Sohu.com Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and good evening. Thank you for joining Soho's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host for today's conference call, Huang Pu, Investor Relations Director of Soho. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Operator. Thank you for joining us to discuss SOGO's fourth quarter 2025 results. On the call are Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Charles Zhang, CFO John Liu, and Vice President of Finance John Stone. Also with us are Chang Youze, CEO Du Wenchuan, and CFO Albin Wang. Before I begin the preparatory remarks, I would like to remind you of the Comprehensive Harbor Statement in connection with today's conference call. Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed are commonly contained in the following statements. These statements are based on current plans, estimates, and projections, and therefore, you should not place undue reliance on them. Following statements involving risks and uncertainties, we caution you that a number of important factors could cause actual results different from those containing any following statements. For more information about the potential risks and uncertainties, Please refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the most recent annual report on Form 20F. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dr. Charles Zhang. Charles, please proceed.

Thanks, Hongpu, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call. In the first quarter of 2025, both our marketing services revenues, this is formally known as the brand-adopting revenue, and the non-GAAP bottom line performance reached the high end of our previous guidance, where our online game revenues were well above our expectations. For the Soho Media platform, in addition to devoting efforts in product requirements and technology improvements, we continue to concentrate on strengthening the distinctive social features, social network features of our platform. Through various unique events, we were able to engage with more users while promoting vigorous social interactions and distributions on our platform and generating massive premium content at the same time. Leveraging our competitive advantage as a mainstream media platform and our unique IPs, we proactively explored greater monetization opportunities. Online games business also achieved a satisfactory performance thanks to the high quality content updates and continued improvements to our games. Before going into each business unit in more detail, let me first give you a quick overview of our financial performance. For the first quarter of 2025, total revenues $136 million, down 3% year-over-year and up 1% quarter-over-quarter. Marketing services revenues were $14 million, down 15% year-over-year, and a 27% quarter-over-quarter. Online game revenues, $117 million, flat year-over-year, and up 7% quarter-over-quarter. GetNet income attributable to Sofu.com Limited was 182 million dollars compared with a net loss of 25 million dollars in the first quarter of 2024 and a net loss of 21 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. In this quarter, the company reversed a tax expense that had been previously recognized as an uncertain tax position and its related accrued interest expense at approximately 199 million dollars. Excluding this, non-GAAP net loss attributable to SOHO.com Limited was $16 million compared with the net loss of $22 million in the first quarter of 2024 and net loss of $15 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. Now, I will go through our key businesses in more detail. First, SOHO Media Platform. We continuously optimized our products and with cutting-edge technologies while further strengthening the social network features. By strategically integrating resources across our platforms and leveraging the synergies created by our unique offline events, we successfully attracted a wide range of broadcasters who are also our users from diverse fueled and greatly increased their engagement. These helped to generate more high-quality content, further promote online social interaction and distribution, and ultimately build a vibrant and dynamic social community on our platform. In April, we successfully hosted the 2025 Spring Convention of the Soho Video Influencers. in Beijing, where we gathered hundreds of pop stars, KOLs, and broadcasters and users in diverse verticals, such as K-pop and Chinese costumes, among others. This event offered a chance not only for enthusiastic participants with similar interests to connect and share in person, but also for them to get to know and interact with those in different fields and thus further boosted the vitality of our platform. This quarter, we also hosted our traditional flagship event, the 17th Soho News Marathon, Soho News Marathon in Weihai City. As an influential cross-border marathon in China, this season's events continue to be presented through immersive live broadcasting, attracting both online and offline participants. Participation. This event not only generated a large amount of content from real-time updates posted by runners during the marathon and other derivative content after the race. They also promoted continuous social dissemination of related content and supported by the active social atmosphere on our platform. And we also continue to attract users and audiences as well as advertisers with a distinctive my physics class, Charles Physics Class, IP. In April, I was invited to give a physics lecture at Beijing Planetarium, reflecting the recognition of the class, of the physics class brand, and so leading position in a polarization of physics sciences. Popularization of physics sciences, At the same time, we continue to explore the monetization potential of this IP and these derivatives, such as everything has physical principles in various scenarios. For example, we combined the physics class with famous exhibitions, such as the 2025 China AWE, the Appliance and Electronics World Expo in Shanghai, and also 2025 Shanghai International Auto industry exhibition, Automobile Industry Exhibition in Shanghai, Zhejiang. In these exhibitions, we provided audiences with our live explanations of the physics principles involved and integrated in the exhibited products and which effectively build up connections between advertisers and audiences. Through these efforts, we were able to provide advertisers with customized marketing solutions and further demonstrated our unique monetization value. Besides the content generated from the above events, we also proactively expanded our content library. During the quarter, we released several original dramas and American TV series while introducing a large number of short dramas, among which Mystic Tales, Hu Siyi, Zhi Guan, and other American TV episodes like Mandalorian were well-received by our audiences. Next, turning to our online game business. During the quarter, our online game business performed well with revenues exceeding our prior guidance. In our PC game business, we rolled out various holiday events, around Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day as well as promotional events for regular TLBB PC. In addition to holiday events, we upgraded a character development system for TLBB Vintage to give players a whole new gaming experience. For Legacy TLBB Mobile, we launched an expansion pack to celebrate the Chinese New Year featuring a variety of festival theme the gameplay and enrich benefits for players. Thanks to these efforts, both player engagement and the revenue for this game remained stable on a sequential basis. Next quarter, we'll continue to launch expansion packs and content updates for the TLBB series and other titles to further keep players engaged. As market competition intensifies and user demand for quality and innovation continues to rise, we'll forge ahead with our top game strategy, staying true to our user-centric philosophy. We'll continue to optimize our R&D process and enhance execution to improve efficiency and the product success rate. With these efforts, we look to bring more high-quality games to the market. Specifically, in terms of product development, we are actively exploring opportunities to unlock the potential of our TLBB IP. Meanwhile, as we maintain our core competitiveness in MMORPGs, we will diversify our portfolio with multiple types of games, including card-based RPGs, sports games, and casual games, and expand our portfolio for global markets. Now, let me give the update on the ongoing share repurchase program. As of May 15, this year, 2025, Sohu had repurchased 5.5 million ADS for an aggregate cost of approximately $67 million. With that, I will now turn to our CFO, Joanna. Joanna, please.