Wang Li
Analyst · Jefferies. Please go ahead
Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. I'm glad to be delivering a solid quarter with decent financial results and progress on the strategic priorities outlined at the beginning of the year. Now I'll walk you through the specifics of our Q2 results. First of all, a brief overview of financial performance. For the second quarter 2021, total revenue at the group level was RMB3.67 billion, down 5% year-over-year, but up 6% quarter-over-quarter. Adjusted operating income for the quarter was RMB782 million, representing a 21% profit margin. For the core business, total revenue was RMB3.16 billion. The year-over-year decrease rate continued to narrow from 10% in Q1 to 6% in Q2. On a sequential basis, revenue from the core business was up 9%. Excluding content’s net loss, adjusted operating income for the core Momo was RMB823 million or a 26% profit margin. Tantan's total revenue came in RMB514 million for the second quarter, up 1% year-over-year and 10% sequentially. Adjusted net loss from Tantan was RMB44.52 million for the quarter compared to RMB70.79 million for the year ago period. The revenue mix of the group remained healthy with VAS representing 72% of the size of live streaming. Now a deeper dive into the quarter. I'm going to focus on core Momo's operational and business update for now, and move on to Tantan later. First thing first, the growth of the core Momo community. Core Momo had 115.6 million monthly actives for the second quarter 2021, up 4% year-on-year and a slight net add from Q1. The user acquisition environment was not ideal in Q2 due to aggressive channel marketing investment from e-commerce companies in June. We, therefore, lowered the marketing spend for our license to the region, leading to the limited quarterly net add to MAU. During the second quarter, despite the conservative approach at the top of the funnel, our team made good progress within the funnel by improving the basic social experience on the platform. The user transplant reached its peak since the beginning of the pandemic. The number of daily impressions of the nearby people reached an all-time high since the homepage suspension in 2019. The number of daily impression of also hit a new record high. The improvement in engagement metrics show that the fundamentals of core Momo as a social platform continued to be solid. Number of paying users for the quarter was 9.3 million compared to 8.9 million a year ago. The increase in the number of paying users was primarily driven by the growth of mass business on the core. Before I get into the operational and business review, I'd like to reiterate the strategic priorities the team has been pushing against since the beginning of the year. On the core Momo side, the three goals for this year are: number one, further grow the core user base with limited marketing budget and improved ROI versus last year; number two, bring the business back on growth track; and number three, continue to enrich our product portfolio and push the boundaries beyond Momo and Tantan. On the Tantan side, the single most important goal for the year is to deliver solid user growth by substantially improving the marketing efficiency and the core dating experience. Now let me walk you through what we've done in the past quarter in order to push forward to each of the priorities. First, regarding the progress we've made in better serving the users' need and driving user growth. During the past few months, we've taken a major step in renovating the way we help our users to discover new relationships and build interactions around our nearby features and functionalities. As many of you know, nearby people and our signature features that have been around for many years. They have been playing a pivotal role in how we connect people. Over the past few years, nearby people and nearby post, had evolved from connecting people based on a single dimension of physical proximity to a much more sophisticated algorithm, incorporating a wide diversity of connecting elements. In terms of presentation, we've also been adding more personal information so that users could find more funding elements right on the nearby people list. Data has shown that these changes have played very positive growth in driving the efficiency of recommendation and improving the basic experience of Momo users. In Q2, we pushed further on that front by experimenting our new recommendation system, which replaces the nearby people list with a sequence of full-screen single-user profile card. The new system and display format allows more comprehensive user profile information to be presented to other viewers in a much more prominent way so that they can focus on each individual from multiple aspects rather than just quickly, and in many cases, slow down the list with numerous profile pictures. More importantly, the new system also gives the recommendation engine more leverage to allocate higher exposure to the users who potentially can be a good match, but are not necessarily accessible or eye catching enough on the crowded nearby people list. Such mechanism gives us much more room to decentralize the attentions received by a relatively small portion of female users to a wider range of female users, which can further improve the rate of response and the quality of interactions. We've been two months into the AB testing, and the results are consistent with our expectations. We will continue to optimize this new version and gradually make it available to users in Q3. In addition to the core Momo, our team has also been making solid progress with enriching our brand portfolio for the Company. Pandaily, our video match making application targeting lower-tier cities almost doubled its DAU and paying user from Q1. Socio, a social product overseas market also made impressive progress in user growth during the second quarter. These new experiences such as and are still at relatively early stage of development. On each individual basis, they may not grow up to be something as ubiquitous as Momo or Tantan. However, it can help the Company expand our market share in specific niche markets and collectively can also make meaningful bottom line contribution to the group. Next, let me review the progress that we've made against our priority of bringing the cash cow business back on to the growth track. Firstly, on live broadcasting. Momo live broadcasting revenue totaled RMB1.88 billion for the second quarter, down 22% from the same period last year, up 10% from last quarter. Live streaming revenue came in better than our original expectation. The year-over-year decrease continued to narrow from the previous quarter. The better-than-expected spending recovery can be attributable to three factors. Number one, the steady improvement in the overall content ecosystem; number two, introduction of long-tail oriented features and operational events; and number three, revival of the supply side boosted by the new incentive program. Now turning to VAS. Driven by the team's resilient focus on product innovation and operational efforts, value-added service maintained its strong momentum in Q2, growing 38% from the same period last year to RMB1.21 billion. Tantan continues to be the most significant growth driver for VAS. In Q2, the team introduced some new experiences to the chat room to keep it fresh and engaging for the users. For example, we brought in my experience where each grass root talents are concurrently available on open line and users can send virtual gifts to request performances ranging from singing to scrip reading. Users can always join in the talent for play or participate in other kinds of dignified activities as they wish. This experience lowers the entry barrier for long-tail users to enjoy high-quality interactions and gained immediate popularity. Virtual gifting within the traditional use case, in particular, the interest group grew meaningfully in Q2 driven by operational events such as the battle by the On the product side, the newly launched customized gifts were well received by users, driving growth in the number of paying users and ARPU In addition to the established experiences, the matchmaking experience [Foreign Language], continued to gain traction. We have adjusted our operational policies to provide better training opportunities for the entry-level matchmakers. As a result, total number of quality matchmakers increased significantly, which in turn drives revenue growth from this experience. We expect the matchmaking experience to accelerate its growth and contribute in a more meaningful way heading into the second half of the year. Now briefly on the new endeavors. Revenue from the new apps showed robust growth momentum in Q2. Collectively, the new bucket was the second biggest incremental revenue contributor to the VAS top line. The organic revenue growth was driven by user base expansion instead of pulling up ARPU. Our team has been operating this app at a controlled pace on the ARPU front, focusing primarily on building better user experience to drive the growth of DAU and retention ratio. Heading into the second half, such approach will continue to be guiding our execution in the new bucket. All in all, I'm glad to see that the team has been doing a good job in executing against all of our strategic priorities. The fundamentals of the core Momo as a social platform continued strengthening. At the same time, the revenue performance and structure are seeing solid improvement follows the target set at the beginning of the year. These give us the confidence that the core platform will continue to be healthy and productive cash which gives us important leverage to plan new grounds and build longer-term drivers for the group. Now turning to Tantan. Firstly, on user trend and overall financials. We made adjustments to Tantan's management team and started making deployment on various product and operational fronts in mid-May. It took us some time to lock down the key issues. We the back-end system and put together a functioning team. The transition has caused some temporary disruptions, which have put some pressure on average DAU in the second quarter. As a result, average DAU in domestic market for Q2 was slightly lower than that for Q1. However, total DAU remained flattish on the sequential basis due to the growth in other markets in Asia, as we resumed our efforts in overseas development. Financing accounts came in RMB3.1 million end of Q2 2021, down from RMB3.5 million from last quarter. The RMB400,000 net decrease was due to the combination of three factors. Number one, the spin-off of certain business in May had around RMB400,000 negative impact on paying user accounts; number two, the improvement in the female percentage in new users acquired in the recent months, adversely impacted paying conversion as women are much less likely to pay for VAS in comparison with men; number three, the lower average DAU in Q2 caused by the transition and related operational disruption was translated into the paying user account. We're happy to see that both DAU and the number of paying users has started ramping up since early July as we move forward with our efforts in reforming the use appreciation approach. Now let me briefly review Tantan's financial performance. Total revenue for the second quarter was RMB514 million, down 1% year-on-year and 10% quarter-on-quarter. VAS revenue decreased to 6% sequentially to RMB297 million. The sequential decrease was due to the decrease in paying user count, reason of which are already explained in the previous part. ARPU of VAS, on the other hand, increased slightly quarter-over-quarter as users shifted towards higher-priced membership service. Live streaming revenue decreased 14% sequentially to RMB270 million. The decrease in ARPPU was due to our strategic decision to deemphasize live streaming as a supplementary experience to dating. Now turning to the most important part of my speech today. our plan and respective execution on how to drive Tantan's user growth and unleash its full potential going forward. Tantan encountered many challenges in the past couple of years. The single most important goal for Tantan this year is to deliver solid user growth by substantially improving the marketing efficiency and quality experience. We spent the rest of Q2 coping through the key areas of focus and coming up with an execution plan for that goal. There are three pillars supporting the plan. Number one, improving marketing efficiency; number two, making the top core dating experience more appealing; and number three, having an effective recommendation engine. On the marketing front, one of the key broken windows was identified in the new user structure. What happened here was that in order to control the unit acquisition cost and improving paying conversion to meet quarterly numbers in revenue and paying user account, Tantan has been compromising the quality of new users acquired through channels. It has led to a gradual deterioration in the user structure, evidenced by disproportional gender ratio and a rapidly increasing average age of the new users. Having a balanced the demographic is crucial for user experience and the long-term healthiness of the dating ecosystem. Therefore, we have to fix the structure in new registration before we can even talk about user growth and made it the key focus for the team in Q2. I'm glad to see that we've had some initial, but fairly impressive progress during the past few months. Female ratio in the newly acquired users increased to 45% in August from around 20% last year. The average age of new female users has dropped seven years from the period before we took over. However, because it's relatively expensive to acquire female and younger users, the average user acquisition cost went up to a pretty high level during June. Our main goal in Q3 is to bring down the unit acquisition cost based on the current user structure. Of course, this goal should be achieved through continuous optimization of app material and data management system. After we reached a reasonable level of the cost run, we will increase the marketing spend to drive top of the funnel activities. So far into Q3, we've been progressing well against that goal and the domestic DAU account also seeing gradual and healthy ramp-up since July. Another thing on the marketing front that can contribute to overall user growth is brand advertising. We believe that Tantan as a relatively young brand has huge opportunity to improve user awareness and enhance brand equity. If we can spread the core value of Tantan to those who potentially need our service, we will start looking at branding options once we complete our next major product upgrade. The second area we need to improve is to enhance the quality experience. In the second quarter, our product team conducted a thorough walk-through of Tantan's product experience and made an in-depth study of user behavior. The study brought two things to our attention. Number one, Asian women tend to be quite passive when it comes to dating. For example, a considerable portion of female users on Tantan likewise in an extremely selective way, and some may not write swipe at all, resulting in a large number of female users getting no matches or interactions based on the current product mechanism. This is one of the key reasons why female users retention ratio is significantly lower than that of man on Tantan. And the second issue is, about 30% of newly acquired users are marked as fake users by Tantan. Fake users refers to those who fail to provide qualified profile photo and are therefore, denied full access to the swipe and match system. The retention of fake users tend to be extremely low because of the inability to get any matches or interactions. The most important near-term priority for our product team is to improve female user and users experience so that we can better retain them because the current product mechanism tends to be less effective for these two groups of users. We realize that we need to get more innovative and just making minor tweaks or adding patches to the current swipe and match system. In fact, we need to build supplementary experience around it, providing additional ways for people to bond. The goal is that through this additional more subtle funding elements more integrated slow to act users can get attracted to each other and gradually open up to others with their real identities and ultimately build offline relationships based on authentic information. You will see our first step into this problem unfolding at our next upgrade. The third area we need to improve in order to drive user growth is a recommendation algorithm. In the open social space for more than 10 years, I believe the causing that makes a social product stand out is its ability to make this recommendation more relevant. Users need to feel that this is a product that understands or at least is trying to understand what kind of people they're looking for. Obviously, Tantan is not doing a good enough job in this area. We are getting the great team so we can move faster on that front. This is a road block that we are determined to crack down as soon as possible. Beyond the China opportunities, we are also getting prepared to resume the pursuit of Tantan's overseas expansion. We believe there is still a lot of growth opportunity by penetrating deeper into overseas Chinese, Southeast Asia as well as expanding our reach to East Asia and other countries. Our team has rich experience in social product innovation, membership business and non-membership value-added services. Very few teams have a comprehensive experience on all those three fronts as we do. We believe that in Asia, such experience is very crucial in building up a scalable social platform that can ultimately reap profit. This is an important competitive advantage that we are going to leverage. We would like to see Tantan becoming an indispensable part of people dating life in Asia. It is a very important constituent of our growth strategy for the Company. These are the things I'd like to cover on this call. Now let me pass the call over to Mr. Jonathan Zhang for financial review. Jon, please.