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 third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Today you will hear discussions from the management team of Tencent Music Entertainment Group, followed by a question and answer session. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded today. Now I will turn the conference over to your speaker host today, Mr. Tony Yip. Please go ahead, sir.

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. Today, you'll hear from Mr. Kushan 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, a CSO, will offer additional thoughts on our product strategies operations, and business developments. Finally, Ms. Shirley Hu, our CFO, will address our financial results before we open the call for questions. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which applies to this call, as we will make forward-looking statements. 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 IFRS in our earnings release and SEC filing. With that, I'm pleased to turn over the call to Kashin, Executive Chairman of TME. Kashin?

Thank you, Tommy. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. I would like to begin by acknowledging all of the hard work that went into our successful listing on the main board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong under Stock Code 1698 on September the 21st. In addition to our primary listing on the New York Stock Exchange, we are truly grateful to our users, employees, partners, and investors who have been with us along the way and helped us reach this important milestone. From this vintage point, we plan to further advance our dual-engine content and platform strategy to support original content on our platform, expand our innovative business models, work with more partners to tap into the music market's potential, and fulfill our social responsibilities, thereby comprehensively promoting the healthy, diverse, and sustainable development of China's music industry. Providing differentiated content particularly by way of original content production, is our bread and butter, and further explains our already large and diverse content library that appeals to cross-generational audiences. To that end, in the third quarter, we rolled out a voice synthesis technology to quickly and vividly replicate a singer's voice for use in original songs of any style and language. Utilizing this patented technology, we have developed the synthetic voice in memory of legendary artists such as Teresa Teng, Deng Yijun, and Anita Mui, Mei Yanfang, and create an AI singer lineup with the voices of trending stars such as Yang Chaoyue, among others. As of the end of the third quarter, we have launched over 1,000 songs with AI synthetic voices. The female song's version of today, 金天女生版, has become the first song by an AI singer to be streamed over 100 million times across the internet. Additionally, we paid tribute to Anita Mui by creating an AI voice based on hers for the 2022 Film Charity Song of the New Sunshine Charity Foundation. May You Be Treated Gently by the World, Yuan Ni Bei Jie Xi Jie Wen Rou Yi Dai, which is also the holding music for today's earnings call. It was well received by a wide range of listening business cohorts, showing the broad reach of our social commitment to technology and music. As the digital music industry thrives, music lovers' tastes in music have grown increasingly varied. We are thrilled that the concept album, Agnes Farewell, by our Indian musicians, was recognized as the monthly pick by Pitchfork, a worldwide authority in music reviews. In the third quarter, we also produced a number of original singles which went viral on the internet and each record in over 100 million streams. such as Heard From You, Ting Li Shuo, Bai Yu Dong Yuan. All these achievements demonstrated our ability to expand the influence of our original work by bringing them to both domestic and overseas audiences. Furthermore, in deep collaboration with the broader Tencent ecosystem, we explored the chemistry between music and popular IPs, including these of legends, virus, 英雄聯盟, 手游, Q2 Speed Mobile, QQ Feature, and Assault Fire, ,, along with renowned artists such as Stephanie Shun, ,, Angela Zhang, and Jason Zhang, to create indie gaming music in the first quarter. Through these stimulating collaborations, as well as both online and offline promotions, we have further raised the popularity of indie music on our platform. Next, let's look at the Tencent Musician platform. Leveraging our robust technology to innovate and augment our one-stop service offerings for musicians, in the third quarter, we launched a new feature, TME Artist Album. This feature helps musicians release digital albums on all TME platforms at the prices they set with automatically generated sales pages. By the end of the third quarter, 281 of our musicians had utilized this new feature and received the income generated by their album sales, shortening the release time and lowering the barrier for them to forge closer connections with their audience. Second, we continue to launch a broad array of activities and initiatives to support our musicians and help them shine on stage. In the third quarter, We discovered Yilong Wang, Wang Yilong, a young hip-hop musician, providing him with comprehensive guidance from song selection to wardrobe, styling, and personal expressions, and signing him up for the Sing China China Hao Xiang Yin variety show, jump-starting his career as a musician within just two months. What's more, in the third quarter, We also recommended a diverse group of our musicians, including to various shows and events hosted by TME and sponsored by Sprite, SAIC, Audi, and Jingdong. Among others, demonstrating our commitment to providing substantial promotion and commercial resources for our musicians. These endeavours empower our musicians to build a full lifecycle career while also facilitating their communication and connection with their fans. By the end of the third quarter, we have served a total of 350,000 musicians, which also allowed us to attract more active and vibrant creators to our platform. further pushing the prosperity of our ecosystem. Our content strategy also includes a keen eye towards improving the diversity of collaborations with top music labels and artists, both domestically and internationally. In the third quarter, we teamed up with YG Entertainment, Fei Wang, Wang Fei, Woi Wang, Wang Yuan, Lei Zhang, Zhang Yixing, and others to provide our users with benefits in the 30-day head start period following the release of their new songs. Notably, Jay Chou's digital album, Greatest Works of Art, recorded sales of close to 7 million copies by the end of the third quarter. Whereas Lay Zhang's latest EP West, Taylor Swift's new pop album Midnight, And Blackpink's digital single Pink Venom and album Born Pink also achieved dazzling sales, reflecting our users' pent-up demand for user engagement with artists from home and abroad. Ongoing cooperation with professional institutions and industry partners also helped bolster our reputation as a go-to destination across diverse music verticals, such as gaming, classical, and electronic music. In the third quarter, we cooperated with the music label of NCPA Classics, 国家大剧院音乐场台, among others, to debut head-start balances for their releases. We also collaborated with the world's top 100 DJs and over 30 domestic and international electronic music labels to launch Tomorrow Drop, 电音联盟, helping to bring electronic music into the limelight. as a debut platform for international award-winning and global acclaimed electronic music. Lastly, moving on to TMD Live, our comprehensive online-merged offline performances brand, which has consistently propelled the music entertainment and performance industry toward by exploring innovative interactive formats and monetization avenues. In the third quarter, TME Live hosted 32 online and offline performances by various A-list staff, including Han Hong and Zhou Huajian. At the same time, we unveiled multiple innovations to refresh the user experience. For example, watching Zhou's online concert, we pioneered the TME Live Moment interactive activity, Vote Your End Call, EPL Shen Anke. Marking the first time a live streaming concert audience was invited to vote on the concert's closing song, creating a customized offline interactive experience for our online users and successfully accumulating close to 15 million unique viewers within the Tencent ecosystem. Going forward, we will incorporate more interactive formats in TME live moments during the performances. That concludes the update on our growing content capability. Now I would like to turn the call over to Ross, who will share more about our platform strategies. Ross, please go ahead.