Tim Gong Yu
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. In the third quarter, we're faced a lot of volatility as we navigated through a particularly challenging operating environment. We've experienced uncertainty in terms of content scheduling, which resulted in softer than expected top-line performance. Despite of the short-term volatility, we are delighted to see encouraging signs across multiple operating metrics. Our leading market position remains intact as we continue to be number one in various user metrics according to third-party data. We firmly believe there are a couple of eternal truth when it comes to entertainment. The first is that audiences constantly demand high-quality entertainment contents such as movies and dramas. And the second is that creators have infinite potential to develop excellent material. With this market dynamics in mind, we think we have a tremendous space for growth and development. During the quarter, we continue to enhance the production capabilities of our original content, explore new genres to diversify into and expand our user base by refining our products and the overall user experience. Meanwhile, we have been driving the industrialization of video production to improve the efficiency of our operations. We believe all of these developments will enable us to navigate through the short-term challenge. And we're on the right path to achieve long-term success. Now, let's go through the performance of our business segments in the third quarter. Let's start with the membership. During the quarter our membership services revenue grow both annually and sequentially. Our core strategy is to cater to the demands of specific user segments with diversified content and continuously improve member benefit that enhance the member experience and driving new member sign up and user retention. At the same time, we are focused on raising ARPU and improving the long-term monetization of our membership business by developing innovative, new business models, adjusting our price points, eliminating ineffective discounts and pushing through operational initiatives. However, as I mentioned earlier, the uncertainty of our content scheduling caused fluctuations in terms of subscriber numbers. In the future, we will continue to enhance our library of content across different genres and strengthen our ability to withstand risks related to content scheduling. In the third quarter, memberships services revenue grew by 8% year-over-year, mainly due to the success of hit dramas such as One And Only, [Indiscernible], and Forever and [Indiscernible],Ever, which were launched in the third quarter as well as the continued interest in dramas launched at the end of the second quarter, such as, My Dear Guardian and The Rebel. As of September 30, the total number of the subscribers was 103.6 million. The sequential fluctuation was mainly due to delays in the release of some highly anticipated content. Meanwhile, the major content that we did release in third quarter was less diversified in terms of genres. Despite the soft performance. We are happy to see that subscriber growth on TV devices and from overseas maintained good momentum. We believe that higher conversion of users on TV devices and the continued expansion of our overseas user base will be a significant drivers of future subscriber growth. On the other hand, our ARPU recorded both annual and sequential growth. The annual growth rate of 10% was mainly due to the successful price adjustment that was rolled out last November. We expect the ARPU of our membership business will continue to improve going forwards driven by our content and our multiple operating initiatives. The member experience is one of the most important subjects that we focus on. On October 4th, we proactively canceled the paid advance viewing model, ahead of our peers. This should further help improve the member experience. and that supports subscriber growth and retention and lay a solid foundation for the long-term monetization of our platform. In addition, we continue to enhance member benefits on our platform via our cooperation with top industry partners. In terms of new services and the new business model, one of our key focuses is to promote the development of cloud cinema. Primarily across three content categories. theatrical films distributed via a PVOD model, premium films only distributed via online platform and the iQIYI Original Films. Since 2020, theatrical release of feature films have been hit significantly by COVID -19 pandemic. The cloud cinema model, will reduced reliance of online video platform on theatrical films. Also it enables users to watch new films soon after their offline release at a price that is cheaper than a traditional movie ticket, which further maximize the monetization potential of each film. During our third quarter, we had released our new life, Kungfu Stuntmen and the Malignant under our Cloud Cinema model. This films fall in different genres, namely comedy, action, and suspense, which helps to satisfy the demands of different user cohorts. In addition, our first original PVOD film Northeastern Bro was launched in October and received positive user feedback since its launch. In terms of overseas expansion, we were able to significantly expand our user base with DAUs, increasing sequentially in a number of Southeast Asia countries. Downloads of the IQiyi app remained on top of the chart across various regions. It rank number 1, in Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Unforgettable Love, Forever and Ever, and other domestic blockbusters drove continued growth of our overseas revenue. We've also recently kicked off the development of six overseas original dramas including 4 Korean and the 2 Philippines originals. In addition, we continue to expand our cooperation with local partners, including multiple media platforms and operators in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. We also launched our advertise system and signed annual cooperation framework agreements with numerous advertisers and successfully expanded local sponsorship for our Sweet ON Theater. Moving on to the advertising. During the quarter our advertising revenue came in soft, mainly due to a drop in brand ad revenues. The decline was mainly due to the delay of key content, including dramas and variety of shows. We continue to work on developing new innovative variety shows, which we are doing to diversify our content and de -risks our business from content scheduling uncertainty. We are still refining and fine tuning some of these productions and it's going to take some time to win over advertisers and stimulate their parties with these new genres. The softness of our brand advertising business was also due to the overall challenging micro-economic environment in China. Revenue from performance ads increased steadily both year-over-year and sequentially during the quarter. Our iQIYI Lite app was the main driver behind this. As opposed to our main apps, iQIYI Lite mainly focused -- focuses on lower-tier cities. There is a low overlap with our main app, which mainly focused on brand ads. iQIYI Lite is expected to be a great complement that drives new growth of our advertising business. The year-over-year growth of Performance ads also benefits benefited from one, an improvement in our monetization capabilities driven by our technology and two, contribution from key sectors, including internet service and e-commerce. The sequential growth was also partially driven by the growth in our ad inventory during the summer vacation. Looking forward to the fourth quarter, we have observed some slowdown in China’s overall macro economy, which might negatively impact on our advertising business. Nonetheless, we're proactively adapting ourselves to the environment to minimize our potential exposure. Moving over to content, we have experienced increased uncertainty in terms of content and scheduling, and a prolonged content approval processes since our last earnings call. Although we prepared a rich slate of content during the quarter, some of the top dramas and the variety shows in our pipeline experienced launch delays. Going forward to offset these types of the risks, we are looking to further expand and enrich the diversity of our content portfolio, explore new and different categories and deepen user awareness of our diversified content offerings, all in an effort to derisk our business from content scheduling issues in the future. In addition, we actively responded to the guidelines issued by then various government authorities and to promote the health of entertainment and online media industries. We believe these actions will further resolve long existing problems in the industry, which should help us to further optimize content costs, eliminate the chaos in content production and promotion, and reduce irrational industrial combination. Overall, these changes should be beneficial for supporting a healthy development of the industry over the long-term. I will -- I will also like to highlight our content strategy, efficiency in content production and operation has always been a primary target that we strive for and we are now putting even more focus on it. We're proactively taking initiatives to improve the efficiency of our operations and reduced ineffective investments in content by cutting projects that are expected to generate low ROI. The online video industry has rapidly developed over the past decade and now we've gotten to a point where content is king and the efficiency is key. We're happy to see the continued results of our progress to optimize content costs driven by enhanced production capability, disciplined content spending and improved operations. The important metric we use to track efficiency of our content spending is content related cost ratio. Simply speaking, this metric is calculated by dividing the total costs related to our title by the revenue generated by it. Based on this measurement, we can see the operating efficiency of our overall content in 2021 (including both licensed and original serial dramas) have improved substantially from last year. We will continue to use this metric as an effective tool in managing the efficiency of our investments in content and operations. For example, One and Only and Forever and Ever which created synergy in terms of IP and they are quite innovative in terms of both content creation and the broadcasting models. Also, these two titles, are good examples that demonstrated our increased efficiency in content operation as measured by the content-related cost ratio. The performance of One and Only was 13% points improved than last year's drama Love is Sweet, which features the same leading actress and belong in the same genres. We will also like to share some highlights on the performance of our vertical content theater model strategy. We have always been the industry pioneer in terms of content innovation and operation. Our theater model strategy is definitely one of our successful attempts. This model helps us to build recognition among audiences and advertisers in genres which is beneficial for attracting new users and driving up user retention. It offers better ROI as it brings the synergy among different titles. Within the same content genre, and thus provides more flexibility in working with advertisers. For example, we observed that the recent broadcast of The Pavilion and Wisher boosted the viewership of Mist Theater’s first season titles. ] Specifically, the daily video view and user time spend for The Bad Kids increased by more than two times since the new season of The Mist Theater was launched. Looking forward to the fourth quarter, although we predict that uncertainty will remain in the market, we will continue to execute our diversified content strategy in addition to the new season of Mist Theater launched in the fourth quarter. Other key titles include the dramas series Feng Qi Luoyang, the variety show, Super Sketch Show and Action, and animated content such as Deer Squad 2 and Princess Doremi. The Super Sketch Show premiers in mid-October. The show was highly acclaimed by audiences and solidified our market leadership in variety shows. Moving on to technology, advanced technology is the foundation of our business and we are constantly developing new technology to improve the user experience, increase user penetration, develop innovative new content formats and enhance content production and the efficiency of our operations. And at the same time, technical innovation is key to the industrialization of video production in the industry. ’and it will be greatly beneficial for improving the probability of success increasing ROI simplifying the production management process, reducing production costs and increasing the viewing experience. We continue to make progress in terms of user penetration. The users scale of iQYI Lite grew rapidly. Our peak DAUs increased by nearly 2 times sequentially and the user retention and monetization has also improved in terms of user profile as I mentioned earlier. iQIYI Lite is mainly focused on lower-tier cities. So the growth we have seen with this app speaks to our success in penetrating into these regions. In terms of content production and efficiency improvements, we continue to apply AI technology to effectively reduce production costs during the quarter. For example, operating costs can be effectively reduced with our proprietary intelligent, translation tools. We have fully replaced the manual translation with automated AI translation for the B- level (and below) dramas in Malaysia. Going forward, once we've fully adopted this technology for our overseas business, it will save us hundreds of millions of RMB in translation costs in the future. In terms of industrialization of video, we have launched and applied multiple technology and the products to our content production, which reduced the production costs, increased efficiency and improved the user experience. Take our proprietary multi view capture system as an example, The system significantly shortens the shooting time, and volume of manual work and supports the full production process from camera deployment, video shooting to post-production, make content production more efficient. Other intelligent tools launched include our script supervisor management products, which can be used in the mid-stage production process. The products have been applied to 16 variety show, including some of the external works in production. Also a management tool for the post production editing process has been used by a number of post production companies in the third quarter, improving transcoding efficiency by 3.7 times. In summary, we are proactively adapting ourselves to the current environment. We continue to be a pioneer when it comes to content in innovation and operation. Meanwhile we are seeing a promising growth trajectory for our new initiatives, such as iQIYI Lite and overseas business. Our original content and especially our theater-model content is highly recognized by users and advertisers and we will continue to take the lead in rolling out new technologies and tools for intelligent production and driving the industrialization for the long-form video production process, which should help to further optimize our operating efficiency. We have evolved along with the changes in the online video market over the past decade. The experiences we have accumulated and our expertise are exactly in line with where the industry is heading. We value the current challenges as a precious learning opportunity. We continue to believe that what does not defeat us make us stronger. With that, I will turn it over to Xiaodong to talk about our financials.
