Yalla Group Limited

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for YALA Group Limited Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. This time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Today's conference is being recorded. I'll turn the call over to your speaker host today, Ms. Carrie Gu, IR Director of the company. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to YALA's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. We released our earnings earlier today, and the release is now available on our IR website as well as our newsreel services. Before we continue, please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, our future results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in our earnings release and our annual report filed with the SEC. YALA does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Please also note that YALA's earnings press release and this conference call include a discussion of unaudited GAAP financial measures as well as unaudited non-GAAP financial measures. Yala's press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to the unaudited most directly comparable GAAP measures. Today, you will hear from Mr. Tao Yang, our chairman and chief executive officer, who will provide an overview of our latest achievements and growth strategies. He will be followed by Mr. Jeff Xu, our chief operating officer, who will briefly review our recent business developments. Mrs. Karen Hu, our chief financial officer, will then provide additional details on the company's financial results and discuss our financial outlook. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open up the call to questions. Mr. Saifi Ismayil, the company's president, is unavailable for today's call due to a personal emergency. With that said, I would now like to turn the call over to our chairman and chief executive officer, Mr. Tao Yang. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Kerry, and thank you, everyone, for joining our third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. We are pleased to have delivered another strong quarter with record revenue of 80.1 million USD, exceeding the higher end of our guidance by 6.8%. This also represents a third conductive quarter of record-breaking revenue for the company. and undergoes our unique capabilities in driving business growth at a solid pace while continuing to develop our integrated product ecosystem. Such robust costly results are underpinned by our continuous efforts to refine our operational process, optimize user acquisition, and further drive our product monetization. Together, these actions have effectively improved our user experience, thereby fully boosting YALA's and YALA Leader's user engagement and user's willingness to pay on our platform. Also, our impressive quarterly results are a testament to our core strategy as well as our operational improvements. As we further deepen our expertise and build in our product portfolio in MENA. We are confident in our future growth potential. Now let's take a closer look at our new product updates. Leveraging our extensive industry-leading experience in social and online entertainment in MENA, we established Yala Game to explore the mid-core and hardcore game distribution business as a complement to our casual game portfolio. In this order, Yellow Game has taken a crucial step. We are excited to share with you that after several months of collaboration with the gaming studio we invested in, we have launched the better version of our first hardcore mobile game, Merge Kingdom, in another MENA country. We will soon begin to gather user feedback and actively fine-tune the product through the better stage. paving the way for full-on promotion. We will share more details and metrics with you on our next call. The second hardcore game that we plan to distribute in the region, the RPG game, is on track to be launched by the end of this year. Moreover, Asmina is becoming the next popular emerging market and continues to attract attention from more and more gaming studios. We remain open to discovering good gaming content and potential collaborators with whom we can jointly further explore the middle market. We look forward to sharing more updates with our investors in the near future. We are also very excited to report that we recently launched the Yellow Track version 1.3. which we have already developed into an instant messaging product with a broad area of localized and customized functions. In this quarter, we added more engaging functions into the product. And as we shared previously, we are enhancing Yala Chat by leveraging a unified logging system. Over the past two quarters, we have upgraded our platform and hosted campaigns to encourage users to log into Yala and Yala Ludo using their Yala chat account and to motivate more Yala group users to register for Yala chat account. In addition, this quarter we launched a Yala Ludo mini program within the Yala chat app. Yala Ludo is the number one tabletop game across MENA. Yala Ludo users now have full access to their game assets and get better in the game app when using Yala Ludo Mini program in Yalachat. We believe this is a crucial step to build the product schema here, and at the same time, increase user's thickness to our app. Next, let's take a look at our Waha product, the first ever social metaverse designed for the MENA region. In Q3, we rolled out a number of new functions to enhance WAHA's gamification and entertainment features. First, we continue to launch new social scenes in WAHA, including a difficult scene recorder in which users can dance and play the role of DJ on stage. Second, beyond voice chatting with friends in WAHA's rooms, Users can now also play music and videos, creating a virtual theater space for sharing their favorite entertainment while hanging out with their friends. In addition, to further build out the product's gamification, our team began to roll out mini-games in Wild High Road, encouraging user engagement and boosting user interaction. We will continue to monitor the latest trends and upgrade WAHA accordingly to keep providing our users with fun and cool functions that are tailored to local culture and trends. Before I wrap up, I'd like to share with you that our president, Mr. Saifiz Ma'il, has been named one of the region's 50 most inspiring business leaders of 2022 by the prestigious magazine Arabian Business. which is the Middle East region's top resource for informed news, features, and commentary. Its output includes interviews with some of the world's leading business people and long-form features from around the Middle East. Congratulations, Stacey. In conclusion, I'm happy with our ongoing solid results this quarter. Over the past six years, We have shown our strong focus and commitment to MENA, its people, and its culture. We strive to explore new products to meet MENA users' involving needs and remain dedicated to facilitating digital transformation throughout the region. As a calculator in MENA, we will continue to expand our services and stretch the boundaries of our business while further deepening scenarios of our different products and services to drive brand loyalty among users and improve our platform's brand business. Once again, our vision is to build the most popular destination for online social networking and entertainment activities in MENA, and we remain steadfast in our pursuit of this goal. Now, I will turn this call over to our COO, Mr. Jiaxu, for a closer look at our recent developments.