Shuang Liu
Analyst · Barclays. Please ask your next question Mr. Zhao
Thank you Matthew.Good morning and good evening everyone. In the third quarter, we continued to execute and expand upon our core media DNA, as the leading Internet media pioneer, while blazing new trails as a mobile technology innovator in this rapidly evolving environment for media consumption. The trend towards mobile has brought with it several challenges in 2015, but offers significant opportunities in the periods to come. Allow me to take a few minutes to first discuss the progress we made with our two core complementary mobile applications, Yidian Zixun and ifeng News. Many of you are already familiar with Yidian, but for those who are not, let me explain. Yidian is a personalized content recommendation and aggregation platform. Its core technology is its Interest Engine, which combines both search and recommendation platforms through it’s large database and sophisticated algorithm, Yidian, is able to offer and push content to users based on their exhibited behaviors on selected subscriptions. In recent months we have greatly improved the recommendation function by increasing not only the accuracy of user profile, but also the accuracy of article profiles in terms of metrics like number of page views, reports and time spent. These improvements allow us to better match users with the content they desire and increase the stickiness of the app. Yidian is not only the content distribution platform, but also a content creation platform. Currently Yidian’s platform has attracted over 20,000 individual media outlets to distribute their self-produced contents. The content produced by individual media outlets drives about half of Yidian’s total page views, making it a more efficient platform than other social networks to consume that type of content. Yidian is the first Chinese app to allow a user to personalize their verticals by subscribing using any key words they choose. So far more than 2.2 million key words have been used as personalized subscriptions on Yidian’s platform. Recently Yidian pioneered the Interest Folder function, which allows user to regroup those subscribed key words into folders for better user experience. Through those customized key words and folders we can better develop accurate profiles on users based on their individual preferences. For example, we noticed that the number of users to search and subscribing using the key word childcare almost doubled to 1.6 million following China’s announcement of the two-child policy last month. This example reflects Yidian’s significant potential to offer customized lifestyle information rather than just pure news content like its peers. This increased level of customization and localization for lifestyle information services allow us to integrate high-efficiency, targeted app products as well at O2O or ecommerce services through partnership with many of China’s leading O2O or ecommerce players. Additionally, Yidian’s English version, Particle News, is the first Chinese developed app to offer personalized Interest Engine services in English. And in late September Particle News was recommended as one of the best news apps by the U.S. iTunes store. According to TalkingData, a third-party mobile approximately analytics company, Yidian currently ranks among the top three news and information apps in terms of mobile usage, user coverage in China. In terms of monetization, we have already begun to introduce advertisements on a small scale in the second half of this year, as Yidian continues to optimize its technology and amass a wider user base in a younger tech-savvy demographic, we’re preparing the platform for large-scale monetization starting the beginning of next year. Our traditional ifeng News app is different from Yidian and together they place ifeng uniquely at the crossroads of technology and serious journalism. Like our PC based website, our ifeng News applications offers high-quality in-house editorial contents around popular vertical topics. It's user base comprise mostly more affluent, middle-class users, often time with special interests that are best served by our segmented interest-based vertical model. The ifeng News app continue to progress well in the recent quarter, with active users increasing by 25% year-over-year and many technology related improvements boosting app efficiencies, engagement and overall user satisfaction. We began to deploy data mining technology to offer ifeng News users recommended content base on their user profile, so a new channel called Related Recommendations. We also introduced local channels, covering major Chinese cities and provinces, which enable users to access and consume local content, and now serve about 10% of our users. Meanwhile, our ifeng video app showed astonishing growth, with daily active users growing over 60% year-over-year in the last quarter. As a very niche player, providing professional news video content in the Chinese online video arena, the ifeng video app will continue to serve the Chinese TV news audience and explore more synergies in app monetization with our news app and mobile website going forward. In brief, together these complementary mobile products help us serve different demographics and different user needs, and are the key to allowing us to become the leading mobile gateway of choice for news and information consumption in China. In conjunction with our mobile product development and user expansion strategies, is our focus on introducing next generation app solutions in a world where the competition for users’ eyeballs is more and more intense. In the era of Internet Plus, marketing is everywhere and successful marketing strategies have to utilize the power of context to increase stickiness and results. In late October at the 2015 China Advertising Awards, we were recognized for our next gen marketing solution by taking home three gold, seven silver and nine bronze medal awards, which far surpassed all of our major peers. Driven by our continual progress developing contextual and targeted app solutions, we were able to grow our mobile ad revenues by nearly 19% year-over-year. We see enormous potential for future growth here and we are working to accelerate this growth through further utilizing our data mining capabilities and synergies with Yidian to redefine marketing success in the mobile era. At the heart of our organization, our media DNA are the journalistic fervor, which remains unquestionably strong. In the recent quarter, our experienced team of journalists delivered excellent coverage and deep analysis of several major news events of great interest to our Chinese artist, such as the Tianjin explosion, the Russian military march, North Korean national celebration and the Chinese anti-Fascist military parade. Our Chinese anti-Fascist military parade special feature page attracted over 16 million viewers across the PC client and news app in two days. Meanwhile, the related ifeng articles achieved more than 10 million views through the Company's official WeChat account. We also further expanded our broad platform with the hiring of several famous writers to become columnists on our platform and conducted many interviews with key opinion leaders in Chinese society. In addition, despite the recent challenging business environment, as a major Chinese language media platforms with a global presence, we have consistently remained committed to social responsibility, and our actions show that. This year was the ninth consecutive year that we hosted and sponsored the Happiness Forever charity gala, Meili Tongxing, and conducted a special fund raising initiative to support children in need of medication in rural China. This year's event raised a record high donation amount of RMB32 million, up from just a few million nine years ago. These type of charity initiatives characterize ifeng's consistent and strengthening commitment to utilizing our unique media platform to contribute to the positive development of Chinese society. Recently there has been external interest and speculation regarding internal restructuring and layoffs. Our recent restructuring enabled us to shift resources from the PC to mobile side to allocate more talent to develop our mobile product, optimizing its technology and monetizing it through mobile ad sales. We'll continue to make disciplined judgments regarding headcount and workforce organization, and focus on utilizing talent to drive more user engagement and mobile monetization. Lastly, we’re completely aware that our Company is facing several challenges relating to the soft ad demand in our industry and macroeconomic uncertainties that have impacted our financial performance this year. The shift toward mobile and evolution of marketing trends has both short-term and long-term implications for our Company. In the short term there will be transitional frictions as we experience lower ad demand on traditional mediums and incur expenses related to investing in mobile and next-generation media products. But with the right technology investments and an underlying commitment to serious journalism, there are boundless opportunities that lay ahead in the mobile and data technology enabled world of tomorrow. We’re confident that with our strong business fundamentals, namely cutting-edge technology, a large and expanding user base and consistent, high-quality journalism, we are well positioned to grow our business and deliver sustainable long-term value to our shareholders. With this, I would like to turn it over to our CFO, Betty Ho.