Shuang Liu
Analyst · CICC. Natalie, please go ahead
Thank you, Matthew. Good morning and good evening everyone. We are pleased to see our investment to Yidian started to pay off in the past quarter through its operational progress. Notwithstanding the lower-than-expected ad revenue growth, second quarter carried positive operational development that will lay the groundwork for our long-term growth. We remain confident in the future of our business, especially as we accelerate our mobile expansion and prepare to roll out targeted ads over Yidian and our other mobile products. Other encouraging developments included the ongoing verticalization of our content offering and the rapid success of our video documentary creations, both of which I'll get into momentarily. Now let me first address the progress we have made on the mobile strategy and the future plan for mobile monetization. Yidian is a core part of our evolution into an innovative media company that transforms how Chinese society consumes information anywhere, anytime on any internet-enabled device. We're unquestionably encouraged by Yidian's progress since we first invested in it nearly a year ago. In July, the Yidian app's total daily unique visitors reached 10 million, representing an impressive year-over-year growth of over ten-fold. Together with our ifeng News app, we are on -- we are one of the top three mobile news on the information platform in terms of user coverage according to TalkingData, a third-party mobile data monitoring company. In addition, Yidian's robust user growth was complemented by strong organic growth in ifeng's mobile traffic, which reached 34.5 million daily active users in June, up 25.5% from a year ago. Furthermore, we're seeing very promising results with the apps we have tested on Yidian, due to the high level of app relevance, which is based on the users' exhibited interest. In particular, click-through rates for Yidian app was significantly higher than that on the PC. We are very encouraged by the stats we're seeing and are excited about the future monetization potential it carries. In the coming months, Yidian technology and marketing teams will be working tirelessly in a joint effort to ready the platform for monetization through introducing targeted apps in the second half of the year. We expect Yidian will first start monetization of Android phones in the fourth quarter of this year and expand to a full-scale monetization by the first half of year 2016. In addition, we expect that Yidian's EUB [ph] will remain the strong growth momentum moving forward. We also remain committed to continuous improvement of our apps in order to offer our users the optimal mobile experience. For Yidian, an improved iOS version was recently released that not only offer an enhanced user experience but also better employs Yidian's cutting-edge big data analytics capabilities to recommend the most suitable options which make searching, subscribing and discovering more convenient and effective. For our mobile [inaudible] we have launched [inaudible] which allows users to not only read breaking news of national importance but also quickly and immediately see what developments are impacting their local areas. We believe Yidian's functional enhancements and ifeng newly-added localized news are prime examples of how ifeng strives to utilize technology to deepen our impact and bolster engagement among our loyal and tech-savvy user base. As we march forward with our mobile and technology initiatives, we have not lost sight on the PC side. In the past quarter our PC and daily unique visitors grew at 10% year over year to 50m, and we maintained our number three [ph] position as an integrated media website in China and ranked number seven among all Chinese websites in terms of daily unique visitors according iResearch. Channel development and verticalization has also been another key priority and one on which we had executed exceptionally well. Our finance channel which we made a separate business unit this April [inaudible] previous quarters among such market volatility and its official WeChat account has attracted over 1 million readers in the past quarter. We saw similar growth in our fashion channel, with big-name fashion brands signing off to work with us to promote their products among engaged fashion-specific artists. Our finance and fashion verticals are clear models for success in terms of both user expansion and monetization. Through expanding the depth, quality and quantity of our verticals, with further broadened impact on users in specific sub-segments, this segmentation of our audience will allow us to enhance our marketing solutions for advertisers by more effectively targeting desired demographics. Another exciting development relates to our video documentary strategy. In such a fragmented online video market, we have focused on original video production, with some particular emphasis on documentaries. Our recent efforts in this area have launched us to become the number one online video documentary platform in China, occupying 30% [ph] of the total viewing traffic for this category according to China Mainland Media Research, a leading media consulting firm. Among these exciting news, our app revenue fell short of our original forecast. It was due to the weaker-than-expected PC advertising demand, which was felt across the internet media sector in China, and compounded by our internal sales leadership transition. As a result, it is expected that our full-year ad revenue growth will be hindered. Despite this temporary situation, we see a bright future in 2016 as new trends of premium brand advertisements combined with performance-based targeted marketing solutions across all internet-enabled devices, especially in the fast-growing mobile platform. In a joint marketing and technology effort, we are aggressively investing in developing these next-generation app solutions in order to stay ahead of the curve and command greater advertising revenues in future periods. The core competencies of our business, namely content production capabilities, dedication to serious journalism, and cutting-edge technology have only gotten stronger in the recent period. We are confident that with these strong fundamentals, the ongoing expansion of our model user base and the development of emerging app solutions were well-positioned to grow our business and deliver sustainable long-term value to our shareholders. With this, I'd like to turn it over to our CFO, Betty Ho.