directed model enhancements. So our team is constantly looking through like a new research that's being posted out there, investigating different techniques to potentially improve our algorithm. And those direct model enhancements, on average, we think could drive at least 10% growth on an annual basis. And over the last six quarters, we've had about four quarters of those types of improvements in the system. So we're pretty confident that we can continue to drive at least one of those types of improvements on an annual basis going forward.
第二部分来自模型的定向改进。我们的团队会持续关注和研究新发布的学术成果，不断探索各种新技术来进一步优化我们的算法。我们认为这些定向的模型改进平均每年至少能带来约10%的增长。在过去六个季度里，我们大约有四个季度都进行了此类改进。因此我们对未来每年都能至少有一次这样的大幅改进非常有信心。
Warning
这些说法基于短视频更有说服力。
Matthew Cost

Got it. Okay. Let's shift to a topic I think a lot of people in the room were probably very excited about, which is e-commerce advertising. So let's just start with, what are you doing in e-commerce? How are the early tests going? And why do you think AppLovin will win in this category?
我明白了。好的。我们来聊一聊另一个我认为很多在场人士都非常感兴趣的话题——电商广告。我们从最基础的开始吧：你们在电商领域做了什么？初期测试情况如何？以及你们为什么认为AppLovin将在这个领域获得成功？

Adam Foroughi

Yes. So obviously, there's a lot of excitement around this. But let me start with why we ended up talking about expanding outside of gaming to begin with. When we launched AXON 2.0, we saw the power of this technology, and this is what I call personalization technology. It's a recommendation engine that's really powerful.
好的。显然，大家对此都很感兴趣。但我先从我们为什么要谈论从游戏领域向外扩张说起。当我们发布AXON 2.0时，我们看到了这项技术的强大潜力——我称它为个性化技术。它是一款非常强大的推荐引擎。

Now if you have a recommendation technology and you give it just one category of content, it can't really do what it's designed to do. An analogy would be it's easy to forget that TikTok once was Musical.ly. When they bought that company for under $1 billion, it was niche. They only showed music videos. Then they opened up to all types of content and let the technology do the rest to scale the product. Well, we've got a similar technology, it's very powerful, and we let it only show gaming advertisements to the consumer.
但如果你的推荐技术只能作用于单一类型的内容，那它其实无法充分展现其价值。举个例子，大家或许已经不记得TikTok曾经是Musical.ly了。当时他们以不到10亿美元的价格收购了它，它是一个小众平台，只展示音乐视频。之后他们将平台开放给所有类型的内容，并依靠技术推动规模化。而我们拥有与之类似的强大技术，却只让它给用户展示游戏广告。

So once we saw the power of this technology, we said, look, this thing is going to be able to do anything. So let's get it to be open to everything. And so we started building the tools and technologies to enable any website with the business model to be able to advertise on our platform and reach this really large audience of 1.4 billion daily actives through us and do it on a performance basis. And so we had a lot of confidence that we were able to -- we were going to be able to do this. We did that work. We rolled it out. And now there's been a lot of noise on Twitter from customers that are early in a pilot that we're running that are seeing phenomenal results.
因此在我们见识到这项技术的实力后，就想：既然它几乎什么都能做，为什么不把它面向更多领域开放呢？于是我们开始研发各种工具和技术，让任何有相应商业模式的网站都能在我们平台上投放广告，通过我们的平台触达高达14亿的日活用户，并以效果付费的模式进行投放。我们对自己的能力很有信心，也确实把这件事做出来了。现在，在Twitter上，很多早期参与试点的客户都在热议我们的产品效果，非常出色。

And so I'd urge investors to go to Twitter to -- and look up AppLovin and just see the commentary to understand really how performant this product is for those advertisers. We haven't talked much about the details outside of that. But I did say on our earnings call last quarter, this is the best and fastest-growing product we've ever released. That includes the algorithm itself. So we're really excited about what the potential is here.
因此，我也建议各位投资者可以去Twitter上搜一搜AppLovin，看看那些评价，以了解这项产品对广告主而言到底有多大的成效。除此之外，我们目前没有进一步的细节分享。但我在上个季度财报电话会议上提到过，这是我们发布过的最好、增长速度最快的产品之一，包括其中使用的算法。我们对这项产品的潜力非常期待。

Now I do want to talk for a moment about what winning means to us because as someone who does like to win, and I feel like as an entrepreneur you have to aspire to win in some way, you have to be motivated to win and understand what that means to you. And we built our company to try to win by creating and expanding economies, not in the traditional sense of what people think about winning means in advertising. And let me give you an example what that is.
现在我想花点时间谈谈什么是对我们而言的“成功”。因为我本人非常喜欢赢，而且作为一名企业家，你必须怀揣某种取胜的渴望，需要有动力去赢，并知道对你来说赢意味着什么。我们搭建这家公司，就是想通过创造和扩大经济规模来赢，而不是像一般人认为的那样，只是要在广告领域抢占某个对手的市场。我给大家举个例子。

Typically, people in advertising believed in order to win you got to have a product where you can take dollars away from another player in an ecosystem. We believe, to win, we can create an economy. Now imagine a world where there was one mattress company that existed, this was the whole world, and there was a company like Meta out there that's exceptional at advertising. Massive audience, they've got a superset of our audience, serve a lot of ads. They've built a huge economy in the world.
一般情况下，很多从事广告的人会认为，要想赢，就得拥有能够从其他市场参与者那里抢夺预算的产品。可我们相信，要想赢，我们需要创造一个新的经济模式。想象一下，如果世界上只有一家床垫公司，而同时存在一家像Meta一样的广告巨头，拥有海量受众，他们的受众规模超越我们，能提供大量广告。他们在全球范围内已经建立了巨大的广告经济。

And let's say this mattress company was able to run ads through Meta and deliver 1,000 purchases of mattresses a day. Now if Meta was perfect at advertising, they showed every single user in the world that an advertisement for that mattress the user saw an advertisement for that mattress, that you couldn't create more purchasing power as a secondary platform. But it's just not the case that the audiences are perfectly overlapped. And every single user can notice an advertisement on the social network.
假设这家床垫公司每天通过Meta投放广告，带来1000笔床垫购买。如果Meta的广告投放完全无懈可击，为全世界所有用户展示了该广告，那么从理论上来说，其他平台就没法再创造更多购买力，因为所有潜在客户都已经被Meta覆盖到了。但事实并非如此，受众不可能完美重叠，也不是每位用户都会在社交网络上看到并留意到那个广告。

And so we come along, we write this technology, and we go, hey, mattress company, run your ads on our platform and reach this audience, that's doing something different. At this moment in time, this audience is very, very large scale, is in a different mindset, and let us see what we can do for you. And they come on to our platform, and they launch. And let's say, they're buying on a performance basis, aiming to get the same results that they get on the social network. And really, these advertisers are arbitrage marketers.
这时我们出现了，开发出这样的技术，告诉这家床垫公司：“来我们这里投广告吧，可以触达一批不一样的受众。在某个时刻，这批受众非常庞大，他们心态也与在社交网络上看广告时不同。我们看看能为你做些什么。”然后他们来到我们的平台，开始投放广告，可能也是以效果付费的方式，目标是获得和社交网络同样的回报结果。实际上，这些广告主也属于“套利营销”型。

So the return on ad spend that they target on a Meta has to be matched by us. And they launch a campaign, and they deliver 1,000 transactions per day. Well, we don't want the 1,000 to be pulled away. We want the 1,000 to be additive. And so if we can then measure that the 1,000 is completely incremental to their business, and now, there are 2,000 or more mattresses being sold per day because of the incremental advertising channel, we'll have expanded the economy. And that's important. When we talk about winning, that's what we build products to do.
因此，他们对Meta的广告回报预期必须在我们这里也能实现。他们投放后，每天带来1000笔购买。我们并不想让这1000笔交易只是把Meta的份额抢过来，而是让它成为额外的增量。如果我们能够衡量出这1000笔购买对他们而言是完全新增的，那么现在他们每天的床垫销量就变成2000笔甚至更多，这就意味着我们扩张了经济规模。这一点非常关键。当我们谈到“赢”时，这正是我们想通过产品去实现的目标。
Warning
只是想要的结果，缺少理性的推理。
Matthew Cost  
Great. I guess one thing that investors are curious about is the investment behind the e-commerce business. And it seems like based on your comments just now and things you said in earnings calls, like the technology is there. But what about the go-to-market? Do you have the sales and support infrastructure in place to scale e-commerce? And are there investments that you need to make in order to grow there?  
马修·科斯特  
太好了。我想投资者们想要了解的一件事就是电商业务背后的投入。根据你刚才的评论以及你在财报电话会议上所说的内容，似乎技术已经就绪。那么，市场推广方面呢？你们是否拥有足够的销售和支持团队来拓展电商业务？为了实现增长，你们需要进行哪些投入吗？

Adam Foroughi  
Yes. I mean a lot of times, when we talk investment internally, we're talking about engineering. And we paid for our engineers already. So we don't talk about costs. And we understand that investors really want to focus on like what's going to be the incremental cost investment to scale things. We're an engineering-first company, and we believe that if we build a product that's so good, that's automated and drives to measurable results on behalf of the advertisers, that product should sell itself. And so we believe we have that product. The magic was building the technology.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
是的。我是说，很多时候，我们在内部讨论投资时，说的就是工程方面的投入。我们的工程师已经就位，所以我们不怎么讨论成本。我们也明白，投资者实际上更关注为了实现规模化所需的额外成本投入。我们是一家以工程为先的公司，相信如果能打造一个非常优秀、自动化且能为广告客户带来可衡量效果的产品，那么这个产品本身就会具有吸引力。所以我们相信我们已经拥有这样的产品。关键在于构建这项技术。 

Now where we are is we have to build a lot of automation and tools to allow advertisers to come on to our platform and be able to manage the campaigns themselves. Once we have those tools, and it may be in the future, even an advertiser who wants to talk to an account manager, we don't want a person in that seat. We want an AI bot account manager talking back to that advertiser and helping them work through their issue.  
目前，我们需要大量的自动化和工具，让广告主能够进入我们的平台并自行管理广告活动。一旦我们拥有了这些工具，未来即便广告主想跟客户经理对话，我们也不想让一个真人坐在那个岗位上，而是希望由一个AI机器人客户经理来和他们沟通，帮助他们解决问题。  

And so that's the way we think about expanding. Going into a new market is not to go hire a bunch of account managers and then salespeople, but build a product that could sell itself, so you don't need the sales layer. And then now in today's world, build an AI bot to become your account manager so that we can think about scaling this product to millions of advertisers without expanding our headcount.  
这就是我们对扩张的看法。进入一个新市场并不是去雇佣大批客户经理和销售人员，而是构建一个可以自我销售的产品，这样就不需要一层销售团队。然后，在当今这个时代，我们还可以通过AI机器人来当客户经理，这样在不增加员工数量的情况下，就能把这个产品推广给数百万的广告主。

And in our business, it's not lost on us that the potential outcomes in the future are unpredictable. We may be unpredictably exceptionally good. We may have unpredictably different outcomes. But the one thing that we can commit to investors about is that we don't have an interest in expanding our headcount materially to go after revenue. We think we can go after revenue and automate every step of the way. And if we can do that, we can build a business that has exceptionally high margins.  
我们非常清楚，未来可能出现的结果具有不确定性。我们可能会意外地做得非常出色，也可能有完全不同的结果。但我们能对投资者承诺的一点是，我们并不打算为了获得收入而大幅扩充员工数量。我们相信可以在实现收入增长的同时，让每个环节都实现自动化。如果能做到这一点，就能打造一家拥有极高利润率的企业。

Matthew Cost  
Great. So when we think about your machine learning engine, which is branded as AXON. So when we think about AXON and the ability to extend to e-commerce, does that imply that you could extend the business to other non-gaming ad verticals? And if so, how broad is that opportunity?  
马修·科斯特  
太好了。说到你们的机器学习引擎AXON，既然它能扩展到电商，那么是否意味着你们可以将业务拓展至其他非游戏类广告领域？如果是的话，其潜力有多大？

Adam Foroughi  
Yes. We think it's really broad. We expect, now that we've seen the data that we've seen, that any company that is online with a website that has a business model, that drives to some KPI will be able to buy advertising through our platform. Now that KPI may vary. We've chosen specifically to go after mid-market direct-to-consumer shops right now. Now their KPI is revenue and profit. They want to advertise and get users and know that they're making an incremental profit on that advertising. To us, that's the hardest KPI because it's so far down the funnel.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
是的。我们认为机会非常广阔。根据我们所观察到的数据，任何在网上拥有网站、拥有商业模式并以某种KPI为导向的公司，都能通过我们的平台购买广告。这个KPI可能会有所不同。我们目前主要针对的是面向消费者的中端市场店铺。它们的KPI是收入和利润，希望通过投放广告来获取用户，并且确保广告带来的盈利是额外的。对我们来说，这是最难的KPI，因为它位于销售漏斗的最底端。  

Now you can imagine a different type of advertiser who's sending e-mails to sell financial tips could come online. Well, we can certainly sell e-mails. That's easier to go build the cost per lead model, and that exists in the system already. Another advertiser, like a streamer, might want to sign up subscribers. Cost per registration is also supported in the system. So because we have a KPI-based advertising model, it's completely automated, and we've proven we can expand out to web and make it work across a wide variety of different types of business models at all sorts of different prices in terms of cost per goods sold and revenue per goods sold, we know now that we can go out and expand this product to millions and millions of customers in the future.  
你还可以想象另一类广告主，比如通过发送电子邮件来售卖理财建议的公司，他们也能上线。我们当然可以处理电子邮件，这样去构建按潜在客户线索付费的模式要容易得多，而且系统已经具备了这种功能。再比如，一家流媒体公司想要吸引用户注册，那么系统同样支持按注册付费的模式。由于我们的广告模式是基于KPI的，而且完全自动化，我们已经证明可以将它推广到网页领域，并能在各种不同商业模式和不同成本与收益水平的情况下运作良好。所以我们现在知道，将来可以把这个产品进一步扩展到数以百万计的客户。  

Matthew Cost  
Great. I want to touch on Connected TV for a minute, and I'm curious about a couple of things on this topic. Firstly, why is Connected TV important to AppLovin? What does it allow you to do that you couldn't do before? And maybe most importantly, what capabilities can you bring to that ecosystem that you think advertisers are really looking for?  
马修·科斯特  
太好了。我想花点时间谈谈联网电视（Connected TV），并且对此有几点好奇。首先，联网电视对AppLovin来说为何重要？它能让你们做以前做不到的事情吗？或许更重要的是，你们可以为这个生态系统带来哪些功能，这是广告主真正想要的？

Adam Foroughi  
Again, we're focused entirely on performance. And what bugs me is that when we look at the Connected TV device, this is an IP-enabled device, and the advertising is sold exactly the same way as Linear TV. You had brand campaigns on Linear TV that cut over to Connected TV, very large space. But there haven't yet been economies that were created or expanded through this new way to access the consumer. And what I mean by that is, if you had a Linear TV campaign for Coca-Cola and it was running at some amount of dollars per day that were substantial and some of the traffic shifted to Connected TV device, those budgets shifted in the same amount of the audience shift. And nothing incremental happened. The market didn't expand.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
同样地，我们完全专注于效果。当我审视联网电视设备时，让我感到困扰的是，这本质上是一个可连接网络的设备，但广告的销售方式却和传统电视完全一样。在传统电视上进行的品牌广告宣传转换到了联网电视上，规模很大。但通过这种面向消费者的新途径，还没有催生或拓展出新的商业模式。我的意思是，如果一家可口可乐在传统电视上投放了某个规模相当可观的广告预算，而且当部分受众转移到联网电视设备上时，这些预算就按照受众转移的比例跟着转移，结果并没有额外的增长，市场并没有扩大。  

Now, let's say, through our product, we can serve an ad for an up-and-coming soda company like OLIPOP, as an example. And we can serve that ad and make a completely closed funnel attribution and show the user an ad, track transactional value for the soda company that's up and coming and make that ad performance based. What will end up happening is that today's world, the consumer is not discovering anything new through Connected TV. They're seeing that same Coca-Cola ad they would have seen on Linear TV.  
现在，假设通过我们的产品，我们可以为像OLIPOP这样正在崛起的苏打饮料公司投放广告。我们可以投放该广告，并实现完整的闭环归因，为用户展示广告，追踪这家新型苏打饮料公司带来的交易价值，使广告基于效果付费。这样最终的结果是，目前人们通过联网电视并没有发现任何新事物，他们看到的依然是那些本可以在传统电视上看到的可口可乐广告。  
Warning
加个二维码就可以互动了。
But if now they start seeing ads for all sorts of different products that have no means to advertise on television today, economies will expand. That's what gets us excited. We want to look at big opportunities where we can expand economies. And if we can deliver technologies to do that, we believe we're going to become a lot bigger than we are today.  
然而，如果他们现在开始看到那些原本无法在电视上做广告的各种不同产品广告，这就会扩大市场规模。这正是让我们感到兴奋的地方。我们希望去挖掘那些可以扩大市场的大机遇。如果我们能提供这样的技术，我们相信自己将会比现在发展得更大。
  
Matthew Cost  
Great. So there was a long period where investors were pretty focused on competition in the ad network space. And I think we're now at a point where most people believe that AppLovin is the clear leader in your space. So I want to ask you, given the success that you've had, who do you view as your competition now and why?  
马修·科斯特  
好的。很长一段时间里，投资者都非常关注广告网络领域的竞争。我认为目前大多数人都相信AppLovin在这个领域处于明显的领先地位。基于你们所取得的成功，我想问的是，现在你们认为谁是竞争对手，为什么？

Adam Foroughi  
This is an interesting question because when I started the business, we couldn't raise the seed round and the pushback was, competition should eliminate you. You really have no reason to build this company, go focus on another space. And really, when people talk about competition back then, it was not dissimilar to today. It was -- Facebook and Google have every advantage in the advertising world. They should win every single space of advertising in the future. And for one, when we built the business, we knew if you can focus on something specific, you can build a really large business if that's something specific is a big market and compete with the biggest companies in the world.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
这是个有趣的问题，因为我刚创业时，我们甚至无法拿到种子轮融资。大家的反馈是，竞争会把我们淘汰掉，你们根本没有理由去建立这家公司，不如专注于别的领域。实际上，当时人们谈及的竞争和现在也差不多：Facebook和Google在广告领域拥有各种优势，未来他们可能会主宰广告行业的所有细分市场。可是在我们创建这家公司时，我们知道，只要专注于某一特定领域，而这个领域又足够庞大，就可以在与全球最顶尖公司竞争的同时，打造出一家非常庞大的企业。  

More importantly, when we built our technology and always thought about our products, again, I use this theme constantly, we thought about expanding economies. We didn't think of Facebook and Google as competitors to these advertisers. We didn't want the advertisers to go, we're spending so much money on Facebook and Google and we're going to carve off some of that money and bring it to your platform. What we wanted to do is build a technology that was so good that we could be additive to those two companies.  
更重要的是，在我们打造技术并始终思考产品时，一直在强调同一个主题，那就是扩大市场。我们并没有把Facebook和Google视为对这些广告主的竞争对手。我们并不想让广告主说：“我们已经在Facebook和Google上花了很多钱，然后从这些预算里切下一部分给你们。” 我们想要做的是打造一个足够优秀的技术，能够为那两家公司带来增值。  
Warning
可以优化的地方肯定存在，但是护城河在哪里？可能还不到考虑的时候。
We looked at them for inspiration. They built exceptionally compelling products. We still do look at other companies around us today for inspiration. But we don't think of these companies as competitors. In fact, we're partners with a lot of the companies in the space. We want to expand the spaces and the economies that we operate in.  
我们把他们当作灵感来源。他们打造了极具吸引力的产品。即使在今天，我们依然会观察周围其他公司，从中获取灵感。但我们并不认为那些公司是对手。事实上，我们和很多同行业公司都是合作伙伴。我们希望扩大我们所处的市场与经济体。

Matthew Cost  
Got it. So you've been pretty active in repurchasing stock historically. You continue, I think, to have a large authorization there. You've also done some M&A in the past, including MAX and MoPub and Adjust. But looking forward, what are your priorities? Does the company need any capabilities that it can't build organically? And how do you evaluate the attractiveness of continued stock buybacks?  
马修·科斯特  
明白。你们过去在回购股票方面动作频繁，现在看来似乎还有相当大的回购授权额度。你们过去也做过一些并购，包括MAX、MoPub和Adjust。那么展望未来，你们的重点是什么？公司是否还需要一些无法通过自身发展来获得的能力？你们又是如何评估持续回购股票的吸引力的？
  
Matt Stumpf  
Yes, that's a great question. So our focus today is not, at least in the near term, on M&A. And it's more on these organic growth initiatives that we've been talking about, which are primarily the continued development of our technology for the existing mobile gaming business, that algorithm, and then, the expansion into transactional web advertising, so primarily e-commerce.  
马特·斯坦普夫  
是的，这个问题很好。至少在短期内，我们的重点并不在并购上，而是放在我们一直提到的有机增长项目上，主要包括持续为现有移动游戏业务打造的算法技术，以及向基于交易的网络广告领域（主要是电商）进行扩张。
  
So the investment there, this goes back to the question we were talking about previously about investment within the teams to support those initiatives. I mean, we grow our teams and headcount in a very lean and efficient manner, as you can see from our margin profile. And that's the plan going forward as well as to continuing to invest, but very modestly, so to add on headcount, only finding the best talent that's available. And then at the same time, continually reviewing the rest of the organization, to find areas to trim at the same time so we're continuing to retain that margin profile that we've got today.  
至于在这些项目上的投入，也与我们之前提到的团队建设有关。你也能从我们的利润率表现中看到，我们的团队和人员扩张一直都非常精简和高效。今后我们也会这样做，同时继续进行适度投资，只招募最优秀的人才。与此同时，我们会持续检视公司其他部门，在需要的地方进行精简，从而保持当前的利润率水平。
  
So the business is continuing to improve in terms of its margin profile and cash generation. So then we're left with obviously tremendous free cash flow generation, what to do with that? So what we believe is the best usage of that cash is to continuing to repurchase shares because what we're focused on is driving long-term shareholder value. And we've seen that thus far over the last couple of years, investing over $3 billion in repurchases, we've been able to drive tremendous value for our shareholders by actually reducing the overall share count. So the plan going forward is to continuing to invest the vast majority of our free cash flow and repurchases.  
因此，公司在利润率和现金创造能力方面都在不断提升。这样一来，我们会产生大量的自由现金流，该如何使用？我们认为最好的方式是继续回购股票，因为我们的目标是为股东创造长期价值。过去几年里，我们投入了超过30亿美元来回购，并成功地通过实际减少总股本为股东创造了可观的价值。所以，未来的计划是继续将大部分的自由现金流用于回购。
  
And given the growth opportunities that we think we've got in front of us, the 20% to 30% that we talked about before, the expansion into transactional web, that we really shouldn't be price sensitive in terms of purchasing behavior. So we're going to continue to repurchase our shares on an ongoing basis going forward. And we just received an increase in our repurchase authorization from our Board this last quarter, increasing that by $2 billion. So we have a $2.3 billion authorization today, and we continue to plan to be in the market going forward.  
鉴于我们面前的增长机会，包括之前提到的20%到30%目标，以及拓展至基于交易的网络广告领域，我们在回购行为上其实不必过分在意价格。我们会持续进行股票回购。就在上个季度，我们董事会刚刚批准将回购授权增加了20亿美元，目前总额为23亿美元，我们也会继续在市场上进行回购。

Adam Foroughi  
I do want to add a point on M&A, too. We were acquisitive in the past, so people assumed that we're just an acquisitive company. And a lot of those acquisitions were met to enable our core advertising business, to grow and become what it is today.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
我还想补充一下关于并购的话题。我们过去确实进行过一些并购，所以人们就认为我们是一家“买买买”的公司。而实际上，我们当时的许多收购都旨在帮助我们的核心广告业务实现增长，进而发展成今天的样子。
  
Now we've got a lot of organic opportunities in front of us that we're excited about. But when we look in the rearview mirror at the M&A that we've done and assess it, we realize that M&A is exceptionally hard to execute on. I didn't realize how hard. And what we found for us is that our culture is different. And when you want to go out and buy and make an impact, you've got to buy something that's substantial to the relative scale your business operates at.  
现在我们面前有大量有机增长机会，这让我们非常兴奋。但回头看我们过去做过的并购，再做复盘时，我们意识到并购实施起来极其困难。之前我并没有想到会这么难。我们发现，公司文化本身就不一样。而当你想通过并购来带来影响，就必须收购能够跟你目前业务规模相匹配的资产。
  
Now with the scale that we operate at today, that would mean that if we were to buy something, it'd have to be a pretty substantial acquisition. Those companies don't tend to be set up where you can go in, buy them and let go of most people and dump the technology and recreate it. And really, as we look in the rearview mirror at the M&A we've done, the 2 most successful we had were MoPub and MAX, where we didn't inherit culture, we didn't inherit people nor did we inherit technology.  
以我们目前的业务规模来看，如果要进行收购，就意味着必须是规模相当可观的交易。而这种公司往往并不是你能够收购之后就把大部分人员裁掉或将其技术淘汰重塑的。实际上，从我们回顾过往并购案例的经验来看，最成功的两次是收购MoPub和MAX，因为我们并没有继承对方的文化、人员或技术。
  
The rest of them, we've had a huge headache trying to absorb and get the value out of the M&A that you expect when you do the deal. Now we were able to extract a lot of value because the deals were structured to help our advertising business develop over time. Well, it's developed, it's valuable, and we think we can make it much more valuable organically going forward. So that makes us, as an acquirer of companies, a really tough place because we end up having this differentiated culture. They can't merge with other cultures all that well. And so that's why we talk about M&A not being much of a priority.  
对于其他并购案，我们在整合和实现并购预期价值的过程中遇到过很多头痛的问题。尽管我们依然获取了不少价值，因为交易结构本身是为了帮助我们的广告业务逐步成长。现在我们的广告业务已经成熟且具备价值，我们相信未来可以通过有机方式让其变得更有价值。因此，作为一家收购方，我们处于一个非常困难的位置，因为我们拥有独特的企业文化，难以与其他文化进行良好融合。这也是我们说并购并不是重点的原因。
  
If we fundamentally believed it could accelerate our business and it was easy, then we wouldn't say that. But we think it's much harder than people realize, and it's exceptionally hard for a company that's structured like us.  
如果我们真的相信并购能够轻松加速业务发展，我们就不会这样说了。但实际上，我们认为并购比人们想象的要困难得多，尤其对我们这种结构的公司来说更是如此。
Idea
管理团队的基本素质不错，有着比较清晰的自我意识。
Matthew Cost  
I want to tie that back to profitability with Matt in a second, but just to stick with that point for one second. When you look out over the next five or 10 years, do you see a situation where you would need to significantly extend the engineering teams or sales teams? Like is there -- on the product roadmap that you envision, is this something that you can just leverage a really lean team for indefinitely? Because to the comment you just made, it sounds like you have a really, really effective culture and a pretty small team that's lean and flexible. And is there sort of any reason that, that would ever need to change?  
马修·科斯特  
我想稍后再和马特讨论一下盈利能力的问题，但先回到刚才的话题。展望未来五到十年，你是否会遇到必须大幅扩充工程或销售团队的情况？或者说，在你所设想的产品路线图中，是否可以一直依赖一支非常精简的团队？因为就像你刚才提到的，你们似乎拥有一种非常高效的企业文化以及一支小而灵活的团队。是否有任何理由让这种状况必须发生改变？

Adam Foroughi  
Yes. I mean we gave -- on the last earnings call, I gave a new metric that we care about. And I said EBITDA per employee, but really we care about cash flow per employee. And we expect the numerator to go up over time and the denominator to go down. So importantly, we think our headcount over time, even as these opportunities in front of us become bigger economically, we expect our headcount to go down.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
是的。上一次财报电话会议上，我提到了一个我们非常关注的新指标——每位员工对应的EBITDA，其实更准确地说是我们关注每位员工对应的现金流。我们希望这个指标的分子（利润）随着时间增长，而分母（员工总数）则随时间减少。换句话说，即便我们面临的机会在经济规模上不断扩大，我们仍预计员工人数会下降。  

I don't know of another company that's scaling the business as quickly as us that would say that point. But the reason I fundamentally want to accomplish that is because we're working in a world now where AI technologies are allowing human beings to be more productive. And if our human beings that are exceptionally sharp want to work with other A+ players, you can't hire that many A+ players. There's just not that many A+ players sitting in the world to hire.  
我不认为有另一家公司在业务快速扩张时也会这样说。但我之所以想达成这一点，根本原因在于我们正处于一个AI技术可以提升人类工作效率的时代。如果我们那些非常优秀的人才都希望和其他A+级人才共事，那么我们就不可能雇佣太多A+级人才，毕竟世界上能找到的A+人才总量非常有限。 

And so if we continue to optimize to those players and give them the capability to utilize more AI technologies to improve their output, we believe we can grow the company, execute on all of our initiatives and lower headcount over time. And that's something we're really focused on trying to prove out.  
因此，如果我们持续向这些高水平人才倾斜，并为他们提供更多利用AI技术提升产能的手段，我们相信公司可以持续增长，在所有项目上取得进展，同时在未来逐步减少员工数量。这是我们一直努力想要证明和实现的目标。

Matthew Cost  
And from a go-to-market perspective, is it just that performance sells itself? And so that's it, people come to the product over time because they see it works.  
马修·科斯特  
从市场拓展的角度来看，是否主要依靠产品自身的效果来实现销售？也就是说，用户会随着时间的推移发现产品的有效性，从而主动上门使用吗？

Adam Foroughi  
Well, it's two things. It's performance and patience. So the product itself is really good. I don't know of another ad tech company that's gone social -- that's gone viral on social media as we have on Twitter today amongst the population of advertisers we've allowed on. But then you also have to have patience. If we wanted to go out and get the largest brands in the world to advertise on our platform tomorrow, we'd have to ramp up a sales force and really go sell them. Because while some brands move quickly, the largest ones move pretty slowly. And in order to go get them quickly, you need to sell into them.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
其实包含两点，一是产品性能本身，二是耐心。我们的产品本身就很出色。我不知道还有哪家广告科技公司能像我们一样，在社交媒体，特别是推特上，在我们所允许的广告商群体中形成了病毒式传播。但与此同时，你也需要耐心。如果我们想明天就让全球最大的品牌都来我们的平台投放广告，就必须大规模扩充销售团队，主动去向这些品牌推销。因为有些品牌动作迅速，但最大的品牌往往动作很慢，要想快速拿下它们，就需要推销。  

Now if we were to have the patience to say, look, they're going to come anyways. If this product is really, really good that it can sell itself, well, maybe the largest brands in the world will get five years from now and not tomorrow. But then we don't end up with the headcount. And so fundamentally, we think we're going to be able to get every single advertiser. We're just going to have to have patience and understand that those advertisers will come over time.  
如果我们足够有耐心，说它们迟早会来。只要产品真的好到可以自我销售，也许世界顶级品牌要五年之后才会进来，而不是明天。但这样一来，我们就不必增加人员。所以从根本上来讲，我们觉得自己最终能吸引到所有广告主，只是需要一点耐心，明白他们会随着时间自行加入。 

And this isn't dissimilar to how we were able to scale in gaming. We originally built our products in gaming and targeted advertisers to come on board that were the fastest moving. These were normally called like indie studios. They're smaller businesses where even the CEO who's developed the game and eight other people are running it, the CEO is still making the decisions around marketing. And these companies would come to us. And so five, six years ago, if you talked about who our advertiser base was in gaming, it was a bunch of no-name companies.  
这和我们最初在游戏领域的扩张方式类似。我们最早是在游戏领域打造产品，吸引那些行动最快的广告商。这些广告商通常是所谓的独立工作室，规模不大，往往只有CEO和其他八个人一起运营这款游戏，而CEO仍然负责营销决策。这些公司就自己找上门来。所以如果你回到五六年前，看看我们在游戏领域的广告主群体，基本上都是一些名不见经传的公司。  

And when we went IPO, people did industry checks, and were like, huh, the largest gaming companies don't even work with this company. And what is going on? Why is that? Well, it's because the largest companies take time to go adopt new platforms. They need to be sold, too. They want to feel like VIPs. And we build technologies that sell themselves, and we don't want to have the staff to make anyone feel like a VIP. We want them to get extreme benefit from our products, and we want them to come because they hear so much noise around them that they end up not having a choice. And it take -- that takes patience to wait for, and we're going to continue to execute on that same model.  
后来我们上市时，许多人做行业调研时会发现，最大的游戏公司甚至没有和我们合作。他们就觉得很奇怪，为什么会这样？这是因为大型公司在采用新平台时往往需要更长时间，他们也需要被“推销”，希望能享受VIP待遇。而我们的理念是打造产品，让其自我销售，并不希望雇佣大量员工让某些客户感觉自己是VIP。我们想要的是让他们从产品中得到极大的好处，让他们在外界的各种讨论中不得不选择我们。但这需要足够的耐心，我们也会一直沿用这样的模式。

Matthew Cost  
Great. I mean there's a lot of really interesting qualitative background there, but let's tie it back to the quantitative side now. So I mean understanding everything that Adam just said, do you see, Matt, a path for the ad business to grow at 80-plus percent incremental margins going forward the way it has, for context, for several quarters, quite a few quarters now?  
马修·科斯特  
很好。刚才谈了很多定性方面的内容，现在我们把话题拉回到数据层面。结合亚当刚才的表述，你是否认为广告业务未来还能像过去几个季度那样，以80%以上的增量利润率继续增长？

Matt Stumpf  
Yes. I mean given the ethos that we have at the company in terms of making sure that we're growing in a very lean and efficient manner, like we're very confident in our ability to continue to drive growth at this profile that we've had over the last, I think, it's four to six quarters. We've had on average about 90% flow-through from revenue to EBITDA. And really, the only cost that we've driven up over that period of time are data center costs. So our infrastructure needs to grow, and that's primarily Google Cloud that we work with.  
马特·斯坦普夫  
是的。基于我们公司一直追求精简高效增长的理念，我们对自己继续维持过去四到六个季度那样的增长率非常有信心。在这段时期，我们从收入到EBITDA的转化率平均在90%左右。实际上，在这段时间里，我们唯一显著增加的成本就是数据中心，也主要是用的谷歌云服务。  

So as our revenue increases, obviously, our model continues to get more complex, and we need to support the scale of that existing revenue. And what we've seen over that period of time is around 10% on average is kind of the incremental cost as we continue to grow revenue. And so we actually expect that our margin profile should improve from where we're at today as we continue to drive that kind of 90% flow-through from revenue to EBITDA. And we're hopeful that, to Adam's point, as we continue to grow, that we can actually find ways to be even more efficient than that and continue to drive margins up.  
随着收入增长，业务模型肯定会变得更加复杂，我们也需要支持更大规模的现有收入。过去这段时间，我们看到平均大约10%的增量成本用于支撑收入的持续增长。因此，我们实际上预计在未来继续维持这样的90%利润转化率的同时，还能让我们的利润率水平比现在进一步提高。并且正如亚当所说，我们希望在公司继续扩张的过程中找到更多提升效率的方法，从而进一步推高利润率。

Matthew Cost  
Great. Maybe we'll close out thousand-foot view here. The company has obviously achieved a lot of success. Investors are very excited about what's coming in 2025 and beyond. So from your perspective, what do you see as the most -- or what would you characterize as the most exciting opportunity ahead? And then flipping it around, what do you see is the biggest challenge and things that you need to focus to execute through?  
马修·科斯特  
好。也许我们可以从更高层次的视角来结束这个话题。公司显然已经取得了巨大的成功，投资者对于2025年及以后的发展都非常期待。从你的角度来看，未来你认为最令人兴奋的机遇是什么？然后反过来，你觉得最大的挑战又是什么？你们需要关注哪些方面才能成功应对这些挑战？
  
Adam Foroughi  
Yes. I'd say this ties back a lot to my own role as well over time. And if you talked to us a couple of years ago, I was embedded into every aspect of the company. But most of my time was spent running product. That's what I did for most of the company's existence. And as our technology became what it is today, the mathematical complexity got to a level that I have no idea what's going on there. And unfortunately, that means I was replaced. The engineering team absorbed product and took that away from me.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
是的。我想这也与我自己的角色演变息息相关。如果你两年前跟我们聊过，你会知道当时我深入到公司每个层面，但我的大部分时间都花在产品上。这几乎是我在公司绝大部分时间里所做的工作。随着我们的技术发展到如今的水平，数学复杂度已经达到我完全无法理解的程度。很不幸，这意味着我被“替换”了，工程团队接管了产品，把这个部分从我手中接了过去。  

And a few months ago, I was trying to figure out what to do. It was like if my hours per day of work had gone down to such a low amount, I wasn't sure what to do with myself. And I took on a new role. I took on Head of HR. So not many CEOs of technology companies are heads of HR. But I did this because I feel like our biggest challenge is executing, and I feel like the biggest challenge to executing is a cultural disruption. I have these principles, and I want to ensure that they're maintained.  
几个月前，我在思考下一步做什么。因为每天工作时数减少到一个非常低的水平，我也不知道要做什么好。于是我担任了一个新职位——人力资源总监。并不是很多科技公司CEO会兼任HR负责人。但我之所以这样做，是因为我觉得我们面临的最大挑战是执行，而执行最怕的就是文化破坏。我有一些原则，我希望这些原则能够得到延续。  

And a lot of times, as companies grow, you end up building out these different organizations, especially HR is the culture org. And the founder loses sight of what's going on inside the organization because the company scales beyond a point of that founder having visibility. And that happened to even us. And so when I saw the opportunity to take back control of that and ensure that my biggest fear, our culture getting disrupted, and then, leading to churn of our best talent, does it ever come true, it was an opportunity that I wanted to go after. So that's what I'm focused on as far as addressing the biggest challenges that I foresee could come up into the future.  
很多时候，随着公司壮大，你会建立各种不同的部门，尤其是人力资源部本身就是一个与企业文化紧密相关的部门。如果公司扩大到创始人难以亲自监管的程度，创始人往往会失去对公司内部状况的了解。我们也出现过类似情况。所以当我看到能重新掌控这一部分，确保我最担心的“文化受损、导致核心人才流失”等情况不会发生时，我就想抓住这个机会。这也是我目前应对未来可能出现的重大挑战的方式。  

Now, in terms of the biggest opportunities, we've written, again, this algorithm that's really powerful. We have, I think, quarters and years of growth in front of us. And importantly, we want to do that without expanding cost. So, therefore, we have a lot of tools that we've got to build to continue to automate this process on behalf of the advertisers. But the great thing about what we can become is that we can go from a company that has expanded a niche market, the gaming market, the dollars that are spent on our platform are directly contributing to expansion of that economy. That's not a big economy in the world.  
至于最大的机遇方面，我们已经开发出一个极其强大的算法。我认为我们未来还有几个季度甚至几年的增长空间。更重要的是，我们希望在不增加成本的前提下实现增长。因此，我们需要构建很多工具，为广告主持续自动化流程。这些都是我们要去做的。我们的优势在于，我们可以从一家专注于某个利基市场（游戏市场）且真正推动这一市场增长的公司，进一步转变。就全球范围来看，游戏市场并不是非常庞大的经济体。 

We now have the possibility of going after the whole economy that's connected through digital and creating more discovery. And if we're able to execute on that, we think we can be a company that creates economies. And when you think about the biggest companies in the world, Facebook, Amazon, Google, they've created economies. The biggest companies either enable the creation or do it directly. And that's what we aspire to do.  
但现在我们有可能去开拓一个通过数字连接起来的完整经济体系，创造更多的“发现”机会。如果我们能够把这一点做好，我们希望成为一家“创造经济”的公司。想想世界上最庞大的公司，比如Facebook、亚马逊和Google，他们都在创造经济体。最大的公司要么推动经济体的建立，要么直接创造它们。而这正是我们所追求的方向。

  
Matthew Cost  
All right. That's a great place to close it out. Adam, Matt, thank you so much for being here.  
马修·科斯特  
好的。非常适合在这里结束。亚当、马特，非常感谢你们的到来。

  
Matt Stumpf  
Thanks, Matt.  
马特·斯坦普夫  
谢谢你，马修。

  
Adam Foroughi  
Thanks for the great questions.  
亚当·弗鲁吉  
感谢你提出的精彩问题。

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