Ting Li
Analyst · Jefferies
Hello, everyone. I'm Li Ting. Thank you for joining us today. This call marks my first anniversary as CEO, and I'm excited to share some of our latest progress with you. We've stabilized our livestreaming business while driving robust growth in our non-livestreaming businesses, particularly our ad tech business. We continue our transformation into a global tech company powered by multiple growth engines. Today, I will first briefly summarize our Q2 results, followed by a review of our progress over the past year to highlight the key pillars that will guide our growth. Finally, I will share detailed updates on each of our business units. Starting with our Q2 results, we delivered a solid performance as our livestreaming business reached a stable footing, while our advertising business achieved robust and accelerated growth. We recorded total revenue of $508 million, representing 2.7% Q-o-Q growth. Our non-GAAP operating profit reached $38 million with year-over-year growth of 27.9%. Non-GAAP EBITDA reached $48 million, growing 25.7% year-over-year. To break this down, livestreaming revenue grew 1.1% Q-o-Q, while non-livestreaming revenue achieved 25.6% year-over-year growth, contributing 26.1% of total revenues. Meanwhile, our operating cash flow reached $58 million. As of June 30, we maintained $3.3 billion in net cash on our balance sheet, a sign of our strong financial resilience. Next, I want to highlight the four keywords that have driven our progress in the past year and will continue to guide our growth: high- quality operations, sustainable growth, AI-driven innovation and organizational vitality. First, high-quality operations. Temporary app removals in late 2024 prompted us to take decisive actions to further enhance our community safety infrastructure and proactively strengthen our business ecosystem. By turning adversity into community opportunity, we have emerged more resilient and better positioned for the future. We are committed to continuous improvement as a cornerstone of our competitive advantage, building a robust business that delivers long-term value while pursuing our vision of creating a great enterprise. Next, sustainable growth. Our strong operational foundation has allowed us to cultivate our huge growth engine and achieve sustainable growth. Building on a diverse product portfolio, localized operations and enhanced global market penetration, our livestreaming operations continues to generate reliable profit and cash flows. Leveraging our operational strength and technological expertise accumulated in the 2C sector, we accelerated our expansion into the 2B sector, and we have seen huge progress in our ad tech business in the past year. Thirdly, AI-driven innovation. We believe that AI holds tremendous potential to empower our business. Today, we are applying AI extensively in our recommendation systems and advertising algorithm. In livestreaming, our AI usage is all about boosting user engagement. Early this year, for instance, we launched multilingual real-time voice recognition and translation function for our products. This enables users across languages to interact in real time, strengthening relationships between people from vastly different backgrounds and driving monetization. We have merged large language models with multimodal content understanding to create dynamic topic summarized and interactive comments that deepens the user streamer connection. Our use of AIGC has transformed how we produce virtual items and images. We are able to create personalized, localized items in a much short time span. In advertising, we leverage AI to deeply analyze and dynamically model user intentions, interest and behavioral patterns. This allow us to previously profile mid- to long-tail traffic segments, greatly enhancing targeting accuracy, especially in cold-start scenarios. AI powers our entire advertising value chain from user profiling and targeting to generative ad creation, real-time building and dynamic budget allocation. Our automated data driving decision-making is constantly improving, driving higher conversion rates, better third-party developer monetization and fueling BIGO Ads expansion across more verticals. Lastly, organizational vitality. After 20 years of building milestone successes, we are turning our entrepreneurial drive into enhancing organizational execution and efficiency. By modularizing our foundational R&D and operational processes, we are building agile, scalable capabilities that empower us to replicate past wins across emerging products and businesses. We are also prioritizing the creation of the empowering workplace for our global talent. Above all, our people are the cornerstone of our ability to achieve our strategic ambitions. Next, let me share with you the latest update for the respective businesses. In the second quarter, our group's livestreaming revenue reached $375 million with BIGO livestreaming revenue at $355 million, both stabilizing Q-o-Q. During the quarter, our global average mobile MAUs grew sequentially to 263 million. We continued to refine our user acquisition with ROI-driven approach. As a result, BIGO LIVE's user numbers grew 2.3 points (sic) [ 2.3% ] Q-o-Q while 30 days ROI from new devices improved 4.4% sequentially. Our organic user growth was also strong, driven by improving user experience. Today, majority of our total global MAUs are from our IM product. High-frequency usage and strong user stickiness, fueled by enhanced features such as HD audio-video calling and rich media messaging has been pivotal to add organic expansion. In the second quarter, the MAUs of IM increased by 3 million with average daily user time spent up 12.8% year-over-year. We are building our long-term strategy on the foundation of high-quality global traffic that drives sustained monetization across livestreaming, advertising and potentially others. As we prioritize quality over volume, we will continue to closely monitor the effectiveness of our user acquisition through ROI and our long-term user stickiness. We enhanced content quality and refined the paying user experience during the second quarter, which drove higher user engagement and conversion efficiency. Specifically, we optimized BIGO LIVE's cross-regional content distribution algorithm and real-time AI translation. These changes significantly drove continued growth in cross-regional tipping, particularly in Europe and the Americas. We launched the Streamer Academy, which provide tiered training, enhanced livestreaming tools and operational support to help streamers improve quality and reach. This fueled 1.6% Q-o-Q increase in active streamers on BIGO LIVE. We also revamped BIGO LIVE premium paying user benefit system during the quarter, introducing refined tiered incentives and executive privileges. This drove 13% Q-o-Q increase in premium paying users. As a result, BIGO's overall livestreaming paying users grew 3.7% Q-o-Q. Looking at our performance by region. In the second quarter, our livestreaming revenue in developed countries returned to positive Q- o-Q growth. In particular, BIGO LIVE's revenue in Europe rose 6.5% Q-o-Q, marking the first significant rebound in revenue since we implemented a series of content strategy optimizations in the second half of last year. Our livestreaming revenue in Southeast Asia was also up Q-o-Q, with BIGO LIVE's revenue in this market rising 3.9%. We anticipate continued growth in paying users in the second half from heightened localized campaigns, enhanced content and payment experiences and the incremental contribution from our new audio product line up in the Middle East. We are confident that our livestreaming business will regain momentum and continue to deliver sustainable cash flow. In the second quarter, BIGO Ads achieved $87 million in ad revenue, representing approximately 29% year-over-year growth and 9% Q-o-Q growth. In particular, revenues from our ad network recorded mid double-digit year-over-year growth. Last quarter, I outlined our strategic rationale for entering into the ad tech business and how we can utilize our inherent advantages to build a sustainable competitive edge. Today, I want to focus on where we stand in this trillion dollar market and the BIGO Ads strategic positioning for long-term growth. We are building significant scale on the traffic side. Our reach stands roughly 263 million users through our own social apps and we extend this reach substantially by seamlessly integrating developer traffic across major channels. Our first-party traffic monetization remains stable. We believe steady first-party ad revenue with strong profitability, and we expect to maintain growth through improved user engagement and ad fill rates. In the meanwhile -- meantime, we have significantly scaled our third-party network traffic through successful integrations with AppLovin MAX and Unity LevelPlay mediation platforms. Growing developer SDK adoption has driven nearly 80% traffic growth versus the second half of 2024, while new integrations with multichannel platforms further expanded our traffic reach, including CTV. Meanwhile, we saw robust growth across IAP, IAA and web-based channels with daily transaction volumes reaching record levels. Web-based lead-generation continued to post double-digit gains, powered by pixel features, optimization, enriched customer data feedback, and improved building (sic) [ bidding ] strategy. In IAA, we expanded partnership with top gaming companies, with firms including [indiscernible] and Fugo expanding their campaigns on BIGO Ads, which contributed to faster sequential growth. Geographically speaking, we are seeing strong performance in multiple regions. In the first half of 2025, North America delivered approximately 24.2% sequential growth. In Europe, where we kicked off our expansion during the second quarter, revenue grew by a high single-digit percentage Q-o-Q. Finally, our proprietary user data asset, enhanced by customer feedback and multichannel attribution, continuously improved our profiling and targeting protection. Deep synergies across our business segments, including accumulated vertical insights, data asset, established algorithm capabilities and the relevant experiences in cold-start scenarios have given us a head start in developing specialized models tailored to each vertical. Additionally, our global network infrastructure and tech capabilities, originally built for our livestreaming businesses, offer significant cost advantages. In summary, our advertising business has delivered consistent sequential growth and profitability for multiple consecutive quarters. This success stems from the number of key strengths, including expansion of our traffic, rising advertiser demand across channels and verticals and quickly evolving algorithms supported by our global tech and the network infrastructure, fostering a self-reinforcing strategic flywheel. BIGO Ads has emerged as our second major growth engine, representing a strategic long term priority for the group. We are pursuing expansion in North America, Japan and Europe, unlocking substantial new opportunities, leveraging JOYY's ecosystem and deep insight into e-commerce and social major verticals. We are accelerating the training and optimizing vision of AI-driven models to establish a distinct competitive advantage. On our product front, we are enriching our ad format, strengthening in calibration with attribution platforms, enhancing advertisers' data feedback and advancing algorithm to maximize targeting, precision and drive long-term ROI. BIGO Ads' structural advantages combined with our proven execution capabilities and the vast market opportunity ahead reinforce our commitment to building a meaningful and lasting presence in the ad tech industry. We are determined to execute on our strategic plan and retain full confidence in our team and ability to drive long-term success. Finally, let's turn to capital allocation. As discussed previously, we are actively exploring new growth engines and have already seen promising initial results. In the short term, we expect to prudentially expand headcount and the marketing resources to support our ad tech business while maintaining healthy profit margin. In the mid to long term, when our non-livestreaming businesses reach a certain scale, investments in infrastructure upgrades, tech development, talent expansion and marketing efforts are all potentially high-return capital allocation options. From January 1 through June 30, we have distributed $135 million to our shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. We view our share as substantially undervalued and remain committed to actively utilize buybacks under the previous approached program. Looking forward, with our livestreaming business stabilizing and the rising revenue and profit from advertising and other emerging businesses, we expect the company's consolidated operating profit to continue to improve and our shareholders to benefit from long- term profitable growth. In closing, our core livestreaming business has stabilized in Q2, positioning us for sustained growth. Our ad tech platform is rapidly scaling as our second growth engine, and we are building our long-term capabilities, particularly in our data and algorithms and establishing our differential competitive advantages across markets and verticals. We look forward to sharing ongoing positive developments in the coming quarters. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alex Liu, the Vice President of Finance, to provide our financial update.