Wang Li
Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. 2020 was a tough year for all of us. I’m proud that my teams were able to navigate through the many challenges with relentless focus on our core mission which is to help users discover new relationships and built meaningful interactions. The commitment to that core mission also enabled us to make difficult, the right decisions in the past year for the long-term well-being of the company and our community. Getting through that bumpy journey was also a valuable growth experience for my team. I’m happy to see that we have finally come out of those temporary drawbacks, stronger and better poised to seize the growth opportunities ahead of us. My speech today consists of two sections. In the first part I'm going to review the key operating and business results for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2020. And then I'm going to run through our strategic priorities for the year 2021. And perhaps more importantly, how these near-term strategic priorities fit into our ambitions over the longer term horizon. First of all, a brief overview of the financial performance. For the fourth quarter 2020, total Revenue was RMB3.80 billion, down 19% year-over-year, but up from RMB3.77 billion last quarter. Q4 revenue came in better than our original expectation mainly because of the outperformance from Momo's almost live streaming business in the year end competition event. Adjusted net income for the quarter was RMB836 million, representing a 22% profit margin. Excluding Tantan's net loss, adjusted net income for the core Momo was RMB845 million or a 28% profit margin. Tantan's total revenue came in RMB341 million for the fourth quarter, up 100% year-over-year. Adjusted net loss of Tantan further narrowed down to 3.3 -- RMB8.84 million as a result of strong top line growth as well as temporary scale back of marketing investment in the fourth quarter. For fiscal 2020, total revenues for the whole group were RMB15.0 billion compared to RMB17.0 billion last year. Adjusted net income was RMB2.9 billion compared to RMB4.49 billion last year. The year-over-year decrease at top line and bottom line level were mainly caused by the COVID impacts during the first half and the structural reform in the second half of the year. Now a deeper dive into other aspects of the year. First, on key operating metrics. Momo core ended the year with 113.8 million MAUs, slightly better than last quarter, but still below the peak level in the year 2019 primarily due to the -- due to us optimistically lowering marketing spend in November and December for ROI considerations. As we expected on last earnings call, the acquisition cost per user was either -- was at a hyper level of due to heavy spending from the education eCommerce and to some extent gaming companies. We therefore would rather defer part of our marketing spend to after Chinese New Year when the marketing costs came down. Paying user accounts which has pretty -- has been pretty much in correlation for MAUs in the 9.0 million for the core Momo, flattish over last quarter. The post Chinese New Year user recovery on the core has been pretty encouraging, which can be attributed to our successful campaigns during and after Chinese New Year as well as the team's efforts to improve the basic social experience, which I'd like to elaborate a little bit later. Tantan's paying user account came in at 3.8 million end of 2020, down from 4.1 million from the previous quarter. The net decrease was attributable to the following two factors. Number one, the continuous rollout of the SVIP premium package, which had a positive impact on ARPPU [ph], a negative impact on the number of paying users due to its price lifting effect. The second factor pertains to the pressure on MAU as we substantially lowered Tantan's investment in the paid marketing channels due to the same ROI considerations as mentioned in the earlier part of my remarks. The user acquisition costs came down during the Chinese New Year holiday. So we stepped up our marketing efforts then to capture the window opportunities. At the same time, we believe that the biggest priority for Tantan this year is to reshape its user acquisition system and more broadly, its marketing approaches, so that we can see substantial improvement in its marketing efficiency. This is an area where Momo team has extensive expertise and experience to learn. Momo undertook the same reform in 2017 and have since made significant improvements in user acquisition and subsequent conversions. We're going to implement the same playbook on the marketing front at Tantan this year. Our marketing team has already started some initial work since the beginning of the year. These early works confirmed our belief that Tantan still has significant headroom to grow its user base by optimizing its marketing and conversion approaches. Our February campaign shows that even the initial change in the marketing approach could make a difference. For example, the initial adjustment to the marketing materials and the data management system brought in a substantial increase in a female percentage in the new users. At the same time, we were also able to see some initial improvement in managing the unit acquisition cost as well as the user retention ratio. Of course, we still have a lot of hard work ahead of us and making this one of my biggest priorities for the year. Now let me switch gear a little bit to review the key things that we did last year to better serve our users and communities. I'm going to break this part down by the core Tantan and then the newer buckets within our product portfolio. First of all, on the core Momo side, the biggest focus of the team last year was to improve the basic social infrastructures and user experience on the platform, including the nearby people, nearby posts, optimizing our onboarding experience, and making initial upgrades to the user resurrection model. As a result of these products and operational efforts, in Q4 2020, we were able to see meaningful improvement in some of the most important metrics reflecting the social efficiency on Momo. Among them, the number of impression of the user profile page, the number of two way conversations as well as the number of interactions around nearby content has reached their peak since the beginning of the 20 -- of 2018. At the same time, the 30 days retention ratio for resurrected users improved 3 percentage points versus the beginning of the year. The 30 days retention ratio for complete new registrations reach this peak level since the beginning of 2019. These improvements in engagement metrics show that even amid tremendous external challenges of the year, the fundamentals of core Momo as a social platform to build new relationships are strengthening. That constitutes a solid foundation for Momo to pursue further growth opportunities in the year 2021. Now turning to Tantan, I'll be brief here and leave the details to Wang Yu later in his speech. If I were to name only one most impressive progress Tantan made in the year 2020, it would have to be that we've taken a few concrete steps toward enriching the peripheral social experience around the core swipe and match system. We will further accelerate Tantan's product efforts this year, aiming at taking the core dating experience to the next level and making a better fit into the Asian dating culture. In addition to the Momo core and Tantan, in the year 2020, we have made solid progresses with endeavors to build new applications. For example, Hertz, a voice-based dating application primarily serving the Gen Z in lower tier cities; [indiscernible], a video and voice based matchmaking application serving users seeking more serious relationships have all hit their respective retention and ROI targets for the first date. This year, we're moving these two applications into the second phase, where we are going to demand the growth of users as well as the fulfillment of ROI too, which means having enough revenue generation power, recover the revenue share and the marketing costs. This is an important milestone metric in our new project management system because once the new application reaches that stage, it is rolling into a self sustaining cycle and have the ability to contribute to the bottom line. Other than these ROI focused new applications, we were -- we are also working on a couple of projects that aim at establishing new touch points in the social as well as the [indiscernible] and payment industry [technical difficulty] as compared with the year 2019 now have a much more mature system that effectively evaluates and manages different types of new projects at different stages. Now turning to a quick review across our key business lines. I'm going to focus on the core Momo and leave Tantan's part to Wang Yu. Firstly, live broadcasting. 2020 was a challenging year for the live streaming team at the core. During the first half, the business, especially the top spending was struck hard by the COVID impact. In August, we undertook a structural reform to the live stream business in order to revive the long tail content ecosystem and to make sure this cash cow business continues to grow healthy in the new external environment. The waveform touched in many different areas on a product and operational side. Although the initial product adjustment in August caused significant negative impact on revenues, it was a critical step in eradicating the undesirable practices that were harmful for the long-term health [indiscernible] of the business. After several months of hard work, we have started seeing positive signs for improvement in the content ecosystem. Revenues have also shown stabilization and a gradual improvement from the bottom seen in August. It's also worth mentioning that by the end of last year with a new incentive plan, we have successfully achieved our goal in the golden broadcasters contract renewal project, securing the big majority of the high grossing performers by multiple years exclusive contracts. It will provide a solid base for us to drive continuous improvement in the live stream business at the core. The new incentive plan also gave a morale boost to the new performers and agencies. The outperformance of the year-end competition was a good example of that. We had quite a few new agencies and performers emerging from the competition as hardworking and dedicated value adding partners for Momo platform. Moreover, we were able to manage cost structure well enough to fully absorb the impact of the increase in the payout at a gross margin level, which remained flattish versus Q3. This was a much better outcome than we originally expected, demonstrating our focus and ability to grow the business at a gross profit and cash flow level rather than purely at the revenue level. Our plan in 2021 is to continuously support newcomers by diverting more traffic toward the mid to long tail. We also have plans to enrich the content verticals and to promote content that emphasize on emotional companionship in particular, in order to further cultivate the social attributes of the Momo platform. Now turning to back on the core. I’m quite satisfied with the team's execution on the VAS front during past -- during the past year. In a tough external environment, we've managed to not only deliver robust growth, but also successfully control the pace of growth to make sure it plays a positive role in the overall social ecosystem. Last year the growth of VAS was primarily driven by innovative product and operational ideas. For example, we continue to introduce new moderated shows into the chat room experience. In addition, we also brought in interactive gifts into the audio and video social entertainment experiences. This has proven to be a sustainable lever that we can pull to drive revenue and engagements in the chat rooms. In the second half of the year, we revamped the Werewolf experience and introduced a bunch of new gifting experiences into the interest group, both of which subsequently showed impressive growth. This prove that even for very mature use cases as long as we continue to innovate on consumer and paying experiences, there is always going to be opportunity for us to drive further growth in VAS. I'm also pleased that the VAS team focused not only on the quarterly revenues, but also on building future drivers for the long-term. Throughout 2020, Hertz and [indiscernible] continue to show gradual improvement both in terms of retention and user scale. We now have established a clear roadmap and a standard playbook for monetizing these experiences. As said in early part of my speech, 2021 will still be a year focused on product. But we do expect Hertz and [indiscernible] to contribute more meaningfully to the VAS line relative to last year. We also believe that they have the potential to become a longer term driver to both the top line and the bottom line. Those are the business updates. Now moving to the most important part of my speech today, our strategic priorities for the year 2021, and how these midterm priorities fit into our ambitions over the long-term horizon. Again, I’m breaking this section down by the core, Tantan and the new endeavors. For the core, I have two goals for the team. Number one, further grow the core user base with limited marketing budget and improved ROI versus last year. Our action plan to this goal consists of three key tasks. A, build new social experiences within the core to better serve underserved user demand. For example, we are clearly seeing the social desire from female users on Momo for the product and services we currently have on the core clearly work much better for men rather than women. This is an area where we should and can do much better than before. B, penetrate deeper into lower tier markets with Momo Lite. This was a key product project for last year. We actually made some good progresses on the product side in the second half of 2020, but the marketing plans got stuck due to the measures in different regions to keep the virus under control. As COVID risk continues to tail out this year, we still have good opportunities to push the plans forward and see substantially refining our user resurrection model; complete new registrations are increasingly becoming a scarce and expensive resource for every social media operator. That makes it crucially important to cultivate the value with the existing users as well as the users in dormancy. This is an area where Momo has lots of edge because we have a large pool of dormant users and can leverage new social experiences to call them back. The focus this year is to improve our current resurrection model, so that we can do much more effective targeting and conversion and drive better ROI from the reactivation. The second goal for the core of course is to get the business on to the growth track. We need the cash cow to remain productive not just at the revenue level, but at the gross profit level as well. As compared to the user goal, this one is easier to fulfill because from the trends we've seen -- we’ve been seeing so far into March, it seems that we have already completed the most arduous part of the journey and get the live streaming business on track for recovery. VAS having been growing robustly for the past 2 years, still has plenty of growth opportunities both in terms of traffic and in terms of new revenue features. As a social platform, 70% plus of our DAU and 80% plus of total time spend are not related to live streaming at all. Having VAS as a main revenue source will eventually prove to the investor community our potential and advantage as a social networking product as opposed to a live streaming product. That's an important role I’ve set for the team for 2021 and beyond. Now moving on to Tantan. Our goal for the year is to deliver solid user growth by substantially improving the marketing efficiency, and the core dating experience. As I said on the previous call, Tantan has huge room to grow its user base and engagement due to the secular trends that we're seeing in China. And currently, we can say with full confidence that in China, Tantan is clearly the most committed as well as the most effective dating product focused on connecting people for romantic purpose, and offline relationship conversions. This is a fundamental demand proven throughout human history. I see no reason why Tantan cannot be as large as Momo today in terms of user scale. As a matter of fact, it should be much bigger than that as we see how today's young people evolve as it relates to dating culture. Now the question really is why we are not growing as fast as we should be? The answer is not because the opportunities are not there, or somebody else is stronger than we are in serving that demand, but because there are important areas where we need to improve. We should make our product and marketing efforts more effective and execution more efficient, so that we hit the nail right on its head to pin down the growth opportunities that we're seeing. The two teams will need to work more closely together in order to push forward faster. This year you would see the collaboration between Momo and Tantan moving to a deeper level. Now turning to the plans beyond Momo and Tantan. This, of course, involves the new applications that we're working on, about which I've already talked a lot in the previous sections. But there is something more to it. Many of you would agree with me that the coming 10 years we'll see continuous boom of China's private consumption and it will be gearing up from a goods driven mode toward a service and new consumption driven model. The coming decade we'll also see phenomenal changes and advancements in communication technology and hardware devices. Moreover, with the rising personal income at an education level, the world's highest level of digitalization and increasing focus on individuality, today's younger generations are becoming increasingly open toward the idea of online dating and broader social products and services providing emotional companionship. It's quite possible that we will see the cultural reflection -- inflection point in the dating and on social space within the coming decade. As a company that focuses on helping people build new relationships, we stand at a cross section of all those trends. That's why I'm extremely excited about the growth opportunities that we have ahead of us. In order to capture these opportunities, we need to: a, drill down deeper in our strong areas, namely the open social space; and b, push the boundaries and expand the footprint in other adjacent areas along the value chain. And last but not least, stick to our long-term mission and have sufficient patience and tenacity to push through. Lastly, I'd like to finish my speech today by announcing that our Board has declared a cash dividend in the amount of US$0.64 per ADS, which will amount to a total cash payment of approximately US$132 million, or 30% of our adjusted net income attributable to Momo Inc in 2020 -- this is -- Momo Inc in 2020. This is the third consecutive year that we've shared the fruits of our operation with the shareholders. It demonstrates management's confidence in the fundamentals of the company as well as our commitment to creating and delivering shareholder value for the long-term. Thank you for trusting Momo team. These are the things I like to cover on this call. Now here's Wang Yu to talk about Tantan's product and service -- product and business development. Mr. Wang, please.