David Xueling Li
Analyst · Credit Suisse. Please ask your question
Thank you, Matthew. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2018 earnings conference call. At the beginning of my prepared remarks, I want to share the joy with you since a few hours ago we announced news regarding YY's successful completion of the acquisition of Bigo. You can find more details from our separate press release. It is an important milestone for YY group which demonstrated our confidence and commitment to the globalization strategy. Bigo has delivered both rapid user growth and significant monetization progress in 2018, making it one of the fastest growing internet companies worldwide. While Bigo LIVE is consolidating its leadership in entertainment live streaming market outside China, LIKE, the short form video app also experienced tremendous user growth and user time spend increase in short form video market. The combination of YY and Bigo's unparalleled business and services in both China and overseas will enable us to create intense live streaming content. Expand our global footprint and offer world class user experiences for our global user community. As a result, we will be well positioned to become a world leading video based social media platform. Next, let's talk about the quarter and the full year results. We concluded 2018 with another quarter of solid operating and financial results. Our total revenues increased by 28% year-over-year to RMB4.64 billion during the fourth quarter, exceeding the high end of our previous guidance range. Revenues from our live streaming business grew by 30.4% year-over-year to RMB4.39 billion. Revenue from game live streaming subsidiary Huya increased by 100.31% year-over-year to RMB1.5 billion. During the fourth quarter, we achieved year-over-year and subsequent sequential increases in both our mobile live stream and use and live streaming pay users. Our number of mobile live streaming monthly active users increased by 18.1% to 90.4 million and numbers of live streaming pay users increased by 36.6% to 8.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2018. Since we own one of the most loyal and engaged live streaming communities throughout the industry, the continuous healthy expansion of our community has enabled us to sustain our strong growth momentum. I would like to share with you more color on three key areas efforts. International expansion, content upgrade and AI technology enhancement. Firstly, we are actively exploring opportunities globally in 2018, our initial foray into the global market with several early-stage innovative products generated exciting results. One good example is HAGO, H, A, G, O. A casual game oriented social media platform that we officially launched in the third quarter of 2018. HAGO only provides around 50 casual games, but also induces multiple social features such as live streaming chat rooms, karaoke and others into the app. As a result, that platform encourage young generations to use these features to establish and maintain social connections, while enjoying casual games. Now HAGO is available in 33 countries and regions worldwide with a focus on Southeast Asian markets. In the fourth quarter of 2018, HAGO consistently topped the charts of the most popular apps on both App Store and Google Play in both Indonesia and Vietnam, HAGO's monthly active users reach 20.9 million and on average its users spend over hour on the HAGO platform on a daily basis. Looking ahead, we intend to further expand our product portfolio globally to achieve faster user growth and explore more monetization opportunities. With HAGO proven to be a smash hit in its targeted markets and the acquisition of Bigo, we're very confident that the successful model of our international operations will be a very important driver for our long-term growth. Secondly, moving to our content upgrades. In the past through our proven cross channel promotion strategy, we successfully transformed a number of grassroots performance into social phenomenon. In addition to promoting our hosts online, we have also implemented creative methods to reinforce their popularity offline. Such as our recent YY Annual Award 2018. That event features 20 original performances from 31 of our top hosts, attracting over 20 million video views on our platform. Looking forward, we will continue to build up our capabilities in packaging, promoting, and marketing our talented hosts for entertainment live streaming. We also intend to diversify our content to include more lifestyle and interest oriented live streaming content. Thirdly, on the technology front, we have continued to upgrade our proprietary AI algorithms, which resulted in increased average user time spent on our platform. We leveraged our sophisticated machine learning models to enhance the effectiveness of our content tagging. We implemented our AI-powered visual recognition technology into our content distribution engine, so that it can automatically tag and accurately recommend the most relevant live streaming shows to our audience. Through these efforts, we can create an optimal experience with users by ensuring that we distribute the right content to the right audience at the right time. As a result, our average user time spent along live has increased by 7% sequentially. In summary, during 2018 we made significant progress in upgrading our content operations and enhancing our user engagement through advanced AI technology. As we entered into 2019, we will continue to execute our international expansion strategies, while simultaneously enriching and diversifying our live streaming content. We expect these efforts to result in improved traffic to monetization conversion rates on our platform. We intend to build upon the momentum created this quarter by evaluating potential opportunities in partnerships and mergers acquisitions to further expand our operation, user base and influence as a leader in the global live streaming industry. Now that concludes the remarks of our Chairman and acting CEO Mr. David Xueling Li. Now as the CFO of YY, I would to discuss our financial results in more details. We continue to deliver solid financial and operating metrics during the fourth quarter of 2018. Our total net revenues for the fourth quarter increased by 28% year-over-year to RMB4.64 billion. Specifically our live streaming revenues increased by 30.4% year-over-year to RMB4.39 billion, accounting for 94.6% of our total net revenues this quarter. In the fourth quarter, mobile contributed 64% of our live streaming revenues, while mobile live streaming MAUs increased by 18.1% to 90.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2018. Live streaming paying users increased by 36.6% to 8.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2018. While mobile paying users constituted 75.7% of overall live streaming paying users. Cost of revenues for the fourth quarter increased by 37.2 % year-over-year to RMB3.01 billion. Revenue sharing fees and the content costs paid to the performers views and content providers increased to RMB2.56 billion in the fourth quarter, reflecting the growth of both YY and Huya's lives streaming revenues. In addition, bandwidth cost for the fourth quarter increased to RMB246.5 million, primarily reflecting continued user expansion and live streaming quality improvement. Gross profit for the fourth quarter increased by 13.8% year-over-year to RMB1.63 billion; gross margin was 35.1% as compared to 39.4% in the prior year period, primarily due to the increase in revenue sharing fees and content costs. The decrease in gross margin was attributable to the impact caused by the relatively low cost margin of the Huya segment as its contribution to our total net revenues increased significantly year-over-year. Our operating expenses were RMB931.2 million during the fourth quarter of 2018, as compared to RMB652.9 million in the prior year period, primarily due to our increase efforts in sales, marketing activities as we continue to expand in domestic and overseas markets. Sales and marketing expenses for the fourth quarter were RMB323.7 million or 7% of total revenue, compared to RMB148.8 million or 4.1% of total revenue in the prior year period. Our R&D expenses for the fourth quarter was RMB332.5 million or 7.2% of total revenues, compared to RMB282.8 million or 7.8% of total revenues in the prior period. G&A expenses were RMB275 million or 5.9% of total revenues in the fourth quarter compared to RMB218.8 million or 6% of total revenues in the prior period. Our GAAP operating income for the fourth quarter of 2018 was RMB718.6 million compared to RMB 821.5 million in a prior year period. Our non-GAAP operating income which excludes share based compensation expenses, impairments of goodwill and investments was RMB888.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2018. GAAP net income attributable to YY was RMB684 million compared to RMB740.4 million in the prior year period. Our non-GAAP net income attributable to YY was RMB836.2 million compared to RMB932.1 million in the prior period. Non-GAAP net margin in the fourth quarter of 2018 was 18% compared to 25.7% in the year prior period. Diluted net income per ADS in the fourth quarter of 2018 was RMB10.4 compared to RMB11.53 in the prior period. Non-GAAP diluted net income per ADS was RMB12.86 compared to RMB14.51 in the prior period. Now turning to the results of the full year 2018. Our total net revenues increased by 36% year-over-year to RMB15.76 billion, driven by 39.4% year-over-year increase in live streaming revenues. Our GAAP net income attributable to YY for the full year 2018 was RMB1.64 billion and our non-GAAP net income attributable to YY for the full year 2018 increased by 18.4 % to RMB3.2 billion. Diluted net income per ADS for the full year 2018 was RMB25.38 compared to RMB41.33 in the prior year period. And non-GAAP diluted net income per ADS for the full year 2018 increased by 9.7% to RMB49.05 from RMB44.72 in the prior period. Before I provide our guidance, let me first share an update regarding our online game related business. Recently, we entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Shanghai Chuangsi Enterprise development Co Limited. Shanghai Chuangsi owns 9377 Games, one of the leading game platforms in China. Under that agreement, we will obtain 30% equity interest of Shanghai Chuangsi by injecting our online game business into Shanghai Chuangsi. As a result, the financial results of YY’s online games business, which contributed to less than 3% of YY segment’s total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2018, will no longer be consolidated upon the completion of the transaction. Currently, the transaction is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2019. With that said, we expect our net revenues for the first quarter of 2019 to be between RMB4.01 billion and RMB4.16 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of 23.4% to 28% without giving effect to the acquisition of Bigo Inc. This forecast reflects our current and preliminaries views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we would now like to open the call to questions.