Shuang Liu
Analyst · Amanda Chen from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question
Thank you, Matthew. Good morning and good evening everyone. We are very pleased to close out 2014 with strong momentum, heading into 2015. We continue to deliver robust operational and financial results, given as we make heavy investments in mobile and emerging advertising solutions. Today on this call, I want to focus our key growth strategies, what we have accomplished in the last year surrounding these strategies and what we plan to do in 2015. The main areas I will focus on today are mobile expansion, Yidian investments, innovative advertisement initiatives and our verticalization strategy. In 2014 we invested aggressively in building out our mobile platform for users and advertisers. Over the past year, we experienced significant organic growth in users, our mobile platform, with aggregate daily active users growing by 26% year over year to 30.5 million in the fourth quarter. We also saw very solid progress in terms of mobile monetization, as evidenced by our mobile advertisement revenues growing by 116% in 2014. In addition, last month we increased our investment in Yidian and became its single-largest shareholder. Yidian is a rapidly growing personalized news information app in China, which allow users to efficiently define and explore desired news and information over mobile devices. Yidian daily active users reached 6 million at the close of 2014. It was also ranked the fastest-growing news-related app in China in terms of user base last year. According to TalkingData our strategic investment in this powerful next-generation mobile app demonstrates our resolute determination to lead in evolution of content generation and consumption in an increasingly multi-screen world. Yidian's strong and addictive appeal for users lies in its ability to bridge search and recommendation functionalities in a personalized and user-friendly manner. Our integration with Yidian is a game changer, because it will greatly enhance our users experience, drive additional traffic and attract advertisers in a way that is completely complementary to our existing lines of mobile products. Yidian and our ifeng news app serve different audience demographics and enjoy different future monetization opportunities. The ifeng news app is driven by premium editorial news content and attracts reputable brand advertisers, while Yidian is driven by interest-driven search and recommendation technology and carries huge potential for performance-based advertisements. Our ifeng news app targets the affluent, white-collar reader, while Yidian can reach a broader community. The synergies here are undeniable. These two major mobile engines complement each other very well. Looking ahead into 2015, we will greatly expand our efforts to become the top mobile gateway for information consumption in China, enabling users to access our proprietary information anytime, anywhere and over any device. With this in mind, we will continue to focus on driving mobile user expansion for both our news app and Yidian. Additionally, Yidian inked a deal with its second-largest shareholder Xiaomi to have the Yidian app pre-installed on all Xiaomi mobile phones and tablets products sold in China. As Xiaomi is the leading mobile phone manufacturer in China, this deal represents a tremendous opportunity to accelerate the growth of Yidian's already large user community and build bridges to ifeng's existing mobile news apps. Furthermore, we will have the option to consolidate Yidian's financial statements into our own once the apps user base reach a certain level. The next topic is our innovative advertising solutions. Our overall ad revenue growth in 2014 remains strong despite cyclical [ph] headwinds, which negatively impacted the ad business of many of our peers. Propelled by both increasing upper and total number of advertisers, our net advertising revenue in fourth quarter increased by 28.3% to RMB338.9 million. What was particularly impressive was the progress we made developing new innovative solutions for advertisers. When we entered 2014 our native marketing solutions were nascent. In the full year 2014, we made enough progress on native advertising to more than offset particular pressures in the traditional ad business. Over the course of the last four quarters, we've build this offering from scratch and partnered with several reputable companies as pioneers in this field to develop some of the earliest native ad campaigns targeting the Chinese market. Looking ahead into 2015, as we continue to improve our native marketing offerings, we will ramp up our performance-based mobile marketing solutions through mobile products such as Yidian. Performance-based and target-ad solutions are the way of the future. Armed with Yidian's data analytics technology, deep pool of user behavior data, a large user base, we will be able to provide more targeted interest-based advertisement solutions to our advertisers based on users exhibited preferences. The third area I want to talk about is verticalization, an area where we made a lot of positive progress [over] the last year and continue to expand upon in 2015. By increasing our focus on strengthening our urban lifestyle-related offering, as urbanization and expansion of the middle class in China continues, we are faced with emerging demands related to the new cosmopolitan lifestyles. These trends have helped propel our fashion and real estate verticals to now both rank number one in China in terms of daily unique visitors according to iResearch. In 2015 we aim to be more aggressive and focused in capturing these market opportunities by expanding our vertical offerings either via partnership, investments and acquisitions, or organically by better leveraging existing resources and adapting to evolving market dynamics. The income level and spending power of our affluent user base provides us with great monetization opportunities not only through our existing news, information and advertising services, but also through value-added services and O2O and e-commerce transactions. Lastly, as I mentioned before, our strategy is to invest and employ necessary resources in order to become the number one mobile gateway for content consumption in China. With this in mind, we expect to spend more on mobile traffic acquisition for our news app, which will result in the increase of the related sales and marketing expenses. In the short term, our operating margin will be slightly impacted in 2015, but over the long term, we expect to benefit greatly as these necessary investments pave the way for us to rapidly expand our user base and capture additional monetization opportunities going forward. Overall, we see a very bright future for our Company in this dynamic industry. We are proud of the evolution of the Company and our successful performance, both operationally and financially in 2014. ifeng's mission is to become the primary source of news and lifestyle content for the Chinese population across all internet-enabled devices. Looking ahead, as we pursue this goal, we realize we have a lot of work to do, but we're very confident that executing our key strategies will lead to long-term market share expansion and financial growth. With this, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, Betty Ho.