Shuang Liu
Analyst · CICC, Natalie Wu. Please go ahead
Thank you, Nicole. Good morning and good evening, everyone. In the third quarter of 2017, we continued to witness solid performance in both our financial and operating results. Our total revenues increased by 18% year-over-year to RMB426 million, which exceeded the high-end of our previous guidance range. Net advertising revenues increased by 17% year-over-year to RMB363 million, primarily driven by a 50% year-over-year increase in our mobile advertising revenues. Our strong commitment to continue executing our twin-engine model strategy brought great results to both the ifeng News App and Yidian in the third quarter. I'll first address Yidian's significant progress. We're very excited that our investee, Yidian, received a license for Internet news information service from the Cyberspace Administration of China, or the CAC, on October 31, 2017. This is the first license issued by CAC since the new regulations for the administration of Internet news information services came into effect on June 1, 2017. The license issued to Yidian is applicable to both PC and mobile news services. In addition to news services, the license also explicitly authorize Yidian to operate Yidianhao, Yidian's we-media platform in China. It is the first time that the CAC has authorized a we-media platform to operate in China. We believe this will provide Yidian a strong advantage to attract more we-media accounts, especially professional account institutions, to join Yidianhao, enabling Yidian to provide differentiated and high-quality content to users. We view the license as an official recognition of Yidian's credibility, which will further differentiate Yidian from other Internet news service providers in China. With the license, we expect Yidian to gain additional competitive advantages in channel expansion, partnership establishment, content operation and we-media development, thus accelerating Yidian's user growth. Going forward, the license should also open up additional opportunities for Yidian to strengthen strategic partnerships with content providers and handset manufacturers. As we announced in our recent press release, the license also fulfills a prerequisite for an equity investment in Yidian from Long De Cheng Zhang Culture Communication, Long De Cheng Zhang, a company affiliated with the Beijing Culture Investment Development Group. We are excited that the investment has validated Yidian's valuation, though it took much longer than expected to close due to its complexity. As the major terms of this transaction were conducted last year, with investment from Long De and the other two investors that we discussed in the second quarter, Yidian raised a total of approximately $112.1 million at an estimated transaction valuation of around $1 billion. On the financial and operational level, leveraging cutting-edge algorithm, high-quality content on the strong partnerships with top Chinese content manufacturers, OPPO and Xiaomi, Yidian continues to grow its organic traffic. By the third quarter of 2017, its combined daily average user, or DAU, exceeded 55 million. We believe Yidian's strong growth momentum should continue. Therefore, we're confident that Yidian's revenue will grow at least three times in 2017, which is at the high end of our previous expectations. While we operate independently from Yidian, we will cooperate more closely with Yidian to boost our synergy in content development, advertising sales and algorithm improvement. It is vital for us to continuously improve our algorithm, as it helps us better target users with our apps, push news and display advertisements, which in turn increase our monetization opportunities. As for ifeng's development, I would like to first talk about our programmatic advertising. In the third quarter, revenues from our programmatic apps increased by 106% year-over-year to RMB152 million. The strong increase was primarily driven by the progress of our programmatic advertising platform, Fengyu, which is a customizable, self-service marketing solution. We launched a new version in the second quarter that operates under a bidding system. We've further optimized Fengyu systems and connected it with ifeng's core traffic in the third quarter in order to provide our advertising customers improved targeting capability and maximize their ROI. In terms of advertiser portfolio, Fengyu continues to actively bring in advertising customers in the industry of home furnishing, education and immigration as their apps have brought better quality in terms of content and innovation. With Fengyu, we believe we are strongly positioned to better fulfill advantages – to better fulfill advertisers' growing demand as increasing budget allocations for programmatic advertisements. With respect to our content strategy, we continue to be the leading news distributor of major current affairs around the world. For example, our reporting of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China once again received recognition from our users and advertisers. According to a report from iResearch during the 19th National Congress, the growth rate of weekly active users of the ifeng News apps surpassed that of all of our peers. In addition, we are ranked number one on the PC platform for the number of page views of our featured stories. Also during the third quarter of 2017, we initiated a strategic content cooperation with Youku to further broaden our video content. The cooperation allow our users to access Youku's video database. As a result, our traffic has experienced solid improvement in search visibility and conversion rates. Finally, let me provide an update of our product diversification strategy for digital reading. Our digital reading business was launched to better monetize our traffic and has experienced rapid growth in the past two years, with revenues increasing by almost fourfold. In the third quarter of 2017, online digital reading revenue increased by 51.5%, and all major operating metrics showed strong growth as well. This quarter was incorporated online novel subscription channels on both PC and mobile platforms, which complemented ifeng's core products nicely and generated great synergies. In August 2017, to better convey the attractiveness of our digital reading content, we changed the name of our app, Phoenix Bookstore, to Fengyu Novels. Fengyu Novels represents our initial foray into product expansion for our digital reading business, and we are encouraged by the results so far. In summary, we are pleased to report the solid progress we achieved in the third quarter of 2017 while we also acknowledge the competitiveness of our industry. In order to stay ahead of our competitors, we will continue to invest in traffic acquisition to further expand our market share while adopting strict cost control measures and closely monitoring the ROI of our products. By leveraging our professional journalism, cutting-edge technology, extensive partnership resources, as well as our branding power, we believe we can maintain our leading position in a highly competitive market. We have the right team and strategy in place, and we strive to generate incremental value for all of our shareholders. With this, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Betty Ho.