Rongjie Dong
Analyst · Citigroup
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's call. I would like to talk about two primary topics. One is a review of our business and operations during the first quarter. The other is Huya's new initiatives and underlining strategic thinking as we look ahead. In terms of key quarterly highlights, Huya's revenues for the first quarter grew 93% year-over-year as we continued delivering game and e-sports content to a highly engaged community of game enthusiasts while also making progress in the nongame genres, thereby participating -- participation grew faster evidenced by our total monthly average user base growth of 33% year-over-year, reaching 123.8 million in quarter one. In particular, the accelerated growth of our MAUs during the past two quarters has exceeded our expectations. Looking at the composition and the strategy behind our MAU numbers, we maintained our focus on mobile and solidified our advantages in technology as well as product diversification for the sake of both user and broadcaster experience. Our mobile strategy paid off with promising results as mobile MAUs for the first quarter continued its strong momentum to 54 million users, up 30% year-over-year and up 6.3% quarter-over-quarter. Mobile achieved higher sequential growth than that of the PC end, contributing more than 80% of live streaming revenues, justifying our resource allocation and technology focus in this area. Additionally, we experienced higher MAU conversion rates to paying users at 5.4 million, up 57% year-over-year and up 11% quarter-over-quarter mainly thanks to our mobile-end strength. E-sports remains a strategy -- strategic concentration as we further integrate ourselves across the ecosystem's value chain. We are making further positive strides in deepening relationships with key stakeholders as we build up our vibrant e-sports community, engaging with more industry players. Talking about deepening industry relationships vertically, in the first quarter, we broadcasted over 80 e-sports tournaments with viewership of approximately 380 million covering all major events such as LPL, LCK, KPL, HoK Champion Cup Winter Season and WESG Grand Final as compared with broadcasting 60 tournaments and generating 260 million viewership in the year ago period. It's also worth noting that our exclusively broadcasted LCK series alone hit viewership of 89 million in the quarter. In the spirit of mapping out the horizontal relationship within the e-sports matrix, we have recently signed Team WE and TOP and look forward to more teams who are producing exclusive and professional gaming content for Huya. We are also quite committed to self-organized tournament services by hosting over 20 events in quarter 1. These self-organized tournaments generated viewership of over 63 million, among which Huya Destiny PUBG Solo Series and the Fifth Honor of Kings Guild Tournament each generated viewership of more than 10 million. Through our dedicating to generating a broader range of diversified content, Huya has successively evolved its ecosystem to create more original and quality content targeted at our expanded cohort from hardcore gamers to the entire gaming population. In the past 12 months, Huya's platform has expanded its content suppliers into a mix of user generated content or UGC, professionally generated content or PGC and the professional user generated content or PUGC from the original composition of major UGC and limited e-sports PGC. Meanwhile, we are leveraging our talent agency mechanism especially the platinum talent agencies to produce high-quality PUGC efficiently. Platinum talent agencies are recognized as capable of managing large pools of broadcasters and contributing to constant streaming hours upon thorough and ongoing assessment of their quality by us. The number of platinum agencies increased from approximately 1,000 in 2017 to over 1,500 by the end of 2018. As a marketplace for content producers, we strategically provide platinum talent agencies with additional resources to promote and develop their broadcasters while we also set some incentive measures for top earning platinum talent agencies. Platinum talent agencies are playing a key role in producing both gaming and the nongaming content since we have seeing that outcome from our efforts with providing them with more foreseeable diversification guidelines based on our data mining and operation experiences. For example, as are sharing some overlapping cohorts with gaming content, both outdoor activities and animation themed streaming have also been successful categories thanks to Huya's talent agency partners. The percentage of MAUs viewing live streaming of outdoor content and anime content increased to 14% and 10% in quarter 4 2018 from 10% and 7%, respectively, in the year ago period. As talent agencies are taking a significant role in developing outdoor and anime PUGC, our quality of content has been greatly improved at minimal overhead costs to us. At the same time, we produced a series of original PGC shows on our path to content diversification. For instance, by collaborating with PUBG Mobile, we launched the Team up with My Idol in January, a crossover live show inviting idol celebrities to stream with popular game broadcasters. International expansion continues to be our key competitive differentiated -- differentiator as we remain optimistic and selective in emerging markets across Southeast Asia and Latin America, where we have established first-mover advantage. Establishing a baseline foundation through NIMO TV, our wholly owned business unit targeting the overseas market, we will launch further marketing and promotion efforts to grow user base. To illustrate, we are hosting local tournaments on regional popular games such as Free Fire in Brazil to attract streamers and users alike. Leveraging off our expertise in the game live streaming space and localization strategy, we are confident in our globalization process and long-term returns on our overseas investment. Facing the uncertainties that lied ahead under such macroeconomic conditions, our overseas strategy will diversify the sources of both user base and revenue streams, thus bolster our confidence to generate steady long-term growth. On the technology initiatives front, with the advantages in content and operation, we will remain focused on investing in technology to develop revolutionary products and best-in-class user experience. As an example, we have now deployed AI facilitated technology called Smart Editing, which generates clips of highlights right after a game ends and automatically distributes to various channels so that users can have immediate access to the gaming highlights. Another recent tech update is that we signed a MOU with China Telecom in April for 5G solution cooperation and successfully completed live streaming outdoor activity in 4K high-definition through the 5G network for the first time among China -- Chinese live streaming peers. Looking ahead, we see great potential for higher definition and latency-free solutions as 5G technology is put into commercial deployment, bringing fluent gameplay and content consumption experiences. With all that being said, as we drive our leadership position further with these initiatives in technology, overseas market and content diversification, I believe Huya will establish significant presence in some of these new territories within next 2 to 3 years. While the game live streaming industry has been consolidating since Huya went public last year, we are also seeing an increasing amount of capital inflow into this arena, and the competition remains among top companies. To lay the foundation of these new initiatives and provide funding for long-term sustainable growth, we successfully completed a follow-on offering recently. In summary, we are excited to get the year off to a strong start as we successfully execute our business strategy. We are confident in leveraging our well-established leadership position in game live streaming to unlock value for all stakeholders. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Henry, to share the financial details.