Tencent Music Entertainment Group

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and good morning and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tencent Music Entertainment Group 2021 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Today, you will hear a discussion from the management team on Tencent Music Entertainment Group, followed by a question and answer session. For the benefit of all the participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question. And if you have additional questions, you can re-enter the queue. Please be advised that the conference is being recorded today. Now, I will turn the conference over to your speaker host today, Ms. Millicent T. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, Amanda. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us on today's call. Tencent News announced its quarterly financial results today after the market closed. And any release is now available on our IR website at ir.pensamuses.com, as well as via Newswire services. Today, you'll hear from Mr. Kashan Palm, our Executive Chairman, who will start the call with an overview of our recent achievements. He'll be followed by Mr. Ross Leon, our CEO, and Mr. Tony Heap, our CFO, who will offer more thoughts on our product strategy, operations, and business development. Lastly, Ms. Shirley Hu, our CFO, will address our financial results before we open the call for questions. Please note that this call may contain follow-up statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These follow-up statements are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors not under management'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 forelooking statements. All forelooking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statement, risk factors, and details of the company's filings with the SEC. The company does not assume any opportunity to revise or update any forelooking statements as a result of new information, future events, changes market conditions, or otherwise is set as required by law. Please also note that the company will discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more thorough, explained, and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported under the International Financial Reporting Standards in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC. You are reminded that such non-IFRS measures should not be viewed in isolation or as an alternative to the equivalent IFRS measures and other non-IFRS measures are not uniformly defined by all companies, including those in the same industry. With that, I'm very pleased to turn over the call to Queshen, Executive Chairman of Tencent Music. Queshen.

Thank you, Melissa, and hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. Echoing the reorganization of the Tencent digital content ecosystem and expecting TME towards the next phase of development, we recently announced a change of leadership. As the executive chairman of TME, I will be responsible for setting our long-term strategy and TME's overall coordination and management of the board and also the company. I will also focus more on building the most comprehensive music and audio content ecosystem in China. Also joining us on today's call is Mr. Ross Liang, TME's new CEO, who will oversee QQ Music, WhoGo, WhoWall, WeSing, and the long-form audio business. Having worked closely with Ross for a number of years in the past, Ross and myself share the same vision in TME's strategic goal. As a GM of QQ Music from 2014 to 2016, and one of the key members of WeSing's founding team, Ross has a deep understanding of the nature of our businesses. A warm welcome of Ross back to the TME family, and I look forward to working with him again as we continue to execute our strategy and grow the business. Since TME's establishment in 2016, we have stated true to our original aspiration of creating more value for users, musicians, the industry, and society as a whole. We pioneered and defined a model benefiting for the long-term development of China's music and entertainment industry. Our established and comprehensive services now include online music, online audio, and social entertainment, positioning us as an all-in-one music and audio entertainment destination for hundreds of millions of users. We are not only great believers in upholding digital music copyrights, but also strong advocates for effectively rising income levels for China's indie musicians and cultivating China's original music ecosystem. We have been pushing the boundaries of the music entertainment ecosystem, committing to explore innovative ways to promote upstream content production. This has resulted in numerous chart-topping songs originating from our platform, alongside our growing capabilities in artist intubation and additional channels for distribution and promotion. We also pioneered TME Live, which has earned a solid standing in the industry. Although the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic still lingers and some uncertainties remain, China's music industry is thriving and flourishing. With a steadfast focus to create a one-stop shop online music and audio ecosystem, we will unite our efforts to drive the next phase of development for TME. Moving to the quarterly discussions, in the first quarter of 2021, we achieved robust performance with 24% year-over-year growth in total revenues while hitting multiple milestones across the spectrum of our business. Net addition of music-paying users reached a record high of 4.9 million in the first quarter, demonstrating our strong momentum and further inspiring us to unlock the value of music and elevate its role in people's lives. For our long-form audio business, we have also made significant breakthroughs, with MAU's surprising 100 million at the end of 2020 and MAU penetration crossing the 20% milestone in the first quarter of this year, making us one of the leading players in China's online audio industry. Our content ecosystem is becoming increasingly robust, dynamic, and powerful. In the past quarter, we were very excited to see increasing user engagement from young users, thanks to a broader offering of genres such as hip-hop, Chinese-Asian style, and music for a wide range of entertainment, including popular television programs, variety shows, and online games through both licensing or self-production. Also, in the hip-hop category, QQ Music launched the Rappers Alliance in January, attracting participation from both uprising and top-tier established rappers. By providing a stage to perform and shine, We helped the rapper Lambert, Lin Jie, be enlisted by the Treasure Voice, Tian Shi de Sheng Ying, a well-recognized music variety show in China. These efforts have brought increasing engagement from young users and on QQ Music. The penetration of young users among hip-hop listeners is more than 15% higher than their overall platform presence. As another example, in the first quarter, we worked with Tencent Games, to create the highly-praised theme song, Battle for Glory, for PUBG Mobile, one of the most popular mobile games in the world. In 2021, as an essential component of Tencent's platform and content group, we plan to strengthen and develop additional ways to collaboration with the broader Tencent ecosystem. Cultivating indie musicians is another strategic talent of us In the first quarter, the scale of the Tencent Musician program, as indicated by the original songs uploaded, continued with industry-leading growth. On a year-over-year basis, the number of artists on our Tencent Musician platform more than doubled to over 200,000. And the music streaming volume of Tencent Musician's witnesses and increasing share in our platform on a sequential and year-over-year basis. This demonstrates Lucision Plus in our promotional capabilities, platform support, incentive plans, and other comprehensive services, as well as our ability to drive influence in the industry by successfully incubating and promoting hit original sounds. Tencent Lucision Platform also serves public welfare with its social influence. For example, it cooperated with a leading logistic company using music to promote the virtualization in the southwest of China, namely Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan offices. Also, we further expanded our content ecosystem to live concerts. TME Live celebrated its first anniversary in March this year. In just a year's time, It hosted 60 live concerts for over 100 artists with 18 billion social buds, building and cementing TME Live's strong industry influence as a brand. In 2021, we will innovate more interactive features such as ticketing, VIP privileges, reserved camera, and virtual gifting to create a holistic and more immersive user experience that will get us one step closer to unlocking the massive value and market potential for online live performances. Apart from music content, long-form audio forms a core building block for us as we evolve into a leading all-in-one music and audio entertainment platform in China. We emerged as the key players in China's fast-growing long-form audio market. We provide a broad spectrum of audio categories, expanding into diversified audio genres such as drama, comics, Chinese comedy, history, parenting, relationship and education, among others. The consolidation of lazy audio in March further allowed us to gain access to an extensive library of high-quality audio books. In the first quarter, license titles more than quarterly year-over-year. We are also accelerating the addition of PUGC and UGC long-form audio content, bringing both professional and long-tail podcasting content to users. Our initial efforts have included QQ Music's in-depth collaboration with Xiao Yu Zhou, a leading podcasting app in China. In February, QQ Music initiated the Ground Zero podcast program, under which we aim to continue introducing various features and widening support to facilitate podcast creation. Secondly, our adoption of a valuable two-pronged product strategy evolves to unlock significant value from our music and standalone long-form audio applications. This approach allows us to leverage our massive music user base, and nearly quadrupled our long-form audio MAU penetration to 20% in the first quarter, compared to 5.5% for the same period last year. Long-form audio content also contributes positively to time spent per user. It inspires incremental listening of audio content in addition to music, and newly converted audio users stream even more music content than before. Our standalone application launched in April, Lan Lan Chang Ting, pioneers a well-rounded visual and audio experience through comics, surround sound, and bullet chats to offer an immersive and interactive user experience and aim to address the needs of heavy audio users. Lastly, we commenced the app-based monetization, which gives us our users ease access to a vast amount of high-quality audio content. Users are able to gain membership privileges or title rights by watching advertisements or completing certain tasks. We believe that such a model will not only be effective in scaling our user base quickly, but also unlocking additional monetization methods. China's long-form audio market remains extremely undeserved as compared to the online music and video market. And we are eager to continue cultivating users' listening habits to ultimately accelerate the penetration of online audio in China. Now I would like to pass the call to Ross, who will share more about the strategy of our key business lines. Ross, please go ahead.

Hello, everyone. I want to start off by saying how excited and honored I am to join TME as CEO. I see tremendous strength and future upside potential in TME, particularly with its leadership in joining industry growth, its innovative business models, and last but not least, its remarkable team consisting of a talented group of people in the industry. I firmly believe the pandemic has changed. and continues to change. The content distribution and user interaction within online music industry in China and TME from a position of strength is at the forefront of this paradigm shift. By raising the growth momentum of the visualization and the socialization of music platforms, we plan to launch the TME video account to further strengthen the interactions between artists and fans, with a significant upside to music-centric social activities through the combination of private domains for musicians and both of music content promotion on each social platform. We are poor under streamlined resources, enhanced middleware and architecture sharing among all of online music services to pursue R&D and technology breakthroughs. As a carnage of cutting-edge technologies and innovative operation models, we endeavor to provide a more immersive online karaoke and concert experience, making virtual reality as real as offline experience and potentially better. Our multi-product portfolio puts us in a strong position to offer differentiated services for the diverse and nuanced needs for users nationwide. With casual music, cementing its position as a young and trendy brand, and cool music, showing a diverse use base by offering multi-version of customized for different vertical of target audience such as children, silver, and senior citizens. Cool music will focus more on catering to users' intrinsic demand of music streaming, while providing a superior experience with easy-to-use music streaming features. We have also established a tighter and more seamless collaboration with Tencent's stronger product portfolio to enhance music content promotion. By working more closely with broader Tencent ecosystem, We will explore our interactions between music and social platforms, innovate content production and artistic incubation with digital content platforms, and promote the development of long-form audio, leveraging our partnership with online literature platforms. We are dedicated to enhancing the power of music. We are opening up more monetization opportunities. We will also be setting up our efforts on international expansion and have appointed the group vice president, Dennis Hall, to lead this effort. Dennis was previously in charge of the operations and management of QQ Music. Under his leadership, QQ Music successfully launched the Putong community to enhance social interaction between music fans and their idols. developed industry-leading music discovery prediction technology, and substantially strengthened promotion capability for trending hit music. With the support of Dennis and a deep bunch of senior managers, and leveraging my private experience with QQ Music and V-SYNC, I will personally take a a more active role in driving the growth of QQ Music and V-SYNC. I look forward to working in close partnership with Caution and side-by-side with other TME management members, showing laser-focused efforts to enhance product features and services to elevate the user experience. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Tony, who will discuss the business highlights and the important areas of focus. Tony, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ross. Hello, everyone. I'll first talk about the key operational and financial performance during the first quarter. Online music services growth rate continued to accelerate for two consecutive quarters. We delivered another strong quarter for subscription business. with a record high net ads of 4.9 million online music paying users. The strongest subscriber growth was primarily driven by better content offering, effective marketing campaign, and improving retention rate. We also made notable progress in advertising within online music services. Advertising revenues more than doubled year over year in the first quarter for the third time in a row. as we've benefited from an increasing number of advertisers from various industries attracted to our platform, as well as triple digit year-over-year growth in ad inventory and double digit year-over-year eCPM growth. We also continue to innovate with advertising products to further tap into the growth potential for advertising. In 2021, we are focusing on developing creative advertising solutions and enhancing in-house capabilities to further boost our advertising revenues and complement subscription models. Online music mobile MAU were $615 million in the first quarter. While there were some churn of casual users resulting in a year-over-year MAU decline, our total music user time spent was up year-over-year. demonstrating the increasing engagement of our core users. In terms of expanding our services beyond the mobile phone, we continue to broaden our services to Internet of Things IoT space, and find more and better ways to interact with our users. Opportunities arising from the IoT market are exciting, and we are actively expanding use cases for users to enjoy all our services. we will continue to solidify our leading position through extensive cooperation with mainstream automakers, smart speakers, television, and other connected device manufacturers. In the first quarter, our IoT MAU was 69 million, representing an increase of 50% year-over-year. The IoT market will serve as a new distribution and promotion channel as well as serving as a potential additional driver for future subscription growth. Moving to visualization and socialization, our concerted efforts to enrich both music and audio content offering, as well as enhanced innovative features and services, such as music community and video content, have helped us gain higher mind share among our users. illustrated by a 10% year-over-year increase in average daily time spent for mobile users in the first quarter. For Putong Community, we introduced more social scenes, such as synchronized music and podcast listening, video and concert watching, as well as improved private messaging, catering to our users' needs for interactive social connections. As a result, DAU penetration and retention rates of Putong community both increased steadily. Google Fans Club, another community on our platform, has also drawn many leading artists, labels, and content IPs. Highly rated and domestically produced animation series, Scissor 7, Wu Liu Qi, is a recent example. Fans Club is becoming a well-loved destination for young generation evidenced by an increasing proportion of young users and its time spent per user increased sequentially in the first quarter. Now, let's turn to our social entertainment services. In the first quarter, we delivered solid performance. Both online karaoke and live streaming delivered steady year-over-year growth. Our strategic shift to focus on monetization efficiency gain has continued to lead to strong advertising revenue growth for WeSync. QQ Music live streaming gathered further momentum during the quarter, and we are on track to scale it up over the course of 2021. Social entertainment MAU improved quarter over quarter to $224 million as user base of QQ Music live streaming ramped up and our efforts to invigorate content ecosystem and enhance social attributes for WeSing took place. Paying users of social entertainment services also sequentially recovered to 11.3 million in the first quarter by 4.6%. Our online karaoke services strengthened its core singing and entertainment functions with material improvement in monetization through advertising. Our concerted efforts to make the experience more immersive and fun through video enrichment, personalization, and community resulted in sequential improvement in users' willingness to sync and record and further content distribution, driving an increase in average daily time spent within WeSync and also daily active users bottoming from the last quarter. With a dual approach in splash screen ads and news feed ads, advertising revenue for WeSync more than doubled year over year in the first quarter. making it a more meaningful revenue stream of WeSing. For the remainder of 2021, we expect strong advertising revenue growth to continue and become an important top-line driver for social entertainment services. For music-centric live streaming services, through efforts such as full-screen live streaming and category expansion or content in ACG, gaming, Chinese ancient style, and dancing, we maintained a healthy, interactive ecosystem as evidenced by steady quarter-over-quarter improvement of retention rates for performers and our users. The closed-loop ecosystem between online music and music-centric live streaming have been demonstrated by higher streams of Chinese ancient style during the quarter. Inspired by the increasing trend of this genre on our online music services, Google Live hosted the live show Chinese Ancient Style for Today for more than 80 groups of Chinese ancient style singers, further integrating Chinese traditions with a modern twist. This show, in turn, led to a 17% higher stream of music by the participated singers during the days of this event. In conclusion, We kicked off 2021 with a firm step forward in our evolution into an all-in-one online music and audio entertainment destination in China for users and artists. With that, I would like to turn it over to our CFO Shirley for a closer review of our financials.

Thank you, Tommy. Hello, everyone. Next, I will discuss our results from a financial perspective. Overall, We achieved outstanding growth in online music services, particularly in music subscriptions and advertising revenues this quarter, and a continually healthy growth in social entertainment business. Total revenues for Q1 2021 were on B, 7.8 billion, up 24% year-over-year. Our online music revenues reached on B, 2.7 billion this quarter, up 35% year-over-year. Our music production business continued to grow rapidly in the first quarter of 2021, with revenues of RMB 1.7 billion and a year-over-year growth of 40%. We had a recorded high net ads of 4.9 million in Q1 2021, and paying users grew 43% year-over-year, driven by user retention improvements and higher new ads of paying users. while monthly ARPPU remained relatively stable year-over-year. This was resulted from our continuous improvements in products and content, extended sales channels, and efficient promotions. And we are very pleased to see that our efforts started bearing fruit, and the value of quality music is increasingly disclosed by our users. In addition, on a year-over-year basis, Our advertising revenue was more than doubled again for the third consecutive quarter due to increased ad availability and eCPM improvements. We also enhanced our products to improve ad efficiency and better serve our customers. Over the past year, we have made various efforts in expanding and educating our customers for their consumption habits and stickiness. As a result, both our customer number and average spending per customer have expanded year-over-year. Social entertainment services and ad revenue will be five-point billing, up 19% year-over-year, driven by growth in revenues from live streaming and advertising services on our social entertainment platform. Social entertainment monthly ARTPU increased 36%, while paying users dropped 12.4% on a year-over-year basis. Livestream revenues had a relatively high growth year-over-year, as we had a lower basis in Q1 2020 due to the impact from COVID-19 and adjustments to interactive filters. Additionally, our improved ad business model on social entertainment provided more and better ad products on our platforms, resulting in significant growth in ad revenues on our search and payment platform. Growth margin was 31.5% in Q1 2021, up 0.2% year-over-year and down 0.8% sequentially. Year-over-year increase was due to rapid growth in subscription revenue and other passing revenues. Sequential decrease in growth margin was because Social entertainment revenues and advertising revenues were seasonally lower in the first quarter of 2021. Now moving on to operating expenses. Total operating expenses for Q1 2021 were unbeaten 1.6 billion and was 20% as a percentage of total revenues as compared to 18% in the same period last year. Selling and marketing expenses were unbeaten 672 million Up 40% year-over-year. The increase was due to higher use of creation expenses to enhance our product's long-term positioning and spending related to our legacy TMEA event in general. The increase was also because we had a lower base in Q1 2020 as we reduced spending on use of creation during pandemic. General and administrative expenses were on the $883 million up 30% year-over-year, driven by a higher number of employees in R&D. As we invest in product enhancement and topic innovation, such as platform audio, we see international version, content library technology. Our effective tax rate for Q1 2021 was 11.5%. Our net profit was R&D $979 million, and the net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was only $926 million. Non-office net profit was $1.25 billion, and the non-office net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was only $1.18 billion. Non-office net profit margin was 15.8%. As of March 31st, 2021, our combined balances of cash, cash equivalents, term deposits, and short-term investments were RMB 27 billion, representing a decrease of RMB 2 billion from Q4 2020. The decrease in balances was primarily due to acquisition of lazy audio. Investments in the consortium to purchase additional active interest in universal music groups As well as the purchase of ordinary shows, cash generated from operating activities has a positive impact on the combined financing. Looking forward, we'll continue to invest in core content investments to further increase recognition of the value of quality music by our users, and we'll keep focusing on new products and features such as long-form audios. We are optimistic about the future for the music and audio industry and are confident in the overall system and the product pipeline that we are building in the long run. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operators, we are ready to open the call for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, for the benefit of all participants on today's call, please limit yourself to one question. And if you have additional questions, you can re-enter the queue. Your first question comes from Alex Yao from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Good morning, management, and thank you for taking my question. My question around the regulatory environment. Can you guys comment on the recent news flow that you guys are being investigated by the regulator for antitrust purpose, and the worst-case scenario of the penalty could involve not only a fine, but also a separation of the three music apps, i.e., Qt Music, Google, and Cool. And then in addition to this news piece, can you guys talk about What do you expect to change your operation in the next couple of years, given the tightening regulatory environment in the general Internet space? Thank you.

In recent months, we have received increased regulatory scrutiny from relevant authorities and have been actively cooperating and communicating with the relevant regulators. At this point, we are not in a position to comment or predict potential outcomes of such dialogue with the regulators. We wish to say that we are committed to complying with all relevant laws and regulations, including those related to antitrust. And as you know, the online entertainment industry is highly competitive and dynamic. Our goal is to deliver valuable products and services that can provide more and more value add to our users to musicians, to the industry, and to the society as a whole. And that would remain to be the case. And we wish to establish ourselves as a healthy force for the industry that is providing value-add to the society as a whole. So I think that's all we could say and comment on with regards to the regulatory developments at this stage.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Eddie Leong from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. I would like to get a sense on your plan to have a better integration among free music applications, as we read from some of the media news. and any more color on the potential cooperation with other assets under Tencent? Thank you.

Sure. I think with regards to, you know, better cooperation within T&E, as Ross mentioned in the early remarks, We plan to build a shared middleware and architecture that is shared across the three music platforms to improve R&D efficiency, improve data efficiency, while at the same time refining the positioning of each music platform for different target audience. I think, you know, along the lines of Mikuku Music, we'll continue to cement this position as the young and trendy brand and establish strong endorsement among young users. And then KUGO Music, who serve as a diverse user base by offering multiple versions of customized for different verticals of target audience, such as children or senior population. And then KUGO would focus on a more intrinsic, more streamlined, easy-to-use music streaming service. And then in terms of cooperation with the broader Tencent group, as Ross also briefly mentioned, TME will strengthen the collaboration with the wider Tencent ecosystem. Examples could include using Tencent's social platform as a channel for better music content distribution and promotion. working more closely with Tencent Maps for in-car use cases, and joining forces with Tencent's digital content platforms, such as Tencent Video in areas such as music variety shows, fan-based community operations, long-form and short-form video promotions, and commercial membership partnerships, as well as a better search and discovery experience for music within Q2 Browser. And last but not least, of course, the deepening of the partnership with China Literature, which we started last year.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Alex Poon from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thank you, management, for taking my question. I have a question regarding long form audio. Can you talk a little bit more about the time and investment needed to build the content library and to become similar or even better than the existing industry leaders and in the following revenue ramp up the trajectory and the impact on margin of the overall company? Thank you very much.

Okay, Alex, thank you for your questions, and I tried to answer it from a more business strategy point of view, and then Tony and Shelly may add a little bit on the financial side as well. Regarding the long-form audio, definitely is a lot of exciting opportunity out there. We are seeing it as one of our core strategic moves, not just this year. We actually launched it out last year, and this is also the first anniversary after we soft-launched our new long-form audio platform. We are actually taking the two-pronged approach, which means that we are not just promoting the long-form audios from our music applications, but also after the acquisition of the LASIK audio, we merged it with our pool of chanting, and we formed another standalone long-form audio app that will help to facilitate the needs of our core audio users. In terms of the content side, as we mentioned, we have a strong partnership with not just China's literature, but also most of the poor, leading, long-form ODOs, IP rights providers in the industry right now. Deciding this, we also wrote some platform and also the program to acquire the podcasting providers to go to our platform and start providing the services. So all of this we will be doing simultaneously, and we are in a really fast-moving pace to acquire and also to have joint partnership with different content providers as soon as possible. One of the latest news that I would like to share with you is we're also in the alliances with Xiao Yuzhou, who is leading podcasting application in China nowadays. They are very energetic and young team, and after having in-depth discussion with them, I think that we share the same vision, and we have already rolled out joint partnership with Xiao Yuzhou on the QQ Music platform regarding podcast. So I think that we have a lot of exciting projects going on, and we will continue to pull in more resources, not just from financial point of view, We are also from the company and structural organization. We have already formed a long-form audios business group, and we have a dedicated team, not just from a technical point of view to lay out a good foundation, but we're also working on the product and operations side as well. And I see whether my team has any additional comments regarding the resources of financials.

Shirley can address the margin impact on the long-form audio investments.

Pardon me, this is the operator. We have temporarily lost connection with the speakers.

Okay, no problem. I will carry on. So I think overall, you know, we do expect to see some margin pressure due to the investments in the content side for long-form audio. You know, as we step up on the investment. However, we want to bear in mind of the long-term opportunity that is ahead of us, which to us is very exciting. We do think that while it is short-term, you know, margin diluted, we do expect the long-form audio business to be long-term margin accretive, you know, given the business models that we are planning to monetize on.

And we are going to monetize it through not just the paying model, but we also have the advertising model as well. So a lot of people can start to enjoy some of the paid content by after completing some tasks or listening to some of the advertisement. So actually, I think that from a business model point of view, it's more healthy and the correct approach for us. Okay?

Thank you. We now have the speaker back online.

Okay, let's carry on to the next question.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Tian Ho from TH Capital. Please go ahead.

Good morning, management. Congratulations on a good quarter. So I have one question related to socialization. So it looks like Tencent Music has a set of the content like a web. So I really want to know, among all the products, what's the interconnection? And also, how do we develop socialization, you know, out of each product and among the product? That's my question. Thank you.

Tony, can you help me translate?

Okay, no problem.

Okay. So, music brands, we... I think for a music platform, our focus is going to be on twofold, the relationship between our friends and also building relationship with a wider circle beyond friends. Because of the advantage of Tencent, mainly on WeChat and QQ, we will focus on providing some tools to allow users to consume music on WeChat and QQ. So we will provide some music creation tools, or scenes where two friends can consume music together, and then try to increase our own Okay.

I mean, for the area of social connection among friends, you know, given within Tencent, the major social platforms such as WeSing and QQ are very strong in that area. You know, we will strive to provide easy-to-use tools especially, as an example, content creation tools that make it easy for our users to create content and also provide use cases for the users to share these content that are created by these easy-to-use content creation tools within the social platforms of Tencent.

Yeah.

And we also aim to provide easy-to-use tools for content creation to facilitate sharing and interaction among friends and families. These tools could allow quick sing-alongs. It could provide a virtual room that is tailored for friends to enjoy and sing songs and also provide an easy method for them to produce short video clips consisted of music and photos. and make it easy for them to be shared, for these content to be shared on the Tencent social platforms.

Another very important aspect is community attempts. That is to say, between non-friends. We pay great attention to the interaction between celebrities and fans. This is also an important reason for us to establish an ordinary community and Google's fan community.

In the area of social connection beyond fans to just users in general on the platform, we'll be very focused on the interaction between idols and fans. We think that's a very important community. And it would be an important effort for us to focus on to broaden the idol and fan interaction and community as a way to increase music distribution and promotion. 其中包括我刚才提到的视频号,包括普通社区,包括在线的演唱会。

There are many ways for us to enhance the interactions between fans and idols.

TME video account, something Ross mentioned earlier in the prepared remarks is an example. Putong Community is another example, as well as online concert with interactive features. We believe as we invest in these more social elements and methods for people to interact, we'll be able to better monetize and capture the fan economy opportunities.

The two most important ones are Pudong and Shiba Inu. For the Pudong community, the version we just released this year also includes shared apps like rooms, so that friends can go to a room together, so that fans can listen to music and chat together. But later on, we will provide better In particular, Putin community and video account are of great importance to us. In particular,

Within Putong community, we've launched a virtual room and we'll be further enhancing that product feature, one that allows the fans together within the virtual room to chat and to enjoy music together. We'll also aim to provide better communication tools to facilitate communication and interaction between idols and fans.

Yes, and the other most important thing is the video number, because we may consider to have a certain link with the WeChat video number, to promote the whole Tencent video ecosystem together. In this case, our musicians can open their own account on WeChat, and at the same time, their content can be very conveniently distributed to our four major platforms, and then to better promote The most important of all is the TME video account. And that's an area where we'll be looking to partner with Weixin.

It is important for us to find ways for musicians to interact with the fans through a short video-based format. We believe by providing these tools, musicians can develop their private domain traffic within these TME video accounts and Waysing video accounts and thereby allow us to capture potential growth opportunity and commercialization opportunities.

Okay, great. Thank you, Rob. Next question, please.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Alicia Yats from Citi. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, management. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a question related to the advertising. So can management provide updates in terms of the colors on the traction from the advertiser? For example, who are the major advertiser category and how is your ad load and eCPM compared to the peers? Any pressure on the ad pricing and ad inventories issues among the peers. Thank you.

Sure. As you know, we recorded another strong quarter of advertising revenue growth of over 100% on a year-over-year basis. And that's driven by growth basically across the board in terms of infantry, in terms of sell-through ad units, as well as in terms of unit pricing in the form of eCPM. And so we don't, at the moment, see any bottlenecks in terms of infantry. For 2021, we do expect advertising to continue to achieve a very solid year-over-year growth. We'll gradually be ramping up various additional advertising formats. As Tashin mentioned, You know, we have introduced ad monetization for long-form audio business, which is an innovative way that allows users who watch a video ad or complete certain tasks to gain access to what would otherwise be premium content that requires a paid subscription or paper title. We think that's a highly differentiated strategy. that will allow us to both grow the advertising business as well as serve as a differentiation for our long-form audio business. In terms of music, we mentioned in the past that we will continue to invest in new advertising format, which will serve as additional future growth drivers for music monetization beyond subscription. And then in terms of the advertised exposure, we are seeing an increasing number of advertisers being attracted to our platform pretty much across the board. But you could expect the usual suspects in the form of automakers, FMC, CG advertisers, major brands, et cetera.

Thank you. Your next question comes from John Egberg from Stifel. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. The IoT disclosures were very enlightening, really strong, and may you count in growth there. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the monetization strategy for IoT. For instance, on the subscription side, is the paywall strategy expected to be the major driver of conversion among IoT users, or do you have plans to maybe offer some paid features that uniquely provide value to IoT listeners that could encourage conversion among that group. I believe you had said in the past that the IoT users don't always overlap with your mobile MAU base. So I was just wondering if a different set of subscription features might make sense there.

Yeah, that's right. We're very excited with the growth of the IoT user base. As you could see, I think if you looked at our numbers and compared to the industry sizing in terms of smart speakers or in-car systems or smart TV, it would be quite clear that we continue to be an early mover in that space and have established a strong position within each of these verticals. In the form of monetization, we'll be looking at trying different approaches with the overall principle of increasing the interactiveness between the mobile user and the IoT users, precisely because some of them are quite different. So we do want to leverage the IoT channels as a promotion and distribution channel, but also act as an effective channel to convert into subscription over time. And that can also be done in a number of different ways. There could be standalone IoT subscription plans. There could also be a way to drive the mobile phone subscription. As an example, you know, a user may require mobile phone subscription in order to gain access to the IoT subscription. That's an example. So we do see the growth and the size of the IoT user base serving as a future growth driver for our mobile music subscription going forward.

Yeah, and definitely we will also have the advertising model as well, especially for the in-class scenario. A lot of people, when you're driving, I think this is a perfect environment for you to listen to the music or other long-form audio content, and advertising is also going to be a really good monetization way for us as well. So leveraging our technology platform and also the very targeted and personalized engine, I think it will bring us to be in a better place to monetize through the IoT area.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Thomas, do you have your cell phone mute? Please rejoin.

Hi, can you hear me? Hi, this is Thomas. Hello.

Hey, Thomas.

Hi. Oh, thank you. Hi, good morning. Thanks, management, for taking my questions and congratulations on a solid set of results. My question is about the 2021 and 2022 outlook. Given that, I think last conference call, we have talked about the top line business trend and the quarterly net. Given the Q1 results, do we have any changes to our full year outlook? And on the investment side, should we expect 2022, we should see a easier calm and expect a margin expansion? Thank you.

I'll address the outlook with respect to top line, and then Shirley can address the outlook with respect to margin. Well, I think we're very pleased with the Q1 results. As you can see, the music paying users surpassed the 60 million milestone, reaching 60.9 million, representing a 43% year-over-year growth. The NetX last quarter was also a record high at 4.9 million. And along for Bordeaux, business also achieved a number of milestones exceeding over 100 million MAU by the end of the year and 20% penetration by Q1, which represents an MAU of 120 million MAU. growing at over 200% on a year-over-year basis. So with that as a solar foundation, you know, we expect the strength to continue with regards to music and long-form audio. With respect to the total revenue, we do expect to achieve a year-over-three-year growth rate of mid to high teens for second quarter. In terms of online music revenue, We expect that to maintain year-over-year growth rate of around mid-30s, and that's driven by continued strong subscription, which I've outlined, and also continued strong advertising growth. While social entertainment revenue, we expect that to grow at a reasonably healthy pace, driven by increasing contribution from QQ Music live streaming. And then With respect to the subscriber and main music paying user numbers in particular, we said in the last quarter that we expect a quarterly net ads of between 4 to 5 million on average per quarter for 2021. We expect that to continue to be the case, so no change. Specifically for the second quarter, we'll work towards achieving the high end of that range.

Okay, about the gross margin. We expect our gross margin for four year 2021 to be slightly lower as a result of the following. First, we continue to have an investor in non-form audio to build our solid content library. So that will be a negative impact on our gross margin. And two, our revenue sharing fees of social entertainment will be increased. There are two reasons. One, that the habit of revenue increase in live streaming is come from QQ live streaming. The ratio of the revenue will be the highest in our social platform because there is audio live streaming remaining. And second, the revenue sharing ratio of Waysing will be gradually increased to industry level. So the revenue sharing will impact our growth margin. And the good news is that our growth margin for online music business, it has generally improved. And we expect it to keep improving over time in this year. And because our music subscription revenue and the advertising revenue grows rapidly. And in all, in 2021, we think the growth margin is under pressure. And we hope in 2022, the meaningful revenue come from long-form audio and new monetization model come from IoT. and any other new monetization that can increase our revenue in 2022, that our gross margin will be come back.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Rob Sanderson from Loop Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. A lot of my questions have been asked and answered, but I wanted to maybe go backwards. Sort of revisiting the thoughts and expectations coming off the IPO. I know we're a few years back. But at the time, I think the thought was there was opportunity for the business to grow at 30% levels for a number of years going forward. And we just came off of a 15% growth year. We're looking at around a 20% maybe growth year for this year ahead. and things have definitely changed. So obviously lots of room for runway and growth in music subscriptions and long-forward audio and advertising and whatnot, but social entertainment side definitely seems fundamentally different. So is there still opportunity for a 30% level type of growth down the road, or is changes on whether the opportunity set is fundamentally different or the competitive environment is fundamentally different on the social entertainment side? How should we be thinking about you know, sort of the long-term opportunity to grow the business compared to what we may have thought just two and a half years ago in the IPO. Thank you.

Sure. Look, I think we should look at that question separately for online music and social entertainment. For online music, I think it's fair to say that, by and large, the business performance has somewhat exceeded expectations. with the subscription growth faster than most people have expected. And we continue to expect, you know, continuous strong growth for online music, as I mentioned, you know, for the rest of the year. And that's driven by very healthy uptake in net ads on a quarterly basis, which is driven by a combination of attractive content offering, driven by effective marketing campaigns for the subscription plan, advertising, which is increasingly an element, and also IoT, which could act as a future growth driver, like I mentioned. And then advertising. Advertising is another growth driver for online music that has been very strong, which we've talked about and we won't repeat. In terms of social entertainment, we have seen, obviously, greater competition amongst pan entertainment platforms. That impacted the user base, in particular, WeSing. And we had to, over the past several quarters, embark on a number of product strategy shifts and product upgrades, in particular relating to enhancing the singing tools and the publishing tools to make it easier for our users to generate content and share it amongst their peers. And that has – we've seen some positive results in development on the back of those product strategy shifts as we – as witnessed by the stabilizing MAU on a quarter-over-quarter basis and – which also applies to the WeSing and social entertainment MAU and DAU as well. And live streaming is, you know, continues to be a highly competitive sector. I think the industry is somewhat more mature now compared to two years ago with a large number of players, you know, entering live streaming, whether they're short video platforms or others. And we continue, and we also saw a big impact on the live streaming business as a result of the pandemic, which we are still gradually recovering from. So I think the key changes mainly relate to, you know, we're seeing in terms of competition as well as live streaming.

Yeah, I would like to add a little bit more color on the long-term development of our entire business. As well, as you mentioned, during the IPO, you mentioned about the online music and also the social entertainment. I think that you're absolutely right that we are facing some of the challenging times in the social entertainment, especially for the live streaming side. But again, we are growing extremely good, especially for the online music side. So in terms of the ratio of our total revenue, I think that the online music side is picking up and also is going to be a long-term sustainable business for us. Besides the online music and social entertainment, I think that after five years of running an operation for TME, I think that right now we are also expanding our footprint to the upstream and also the downstream, which will make us to be with the focus on to becoming, to building the ecosystem for the entire music industry in China. This is very important. So we have been putting in a lot of efforts in working together with music labels, content providers, and we started to participate in content creation, which may not be at this moment. We will have a very good refresh on our revenue, but in a more medium or long-term point of view, it will definitely drive more additional content-side revenue for us in the future. The second point, what I mentioned before, which is the TME Live, which we did a year ago, and this year in March, which is the first anniversary of this, I think we are so proud that the TME Live has helped us to really extend our footprint into the show business, which is not just a traditional offline concert event, but we have also opened the door for the online music concerts as well. And we will also help us have a lot of collaboration for the online and offline event in the future. So I think that this is also another new business initiative that can help us to drive additional revenue stream for us in the future. So for TME as a whole, we are seeing that after we have established five years ago, when we are entering the next five years plan, I definitely think that the world is even, I think the future is brighter because we are not just having platforms only, but we have the upstream and downstream business. And together with the strong business team and all the technical teams that we have, I definitely have the confidence in that TME is going to have the advantage when compared to our competitors when we are moving forward. So I hope I can answer your questions.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Xijin Lu from UBS. Please go ahead.

Thank you, management, for taking my question. I have one question. Aside of long-form audio penetration of music MAU at 20%, any further numbers on the daily time spent on this category? Thank you.

Yeah, we're not in a position to disclose further details at the moment, but we are seeing healthy growth in the time spent metric. And what's encouraging is that if we look at our standalone application within Longform Audio, you know, and traditionally what we see is that the core users and the more heavy high-frequency users tend to over time migrate to the standalone apps. we see very, very high time spent per DAU, which is actually higher than the time spent per DAU for even our music apps. And that's the nature of the content types because at the moment, you know, China literature, you know, through our partnership with China literature, we have a lot of online audio books. You know, obviously, you know, with audio books, the time spent tends to be longer. And as Tasha mentioned, we do plan to significantly broaden our content coverage within long audio to include not just audio books, but to multiple genres, you know, Chinese comedy, comics, drama, education, as well as more PUGC and UGC podcasts. And as we do that, I think, you know, the time spent naturally would come down a bit, but it would still be at a very healthy level across our standalone apps and as well as in our music apps.

Yeah, and also we are seeing that after we roll out the long-form audio content, More and more of our music users started to enjoy the long-form audio content, and it will definitely drive their total time spent. And we are also seeing a good news is it do not affect the time that they spend on listening to music. or watching other music-related video content as well. So we are seeing that actually the long-form audio is in complement with the music side. So once the user started to enjoy some of the long-form audio, it definitely, you're not just driving additional time spent on long-form audio, but also music as well. So this is a very good indication and proving that our direction is the correct one. And this is also our competitive advantage, because we have a lot of music users, and right now the penetration on the long-form audio is just 20%. So I think that it will let us have a lot of room to grow in the future.

In the interest of time, operator, we'll take the last question, please.

Thank you. Your last question comes from Vincent Yu from Needham & Company. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Maureen. Can you help us break down the gross margin for the online music segments? What is the stand-alone margin for the music business and how much drag did the long-form audio cause? Thank you.

About the gross margin for online music, we have implemented an improvement to the improvement in last quarter and we expect in the 2021 the gross margin of online music will be increased year over year and for gross margin how to check the cost of the long form audio we think that the library the content is the have a factor to impact the gross margin because we cannot get the meaningful revenue at this stage because the long-form monetization, long-form audio monetization is at the very early stage. And we believe in 2022, the meaningful revenue can come in that will be raised at the gross margin. Yeah.

Thank you. We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I will now turn the call over to your speaker host today, Ms. Millicent Key, for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact the IR team. This concludes today's call, and we look forward to speaking to you again next quarter. Thank you, and goodbye.

Thank you so much.