Tencent Music Entertainment Group

Thank you, Operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us on today's call. TME announced its quarterly financial results today after the market closed. An earnings release is now available on our IR website at ir.tintinmusic.com, as well as via Newswire Services. Today, you'll hear from Mr. Kashan Pang, our Executive Chairman, who will start the call with an overview of our recent updates. Next, Mr. Ross Liang, our CEO, and I, Tony Yip, as the CSO, will offer additional thoughts on our product strategies, operations, and business development. Finally, Ms. Shirley Hu, our CFO, will address our financial results before we open the call for questions. Please note that this call may contain forelooking statements made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions, of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These four looking 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 four looking statements. All forelooking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements, risk factors, and details of the company's filings with the SEC. The company does not assume any obligation to revise or update any forelooking statements as a result of new information, future events, changes in market conditions, or otherwise, except as required by law. Please also note that the company will discuss non-IFRS measures today. which are more thoroughly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported under the IFRS in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC. You're reminded that such non-IFRS measures should not be viewed in isolation or as an alternative to the equivalent IFRS measure, or other non-IFRS measures are not uniformly defined by all companies, including those in the same industry. With that, I'm pleased to turn over the call to Cushion, Executive Chairman of TME. Cushion. Thank you, Tony.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. In the third quarter, we continue to implement our dual-engine content and platform strategy, which reinforces one and another, guided by our goal of becoming a leading provider of high-quality content we are working to expand our all-rounder capability in music creation, discovery, promotion, and monetization. While strengthening our platform's infrastructure and actively collaborating with the border Tencent ecosystem, these efforts will enable us to unlock greater potential in each component of the music industry value chain and continue to promote the healthy and sustainable development of the music industry in China. With respect to content, our accelerated expansion to music production has delivered promising results. We have designed an innovative and comprehensive process that leverages on our proprietary technology and deep understanding of music trends to systematically create, evaluate, and promote music. This process accentuates compounding benefits as we integrate, first, our comprehensive music composition library. Second, branded machine and manual analytics for artist and laboratory discovery. Third, a media platform that enables refined matching for artist collaboration. Fourth, a technical system to demo and evaluate trials to improve ROI. And fifth, flexible promotion channels and resources to enhance promotion efficiencies. By utilizing this process, we aim to produce better music, achieve a shortened creation cycle and better hit rate, and realize meaningful cost savings from economies of scale and composition tools. I want to share some recent examples that illustrate this point. First, in the third quarter, through our proprietary process of matching repertoire with suitable singers and producers, and promoting on multiple TME and external platforms. We produced, especially, Hulu, a hit song which reached the number one on multiple music charts, with streaming volume of over half billion within the three months of its launch. Secondly, we also produced the chart-topping theme song, The Penis King, by artist jam, for the popular game, Honor of Kings, The song was released for the Games 2021 annual competitions and the World Champion Cup and has been well received by both music and game lovers. Cultivating the original works and enriching the indie musician ecosystem through our Tencent Musician platform is another key source of our content differentiation. We empower our indie musicians with useful tools and collaborative opportunities to realize their full potential and create, grow, engage, and monetize their art and fan base. We do this in part by providing them access to valuable resources, including TME live performances, incentive plans, promotion channels, education platform, copyright support, and more. Our ongoing support to Indian musicians has been gaining traction By the end of the first quarter, the number of indie musicians on the Tencent Musician platform reached 260,000, expanding its growth with a double-digit year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, the streaming volume of their original works continues to record healthy growth. Following our December 2020 talent discovery plan, Bo Luo Ji Hua, We introduced our Riding on the Wind plan, Chengfeng Jihua, in August 2021 to inspire new music content creation by efficiently pairing musicians with top songwriters and directors. With this plan, we have also upgraded our platform artists and repertoire discovery and promotional capability to become a consistent source of hits. As a result, with just one month of its launch, The plan generated eight hits in multiple categories, such as Stars in My Dream, Xing Chen Ru Meng, by the virtual idol Hua Xiaoliu, Galaxy into the Sea, Xing He Ru Hai, by the internet influencer Ying Ximian, and Rubber Palms, Mei Shu, by the broadcasting celebrity Nightly Art, enabling these musicians to grow their fan base by 26%. Tencent Musician Platform has also established the sustainable and diverse monetization models for musicians and the industry which help indie musicians to earn a better living while they focus on honoring their craft. In the third quarter, we launched and upgraded 100 million yuan incentive plan, which incentivize legitimate musicians to collaborate with us in music creation. as well as provide comprehensive incentive mechanisms to help high quality content and artists gain exposure across our platforms. Within two weeks of the plan's launch, we discovered an original hit song, Mutual Deletion by Hit J. This is just one of our early successes, and we expect many more hits to follow. With awareness, exploration, and experimentation, Tencent Musician Platform will drive our success in the original music industry and continue to create benefits and opportunities for indie musicians, encouraging original music creation while unlocking the musician's potential. Expanding our licensed content library is also a crucial component of our content strategy. We are working to cement our leadership position in trendy categories like the Chinese-Asian style, as well as provide full coverage of top hip-hop variety shows such as Girls Like Us, Hip-Hop Nu Hai, and Shuo Chang Qing Wo De Dear Ji. With our presence in diverse genres catering to the younger generation, we are establishing our platform as a go-to place for enthusiasts in each genre, with branding such as QQ Music's Records Alliance and Kugel Music for New Hits. We prioritize copyright protection to protect musicians' rights and promote the healthy and sustainable development of the music industry. To this end, we leveraged our understanding of the industry copyright pain points and launched the TMU Music Cloud, Under this grant, in the third quarter, we introduced a SaaS-based music authorization service for the live streaming industry, which offers copyright licensing service, whereby live streaming platforms and live streaming performers can pay licensing fee to properly obtain legitimate music licenses for commercial use in the live streaming. In addition, we are helping music rights holders and musicians distribute their work and expand their influence worldwide by collaborating with Apple Music. Going forward, we plan to expand such copyright licensing service to other online applications that require legitimate music licensing for commercial use and continuously contribute to copyright protection in China by establishing a smart music copyright infrastructure. We are also optimizing our internal and external promotion channels to create a more comprehensive promotion system. We continue to embrace external resources like racing, QQ, and racing video accounts to create new social connections based on models for music promotion. And we are creatively combining music resources such as variety shows, films, videos, and performance events to strengthen our content influence. For example, Wang Jingwen, a rising musician we nurtured, entered the industry acclaimed singing competition show Sing China 2021 and won second place, propelling the popularity of the songs to a new record with a total of 1.9 billion streams on our platform in the third quarter. We began testing a new business model by commercializing some of our promotional capability to enable content providers to purchase promotional resources on our platform. We are also making substantial progress with promotional via external smart IoT devices. Last but not least, we are more confident than ever in the ability of TME Live to drive new online-merged offline music scenarios with immersive experience. In terms of its efforts online, TME Live held 26 diverse live performances in the third quarter, including the 2021 Tomorrowland. TME Live's series of mind-blowing electronic music performances sponsored by e-commerce, automotive, and other advertisers, helped brand owners dynamically resonate with users and maximize their brand's emotional impact while simultaneously fostering new business models. To satisfy younger users' booming demand for live performances as they seek new social outlets in the pandemic age, TME Live has expanded downstream. In the third quarter, TME Live collaborated with the Tencent Musician platform to showcase live performances in key cities via the 2021 Fourth Stage Plan, 原力舞台计划, offering talented musicians the chance to participate in nationwide tours to reach a broader audience both online and offline. We also rolled out a series of music festivals across multiple cities in the third quarter and pioneered an indoor music festival IP, Electronic Music Festival . The first event debuted in Chengdu, a cultural hotspot for music entertainment and home to a vibrant party scene for younger generations. Motivated by these trailblazing successes, we look forward to creating more events that will rock our users' lives. Having updated you with our progress in content, I would like to turn the call over to Ross, who will share more about our platform strategies. Ross, please go ahead.

Thank you, Kunshen. Hello, everyone. Moving on to our platform strategy. We are strengthening our platform's capability to enable music lovers to enjoy more video-based content. share their passion for music within our community, and have a more socially engaging experience. To inspire creation and innovation of video content on our platform, we continued to build shared middleware and infrastructure. First, QQMusic's short video type featuring immersive face and Google Music's embedded MVs on its streaming page achieved sequential increasing in their user penetration. Early indications of our video functionality are very positive. By the end of the third quarter, QQMusic's daily video views and daily unicorn visitors on our platform reached 100 million and 18 million, respectively, representing triple digital growth rates year-over-year. enthusiastic about its monetization potential via advertising and other avenues going forward as video will ramp up. Second, to better cooperate with Weixin Video Account, we are now supporting the one-click video publishing feature across Weixin Video Account, QQ Music, Google Music, Huo Music, and WeSing, making it easier to musicians to reach a broader audience. within 1.5 months of its launch. The one-click video publishing feature was adopted by more than 20,000 musicians on our platform. In addition, QQL Music's collaborative Indian musician live streaming initiative with a video account has 633 events and attracted over 10 million viewers in the third quarter. As we aspire to connect people through music, our social and community-building efforts focus on interactions among both strangers and friends. We are pleased to see increasing, vibrant social interactions on our platform as demonstrated by user utilization of Putong Planet and Google's new feature, Leap of Heart, Xindong Moshi. which allows users to swipe through visualized user profiles and interact with those who are listening to the theme song, as well as our upgraded Pied Synchronized Listening feature, which was originated in QQ and carried over to QQ Music. During the third quarter, average daily listening time spent by users of the synchronized listening feature was 80% higher than the average where penetration of young users of PlutonPlanet was over 10% higher than that of QQMusic. Our initiative of WeThink included the virtual live streaming room launched to provide an all-new interactive experience to users, targeting real-time virtual social networks as a new growth engine for user engagement. We strive to appear to diverse youth groups and their varying tastes with the broadened options and features. In the interest of the young generation, we launched the BoDian Music, BoDian YinYue, pioneering video-driven music listening experience in China and helping users better connect with the music with the right to sleep UI design. Well, for seniors, We launch a large fund in QQ Music to provide them an aging-use-friendly experience. For music fans seeking the ultimate sound quality, we upgrade QQ Music and Kugel Music's high-resolution audio library, including millions of musical works by popular artists and domestic and international musicians. This upgrade has proven very attractive to young users. In addition, QQ Music and Google Music both introduced automatic music score generation functions, which generate professional quality music scores at a user's fingertips. For those users who prefer a simple music listening experience, We now have QQ Music Live, QQ Music ,, which offers a call site of music streaming function with a minimalistic user-friendly UI design. These tailored products and the options allow us to improve the experience for our users and engage them in a more personalized way. Most importantly, we are on track to deepen our partnership with the broader Tencent ecosystem to create a new music entertainment experience. First, in September, QQ Music and Roblox China, a joint venture set up by Tencent and Roblox, collaborated to launch an immersive virtual music concert for an indie musician with exclusive special effects, fireworks, virtual gifts, and music mini-games in a 3D setting, giving offline audience and online viewers an intimate view of the action. It attracted more than 2 million views domestically and abroad with over 100,000 US dollars worth of in-event purchases, laying a solid groundwork for our future endeavors in creating transformative experiences. Secondly, Second, we are working with Tencent Video to enhance content distribution. Tencent Video users can now seamlessly discover and enjoy arranging song tracks and other music related to the video content they are watching. This function is currently available in multi-drama series. Third, As another step forward in promoting socialization through singing, users can now update their WeChat status when they sing or finish a recording on WeChat, sharing the experience with WeChat friends. We are also making strides with our long-form audio business as a complement to our music products and video. value-added to overall user engagement and activities on our platform. We have made continued efforts to expand and differentiate our long-form audio content and features. First, our heroic, fantastic radio drama Sword Snow Stride has become a self-produced content blockbuster. accumulating 140 million streams since its launch. Second, in the third quarter, QQ Music launched an open platform to improve podcast creation process and allow them to upload and share their content to TME and other platforms with simple clicks. Third, to bring users a more immersive, vivid, and smooth listening experience, We deployed the industry's first vocal emotion-enabled AI reading technology to produce audiobooks, contributing to 30 titles based on well-known literature IPs, such as Battles Through Heavens, Dou Po Cang Qiong. Fourth, we further enhanced our content library by offering the audio content from Rock and Roth, Tuo Kou Xiu Da Hui, Tencent Video's number one-rated variety show. This effort led to stronger growth of long-form audio MAUs, which exceeded 140 million in the third quarter, growing by 89% year-over-year. Long-form audio paying users reached 5 million by the end of the third quarter, growing by over 100% year-over-year. a majority of which are also online music paying users as they are attracted by the complimentary nature of an integrated music and audio streaming service. While it has been gratifying to see so much enthusiasm for this role throughout the quarter, it is important to remember that we are still in the early stages of long-term development of this business Finally, our pioneering digital collectible platform remains at the forefront of innovation. Our recent highlight was a vinyl album Monk by Tiger Hu. Hu Yanbin, a renowned Chinese singer and music producer. The lottery for this limited edition vinyl album with $2,001 copied price attracted an intense fan interest in limited editions of artists' works. Its success is a stronger endorsement of this cutting-edge collection format, and this is just one example of the substantial creative efforts underway. We are building on this early momentum, and we are engaging more artists by creating a diverse pipeline of collectible works in the upcoming quarters. That covers our platform's progress and innovative initiatives. Now I'd like to pass the call to Tony to discuss our business highlights. Tony, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ross. Hello, everyone. As we continue to execute on our dual engine content and platform strategy in the third quarter, Our online music services MAU grew quarter over quarter to 636 million, maintaining the progressive recovery trend which began in the second quarter and bolstering our confidence in the underlying health of our user funnel. Our IoT MAUs reached 74 million in the third quarter with a year-over-year growth rate of 42%, benefiting from the rich and growing variety of products and services we provide on a broad range of IoT devices. We're pleased to see IoT devices becoming an increasingly important and influential music content distribution channel for our platform. Despite some impact on advertising due to recent regulation on splash screen ads, our online music revenues demonstrated strong momentum in the third quarter as users continue to be attracted by our enhanced music streaming experience. With a net ad of 5 million during the quarter, the number of paying subscribers to our online music services reached 71.2 million, increasing by 38% year-over-year and resulting in a paying ratio of 11.2%. To weather the decelerated growth in advertising, we expanded our advertising products by enabling advertisers to better appeal to audience within music streaming page and search sections. We also rolled out a new monetization model to help artists boost their earnings by sharing advertising revenue with them on streaming page advertisement. To rejuvenate our brand and expand our communication channels with Gen Z users, in the third quarter, we fostered a new culture around Chinese ancient style and hip hop through multiple themed events. We also livestreamed Ariana Grande's Rift Tour concert, hosted by the popular online game Fortnite, BaLiZiYe, creating an immersive virtual reality experience, including elements of both popular music and games. In addition, we grew our on-campus influence with events such as Young Music Summer Party, ShengXia PaiDui, and Music for the Future , as well as a record label for students, VoLa College , among other initiatives. Turning now to social entertainment services, due to recent regulatory changes and industry competition, social entertainment services MAU and paying users were lower year over year and quarter over quarter. we will continue to invest to strengthen the operations of our social entertainment services to better engage users. We continue to establish WeSing as a social entertainment platform with singing at its core. This year, we're focusing on engaging users by demonstrating the power of singing in socializing, celebrating, and supporting our community in a meaningful way and creating tools that deliver a more personalized and enjoyable user experience. We have worked to popularize the music creation process within WeSing, encouraging more WeSing users to become content creators. To this end, we have launched multiple features, including large group chorus, acapella chorus, and multivariant adaptation in recent quarters, which have engaged more than 15 million cumulative users. We are also proud to share that many musicians who are currently active on larger stages, such as Curly G, from Bon Bon Girls, were loyal and frequent users of We Sing and accumulated their initial fan base on our platform before they were discovered by the wider public and had the opportunities to shine on larger stages. Amidst increasing competition, We strove to differentiate our live streaming services through audio live streaming, QQ music live streaming, cross-platform events, content category expansion, and our foray into exploring the metaverse concept, which promises a new era in entertainment. We have made solid progress in expanding audio live streaming, which is a complementary use case to our core listening experience, as demonstrated by incremental growth in both user base and revenues quarter over quarter and year over year. Going forward, we will continue to strengthen our audio live streaming business in China, as well as leverage our experience to further expand its presence in overseas markets where we have seen strong growth and monetization potential. By the end of the third quarter, QQ Music live streaming had attracted approximately 10,000 musicians to live streaming. These broadcasts enabled musicians to connect and interact with their fans via live streaming on our platform, amplify their music's influence, and establish deeper bond with fans, which ultimately drive audience growth and improves monetization of their fan base. This, in turn, drove the number of performers and active users on QQ Music's platform. Google Music, QQ Music, and WeThink's live streaming services also joined forces in another cross-platform live streaming event in September, fostering improved paying user engagement. We believe the Metaverse concept represents the sea change opportunity for future entertainment innovation, as well as category expansion. Google Live launched Cool Dimension, Cool Ziyuan, a virtual ACG live streaming social platform. It targets users different from those on Google Live, with generation born in the 2000s and female users, both accounting for 60% of the user base, respectively. Cool Dimension creates an exclusive community for ACG fans through seamless integration of virtual reality, live streaming, and social interactions. We will explore more opportunities to leverage the Metaverse concept for innovative, interactive entertainment experience going forward. In summary, we see both challenges and opportunities in our operating environment. We will meet them with determination, passion, and persistent effort to differentiate TME, expand our capability for creators, and optimize user experience. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Shirley, our CFO, for a closer review of our financials.

Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Next, I will discuss our results from a financial perspective. Our total revenues for Q3 2021 were RMB 7.8 billion, up 3% year-over-year. Our online revenues were RMB 2.9 billion this quarter, up 24% year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2021, our musical subscription business continued to grow rapidly with revenues of RMB 1.9 billion and a year-over-year growth of 30%. This resulted from our continuous improvements in products and content, expanded sales channel, and effective marketing campaigns. Monthly up was RMB 8.9 this quarter, compared to only 9.5% in the same period last year, as we solidified our competitive advantages and offered more effective promotions to cultivate users' willingness to pay for music. Our Q3 advertising continued to grow on a health pace. During the quarter, we added more advertising product options to mitigate the impact from the new guidance on splash aids issued by the regulator in the second quarter this year were also patented more closely with Pencent to reach more advertisers and improve eCPM. Social entertainment services and other revenues were unbeaten, 4.9 billion, down by 6% year-over-year, as we faced more intense competition from other pain entertainment platforms and tightened regular environments. The copy-waste competition, we are making efforts in retaining existing and attracting new performers by utilizing our internal cross-platform traffic to attract more users and keep revamping product futures and launching new initiatives to maintain steady revenue scale. Growth margin was 29.6% in Q3 2021, down by 2.8% year-over-year which was better than expected. The decline was due to the following reasons. Firstly, with the continuous growth in subscription revenues, revenues may shift as revenue from online mail accounts for higher percentage of revenue, whose gross margin were generally lower. Secondly, ratio for wishing increased on a year-over-year basis and remained relatively stable quarter-over-quarter. Thirdly, Audio live streaming accounted for a higher percentage of revenue with relatively lower gross margin. Lastly, increased investments in new products, such as long-form audio, like RCU, ramping up in terms of revenue generation, also had a negative impact on gross margin this quarter. Now, moving on to operating expenses. Total operating expenses of Q3 will unbeat $1.6 billion and was 21% as a percentage of total revenues, as compared to 90% in the same period last year. Selling and marketing expenses were on the 587 million, down by 8.6% year-over-year, mainly because we managed external promotion, channels efficiency, wealth, and battery-utilized internal traffic to attract users. General and administrative expenses were RMB 1.1 billion, up by 33% year-over-year, driven by higher number of employees in RMB. As we invested in product enhancement, technology innovations, and more diversified product offerings. Additionally, share-based compensation expenses, post-acquisition awards for previous management teams, and amortizing and the amortization of intangible assets arising from the accumulation of lazy audio of approximately RMB 66 million also contributed to higher general and administrative expenses this quarter. Including the impact from the accumulation of lazy audio, G&A would have increased by 24.7% year-over-year. Our effective tax rate for Q3 was 11.4.5%. Our net profit was RMB 788 million, and the net profit attributed to equity holders of the company was RMB 714 million. Non-RFI's net profit was RMB 1.06 billion, and non-RFI's net profit attributable to equity holders of the company was RMB 1.02 billion. non-offensive net profit margin was 17.6%. As of September 30, 2021, our combined balances of cash, cash equivalents, total deposits, and short-term investments were RB 24.5 billion, representing a decrease of RB 1.3 billion from Q2, primarily driven by payment for stock repurchase. cash generated from operating activities had a positive impact on the combined balances. Looking forward, we'll continue to invest in content, especially in self-produced content through various channels, such as content utilization platform and the collaboration with Tencent Group. We will also keep focusing on new initiatives, including improving monetization for audio products and rewrapping product filters through socialization, visualization, and the community, building for our long-term healthy growth. Meanwhile, as discussed earlier, we will continue to effectively manage our spending in selling and marketing defenses and enhancing operating efficiencies. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are ready to open the call for questions.

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star 2. 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 Eddie Leung from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. Thank you for the presentation. It's actually quite comprehensive. Just a question, perhaps following up on Shirley's point about content cost, given the regulatory changes as well as growing independent musicians' content, How should we think about the outlook of the connect homes or the gross margin related to the online music pieces? Not in the year term, but more like a trend. Thank you.

Okay. We will continue investment on the musician platform, and that will give us a content advantage for our products. And about the country's regulator, our content will be changed to non-inclusive license. So in the short term, that will have no material effect on our gross margin. But in the long term, that will have a positive impact on our gross margin. OK.

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

Good morning, management. Thanks for taking my question. My question is regarding our music subscription business. So from MusicNetAds' perspective, we have hit the high end of our guidance range, 5 million, in the last three quarters, every quarter. With the better user engagement now, we have seen MAU up sequentially in 2Q, 3Q, and also user acquisition costs is down. And we also recently launched a new QQ Music app recently. How should we think about the paywall, R pool, and net ads outlook in the coming quarters? Is it possible we can do better than $5 million in the coming quarters? Thank you.

In terms of the music paying users, we're very pleased to see that it surpassed the 70 million milestone to reach 71.2 million in the third quarter. It recorded very strong growth of 38% year over year. Net ads was very strong at 5 million, bringing the paying ratio to 11.2%. The music subscription revenue continued to deliver strong growth at 30% year-over-year, and we've achieved all this while at the same time being able to improve on the retention rate of the paying users. The music ARPU recorded a slight decline as we offered some promotions in response to the changing competitive landscape. although our music output will continue to be at a premium compared to industry peers. And as a result of the price promotion, it actually gives us more room to be flexible with regards to putting premium content behind our paid subscription while still being able to achieve the $4 million to $5 million quarterly net ad goal that we set out, which continues to be the case.

Your next question comes from Thomas Chung from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thank you, management, for taking my question. My question is about the advertising outlook. Can management share about the view on the future advertising outlook and the key categories in the dynamic industry environment? Thank you. Yeah.

Advertising accounted for approximately half of the music non-subscription revenue this quarter, but it actually could have been higher, and advertising has seen some slowdown as a result of the regulatory impact that we have outlined. However, we continue to see positive year-over-year growth rate on the advertising revenue, and we believe the impact would only affect us in the short term. As we digest the regulation changes and introduce more advertising products and build out our advertising business in general, we see advertising as a substantial opportunity with stronger potential going forward. The growth sectors that we are seeing include cosmetics, consumer electronics, and food products. Sectors that are more impacted by industry regulatory changes in general, such as finance and gaming, represent only a very low percentage of our advertising revenue. And as a result, we are less impacted than the overall industry.

Your next question comes from Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, management. Thanks for taking my questions. My question is related to the social entertainment competition. In terms of the competitive landscape, just curious, you know, for management view, if the social entertainment live streaming business could see a revival of growth in the coming order following the product upgrades and enhancements. Or does management think this is more or less a more mature and stable industry and potentially could see some declining trend going forward? So any color on how management think about this revenue growth outlook for social entertainment segment would be appreciated. Thank you.

As reported in the third quarter, we saw a slight year-over-year decline in the growth rate of the social entertainment revenues. And in response to that, we continue to revamp the WeSing product, namely the online karaoke room to make singing more fun and socially engaging. We've launched multiple features, including the large chorus, a cappella, multivariate adaptations, which we mentioned. We also enable more inter-room and as well as cross-room interactions. and all these features have engaged a large number of users. WeSing have also launched a virtual live streaming room to pioneer a new 3D live entertainment experience into the metaverse environment. In addition to WeSing, we see strong pockets of growth within live streaming, such as audio live streaming, which is a very complementary use case to our core music listening experience, We've seen strong growth across both user numbers as well as revenue, and we continue to grow our audio live streaming business in China as well as to leverage that experience to further expand our overseas market as we have seen strong growth and monetization potential there. And then in terms of QQ Music live streaming, which is a fast-growing and emerging pockets of growth within our live streaming business, Users, performers, and revenues all continue to ramp up with revenues of QQ Music live streaming growing at over 100% year over year. It has attracted 10,000 musicians to live stream and enabled musicians to connect and interact with the fans via live streaming. QQ Music live streaming currently accounts for mid to high single digit of the social entertainment revenues. And between QQ Music live streaming as well as audio live streaming, as well as our international expansion opportunities, we see effective ways to be able to offset some of the decline in the more traditional live streaming businesses.

Once again, if you wish to ask a question or if you wish to ask a follow-up question, please press star 1 on your phone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. We'll now pause momentarily if anyone else wishes to enter the queue. Your next question comes from Wei Zhong from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi, management. Thank you for taking my questions. We see that your long-form audio business continued to make very good progress this quarter. So if we take a slightly longer view of this business, how should we think about the revenue potential and the margin profile for this business in the next two to three years. Thank you.

Long Audio is a highly complimentary service to our core music product as well as music content portfolio. As we have seen by experience, it is very creative to user engagement and time spent. We continue to enrich the licensed titles podcasts, as well as continue to build the UGC content ecosystem to enhance our audio content offering. Examples that we've mentioned include the Source No Stride, Shui Zhong Han Dao Xing, which has become a very popular self-produced content blockbuster, accumulating a large number of audience. We also continue to enhance our content library by offering audio content from Rock and Roast, and QQ Music has also launched an open platform to improve podcasters' ability to create and upload podcast-related content and allow them to share content to TME as well as to other platforms with a few simple clicks. And as a result, We have seen very strong growth in long audio MAU to exceed 140 million, which recorded growth of 89% year-over-year. And in addition, we continue to grow the monetization opportunity within long audio, and we see in the long run opportunities both across audio subscription which we have recorded over 5 million paying users in the third quarter, as well as audio advertising as we build out the long audio business. And while it remains to be a negative gross margin contributor this year and likely into the next few quarters as well, we do expect the long audio business to be a profitable business beyond that.

Your next question comes from Charlene Liu from HSBC. Please go ahead.

Hi, Nash, and thank you for taking my question. I would like to know whether you can, obviously, I think the expenses came in better than expected, and I was wondering if you can give us some guidance on how should we think about sales and marketing and cost of sales going forward in the next quarter and entering into 2022. Thank you.

Okay. The balance fields and the market expenses. This quarter, we adopted many ways to control these expenses. First, we reduced directly expenses to acquire users because we use our internal traffic efficiently to attract more users. Faced to the competition, we need to use our expenses efficiently. So we will use more content and internal traffic to attract more users. And looking forward, we think we will continue to control our sales and marketing expenses. We expect that we'll be getting more good results in the future.

We are now approaching the end of the conference call. I'll now turn the call over to your speaker host, Mr. Tony Yip for closing remarks.

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