Hello Group Inc. (MOMO) Q4 2025 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Hello Group's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded today. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ms. Ashley Jing. Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Hello Group's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. The company's results were released earlier today and are available on the company's IR website. On the call today are Ms. Zhang Sichuan, COO of the company; and Ms. Peng Hui, CFO of the company. They will discuss the company's business operations and highlights as well as the financials and guidance. They will be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session that follows. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Further information regarding this and other risks, uncertainties and factors is included in the company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under law. I will now pass the call over to our COO, Ms. Zhang Sichuan. Ms. Zhang, please?

Thank you, Ashley. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining today's call. In the second half of 2025, our domestic business faced fresh external headwinds. That said, through the team's agile response and strong execution, we kept our cash cow business stable while sustaining a healthy ecosystem. To better show you our ongoing structural transition towards overseas growth, we began providing a geographic revenue breakdown in 2025 to improve transparency for investors. Our overseas business delivered exceptional results last year, fueled by organic product incubation and targeted M&A. This allowed us to diversify our portfolio and rapidly expand our global presence, leading to accelerated revenue momentum. The overseas business is now a solidified revenue contributor and a key engine for our future growth. Next, I'll walk you through the major highlights from Q4 and the full year of 2025 across our business lines, followed by our strategic priorities for 2026. Starting with the financials. For Q4 '25, total group revenue was RMB 2.58 billion, down 2% year-over-year. Domestic revenue reached RMB 1.97 billion, down 14% year-over-year. Overseas revenue was RMB 608 million, up 70% year-over-year. Overseas revenue accounted for 24% compared to 14% in the same period last year. Adjusted operating income was RMB 354 million, up 26% year-over-year with a margin of 13.7%. For fiscal 2025, total group revenue was RMB 10.37 billion, a slight decrease of less than 2% year-over-year. Domestic revenue reached RMB 8.37 billion, down 11% year-over-year. Overseas revenue reached RMB 2 billion, up 71% year-over-year. Overseas revenue now accounts for 19% of our total, up for 11% in 2024. Adjusted operating income was RMB 1.55 billion, down 10% year-over-year with a margin of 15% Next, I'll review the execution of the strategic priorities for Momo and Tantan and our new endeavors in 2025. Let's start with Momo. Our goal is to maintain the productivity of this cash cow while keeping the social ecosystem healthy. Over the past year, our product and channel efforts are centered on this core objective. On the product side, we focused on 2 major upgrades. First, we upgraded the AI greeting and AI chat assist models to help users break the ice with personalized messages and keep conversation going. Our tech team is consistently iterating these models to make them more humanized and diverse. This upgrades, combined with tailored exposure strategies, significantly boosted the adoption rate of our AI features. Second, we optimized our product strategy for real-time chat scenario. By using historical data to target users with high chat intent, we have made matching more accurate and interactions smoother. This led to an increase in key metrics such as number of 2-way chats and the rate of in-depth chats. For user acquisition, we proactively cut negative ROI marketing spend refined channel and material by ROI and rebalanced spend between new acquisitions and dormant user reactivation. This helped us to reduce average acquisition cost despite intensifying channel competition. We also boosted conversation in high ARPU paying scenario, sustaining ARPU growth and delivering profitable ROI all year. We are highly satisfied with 2025 channels results. Early marketing cuts led to some trends among ultra-low spenders, but with very limited revenue drag. In fact, reducing the inefficient spending helped stabilize our profit. While paying users declined sharply in the first half of the year, the impact bottomed out in the second half. Our new features in audio and video scenarios drove gains in paying ratio, resulting in 3.9 million paying users of Momo in Q4. That's up 200,000 quarter-over-quarter. With some subscription growth in 2 straight quarters, we see clear evidence of healthy recovery. This validates our strategy to broaden low-ticket payment scenario. In the current economic environment, by focusing on [ non-WOU ] users and a profit-centric channel approach, we have strengthened Momo's position as a resilient 15-year-old cash cow. This strategy has enabled the platform to preserve strong operational help, exhibit solid resilience against external pressures and consistently deliver stable results. Turning to Momo's commercial performance. In Q4, Momo's VAS revenue was RMB 1.68 billion, a year-over-year decrease of 14% and a sequential decrease of 6%. As mentioned last quarter, the decline was mainly due to the new tax regulations in October and stricter enforcement which significantly dampened the motivation of high-grossing streamers and agencies. For the full year 2025, Momo's VAS revenue totaled RMB 7.09 billion, down 11% year-over-year. Beyond tax factors, macro softness also affected spender sentiment among high-value users. Product and operation-wise, we focus to focus -- we continue to focus on our top cohort users in live streaming through specialized events and gameplay innovation. Meanwhile, we pivoted our emphasis towards audio and video scenarios that better align with mid-tier and long-tail users. This shift helped offset some of the external headwinds on revenue. Furthermore, the growing proportion of the revenue from higher-margin audio and video scenarios contributed our overall gross margin stable. Now let's turn to Tantan. Our 2025 goal was to build a dating experience and efficient business model tailored for Asian users. As of Q4, Tantan has 600,000 paying users, a decrease from 700,000 from last quarter. Marketing costs have driven user declines in recent years, but our return to brand building and experience optimization have kept organic traffic stable. Currently, the vast majority of new users on Tantan come from organic growth. and the platform is no longer reliant on channel acquisition. At the same time, retention has improved slightly. On the financial side, in Q4, Tantan's domestic business generated RMB 136 million in revenue, down RMB 41 million year-over-year and RMB 16 million quarter-over-quarter. For the full year 2025, domestic revenue totaled RMB 613 million compared to RMB 733 million in 2024. The decline was a deliberate result of reducing channel investments through steady ARPU growth provided a partial offset. On the product side, we rolled out our new version in the first half of 2025, focusing on real person verification and a cleaner interface. We further advanced AI tools for profile enrichment and chat assistance while improving the female users' recommendation. This reduced noise from poor matches and development chat boosted female users retention and like per user. To balance the revenue impact of declining paying users, we also restructured membership tiers to improve low-end coverage and increase paywall exposure for users with high payment potential. This product and algorithmic optimization drove increases in both pay conversion rate and ARPU. Regarding channels, we focus on achieving 100% return on acquisition costs. By cutting high-cost negative ROI channels, we significantly narrowed acquisition costs compared to last year. Combined with ARPU improvement driven by product upgrades, Tantan achieved full payback on channel investment in Q1 with ROI reaching new highs throughout the year. Based on this trajectory, we expect Tantan to generate around RMB 100 million in annual operating profit for the foreseeable future. This gives the team a comfortable window to focus on what matters most, the long-term retention of the Tantan users. This can be achieved only through providing a better dating experience and building a brand image as a dating platform uniquely for Asian daters. We will continue to plough this land until we get the reward we deserve. Lastly, our new businesses. In 2025, our goal was to deepen our overseas presence, enrich our brand portfolio and build a long-term growth engine. In Q4, overseas revenue reached RMB 608 million, up 70% year-over-year and 14% quarter-over-quarter. For the full year 2025, overseas revenue totaled RMB 2 billion, a 71% year-over-year growth. This growth has largely offset the revenue dip in the domestic market. This rapid growth was driven by audio and video social products in MENA region, especially Yaha Live and Amar. The 2 new apps that began monetization at the end of 2024, leveraging the successful experience of SoulChill, which has driven continued revenue growth while narrowing the net loss. Meanwhile, SoulChill remain our largest contributor, although its growth fell slightly short of our initial expectation due to slower localization, which slowed our plans to expand into live streaming and the wealthier golf countries. For 2026, strengthening our regional operation remain a top priority. Beyond MENA, we have seen great progress with MiraiMind in Japan. As mentioned before, MiraiMind is an AI-powered anime style companion and romance app. Its AI-driven character creation and natural language model has been very well received, and we see a clear expansion opportunities there. In our Dating segment, Tantan International officially separated its domestic and overseas version in the second half of 2025, allowing for a more tailored international experience. This separation removed historical technical and operational constraints, laying on a solid foundation for Tantan's long-term international growth. We also made a major breakthrough by acquiring Happn, a well-known European dating product, which was an important driver of the accelerated year-over-year overseas revenue growth in Q4. This, along with other recent acquisitions has allowed us to rapidly penetrate key untapped markets, including Europe, Turkey and South America. Moving forward, we plan to bring this premium global brands into Asian markets to create even more synergies across our ecosystem. Overall, in 2025, our overseas business delivered robust gains in both scale and quality. driven by a multiproduct strategy, deepening penetration in core regions, leveraging our proven expertise and complementing organic growth with strategy acquisition. Moving forward, we remain committed to solidifying our marketing -- our market position in MENA region, rapidly enter high potential new markets and maximizing synergies across our core business segments, thereby establishing overseas operation as a key driver of the group's sustained long-term growth. That concludes our business review for 2025. For 2026, we will continue our strategy, our strategic priorities, Momo for productivity, Tantan for the Asian leading experience and new businesses for the growth engine. Lastly, I'm pleased to announce that our Board has approved a special cash dividend in the amount of USD 0.28 per ADS for a total cash payment of approximately USD 42.6 million or about 30% of the adjusted net income contributed to -- hello Group Inc. in 2025. And this is the eighth consecutive year of dividends, reflecting our stable operation and commitment to creating long-term value for shareholders. This concludes my remarks. Now let me pass the call over to Cathy for financial review. Cathy, please.

Thanks, Sic. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. Now let me take you through the financial review. Total revenues for the fourth quarter 2025 was RMB 2.58 billion, down 2% year-on-year and 3% quarter-on-quarter. Non-GAAP net income attributable to the company was RMB 281.3 million compared to RMB 230.5 million in the same period of 2024 and RMB 404.5 million in the previous quarter. Looking into key revenue items for Q4. Total revenue for value-added services for the fourth quarter of 2025 was RMB 2.53 billion, down 2% year-on-year and 3% quarter-on-quarter. On a geographic basis, PRC Mainland VAS revenue was RMB 1.93 billion, down 14% year-on-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter. The decrease was primarily due to 3 factors: number one, heightened tax scrutiny on the supply side, which diverted their operational focus; number two, softened consumer sentiment amid broad macro pressures; and number three, a decline in paying users on Tantan. VAS overseas revenue reached RMB 604.4 million, up 70% year-over-year and 13% quarter-over-quarter. This robust growth was primarily fueled by the rapid expansion from multiple social entertainment and dating brands across our diverse portfolio. Turning to costs and expenses. Non-GAAP cost of revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025 was RMB 1.6 billion compared to RMB 1.72 billion for the same period last year. Non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 37.8% compared to 34.7% from a year ago period. In Q4 '24, our non-GAAP cost of revenue included certain one-off items. Excluding these special items, gross profit margin in Q4 '25 was slightly down 0.4 percentage points year-over-year. The decrease was the net impact from several factors due to the same structural shift of revenue toward membership subscription revenue in the overseas market, especially in developed markets. These factors are: number one, payment channel costs accounted for a higher proportion of total revenues. two, personnel costs increased as a percentage of revenue; and number three, revenue share to the content providers and agencies decreased as a percentage of revenues. The first 2 are headwinds to gross margin and the third one is a tailwind. Non-GAAP R&D expenses for the fourth quarter was RMB 203.9 million compared to RMB 212.4 million for the same period last year, representing a 4% decrease year-over-year. The decrease was attributed to optimization of engineering personnel. Non-GAAP R&D expenses as a percentage of revenue was 8%, same as Q4 last year. We ended the quarter with 1,400 total employees compared to 1,390 from a year ago. The R&D personnel as a percentage of total employees for the group was 56% compared to 61% from Q4 last year. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses for the fourth quarter was RMB 339.9 million compared to RMB 311.7 million for the same period last year, representing 13% and 12% of total revenues, respectively. The year-over-year increase in sales and marketing expenses was primarily driven by marketing investment in our overseas apps. This increase was partially offset by our ongoing cost control measures in the PRC Mainland businesses, where both Momo and Tantan reduced their marketing spend. Non-GAAP G&A expenses was RMB 85.7 million for the fourth quarter compared to RMB 117.6 million for the same quarter last year, representing 3% and 4% of total revenue, respectively. The decrease in G&A expenses was due to a combination of factors that resulted in a high base in Q4 '24, including provisions for some pending legal matters as well as due diligence costs in connection with potential investments. Non-GAAP operating income was RMB 354.1 million, representing a margin of 13.7% compared with RMB 279.9 million and a margin of 10.6% from Q4 '24. Excluding certain one-off costs and expenses items, operating margin for Q4 '24 would have been 14.2%. Non-GAAP operating expenses as a percentage of total revenue stood at 24%, unchanged from the year ago period. Now briefly on income tax expenses. Total non-GAAP income tax expenses was RMB 72.0 million for the quarter with an effective tax rate of 17%. In Q4, the company accrued withholding income tax of RMB 18.4 million, which is 10% of undistributed profit generated by our ROFE. Without the withholding tax, our estimated non-GAAP effective tax rate was around 13% in the fourth quarter. Now turning to balance sheet and cash flow items. As of December 31, 2025, Hello Group's cash, cash equivalents, short-term deposits, long-term deposits, short-term investments and restricted cash totaled RMB 8.68 billion compared to RMB 14.73 billion as of December 31, 2024. The decrease in cash reserves was attributable to bank loan repayments, distribution of a special cash dividend, settlement of withholding tax accrued for prior periods, together with certain acquisitions and investments and ongoing repurchases of the company's own shares throughout 2025. Net cash provided by operating activities in the fourth quarter 2025 was RMB 549.7 million. Lastly, on business outlook. We estimated our first quarter revenue to come in the range from RMB 2.3 billion to RMB 2.4 billion, representing a decrease of 8.8% to 4.8% year-on-year. This is based on the assumption that at midpoint on a year-over-year basis, revenue from our Mainland China business will decline by mid- to high teens percentage-wise, while overseas revenue is expected to grow by high 40s percentage-wise. Please be mindful that this forecast represents the company's current and preliminary view on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. That concluded our prepared portion of today's discussion. With that, let me turn the call back to Ashley to start Q&A. Ashley, please.

[Operator Instructions] Operator, we're ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies.

Based on the guidance just given now, Q1 domestic business is expected to decline more than what we saw in Q4 last year and full year 2025. Can management provide some color about the trend for domestic revenue this year? What are the measures undertaken on this cash cow business? When should we expect domestic revenue to start declining year-on-year and stabilize?

Thank you. Looking back, our 2025 revenue hit the overall target. But the path, there was a little bit of surprise. We actually started the year very strong by tapping into our mid-tier and regular users, which helped us beat expectations in the first half. However, things got tougher in the second half. New tax policies really hit our supply side and momentum slowed. That said, the Momo team did an incredible job staying steady a really challenging environment, and we are very happy with how they handle it. So while the top-tier users started to tighten their belts, we pivoted and we did it fast. We moved our focus to small ticket spender. -- think social games and direct chat features that don't need expensive agencies. We kept moving our AI tools to make the social experience smoother. This strategy worked. We added 400,000 new paying users in the second half of the year. For a mature platform like Momo, growing that much in this economy is not easy. This shows our business is becoming more resilient and less dependent on top-tier users. Protecting profits, I think I want to highlight that we have been very proactive with our cost cutting. Because we streamlined our teams and reduced channel spending, our profit didn't drop nearly as much as our revenue did. We are keeping the cash cow healthy. Looking into 2026, we are not expecting the macro environment to fix itself overnight. So we are sticking the game plan that works in 2025. On the product side, more AI, better chat features and more social games to keep users grew to the platform. On the money side, we will keep focusing on audio and video scenarios that regular users love. We also expect revenue pressures to continue this year, similar to what we saw in 2025. But our commitment to efficiency is ironclad. Even if the top line numbers fluctuated, we are fully confident that we can keep our profit stable. Let me hand it to Cathy to dig into the numbers.

Okay. I would like to frame the 2026 revenue outlook around my good old 3 key drivers. Number one is regulatory environment; number two, macro conditions; and number three, platform fundamentals. Firstly, on regulation. The tax scrutiny on agencies and broadcasters in the second half of '25 materially impacted our value-added services revenues. But we believe most of the negative impact from that scrutiny has been absorbed by the end of Q1 '26. So assuming no incremental regulatory tightening from here, Q1 should provide a cleaner base to assess underlying trends. Second factor, macro. Consumer sentiment remains soft, perhaps even a little bit softer compared to a year ago. That said, macro conditions have been challenging for the past several years, and we have been adapting our monetization and product strategies accordingly. Encouragingly, our revenue mix is, as Sic said, becoming less top heavy, reflecting improved contribution from mid- and long-tail users. We have additional initiatives rolling out in the coming quarters that aimed at improving monetization efficiency under weak demand conditions. And the third factor, platform fundamentals. Since Q3 2025, we have seen a meaningful shift after multiple years of decline, paying users have returned to net growth, roughly -- I think we've been adding roughly 200,000 net adds per quarter. Retention metrics for both users and paying customers have also improved modestly. We see this as evidence that product optimization and user experience upgrades are working, particularly in expanding monetization beyond heavy standards. So if you put these 3 factors together and assuming no incremental regulatory tightening and broadly stable macro conditions, our baseline view for 2026 is First of all, full year revenue decline should be around low to mid-teens year-over-year. If you break the time line down, first half of '26 decline should decline in the mid-teens and perhaps the second half '26 would moderate meaningfully due to easier comps and improving fundamentals. So that's the outlook for '26. I think there is another question, which is when does the domestic business bottom? It's difficult to precisely call the bottom at this stage. However, based on the trajectory that we're seeing, like I said, we expect the year-over-year decline to moderate in the second half of '26. If the external conditions are stable by Q4 this year, we may narrow the year-over-year decline rate to below 10% if we are lucky. That said, the timing of a full bottom will depend significantly on, of course, macro recovery. Our current focus is on strengthening controllable fundamentals so that when macro stabilizes, we are positioned to return to growth. Back to Ashley for more questions.

Operator next question, please.

Your next question comes from Xueqing Zhang with CICC.

My question is about overseas business. As you mentioned in your prepared remarks, the overseas business accelerated in 2025, mainly driven by the commercialization of new products in MENA regions as well as contribution from M&A consolidation. Could management share more color on the revenue contribution from MENA, specifically for audio and video products, new apps and SoulChill ? What kind of sales are we looking at for each of these? And how should we think about the growth trend of overseas revenue in 2026? Also has the recent geopolitical situation in the Mid East had any impact on the operations in the region? And lastly, considering the overseas business is still in the investment phase, what's the margin impact in 2026? And when do you expect overseas operations to start contributing meaningful profit?

Thank you for the question. First, let's look at the big picture. Back in 2024, our overseas revenue was almost entirely driven by SoulChill and Tantan International. But in 2025 was a total breakout year for us. Our overseas revenue dropped more than 70%, hitting the RMB 2 billion mark. In terms of mix, SoulChill is still the heavy hitter. It brings in over half of our international revenue, but the real growth engine right now is our new MENA products, Yaha Live and Amar. They are scaling fast, and they will be the main drivers for us as we head into 2026. But it's not only just about the Middle East though, our other markets are also picking up serious speed. We have got Tantan International in Asia, MiraiMind in Japan and Happn, which started in Europe and is now moving into Turkey and South America. In 2026, we are focusing on going deeper into this market. We expect this dating segment to become our first largest revenue pillar right behind SoulChill and our new MENA app. Long term, we see massive potential there. The developed markets are more mature and stable. So we are staying fully committed to them for the long haul. As for the revenue trends and the final details for 2026, I will let Cathy walk you through the numbers.

Okay. Let me break this down into 2 parts, growth trajectory of overseas business and profitability. With regards to the revenue growth outlook, unfortunately, it's a bit hard to give you a precise quantitative outlook for 2026 because as Sic said in her remarks, if you look at the overseas part of the business, it's a piece that spans across different markets, including both developing markets and developed markets. In addition, it also spans across different business sectors, including social entertainment and dating. -- each of these markets and sectors presents different growth dynamics and associated risks/ uncertainties. All of those make it hard to pin down a very precise outlook at the beginning of the year, specifically at the time when a lot of these business are still developing so fast. But what I can do is to try to sort of unpack the growth dynamics in each of the different sectors along the lines that are just outlined by Sic. In MENA area, we're -- what we are doing mostly involves social entertainment, SoulChill, which is our flagship brand has already surpassed RMB 1 billion revenue. As the base scales, growth rates will naturally moderate. Additionally, we also have to admit that some of our product and geographical expansion plans didn't progress as fast as we planned in 2025. So there is going to be a further slowdown in its growth in 2026, especially in first half. But in absolute terms, it will remain a meaningful contributor this year. At the same time, newer products such as Yaha Land and Amar are still in rapid expansion phase. Their continued scaling should be able to offset the moderation at SoulChill. With regards to the impact from the war, the Iran war, so far, the negative impact on our business is quite limited. However, if it becomes a prolonged conflict or keeps escalating, it certainly would have adverse effects on our business, especially our expansion plan into the Gulf countries and existing business in regions such as Saudi and perhaps Iraq as well. Outside MENA, our dating and AI-driven products in developed markets are gaining very strong traction. The AI-powered application MiraiMind is scaling quickly in Japan, and we are beginning to replicate that model in other markets. The various dating brands that we have are also growing -- are also growing stronger in their established markets. In 2026, we are also investing to expand our dating footprint in new markets as well. So overall, we expect the non-MENA piece to grow rapidly and reach a pretty sizable level in 2026. So if you take all of these together based on current run rate and expansion plans, we believe something like RMB 3 billion in overseas revenue for 2026 is a pretty achievable target, and that compares to around RMB 2 billion in 2025. So I would take that RMB 3 billion number as the baseline scenario, perhaps add in a couple of hundred millions as potential upside or downside depending on execution and the pace of geographical rollout. Now moving on to the second question, which is on profitability, when the -- specifically when the overseas business is going to turn profitable. Again, I don't want to sound too prescriptive on that because we are still early stage in our overseas development and facing so many different growth opportunities as well as associated uncertainties. But you're generally right in thinking that overseas remains in an investment phase. And I can perhaps talk more about where we are right now in terms of bottom line for our overseas business. And hopefully, by explaining how we manage the growth with financial discipline, we can help you form your own view about when we can expect overseas business to reach a breakeven point. At an operational level, overseas was loss-making in 2025, primarily due to continued investment in the 2 new MENA apps and AI-driven products. While we do not disclose segment level operating profit, directionally, the overseas operating should be roughly in the RMB 200 million range for 2025. That's my best estimate at this point. If you break things down among different applications, the picture is actually quite mixed. More mature apps such as SoulChill has long been profitable. Established dating brands are also profitable. But instead of trying to grow the profit, we are going to invest part of the profit into growing into new markets because we do believe these acquired brands have a lot of potential to be unleashed outside of their existing strongholds. Yaha Land and Amar are scaling rapidly and narrowing losses with clear payback visibility. We expect Yaha Land to turn profitable within this year and Amar should be behind it by half a year or so. The AI-driven product MiraiMind remains in investment mode as we prioritize user growth and product capability. We don't want to focus too much on reaching profitability for that product. But of course, for each of the region we are in, we also have a payback period that's required. On timing -- overall timing to profitability for the overseas piece, while I don't have a clear answer, here is the principle how we exercise financial discipline when talking about growing into various markets. Structurally, our internal requirement is that new products should achieve payback within either 1 to 3 years, depending on the maturity of the market and the business model. That means if we are -- if we were to moderate top line expansion, then we should see profits coming in sooner. However, as long as we see attractive new investment opportunities, be it new markets or new products, we are willing to reinvest to maximize long-term value creation. The key point is this, we are not pursuing growth at any cost. We are pursuing scalable -- only scalable growth with defined payback periods and disciplined capital allocation. I guess that's what I can say at this point about overseas profitability. Now back to Ashley for more questions.

Next question, please operator.

Your next question comes from Leo Chiang with Deutsche Bank.

We had initially expected that adjustment in ratio in the second half together with the rising contribution from low-margin overseas audio and video business would drive a sequential decline in gross margin in Q4. However, Q4 gross margin held relatively stable and even came in slightly above management previous guidance of 36% to 37%. Should we interpret this as an indication that group gross margin in 2026 could remain broadly at the Q4 2025 level? My second question is management indicated that domestic revenue in 2026 is expected to decline year-over-year and low to mid-teens. while overseas revenue is projected to increase from RMB 2 billion to RMB 3 billion. Does this suggest that overall revenue for 2026 could be roughly flat? And given that overseas operations are still in the investment phase, could you provide us with some directional guidance on profitability for the 2026?

Okay. I'll take this question. I'm hearing many questions. Firstly, on gross profit. And the second question is revenue at the group level. Third question is perhaps asking for guidance on the group level profit. So let me sort of flip the sequence of the question a little bit. Let me talk about group level revenue. Before that, I would like to throw out a disclaimer here that we do not really have visibility to give annual guidance on either top or bottom line at this point. So my comments below should be taken as a sort of a working assumption rather than firm targets, especially given uncertainties in both domestic macro environment and the pace of overseas expansion. With that in mind, here are how we think about 2026. On revenue, your math is broadly in line with how we are thinking about it. If we take the baseline assumption we previously discussed domestic business declining roughly low to mid-teens year-over-year and overseas revenue increasing from around RMB 2 billion in '25 to roughly RMB 3 billion in '26, then at the group level, a -- either a flattish or slightly downtick top line versus 2025 would be a reasonable baseline assumption. And then the question on gross margin, you're right that Q4 came in better than we had guided in Q3, and the outperformance mainly came from 2 areas. Number one is on the domestic side, we had expected to further compress margins by raising payout ratios to support agencies under tax scrutiny. In practice, we faced a payout increase in several rounds. And after the first 2 rounds, we saw motivation among agencies and broadcasters recover pretty strongly, more strongly than expected. As a result, we didn't need to deploy as many promotional incentives as originally planned. That helped domestic margin came in better than we had assumed. And second, on the overseas side, particularly in MENA region, we are starting to see operating leverage as revenue scales. Gross margin there improved faster than we initially modeled as well. So given those dynamics, I think it's reasonable to use Q4 gross margin as a reference point when thinking about '26. If overseas continues to scale as expected, that could be -- there could be some upside at the group level. However, I want to be careful not to over extrapolate one quarter, one specific quarter. There is still macro uncertainty domestically. And if we feel additional investment is needed to support the content partners and sustain revenue quality, we would be willing to do that. So at this stage, stability around the 2025 level feels like a prudent base case with potential variability on either side. And on the last question on profitability, if you look at operating expenses, personnel and marketing remain the 2 largest components. And here is my thinking along those lines. Because overseas markets are still in an investment phase, we do expect absolute engineering and personnel costs to increase slightly. But at the same time, we're going to continue to optimize some of the nonperforming businesses. So for R&D, currently, I'm thinking low single digits year-over-year. Marketing could grow in the somewhere around high teens range or 20-something percent. A lot of it -- I mean, how much we end up spending on marketing will depend on ROI in new markets. If certain regions are delivering strong returns, we may lean in more aggressively in that region. If returns are below expectations, we can dial back relatively quickly. So there is a building flexibility in our cost structure and how we manage revenue against marketing investments. Putting this together, if revenue is broadly flat and operating expenses growth at low teens, then on a reported basis, the bottom line will likely come in lower -- come in below 2025 levels. So if we were to frame it in margin terms in 2025, we delivered somewhere around 15% adjusted operating margin for '26. At this point of time, our internal objective is to keep the operating margin above 10%, likely in the low teens range. Overall, I would describe this year as a year where we are balancing profitability with disciplined investment. We see opportunities overseas, but we also want to maintain flexibility. So these assumptions reflect what we can see today with the understanding that we will adjust as conditions evolve. With that, I would like to turn back to Ashley for closing remarks.

Yes. In the interest of time, I think we're going to call it a day, and thank you for joining us and see you next quarter.

Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.