DouYu International Holdings Limited

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you and welcome to DOEU International Holdings Limited Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. We'll be hosting a question and answer session after management's prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to the first speaker today, Ms. Mao Mao, Vice President of Capital Markets of DOEU. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. Joining us today are Mr. Shao-Jie Chen, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Ming-Ming Su, Chief Judge Officer, and Mr. Hao Cao, Vice President of Finance. You can refer to our fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results on our IR website at ir.souyu.com. You can also check a replay of this call when it becomes available in a few hours on our IR website. Before we start, please note that this call may contain forwarding statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provision for the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forwarding statements are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors not under the company's control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements of the company to be materially different from the results, performance, or expectations implied by these forwarding statements. All forwarding statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statement with the factors and details of the company's filing with the SDC. The company undertakes no duty to revise or update any following statements for selected events or circumstances after the date of this conference call. I will now speak on behalf of our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Shaojie Chen. During the fourth quarter of 2020, both our financial and operating results maintained their steady growth momentum as our total revenue rose up by 10% year-over-year to reach RMB 2.27 billion in the period. At the same time, our average mobile MAU increased by 6.9% year-over-year to 68.2 million, and our quarterly paying users expanded by 4.6% year-over-year to 7.6 million. While the residual impacts of COVID-19 persist throughout the macro environment, our game-centric live streaming platform continues to flourish and attract additional users in the period. In the fourth quarter of 2020, our total average MAUs grew by 5.2% year-over-year to 174 million. Such healthy expansion was mainly due to four factors. First, broadcasting large-scale esports tournaments, including League of Legends Season 10 and KPL4 2020, along with the rising popularity of our self-organized tournaments, including PUBG Gold Grant Tournament Season 11 and Peacekeeper Gold Grant Tournament Season 1, continue to fuel our user-based expansion. Second, the releases of multiple new titles, including Call of Duty Mobile, World of Warcraft 9.0, Moonlight Blade Mobile and DNS Hill Rock further enriched our platform's content and attracted new users. Third, our in-depth cooperation with game developers such as Peacekeeper, Dawn of Kings, and League of Legends for the joint operation of tournaments and requirements of platform operations for different games helped to cultivate an increasingly engaging and active platform environment. Finally, our efforts to build diverse communities and provide a wider range of content viewing options through our video segments serves to better satisfy the full spectrum of users' demands. Now let's turn into our content updates. During the quarter, we remained committed to cementing our industry leadership, building the growth of our game-centric livestreaming business and expanding the depth and breadth of our content offering across all segments. Not counting to maintaining the failed calls, we also launched the version 7.0 of our Zouyu app, through which we have established our video content and further refined our community segments to develop a fully integrated system along the eSports value chain. In the fourth quarter, Our efforts to sponsor high-quality esports teams delivered exceptional results. Crucially, esports teams have continued to occupy a key role in the broader esports industry, and therefore, we have continued to invest in this area. During the quarter, our sponsored LL Team TES won the Demacia Cup 2020 Championship and our self-developed owner of King team, EYG, won the King Pro League for 2020 Championship. We were pleased to see our cooperating team deliver first-rate performances and believe that such efforts will continue to both supercharge our brand influence and compound our differentiated esports advantages going forward. Beyond this success, we also continue to take our tournament broadcasting and self-produced events to the next level. As such, during the quarter, our game developer collaboration swelled, reaching more than 90 large-scale esports tournaments in total and featuring the 2020 League of Legends World Championship, King of Pro League. More specifically, through our close collaboration with the Crossfire Mobile team during the Crossfire Mobile League, we developed a joint membership system which pioneered a more creative way to cooperate with game developers. For in-house events, our self-produced Peacekeeper Gold Grand Tournament Season 1 proved to be so popular that it became one of the most widely anticipated and commented on Peacekeeper tournaments in December. As an event split of 30 PEL and PEN League teams came together to compete. Viewers were brought to the edge of their seats during this one-of-a-kind tournament experience. Importantly, we self-produced more than 50 tournaments, which enabled us to establish a solid foundation for future growth in this area, and we plan to organize more tournaments in-house to drive growth going forward. Looking ahead, In terms of content operation strategy, we plan to continue building our community and video business on top of our solid gaming live streaming foundation. By leveraging these strengths, we will drive parallel business development and build an integrated ecosystem. For live streaming, we remain focused on developing more fast-imposed esports content. which will include both partners and self-produced esports tournaments and programs. For videos, we have already completed the initial stage of infrastructure development and experimented with multiple quality PGC content. Going forward, we plan to engage with more quality short-form video content creators in order to further enrich and expand our library of video offerings. Finally, For our community, we plan to further amplify users' daily discoveries, introductions, and discussions through the cultivation of more interest groups based on our previous Yuba. Now let's turn to our monetization progress. During the quarter, as we continued to refine our monetization products and introduce more paying scenarios to enhance our user-paying experience, we increased our quarterly paying users by 4.6% year-over-year to 7.6 million and grew our paying ratio to 4.4%. Our quarterly approval also increased by 4.6% year-over-year to RMB 273. Looking ahead, we plan to continue rolling out more innovative initiatives and events to enlarge our paying user base. Furthermore, we remain committed to the ongoing of innovative product functions and monetization events, as well as refining each segment of our content operations. Such efforts will help to augment our platform's operating efficiency and boost the monetization efficiency of our content segments and live streaming rooms. We also continue to make good progress on the R&D front. As a result of our collaborations with Tencent, for example, we became one of the first content platforms to utilize the video streaming protocol, RMTP over SRT, on our mobile application in the quarter. This technology enabled streamers to live stream smoothly regardless of weak network environments, activating package loss rates of up to 40%, and has thus significantly expanded the range of live streaming scenarios available to users on our platform. For example, With the support of the new technology, our outdoor streamers are able to diversify their content scenarios, live stream and deliver high quality frames in the environment of bad internet connection. On the international front, we have continued to invest in and explore the potential of the Japanese market. Mildom, our Japanese game live streaming product, continues to benefit from the inroads we are making in Japan. our ongoing investments in the platform, and our deep expertise in the game live streaming space. As a result, Milton has continued to perform well, maintaining its leading position in Japan. In summary, during the fourth quarter of 2020, we continued to enhance our operational and financial performance at a healthy pace. Going forward, We plan to leverage our established foundation in live streaming to further develop and refine an integrated ecosystem for our three core business, live streaming, video, and community. In order to advance our platform's monetization capability and financial performance, we will continue to implement initiatives in several areas, including product development, streamer management, and content operations. Such efforts will not only help to fuel our long-term business growth, but will also serve to unlock the additional value up and down the gaming live streaming industry value chain while providing our shareholders with lasting value. With that, I will now turn the call to our Vice President of Finance, Mr. Hao Tao, to go through the details of our financial performance in the fourth quarter.

Thank you, Momo. Hello, everyone. Overall, total revenues in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 10 percent year-over-year to RMB 2.27 billion, while total revenue in the full year of 2020 increased by 31.8 percent year-over-year to RMB 9.6 billion. Additionally, in the full year of 2020, Adjusting net income was RMB 541.6 million, and adjusting net margin reached 5.6%, implying a net increase of approximately 80 basis points from prior year. Total net revenues in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 10% year-over-year to RMB 2.27 billion, with around 91.3% of total revenues generated from live streaming and the remaining portion generated from advertising and others. Live streaming revenues in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 9.4% to RMB 2.07 billion from RMB 1.89 billion in the same period of 2019. This increase was primarily attributable to our platform's improved user-paying experience, which continues to be driven by our ongoing product refinement efforts, as well as our stimulation of user-paying habits resulting from our increased application of platform-paying scenarios. As a result, paying users in the first quarter of 2020 increased to 7.6 million from 7.3 million in the same period of 2019. In addition, the enhanced diversification of our content ecosystem helped to improve the monetization efficiency of both game and non-game segments on platform. As such, our up increase to RMB 273 in the first quarter of 2020 from RMB 261 in the same period of last year. Advertising and other revenues increased by 16.5% year-over-year to RMB 198.5 million, mainly driven by our expanded brand influence and corresponding increase in advertising demand for competitive advertising and promotion solutions. Cost of revenues in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 23.7% to RMB 2.09 billion from RMB 1.69 billion in the same period of 2019. More specifically, revenue share fees and content cost increased by 25.6% year-over-year to RMB 1.85 billion which could generally be explained by the following drivers. First, our content cost increased as we invested more in the broadcasting rights for esports tournaments and the in-house production of proprietary events to further enrich content on our platform. Second, our revenue share fees increased, which was in line with our total revenue growth. we continue to invest quality streamers in the overseas market. Bandwidth costs in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 12.7 percent to RMB 170.7 million from RMB 151.4 million in the same period of 2019. This was mainly due to our introduction of more high-quality viewing options. such as 4K high-definition live streaming content, which provided users with better viewing experiences and further satisfied users' viewing demands. Cost profit in the first quarter of 2020 was RMB 182.2 million, compared with RMB 375.2 million in the same period of last year. Gross margin in the first quarter of 2020 was 8%, compared with 18.2% in the same period of 2019. The decrease in gross margin was mainly due to the increase in revenue share fees and accounting costs as a percentage of our total revenues. Sales and marketing expenses in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 27.3% to RMB 170.7 million from RMB 134.1 million in the same period of 2019, mainly driven by the increase in the promotional activities of key tournaments as well as the increase in prizes for self-produced events. Research and development expenses in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 18.6% to RMB 118.9 million from RMB 100.2 million in the same period of 2019. This increase was primarily due to our development and improvement of video-related technologies as well as our application upgrades. General and administrative expenses in the first quarter of 2020 increased by 54% to RMB 117.7 million from RMB 76.4 million in the same period of 2019, mainly due to the increase in professional service fees related to our potential merger with HUYA. Adjusted operating loss in the first quarter of 2020, which excludes share-based compensation expenses, was RMB 199.1 million, compared to adjusted operating income of RMB 141.5 million in the same period of 2019. Net loss in the first quarter of 2020 was RMB 228.7 million, compared to net income of RMB 157.4 million in the same period of last year. Adjusting net loss in the first quarter of 2020, which excludes share-based compensation expenses, share loss in equity method investments, and impairment loss of investments, was RMB 176.9 million. compared to an adjusted net income of RMB 186.4 million in the same period of 2019. For the first quarter of 2020, basic and diluted net loss per ADS were RMB 0.61 and RMB 0.59, respectively, while adjusted basic and diluted net loss per ADS were RMB 0.11 and RMB 0.45 respectively. Going forward, we will continue to explore our monetization capacity and efficiency. We will also further utilize our operating leverage while staying faithful to the sustainable development of our platform. This concludes our prepared remarks for today. Operator, We are now ready to take questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. If you ask a question in Mandarin, please repeat it in English. The first question comes from Leah Zong from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi, manager. Good evening. Thank you for accepting my question. My question is about the merger deal that everyone is concerned about. First of all, I want to see if the time that we said to the market that the first half of this year may be completed will be completed as scheduled. Thank you management for taking my questions. My question is regarding the merger deal with Huya. Do we still maintain your timeline to complete the deal by first half of this year? Second delay, regarding the anti-trafficking regulation about the internet space, do you see any impact to our merger deal? Yes, thank you.

Okay, thank you for your question. Currently, the potential merger between Douyu and Huya is still on track. Our teams are efficiently collaborating with third-party agencies and working around the clock but the exact timing of the closing also depends on the approval process by the SEC and relevant domestic regulators. As such, we are not able to share the closing date for now. And for your second question, as we know, authorities have gradually improved industry policies and regulations following the rapid development of the domestic Internet industry over the past few years. We can see that regulators have issued revised antitrust guidelines with the goal of promoting positive and fair competition among internet industry participants. Through these guidelines, we expect a level playing field across the industry, which will also support those long-term development. For the entire entertainment segment, We believe that industry competition is still relatively fair at this stage. While the overall competitive landscape continues to change, we believe that DOE has the potential to further improve its user skill and revenue performance. One of the key goals of our merger with Huya is to further integrate the high-quality resources of the two platforms. improve our operational efficiency and work with Tencent to jointly expand our service offerings along the e-sports value chain as well as in the online entertainment segment. This will increase the overall value of the combined platform and unlock a greater growth potential in the future. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

The next question comes from Daniel Chen from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Good evening, Mr. Guan. Thank you for answering my question. I want to ask about the competition pattern. Since the beginning of the century, we have seen the competition pattern of the game streaming industry change. And we expect that after the merger, I was trying to think myself. So my question is related to the competition landscape. So could management give us some update on the competition landscape since the fourth quarter this year in the game streaming industry? And also... After the potential merger with Huya, what kind of change are we going to see in the market in terms of the competition? And also, as we have already signed a merger agreement, so what kind of important procedure are we going to see in the future before the transaction happens? Thank you.

In the past four seasons, there has been no significant change in the financial structure of the entire industry. As for the game industry, the core content of the game is to carry out various deep-rooted games, video games, and community-based expansion. We also saw that after the short video platform continued to advance into the gaming live broadcast industry, these platforms also introduced more traffic to the gaming industry, and led more diversified users to enter the e-sports field, which has led to an improvement in the gaming live broadcast industry. I think we also think this is an opportunity. As for the platform, it updated the 7.0 version last year and updated the content of the video and community version. It also provides users with a more diversified way to display. From a competitive point of view, we believe that the short-term competition in the industry is mainly focused on the diversification of detailed operation, high-quality content, and commercial transformation, as well as in the several aspects of mobile gaming and fast recovery. The long-term competition between platforms is mainly in the field of fast reception and diversification of content products, as well as in the field of the integration of resources into the entire product. As a live streaming platform, we consider games to be the core content platform. Our advantage lies in the accumulation and creativity of games and video content, as well as the group of game users and mature public management systems, as well as the ecological construction of professional video content. Currently, we have also established a relatively wide content accumulation, so that we are in the core of the game user group. In the future, we will continue to use the advantages of the book content and the industrial chain to achieve the improvement of this industry. Continue to expand the user interface and increase the number of users and traffic in the future. After the future merger, we expect these two platforms to have more deep business cooperation between each other and Tencent. I believe this will further enhance the competitiveness of the entire company after the merger.

So regarding your question on the competition, we believe that the industry's competitive landscape has not changed significantly since the fourth quarter of last year. And as a leading game-centric live streaming platform, we would continue to build our game-centric content ecosystem and explore other game-related areas, such as video and community segments on top of our live streaming content. Since the short form video platform entered the game live streaming market, we have seen both user traffic and customer diversification to increase, which has also helped to raise the ceiling of the entire game live streaming market. We took this opportunity and launched version 7.0 of our app at the end of last year. And with the updated and refined video and community content, we can now provide more diversified content to our users. From the competition perspective, we believe that the industry competition in the short run mainly revolves around the refinement of segment operation, the high-quality content, and specification of monetization, as well as rapid deployment of blockbuster games. In the long run, we expect that the cognition will focus on the rapid product upgrade and innovation of content forms such as video entertainment content, the development of communities such as the e-sports community, and the integration of resources both up and down the industry value chain. We have been focusing on building a game-centric content platform in Inception. And we have clear advantages in terms of professional content creation and content accumulation, vertical game user-based formation, and build-up of agencies, as well as cultivation of professional e-sports content ecosystem. Now we have created a stronger content barrier, and as a result, we have clear leading advantages in terms of attracting and maintaining a core game user base. So looking forward, we believe that with the lifted ceiling of the entire industry, we will take advantage of the Dimension Content's advantage in strength to further expand our user coverage and user traffic. And after the merger, we expect more in-depth commercial cooperation between the two platforms, as well as with Tencent, which we believe will further enhance the positioning of the combined entity. And to your second question, as Mr. Su just responded, currently the merger is still ongoing, and we are looking forward to our next steps, including getting approval from the SEC and from the relevant domestic regulators. And for now, we cannot really tell if that's timing for the deal. Thank you.

The next question comes from Alex Liu from China Renaissance. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Wang Yao. I have a few small questions. The first question is, I saw that Recently, there have been some significant changes in the product form, and there have been some big discussions in the video content and the community. Can you share with us what the development of this part is like? The second question is, can the F5 we just talked about share with us some observations and takeaways? Is this a very obvious impact on our traffic overall? I'll translate myself. Thanks, management. I noticed the company has made a notable investment on short video and the virtual community in the past few months. Could management share more color there? And the second question is on the League of Legends Championship. What are the major takeaways and observations from that event? And finally, what are the major revenue drivers for China's live? Thank you.

In fact, the company is currently on the live base, and we have now expanded the logic of video and community to create a real business environment. First of all, in terms of live business, we will continue to create high-quality video content. In addition to the high-quality game content, we will also um um Thank you.

Regarding your first question, we are currently developing the video and community segments on top of our live streaming product content and expect these three avenues to become the key pillars for our integrated game-centric content ecosystem. For live streaming, we will continue to produce high-quality e-sports content. In addition to our existing game, we will also closely monitor any new games in the market, explore new vertical games attractive to our users, develop our own esports events and programs, and produce more content related to the official esports tournament. And secondly, for our video business, we have already completed the first phase of infrastructure development, and we have already launched version 7.0 app with updated video and community segments at the end of last year. We have also introduced a video content creator incentive program to simulate the UGC generation on our platform. And together with our PGC, we have established an extensive content library to satisfy users' diverse demands. And in addition, for our community business, we upgraded the community segment based on IFA and created interest groups focusing on game discovery, introduction, and discussion.

Let me answer your second and third questions. The second question is about the S10 tournament. As we know, the League of Legends World Championship is the latest League of Legends official annual tournament. and has always attracted a larger number of viewers. In the first half of 2020, many large-scale offline esports tournaments were postponed or canceled because of the pandemic, making S10 one of the few global esports events of 2020. Organized in Shanghai, S10 attracted strong domestic viewership, and was widely followed by internet users in China. The League of Legends has always been a strong segment on Doi's platform. In fact, we have a large number of well-known streamer resources and a multi-factor streamer and content system for this segment. In addition, we signed contracts with many famous domestic and international League of Legends esports teams, such as RGD, GDG, TES, and DWG. Combining these strengths, our exclusive partnership with multiple social platforms made us the most popular game live streaming platform for the IOL Championship, and Joe would record high operating metrics during the tournament. It also helps us attract more high-quality user traffic to cement our platform as our go-to destination for watching our tournaments. And for your third question about how to increase revenue, we will continue to develop and refine our monetization products, tailor these product features based on different user profiles, improve existing users' IRPPOs, and cultivate new users' pin habits to further improve daily revenue contribution and pin ratio. To maintain sustainable revenue growth, we plan to leverage our platform-wide events and small-scale monetization events to raise our penetration rate of paying users and the IRPPO. Under our game-centric content ecosystem, we will further diversify our content offerings and increase revenue contribution of our non-game segments by channeling user traffic to segments with relatively high monetization efficiency, such as Thank you. Thank you.

The next question is from Faya Zhao from Haitong International. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Guan, for accepting my question. I mainly have two questions. One is about our income, which is divided into games and non-games. What is the income contribution? My first question is, what is the revenue split by game and non-game content? our outlook of the output and number of paying users in 2021? And my second question is, could you please give us a breakdown of the content post in the first quarter and also the trend of the signing up bonus for the broadcasters in the past few quarters? And how should we think about the trend going forward? Thank you.

Let me answer the first question. We expect our game segment to continue to be the major live streaming revenue contributor to our platform. The game segment has demonstrated its strong growth potential in both ARPPU and total pin users. Revenue generated from our game segment is expected to account for 50% of our total revenue in 2021. And we plan to increase this percentage going forward For non-game segments, we will increase the revenue contribution by strategically allocating traffic between segments. As we continue to focus on platform-wide monetization events and increase the frequency of small-scale monetization events, explore more scenarios to cultivate users' paying habits and increase their willingness to pay. Both our total paying users and ARPQ will further increase.

Regarding your question on the signing bonus, the quarter-of-quarter increase of streamer signing bonus during the first quarter was due to two reasons. First, we continue to recruit new streamers for newly launched game segments to maintain a high-quality content offerings on platform. Second, will increase our investment for our streamers in the overseas market. Looking ahead, the signing bonus will increase at a stable rate due to a rapid international expansion and the increasing signing bonus of overseas streamers and top streamers from new game titles.

Our last question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thanks management for taking my questions. I have a question regarding the bandwidth cost. Can management comment about the sequential trend in Q4 as well as how we should think about the driver for the bandwidth cost going forward? On the other hand, for sales and marketing expenses, can you also comment about the sequential change as well as the driver for sales and marketing going forward? Thank you.

Okay. With respect to the bandwidth cost, in the first quarter, bandwidth cost increased slightly because of intensive tournaments and more frequent peak usage period. Apart from that, We provided users with more high quality live streaming viewing options such as 4K high definition video. We expect bandwidth cost in 2021 to increase along with the increase in users. However, bandwidth cost as a percentage of total revenue will continue to decrease. The second question is about sales and marketing expenses. Sales and marketing expenses excluding service compensation, mainly includes staff salaries and other related expenses, channel promotion costs, sponsorship fees for our esports teams, as well as expenses for offline and online events. In the first quarter of 2020, sales and marketing expenses, excluding SBC, increased our sequential basis. This increase was due to more esports tournaments resulting in increased marketing expenses and increased prices for self-organized esports tournaments. We are quite positive towards the development of the esports industry in the long run, and we will continue to increase our investments in esports-related activities and esports team sponsorships going forward. Meanwhile, we believe our user conversion will increase because of the updated features of platform, and we plan to enhance our channel promotions. Therefore, in the future, the absolute value of our sales and marketing expenses will increase, while as a percentage of our total revenue, sales and marketing expenses will continue to optimize.

Thank you.

There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us or request through our IR website. Thank you and have a good day.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.