Kanzhun (NASDAQ:BZ) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below.

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Summary

Kanzhun Limited reported Q1 2026 revenue of RMB 2.07 billion, a 7.6% year-on-year increase despite a shorter peak recruitment season.

The company saw significant user growth with over 15 million newly verified users and 7.1 million paid enterprise customers, up 10.9% year-on-year.

Adjusted operating income was RMB 810 million, up 17.8% year-on-year, with a 39.4% operating margin.

Strategically, the company is heavily investing in AI to enhance its business model, focusing on AI-driven closed-loop services and small model development.

Management is confident in continued revenue growth, providing guidance for Q2 2026 revenue between RMB 2.38 billion and RMB 2.42 billion, indicating a 13.2% to 15.1% increase year-on-year.

Kanzhun Limited has repurchased over $200 million in shares this year as part of its commitment to shareholder returns.

The company is expanding its overseas presence, particularly in Hong Kong through its Offer Today platform, with a focus on building a core team for future international growth.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Kanzhun Ltd First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be question and answer session. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Ms. Laura Zhang, senior Manager of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Ma'am.

Laura Zhang (Senior Manager of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Operator Good evening and good morning everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today are our founder, chairman and CEO, Mr. Jonathan Peng Chao and our deputy CFO, Ms. Wen Bei Wang. Before we start, we would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward looking statements which are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors not under the Company's control which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different.

The Company caution you not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements and do not undertake any obligation to update this forward looking information except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non GAAP financial measures for comparison purpose only. For a definition of non GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non GAAP financial results, please see the earnings release issued earlier today.

In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our website@ir.kanzhun.com.

Jonathan Peng Chao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

Welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. On behalf of the Company's employees, management team and Board of Directors, I would like to extend our sincere gratitude to our users and our investors for their continued support. Today's presentation will cover four main parts. First, our growth in the first quarter. Second, key trends among job seekers and enterprise users on our platform. Third, the company's perspectives on AI and its strategic approach and finally, the shareholder return.

Let me start with our first quarter growth as a double sided platform. We we continue to see strong growth from both job seekers and enterprise user sides. Looking back to January to April this year, we acquired over 15 million newly verified users. Looking ahead, we believe that achieving over 14 million newly verified users for the full year should be achievable. Looking at Paid Enterprise Customers Condition the number of paid Enterprise customers reached 7.1 million for the 12 months ended March 31, up 10.9% year on year and 4.4% quarter on quarter.

In the first quarter, the average monthly active users or MAU on the BOSS Zhipin app reached 16.9 million, up 5.7% year on year. In March, MAU exceeded 72 million, up 12.6% year on year. The reason our MAU in March was more than 10 million higher than the first quarter average is that the Chinese New Year occurred later this year resulting in a later peak recruitment season. The 2026 Chinese New Year fell on February 17, while the 2025 New Year was on January 29.

Hence, this year the peak recruitment season only fell within March, whereas the peak recruitment season fell within both February and March in 2025. Let me discuss our revenue. In the first quarter, the company achieved revenue of RMB 2.07 billion, up 7.6% year on year. Please kindly note that this figure also reflects the comparison between one month of peak season in 2026 versus two months of peak season in 2025. Looking ahead, we are confident that our revenue growth in the second quarter and for the full year will be stronger than what we delivered in the. On the profit perspective in first quarter, the adjusted operating income excluding share based compensation expenses reached over RMB 810 million up 17.8% year on year. The adjusted operating income operating margin was 39.4% up 3.4 percentage points year on year. Second key Trends among enterprise users and Job seekers on our platform.

As discussed multiple times earlier, our platform is suitable for in different tier cities and different types of industries. Overall, our continued rapid user growth has driven sustained rapid growth among blue collar workers, lower tier cities and small and medium sized enterprises on our platform. At the same time, recruitment demand from white collar workers and large enterprises has continued to improve. From the user growth perspective, as of April 13, among the newly acquired users in this year, excluding fresh graduates, nearly two thirds were full collar workers. From a revenue perspective, in the first quarter, all color revenue exceeded 40% of our total revenue for the first time. Wipehold recruitment demand has also accelerated after Chinese New Year compared to the same period last year.

Looking into the specific subsectors, active job postings for software engineers increased by 10.9% from January to April compared to 2020. This is consistent with the recent observations from our US Peers referring to their public data. Their active software development job postings in the United states grew by 9.1% year on year from January to April 2026, we are 2 percentage points higher than their number. Is. On our platform. We have not seen the kind of alarming large scale reduction in programmer positions that some have feared. At the same time, revenue from AI related roles on our platform has grown by over 100%. Simply put the development of AI has brought us more revenue, but we have not yet seen a large decline in job postings. Among other industries. Manufacturing, electronics, telecommunications, semiconductors, transportation and logistics, urban services and various professional services led in year on year growth on our platform.

For large enterprises, their recruitment demand we saw a notably recovering trend during this year's spring recruitment season. In the first quarter, companies with 1,000 to less than 10,000 employees recorded the fastest growing year on year revenue growth, followed by those with 500 to less than 1,000 employees. This average number of job postings per enterprise users also increased modestly. If we compare it to the last quarter back then we shared that the strongest growth in hiring demand was coming from small and micro enterprises this quarter.

However, if we compare it to last quarter back then we shared that the strongest growth in hiring demand was coming from small and micro enterprises and this quarter, however, it is large enterprises that are delivering our fattest revenue growth year on year. That concludes the recent trend on enterprise users and job seekers on our platform. And then we will discuss few views and four strategic pillars on AI that we all concern. Since the ChatGPT-4 launched in March 2023, this AI paradigm has given us 38 transformative markers.

Meanwhile, recent government disclosure of unidentified aerial phenomenon have put our generation in an unprecedented territory. Our perspectives are broadening, our convictions are being reshaped. Civilization is facing new challenges which is unavoidable. Many things that once felt familiar are now becoming less so, including how we think about our companies and how you think about the investment and competition. As one of the leaders in the worldwide and Chinese recruitment industry and as an entrepreneur mentioned myself, I've spent the past three years navigating between two mine sites hoping that new technologies could solve major problems while at the same time worrying about technology's potential disruptive impact.

I have been torn, yet hopeful and continuously exploring all within the scope of my responsibilities. Our shareholders and employees have also gone through ups and downs, concerned at all times excited as others. Sometimes they have been with us, sometimes left though together we have all been on quite a roller coaster ride. Looking back on the past three years, we believe it is time for the company to provide a progress report to our shareholders, the public and our employees.

This will be organized around two key observations and four main strategies. Our first observation is that to date, for the company's business model and industry position, the opportunities brought by AI technology have outweighed the fears. First based on reliable third party public data, credible data released by listed companies and our own internal data we have concluded that over the past three years the company's market leading position has been further strengthened, user achievements have continued to increase and we have maintained steady growth surrounded by challenging environments.

Second, as we know, lower token costs have accelerated the proliferation of AI application in both our internal operations and user services in the past quarter. The ability for our platform, the ability for over 10 millions of users on our platform to be able to access QAI services has been made possible by this reduction in cost. Third, extensive exploration in large model for training and application has accelerated growth of our young employees including their sense of pride, cohesion and standing with the company.

The more widely AI technologies are used, the more convincingly they solve real problems, the faster young talent will rise and the smoother the process of rejuvenation of our leadership team will become. In the long term, this helps slow down the corporate entropy. Jonathan Peng Chao. The growth of leaders within an organization is at its core a result of individual aspirations and progress aligning with the company's shared vision. AI plus young talent essentially means that young people can more quickly gain recognition from the organization's shared system and stand out. This also explains why in every wave of technological and cognitive revolution, young people tend to emerge as leaders. Add to that those technological oriented companies will enjoy the rights of young people and the reduce of corporate entropy.

Our second observation is that to date, neither enterprise side or job seeker side standalone agents have been capable of challenging the company's business current model. On the contrary, once agents are embedded with our double sided network ecosystem, they leverage the company's simulated user base and data to play a positive and constructive role. Recruitment and job seeking is always a multiple people to multiple people game. Whether a labor contract should be signed or not, or whether every day the actor will go smoothly ultimately comes down to a many to many game between two large groups of people.

The double sided network Daggoss Chipping has been built for over past 12 years and our understanding on users for the past 12 years has always been designed to reflect the real dynamics of job seeking and recruitment in human society. In essence, embedding various AI agents into our double sided network serves as a driving force that enhances information collection, processing and dissemination. Looking at our first quarter data first, the application of AI agents has improved the time efficiency from an initial chat QS successfully set for mutual consent conversion rate by 50%.

Second, the large scale application of AI enabled user retention reached its highest level since the pandemic in 2020. Third, the average per enterprise user achievements increased by a double digit percentage. Overall Our study in data and theories told us that AI is our friend instead of the enemy. Now let me walk you through our four strategic considerations of AI first, investing in AI to advance the closed loop business model. We firmly believe that in the recruitment industry the important thing is that we could deliver the onboarding and replacement of candidates for enterprise users.

No matter we do survey or not to do the survey, every enterprise user is willing to pay for the delivery of candidates instead of the traffic, the traffic exploration or the click on the candidates. We firmly believe that within the support of the AI technology, a result oriented business model is achievable on our platform. It is very important part of our company and we will continue to allocate resources to this effort. And while we protecting the experience of the high end job seekers, we're also open to leveraging new technologies and new operating systems to collaborate with the external companies that specialize in the closed loop services.

I will share three data with you. First, within the company's in house headhunting team for consultants who frequently use AI, 20% of the candidate recommendations they deliver already confound AI driven operations. Second, are another closed loop pilot project, the combined productivity of human plus agents four times in the first quarter, already exceeding the average productivity level of headhunters in the industry. Third, for the human plus agent campus recruitment service the company offers externally, revenue grew by more than 50% year on year in the first quarter.

Therefore, the AI powered closed loop service is one of our core strategy. Second, we are also maintaining a proportion of our resources in AI science currently focused primarily on the training and development of small models. There are five reasons for this. First, small models are less expensive for us to use internally. Second, continuous in house R and D helps us enhance the business controllability and enables the development of long term technical capabilities tailored to vertical recruitment scenarios.

Third, small models are increasingly gaining attention across industries which helps ensure a sense of pride and recognition for our science team. Fourth, our in house small model has also been effectively applied to our search and reference recommendation functions, demonstrating advantages in both efficiency and effectiveness compared to large models. The last under the current paradigm, the large models are too costly for us to pursue. Our third strategy on AI is that we will continue to invest heavily in AI applications.

Our primary evaluation criterion is that how AI helps our double sided job seeking and recruitment network ecosystem. According to the investigation for the past 12 months we have formed some we have formed some logical and common sense on these and we believe that we will treat AI technology as a value added tool for identifying and solving problems. Regarding the reward and bonus Regarding the reward and bonus on the related areas, the teams that use AI to discover and resolve issues will be generally rewarded by us.

So far we believe that our exploration, investigation and investment in AI will be based on our double sided ecosystem theoretical framework. Our fourth strategy is that we believe that AI driven revenue growth is a natural process and a natural result. As AI technology improves platform efficiency, it will lead to a higher user achievement, better satisfaction and stronger user stronger brand reputation among users. This in turn will drive sustained revenue growth.

We see this as a smoother, lower risk and more sustainable path. Investors who are familiar with us understand that we are a very original self developed monetization model which we don't sell. Advertisement we don't sell. Click Our business model is based on protection of our double side network ecosystem. So we believe that essentially to undergoing this current AI development model is already fully verified this model and very functional method.

So whether to grow by 50% for this year or 15% for the next five years, we choose the latter and we believe the combination of our technology and our organization that support the second path Very smooth. Jim. So after three years of exploration, those two points and the four strategies we just talked about actually have been fully verified. It's not that our prior but we have been doing that for a long time. So for the investors who cared about us, for the public who listen to us and our internal employees, I want to say that the strategies we just discussed is based on our real exploration and our employees who work at the front line of our AI development and all the team leaders of our core AI team have all contributed to the points I just discussed.

Finally, on shareholder returns, we have remained fully committed to delivering on our shareholder return promises. Since the start of this year, we have repurchased over $200 million in shares, or around 3% of our total outstanding shares. In aggregate, since 2022, we have bought back close to 10% of our total shares. As a reminder, last quarter we announced that a shareholder return plan committing that over the next three years the annual amount we alloc to buybacks and dividends will be no less than 50% of the prior year's adjusted net income.

And we are following through on that commitment as we all think. With that, I will now turn to our Deputy CEO for Wen Bei Wang to review our financials. Thank you.

Wen Bei Wang (Deputy CFO)

Thanks Jonathan. Now let me quickly walk through the details of our financial results for the first quarter. So we are delighted to report a solid start this year characterized by continued expansion in our user base and engagement alongside sustained revenue growth. Despite a later Chinese New Year which meant a shorter window of the peak recruitment season fell within this quarter our revenue reached RMB 2.1 billion, up 8% year on year. We are witnessing accelerated revenue as well as cash collection growth post Chinese New Year supported by robust pre season.

Our paid enterprise Customers grew by 11% year on year to 7.1 million in the 12 months ending March 31, 2026,

OPERATOR

primarily driven by the growth of enterprise users. Paying ratio among active enterprise users increased on a sequential basis. Growth from key accounts and large size companies showed better trend compared to the same period last year. A more balanced structure As a result, ARPU in the first quarter increased 2% year on year. Moving to the cost side, our total operating cost and expenses decreased by 3% year on year to RMB 1.4 billion this quarter.

Total share based compensation expenses dropped by 24% year on year and 11% quarter on quarter to RMB181 million. As a percentage of revenue wise, share based Compensation accounted for 9.2% of total revenue for this quarter, went down by 3.9 percentage points year on year and 1.1 percentage points. Sequentially. We expect SBC expenses as a percentage of revenue to stay around 9% in 2026. Excluding share based compensation expenses, our adjusted operating cost and expenses were RMB 1.3 billion, remaining relatively stable year on year.

Our adjusted operating income increased RMB 8.3, up 18% year on year, representing an adjusted operating margin of 39.4%, up by 3.4 percentage points year on year. Despite first quarter normally having the lowest margin within the full year due to seasonality, we believe there remains substantial room for further margin improvement in our core business segment due to the robust operating leverage of our business model. But considering our continued investment in AI legacy marketing spending for long term brand recognition and investment in new businesses, along with the corresponding margin dilution brought by those new businesses, we can still expect a modest margin expansion for the coming years. Looking into each segment, cost of revenue decreased by 4% to RMB 298 million this quarter. This decrease was primarily due to lower employee rate expenses resulting from enhanced operating efficiency and partially offset by higher server bandwidth cost. As a result, our gross margin went up by 1.8 percentage points to 85.6 percentage. Additionally, the reduction in App Store commission fees starting in March also contributed to gross margin improvement.

Sales and Marketing expenses increased by 2% year on year to RMB 502 million this quarter, primarily due to increase in advertising and marketing expenses which partially offset by decrease in sales employee related compensations as a result of our continued endeavor to improve sales efficiency. RMD expenses were RMB424 million this quarter, remaining relatively stable year on year. Excluding SBC expenses, Our adjusted R and D expenses increased by 5% year on year to RMB 351 million primarily due to higher cloud service fees and server depreciation expenses relating to AI infrastructure.

Our G and A expenses decreased by 16% year on year to RMB 222 million this quarter, primarily driven by lower share based compensation expenses. Our interest and Investment income was RMB781 million this quarter up 422% year on year. This increase was primarily driven by investment income of RMB614 million arising from fair value changes of one of our invested companies which went public in January 2026. Income tax expenses were RMB 299 million this quarter up 293% year on year.

This increase was also primarily due to those tax impact from the aforementioned investment income of RMB 154 million as well as the provision of RMB 16 million top up tax under the pillar 2 tax rule and the withholding tax of RMB 8 million as well as higher income from operations. Our net income reached RMB 1.1 billion this quarter excluding share based compensation net gains from the aforementioned investment, our adjusted net income increased by 12% to RMB 856 million.

Net margin improved to 54.4% while the adjusted net margin increased to 41 point up 1.7 percentage points year on year. Net cash provided by operating activities reached RMB 1.2 billion this quarter up 19% year on year. Our cash position including cash, cash equivalent, short term deposits and short term investment by excluding investment in securities stood at RMB 19.8 billion as of March 31, 2026. Our strong cash position and cash generated capabilities will support us to continue to deliver our commitment in shareholder returns.

As Jonathan just mentioned, we have purchased a total of 200 million worth of shares representing approximately 3% of our total outstanding shares. We will continue to maintain substantial shareholder return efforts including share buyback and dividend based on specific market and operating conditions. And now for our business outlook for the second quarter of 2026. We set our total revenues to be between RMB 2.38 billion and RMB 2.42 billion a year on year increase of 13.2% to 15.1%.

That concludes our prepared remarks and now we would like to take on the question answer questions. Operator, please go ahead. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q and A roster. We will now proceed to take our first question and the question comes from the line of Wei Xiong of ubs. Please ask your question.

Wei Xiong (Equity Analyst)

Wei. Your line is open. Thank you management for taking my question. I have two questions. So first, you mentioned about the business impact from a delayed Chinese New Year this year. May I ask if we only consider the days in the first quarter post CNY as well as the second quarter based on our expectation, do we see an improvement in the year on year growth rate and which industries or job postings have seen more notable improvement? And second, regarding the disruption, have we seen any impact on the job are postings on our platform?

Considering we already have a very mature white collar business, but the AI disruption to blue collar is theoretically smaller, will we accelerate blue collar business going forward? And also regarding the AI powered closed loop services, could management give an update on the latest progress as well as the feedback from industry participants such as agencies and headhunters? Thank you.

OPERATOR

So can you show you. So I will take your second question first about the closed loop service. We talk a lot about opinions. I will give you several numbers. The first number is among all of our different business in the first quarter. Actually the AI supported closed loop service is the fastest among different experimental groups. Some have a growth rate over 100%, some have 50%. But yes, the overall revenue scale is relatively small. So for the first quarter our AI facilitated closed loop service have a total revenue size of around RMB50 million.

And about your first question regarding the sprue recruitment season, I also can support you with data. So our average monthly active users for the first quarter is around 60 million. However the MAU for March is over 70 million and MAU for April is also close to the number of March. So I think that's a very representative number that the overall industry have been readily robust after spring season and on the premises that the ratio between supply and demand that which is enterprise users and recruiters is healthy.

So it's quite easy to understand. It's a very good. The Overall newly added dou poting number increased by 10% year on year. And even to be more practical, so for the first half and overall this year I think the growth rate of our cash collection will be accelerating compared to last year. So for the full year we are looking at at least a double digit number of beyond year growth. And Xiong Wei. And about another question or most people have been quite concerned about which is what kind of jobs will be impacted by the AI or even replaced by AI so to be honest, our dear investors and Xiong Wei I have been doing input serious resources into this matter and want to make our own conclusion a very serious and scientific conclusion and once we have our report we will we were open to the public but till today our observation is that the software development engineer hasn't experienced any declining in job posting on the contrary, the active number of job posting increased by 10.9% so I will continue to work on this topic and our team want to publish some papers but I want to take more time so just give me like two fingers two quarters of time and I may be giving you more clear answer to this question.

Yes, that's some of our views. Thank you. Thank you. We would now take our next question from the line of Eddie Wong of Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question Eddie, your line is open.

Eddie Wong (Equity Analyst)

Thank you management for taking my question. My question is also related to AI we have noticed that recruit our foreign peer company mentioned in its latest earnings that AI has greatly contribute to the increase of their revenue especially the average revenue per job. Can bus dripping enhance the revenue per job listing with the help of AI as well? And how much can be enhanced and how can this be achieved? And a follow up question is that in the Chinese recruitment market could there be recruitment platform with lower matching efficiency than ours that might benefit more from AI? How does company build a change in the future industry competition patterns? Thank you.

OPERATOR

Yarn ja. And Jintan. It's a long way. It's a long journey. Jonathan Peng Chao. Jonathan Peng Chao. And thank you for your question. We also noted that our predecessor who established 1962 have been making some statement like you said and we are quite happy for the progress they have got from our perspective. So the Chinese domestic market is on current maintenance focused area and how it can help us to achieve higher revenue growth. I think I will divide it by three point so in the order of considering this I think the first thing we insist still to first provide better value and then we charge higher price.

So that's the first path. A second is in China domestic market There are over 40 million enterprises which more than half of them have never used online commissars before. So I think there is a process that from a rural area, a raw land To a fully cultivated market. So the third thing is that I have actually talked a lot in our industry that are very basic contradictory or controversy is that whether you are selling exposure to the recruiter or onboarding.

So from the exposure to onboarding, there are very, very long journey and there are many, many different steps. So we are all experiencing from selling one job exposure to selling one job candidate. And even after the testing period, you becoming a very good employees or even get promotion. So what are we providing to our customers? I think everybody is going through the exploration process. So in all those three point I just discussed with our help where currently we are withstanding, I think without a doubt that can let us to help with all those people who haven't used online common service in China to use their digitalized and network data to better help us to serve our clients. And that's the first thing we need to do. And now we are using it to support our growth of services. So from the earliest online recruitment service in 1997, from selling advertisement exposure to someday in the future with help of our technology, we can tell you I can help you to deliver onboarding and you can pay me based on that. That's what is we have been insisting. And I also want to remind you with a number of that our paid enterprise number of paid enterprise customers is over 7.1 million by end of this quarter.

So grew by 10.9% year on year and 4.4% quarter on quarter. Why I want to talk about this number is because this 10% increase not only representing a progress of our commercialization, but also means for us we are helping more and more users in China who have not used online service before to go in step by step step to a more civilized way for hiring and job seeking. So now we are talking about price hiking because for all those 7.1 million people, how many they are paying us by each individual, our revenue is around 8 billion per year.

So on average every paying customer is paying us around 1,000. So I think everybody can see there are huge potential in here for our for higher price. But between more paying customers, for example, we have 7.1 million today. In the future we can have 9.1 or even 19 million paying customers. So I choose to grow our number of paying customers first. And by that time I think we still have huge potential to further increase our price. That's without doubt.

That. And my idea about growing paying users or the price might change for one day and I will communicate with people who concern about us timely about changes and then about whether there are potential for the AI empowering our peers who have maybe weaker technology than us to maybe exceeding us. I think their possibility definitely exists. But based on my experience when I have experiencing from maybe a little bit concerned about AI and more curious and less concerned and now we have our own views and strategies and we are actually more practical people and solving questions together.

So today I'm not that worried that in our peers in China's recruitment industry who have maybe weaker matching efficiency maybe one day to exceeding us or disrupt us, I'm not that worried and it won't be quite saddest. And that's our answer to the question Operator let's proceed to our last question. Thank you. Our final question today comes from Timothy Chow of Goldman Sachs. Please ask your question Timothy. Your line is open.

Timothy Chow (Equity Analyst)

Thank you management for taking My first question is regarding your operating expenses regarding the World cup marketing expenses and R and D expenses on AI. Just wondering if you can share some more detail color and what is your outlook for this year's overall profit margin. And also I note that you have been increased your buyback from the public market. Just wondering if you any if there's any updates on your shareholder return plans for this year and in the midterm. And secondly is regarding your overseas expansion. We note that off today has been growing very rapidly in the Hong Kong market.

Just wondering if you can share some color on the latest user base and the multi edition updates in Hong Kong and any investments that you have made in Hong Kong in the first quarter and do you have any other plan to further expand into new overseas markets? Thank you.

Jonathan Peng Chao (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

As. Jonathan Peng Chao. But. And thank you for your question. So the World cup is always a very good thing which we can communicate with a lot of users during a very short period of time whether how much on World cup it depends on the roi. So the advantage for this year is that there are more gains and a longer period of the World cup events. But the disadvantage is also quite clear because the time difference so we are still under communication looking at the final roi.

I will communicate once we have second is about the AI who will continue to invest. But this year the one major change we have all witnessed that for some companies and some very critical jobs companies can offer very high salary for top talents. So we should pay and find appropriate person to maintain our AI related development capabilities. And another one is on the computing power including rental service and referring cost. So we will also invest on that and maybe further expanding our expenses.

OPERATOR

So Jonathan Peng Chao. So for our margin perspective Our core business margin is quite high over 50% but considering all those investment on the World cup sponsorship and the new business. So I think it's just a similar expectation for us. From the beginning of this year we are expecting a smaller increase in our adjusted operating margin. Jonathan Peng Chao. And about shareholder returns and buyback, I want to re emphasize that year to date we have spent more than US$200 million to bought over 3% of the total shares.

If you're looking at the quarterly payout ratio is already exceeding what we planned in the first and there are two reasons we are doing this. First is actually our valuation is quite good so it's very efficient to spend money. And also we want to provide more confidence. We have confidence in our company and we want to share that view with all those employees and investors who have been standing with us. So we will continue to do that that. Chamai so it just priority number Toro.

Thank you for asking about Offer Today. And actually we did developing quite well in Hong Kong looking at the mobile side which we have more advantages. So we have now currently our daily active user is approximately 60,000 daily active users. So if you can understand like this way for the 3 million Hong Kong workers 1 out of 50 are using US every day. So actually we are providing our enterprise customer with a large amount of active effective supplies who can communicate today.

So that's why the recruiters are using very efficient and new model to communicate with job seekers. So wherever more and more people can get Offer Today. So that's our kind of situation. And there are two reasons we are developing our Hong Kong business. First is whether our business model based on double side ecosystem can get verified in the market quite clear close to the mainline. And another more important reason is when we are developing internationally we want to cultivate a very important and core team for us to go further.

So that's our purpose, our priority revenue is not our current priority and we are investing a reasonable amount. I have been communicating with our employees and our that before and we still have that view today. And we have confidence that we can turn over today to Hong Kong local most satisfied job seeking recruitment platform for both job seekers and recruiters. That OKR has not changed for a day and we will continue to invest and continue to make more efforts and hope you can keep following our and that's all of our answers to the questions today.

Operator. Thank you. Due to time constraint that concludes today's question and answer session. At this time I'll turn the conference back to Laura for any additional or closing remarks.

Laura Zhang (Senior Manager of Investor Relations)

Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact our IR team directly. Thank you.

OPERATOR

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.