Tang Yan
Analyst · Nomura. Please go ahead
[Interpreted] Good morning and good evening everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. I’m pleased that we delivered solid operational and financial results for the quarter. At the same time we continue to push forward on products and operational fronts in order to build up longer term growth drivers as we start to look beyond 2018 into next year. Now my team and I will take you through the details. Firstly, from a high level, total revenue reached $536 million for the quarter, up 51% year-on-year. Adjusted operating income for the quarter was $125.1 million, up 21% from the same period last year. Now a deep dive into the quarter. Firstly, our community continued to grow. The core Momo app had 110.5 million monthly access for the third quarter, up 17% year-on-year and representing a 2.5 million net addition from the previous quarter. During the past few quarters we have made solid progresses with our strategic priorities around product innovation and improving marketing efficiency. As a result, we've been seeing steady growth in both user base and the engagement level. However as the community evolved and the social use cases increasingly diversified, we also realized that we need to deal with the stammers in the ecosystem who also evolved as the community does. Since September we stepped up our efforts in cleaning up the spam account. These efforts involve updating the algorithm to identify more sophisticated spamming and other harmful activities, as well as implementing more stringent measures on the identified account. Although the campaign has caused some pressure on the user growth rate, we believe that’s the right thing to do, because the targeted accounts and activities were harmful to the ecosystem without creating any real value to either the users or our business. Cleaning them up will ensure the long term wellbeing of the Momo community. The other thing worth mentioning is that the user retention on an ex-spam basis in September was actually stable with a slight uptick as compared with the June quarter, which provides a very solid foundation for us to drive continuous growth of our user base in a healthier environment going forward. Total paying users for the Momo platform reached $8.9 million in Q3, 2018, representing a 22% year-over-year growth or a 400,000 net addition for the last quarter. The healthy increase in paying users shows the growth of the core commercial value of the Momo platform remains very strong. The other thing that I feel excited about, the rapid growth of the Tantan community. In Q3 Tantan reached $3.6 million in its paying subscribers, a quarterly net addition of 500,000. That number demonstrated continuous growth of Tantan’s annual base, as well as the increased paying conversion from Tantan’s new launched monetization feature. Wang Yu will have more details for you later on this call. Tantan’s success in building premium features this year speaks well to its unique value proposition in the dealing space. We are confident that its potential will be further unleashed next year as Tantan continues to innovate and bring new features that create value for the user. Now let me shift back to Momo and briefly review the product initiatives that we took in the past quarter. In Q3 we remain focused on executing against our key strategic priority, in reaching that social features, optimizing the recommendation algorithm and driving the constant quality for the video services. For example, we made a couple of key upgrades to the chart room experience that was introduced earlier this year. The karaoke function has been optimized and connected to more social module within the Momo ecosystem. The users are now able to share the KTV room either through the news feed or to their Momo friends, so that other interested users can join them and that have fun together. We also started to test the experience of creating and sharing prerecorded karaoke songs on Momo. In August, we further introduced a new interactive game called [Foreign Language] into the chat room experience. This game which used to be a popular offline party game further diversifies the form of interactions and lowers the barrier for our users to socialize and have fun in an open environment. As a result of these optimizations, the overall usage and DAU penetration for chat room continue to ramp in the third quarter and is now one of the key social use cases on the platform. Other than the chat room experience, Quick Chat after several reiterations this year also reached a steady growth stage, both in terms of usage and in terms of monetization. It is now becoming a new driver for the vast business line. The other important initiative that we have been taking since Q4 last year was to diversify the connecting elements on top of the single dimension of location, so that we can help the users more effectively discover new relationships and build meaningful interactions. We have seen this strategy working well in driving the number of interaction around the content and response rate around nearby people. In Q3 while the team continues to test and optimize different recommendation formulas around nearby function, they also started to test new recommendation strategies in the follow-up feeds. We saw early positive impacts in increasing the click through and watch through rate, as well as the number of interactions around the follow-up feeds. These changes show that the possibility that big data and algorithm changes to our users make more relevant discovery, increase their chances of getting meaningful interactions, and that’s reduced their level of frustration and make them feel less lonely and isolated. A lot of the things that we are doing in this area are early based experiments. We do see plenty of opportunities for further optimization and we'll keep exploring these opportunities going forward. On a constant side, in Q3 we are mainly focused on beefing up our content supply system through various initiatives. Wang Li will have more for you later, so I won't go into detail. To sum up what I said on today's call and on the previous calls, Momo has made impressive progresses this year in expanding the form of interaction based on audio and video technology and pushing the ways we connect people beyond physical proximity and in providing higher quality entertaining content to our users. These progresses are important to us, because they enable us to go after not only the new registration, but also the huge amount of dormant users who turn due to the limitation in the form of interaction and the ways that we connect people in the past. In addition, the new cases also increased our ability to build monetization futures and drive business growth beyond live streaming shows in the future. We see a lot of potential here, and we’ll continue to pursue this opportunity going forward. With that, I’m handing over to Wang Li for our business review.