SOGP Sound Group Inc ADR 2023年第3季度财报电话会议文字稿中英文

Operator

大家好，女士们、先生们。感谢各位参加荔枝公司2023年第三季度财报电话会议。请注意，所有参会者目前处于只听模式，今天的电话会议正在录音中。现在我将会议交给公司资本市场主管Effy Kang女士。请开始。

Effy Kang

非常感谢。大家好，欢迎参加荔枝公司2023年第三季度财报电话会议。我们今天早些时候已通过新闻专线服务发布了财务和运营业绩，相关信息可在网上查阅。今天电话会议的参会者包括我们的创始人兼首席执行官赖奕龙先生；以及我们的代理首席财务官陆成芳女士。管理层将首先进行准备好的发言，介绍第三季度的业务发展和财务表现。提醒一下，本次会议正在录音。此外，本次电话会议的在线重播将在我们网站投资者关系板块ir.lizhi.fm上提供。在继续之前，请注意今天的讨论将包含根据美国《1995年私人证券诉讼改革法案》安全港条款所作的前瞻性陈述。这些陈述通常包含诸如可能、将会、预期、目标、估计、打算、相信、潜力、继续或其他类似表述。前瞻性陈述涉及固有风险和不确定性。这些陈述的准确性可能受到许多业务风险和不确定性的影响，这些因素可能导致实际结果与预测或预期存在重大差异，其中许多因素超出我们的控制范围。公司、其关联公司、顾问、代表和承销商不承担更新这些前瞻性信息的义务，除非适用法律要求。还请注意，荔枝的财报新闻稿和本次电话会议包含对未经审计的GAAP财务指标以及未经审计的非GAAP财务指标的讨论。请参阅荔枝的财报新闻稿，了解未经审计的非GAAP指标与未经审计的GAAP指标之间的调节表。现在我将会议交给我们的创始人兼首席执行官赖奕龙先生。请开始。

Jinnan Lai

[外语] 大家好，感谢参加荔枝公司2023年第三季度财报电话会议。[外语] 2023年第三季度，我们依托长期技术资产，进一步强化了以在线音频为核心的全球化战略执行。我们持续赋能国内业务创新，同时稳步推进全球业务，培育充满活力且多元化的生态系统。2023年第三季度，我们的营收达到4.25亿元人民币。我们的总平均移动月活跃用户数为4210万，平均月度付费用户总计40.26万。尽管面临宏观逆风，我们坚定地沿着既定路线前进，强化了对长期愿景的承诺。本季度，我们继续降本增效，提升组织效率和敏捷性，同时加强全球化能力，以更好地支持我们多元化业务的发展。现在让我回顾一下第三季度的业务发展情况。[外语] 在音频娱乐业务方面，我们致力于构建健康可持续的产品生态系统。通过积极优化运营策略，精心完善内容创作者拓展与培育机制，我们提升了创作者质量，扩大了创作者规模，同时巩固了平台的竞争优势。本季度，除了持续优化内容创作者平台外，我们还推出了星光挑战赛，这是一项旨在培养中长期内容创作者并激励顶级贡献者的战略举措。该计划赋能内容创作者展示其独特的声乐才能，释放创作潜力，同时提升了平台对内容创作者社区的吸引力。[外语] 此外，我们通过丰富内容供给和产品创新，努力改善用户体验，吸引更多高质量用户。本季度，基于用户偏好，我们新增了一系列精心策划的模块，丰富了内容品类，为用户提供了更多样化、更具吸引力的内容选择。此外，我们持续迭代产品设计，培育新产品功能和互动工具，利用前沿技术引入创新的音频互动体验。我们通过多样化的营销活动和主题赛事维持用户活跃参与，增强了用户粘性和参与度。[外语] 在全球创新业务方面，我们致力于通过下一代社交产品为用户带来愉悦体验。通过整合跨设备功能、实时能力、AIGC技术等先进功能，我们持续完善产品界面和功能。我们利用先进技术赋能产品创新，满足多样化用户需求。同时，我们努力通过增强产品的网络效应来改善用户体验和用户参与度，从而促进有机用户增长。在组织层面，随着我们在产品开发、运营等关键领域持续提升本地化能力，我们也采取了跨团队协作的方式进行产品创新，以提高创新生产力。展望未来，我们将继续开拓国际市场，强化全球化能力，最终加速全球业务版图的扩张。[外语] 在技术进步方面，我们持续加强研发能力，提供更定制化的产品支持。这从内部赋能产品创新，并推动全球业务进展。我们还持续深化多模态AIGC技术与创新业务框架的融合与发展。通过模型增强训练和算法优化，我们正在巩固AI资产，为持续的产品创新释放广阔机遇。在语音技术方面，我们持续提升中英文自动语音识别和文本转语音（ASR和TTS）的稳定性和性能，使其适应多样化场景。我们还在AI变声技术方面取得突破，包括与我们的内部实时音视频流平台DOREME实现无缝集成。同时，我们进一步提升了即时通讯平台VoderX上的信息传输质量，为业务提供高性能、低延迟、可扩展的定制化即时通讯能力。在多功能技术平台建设方面，我们进一步完善了数据分析与数据管理系统，并将AI技术应用于营销等领域。这些举措共同提升了整体运营效率。总体而言，我们相信技术进步是业务发展的基石。我们致力于追求行业领先的技术标准，持续巩固核心技术能力，为业务发展赋能。[外语] 我们很高兴地宣布，上个月公司被中国互联网协会评为中国互联网百强企业之一。这是我们连续第五年获此殊荣，代表了中国互联网协会及整个行业对我们综合能力的充分肯定。展望未来，尽管面临宏观挑战，我们将不遗余力地积极完善业务策略，构建更具竞争力的生态系统。我们将持续提升核心技术能力，同时在整个业务中更深入地采用和整合AIGC及语音AI技术。与此同时，我们将进一步精简运营，提高资源配置效率，以新的动力推动公司长期可持续发展。[外语] 谢谢大家。接下来，我将把电话会议交给我们的代理首席财务官陆成芳女士，她将更详细地讨论我们的财务业绩。

Jinnan Lai

[Foreign Language] Hello everyone, thank you for joining LIZHI INC.'s third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. [Foreign Language] In the third quarter of 2023, we further strengthened the execution of our online audio-centric globalization strategy, leveraging our long-term technological assets. We consistently empowered domestic business innovation, while steadily advancing our global business, fostering a vibrant and diversified ecosystem. In the third quarter of 2023, our revenue reached the RMB425 million. Our total average mobile MAUs amounted to 42.1 million, and our average monthly paying users totaled 402.6 thousand. Despite macro-headwinds, we steadfastly pursued the course we had charted, reinforcing our commitment to our long-term vision. During the quarter, we continued to reduce costs and increase operating efficiency to improve organizational efficiency and agility, while also reinforcing our globalization capabilities to better support the development of our diverse spectrum of businesses. Now let me go over our business developments during the third quarter. [Foreign Language] In terms of our audio entertainment business, we remain committed to building a healthy and sustainable product ecosystem. Through proactive optimization of our operating strategies and meticulous refinement of our mechanisms for expanding and nurturing our content creator base, we have enhanced the creator quality and increased the scale of our creator base, while also solidifying our platform's competitive edges. During the quarter, in addition to the continuous optimization of our content creator platform, we launched the Starlight Challenge [ph], a strategic initiative designed to cultivate mid and long-term content creators and motivate our top tier contributors. This program empowered content creators to showcase their distinctive vocal talents for the unlocking their creative potential, while also elevating the platform's appeal to the content creator community. [Foreign Language] In addition, we strove to improve the user experience and attract more high-quality users through enriched content offerings and product innovations. During the quarter, based on user preferences, we added a suite of carefully curated modules to enrich our content genres, providing our users with more diverse and engaging content options. Furthermore, we continue to iterate our product design and cultivate new product features and engagement tools, harnessing cutting edge technologies to introduce innovative audio-based interaction experiences. We sustain active user participation through a diverse array of marketing programs and themed events, augmenting both user sickness and engagement. [Foreign Language] As for our global innovative business, we are deeply invested in delighting our users with next-generation social networking products. By integrating advanced features including cross device functionality, real-time capabilities, AIGC technologies and more, we continue to refine our product interface and functionality. We leverage advanced technologies to empower product innovation capturing to diverse user needs. Meanwhile, we endeavor to improve user experience -- user engagement by enhancing the network effect of our offerings, thereby fostering organic user growth. Organizational wise, as we continue to boost our localization capabilities across product development, operations and other key areas, we have also taken a collaborative cross team approach to product innovation to increase innovative productivity. Moving forward, we will continue developing international markets reinforcing globalization capabilities and ultimately accelerating the expansion of our global footprint. [Foreign Language] With respect to technological advancement, we continue to strengthen our R&D capabilities to provide more customized product support. This internally empowers product innovation and drives progress across our global business. We have also consistently deepened the integration and development of multi-model AIGC technologies into our innovative business framework. Through motion-enhanced model training and algorithm optimization, we are fortifying our AI assets unlocking vast opportunities for ongoing product innovation. On voice technologies, we have been constantly improving the stability and performance of automatic speech recognition and text to speech ASR and TTS for both Chinese and English languages, adapting them for diverse scenarios. We have also achieved the breakthroughs in AI voice changing technology, including a seamless integration to DOREME, our in-house RTC platform for real-time audio and video streaming. In the meantime, we further enhance the quality of information transmission on our IM platform, VoderX, empowering our business with high performance, low latency and scalable customized instant messaging capabilities. In terms of our versatile technology platform construction, we further improve the data analytics and data management systems and apply the AI technology to marketing and other fields. Collectively, these initiatives have improved overall operating efficiency. In general, we believe technological advancements are the cornerstone of business development. We remain committed to pursuing industry-leading technological standards and continually fortifying our core technological capabilities to empower the business development. [Foreign Language] We are delighted to announce that last month the company was awarded as one of China's top 100 internet companies by the Internet Society of China. This marks the fifth consecutive year that we have received this honor, representing powerful recognition of our comprehensive capabilities by the Internet Society of China and the broader industry. Going forward, despite the macro challenges, we will spare no effort in proactively refining our business strategies and building a more competitive ecosystem. We will continue to improve our core technology capabilities, while also adopting and more deeply integrating AIGC and voice AI technologies throughout business. Meanwhile, we will further streamline our operations and improve the effectiveness of resource allocation, propelling the company's long-term sustainable development with fresh momentum. [Foreign Language] Thank you all. With that, I will now turn the call over to our acting CFO, Ms. Chengfang Lu, who will discuss our financial results in more detail.

Chengfang Lu

好的。谢谢Marco，大家好。2023年第三季度，我们的净收入为4.251亿元人民币。尽管面临复杂的背景和持续的市场不确定性，我们在第三季度仍坚定不移地通过技术创新来加强核心竞争力。展望未来，我们将继续致力于进一步提升组织效率、发展全球化能力、增强整体敏捷性，为我们的利益相关方创造持久价值。现在，我想简要概述一下2023年第三季度的财务业绩。本季度，我们的总净收入为4.251亿元人民币，而去年同期为5.652亿元人民币，主要原因是音频娱乐产品的平均付费用户数和用户支出下降。本季度营收成本为3.173亿元人民币，而去年同期为3.762亿元人民币，主要归因于收入分成费用、股权激励费用、支付处理成本及其他杂项成本的减少。2023年第三季度毛利润为1.078亿元人民币，而去年同期为1.891亿元人民币。本季度非GAAP毛利润为1.079亿元人民币，而去年同期为1.908亿元人民币。2023年本季度毛利率为25%，而去年同期为33%。本季度非GAAP毛利率为25%，而去年同期为34%。2023年第三季度运营费用为1.679亿元人民币，而去年同期为1.766亿元人民币。2023年第三季度研发费用为8,380万元人民币，同比增长7%，主要原因是与优化研发效率相关的遣散费增加导致薪资和福利费用增加，部分被第三方提供的研发服务费用减少所抵消。本季度销售和营销费用为5,910万元人民币，而去年同期为7,120万元人民币，主要归因于品牌和营销费用减少。公司将根据市场情况监控其可自由支配的广告和促销费用并进行相应调整。2023年第三季度一般及行政费用为2,510万元人民币，而去年同期为2,710万元人民币，主要驱动因素是第三方提供的专业服务费、诉讼或有事项拨备及其他杂项费用减少。2023年第三季度运营亏损为6,010万元人民币，而去年同期运营收入为1,250万元人民币。本季度非GAAP运营亏损为5,500万元人民币，而去年同期非GAAP运营收入为1,220万元人民币。2023年第三季度其他费用为590万元人民币，而去年同期其他收入为170万元人民币，主要归因于与2023年9月20日ADF比例变更相关的存款返还报酬费用。2023年第三季度净亏损为6,200万元人民币，而去年同期净收入为1,980万元人民币。本季度非GAAP净亏损为5,650万元人民币，而去年同期非GAAP净收入为2,750万元人民币。2023年第三季度每份ADF的基本和稀释净亏损均为11.01元人民币，而去年同期每份ADF的基本和稀释净收入分别为3.81元人民币和3.79元人民币。2023年第三季度每份ADF的非GAAP基本和稀释净亏损均为10.07元人民币，而去年同期每份ADF的非GAAP基本和稀释净收入分别为5.29元人民币和5.26元人民币。截至2023年9月13日，我们拥有现金及现金等价物和受限现金共计6.158亿元人民币。好的。我们的预置发言到此结束。再次感谢大家今天的参与。如果您有进一步问题，请随时通过我们网站ir.lizhi.fm上提供的联系方式或Piacente Financial Communications联系荔枝的投资者关系部门。问答环节结束：谢谢。本次电话会议到此结束。您现在可以挂断电话。谢谢。祝您有美好的一天。

Chengfang Lu

Okay. Thank you, Marco, and hello everyone. Our net revenues in the third quarter of 2023 were on RMB425.1 million. Despite the complex backdrop and market uncertainties and persisted, we remain steadfast in strengthening our core competitiveness through technological innovation during the third quarter. Moving forward, we remain committed to further enhancing organizational efficiency, developing globalization capability, and enhancing overall agility, positioning us to deliver enduring value to our stakeholders. Now, I'd like to provide a brief overview of our financial results for the third quarter of 2023. In this quarter, our total net revenues were RMB425.1 million compared with on RMB565.2 million in the same period of last year, primary due to the decline in average paying users and user spending on our audio entertainment products. Cost of revenue was on RMB317.3 million in this quarter compared with on RMB376.2 million in the same period of last year. Many attributable to the decreased revenue share fees, share-based compensation expenses, payment handling costs, and other miscellaneous costs. Gross profit was RMB107.8 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared with RMB189.1 million in the same period of last year. Non-GAAP gross profit was RMB107.9 million in this quarter compared with RMB190.8 million in the same period of last year. Gross margin in this quarter of 2023 was 25% compared with 33% in the same period of last year. Non-GAAP gross margin in this quarter was 25% compared with 34% in the same period of last year. Operating expenses were RMB167.9 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared with RMB176.6 million in the same period of last year. Research and development expenses were RMB83.8 million in the third quarter of 2023, representing an increase of 7% year-over-year, primary due to the increased salary and welfare benefits expenses, related to increased severance pay to optimize the RD efficiency, partially offset by the decreased expenses related to research and development services provided by third parties. Selling and marketing expenses were RMB59.1 million in this quarter compared with RMB71.2 million in the same period of last year, primary attributable to decreased branding and marketing expenses. The company will monitor its discretionary advertising and promotion expenses, and adjusted economy depending on marketing conditions. General and administrative expenses were RMB25.1 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared with RMB27.1 million in the same period of last year, primary driven by decreased professional service fees provided by third parties, provision for litigation contingencies, and other miscellaneous expenses. Operating loss was RMB60.1 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared with operating income of RMB12.5 million in the same period of last year. Non-GAAP operating loss was RMB55 million in this quarter compared with non-GAAP operating income of RMB12.2 million in the same period of last year. Other expenses were RMB5.9 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared with other income of RMB1.7 million in the same period of last year, primary attributable to the remuneration fees to the deposit back in relation to the ratio change of ADF on September 20, 2023. Net loss was RMB62 million in the third quarter of 2023 compared with the income of RMB19.8 million in the same period of last year. Non-GAAP net loss was RMB56.5 million in this quarter compared with non-GAAP income of RMB27.5 million in the same period of last year. Basic and diluted net loss per ADF were both 11.01 in the third quarter of 2023 compared with basic and diluted net income of RMB3.81 and RMB3.79 per ADF in the same period of last year. Non-GAAP basic and diluted net loss per ADF were both RMB10.07 in the third quarter of 2023 compared with non-GAAP basic and diluted net income of RMB5.29 and RMB5.26 per ADF in the same period of last year. As of September 13, 2023, we had cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash of RMB615.8 million. Okay. This concludes all of our prepared remarks. Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact LIZHI's investor relations through the contact information provided on our website ir.lizhi.fm or Piacente Financial Communications. End of Q&A: Thank you. This concludes the conference call. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you. Have a good day.