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Hello Group Inc. (MOMO)

Q4 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Mar 7, 2017

$6.13

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2016 Momo Incorporated Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. I must advice you that this call is being recorded today November 8, 2016. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ms. Cathy Peng. Thank you, please go ahead.

Cathy Peng

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Momo’s fourth quarter and fiscal 2016 earnings conference call. The Company’s results were released earlier today and are available on the Company’s IR website. On the call today from Momo are Mr. Tang Yan, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Jonathan Zhang, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Tang will discuss Momo’s business operations, company highlights followed by Mr. Zhang who will go through the financials and guidance. They will all be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session that follows. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are based on management’s current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the Company’s control, which may cause the Company’s actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties, and factors is included in the Company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under law. I will now pass the call over to Mr. Tang. I would translate for him. Mr. Tang, please.

Tang Yan

Analyst

Good morning and good evening everyone. Thanks for joining our conference call today. Q4 was another remarkable quarter for us in almost every major aspect and execution. Total revenues for the quarter reached another record high as $246.1 million up 524% year-over-year and far exceeded our regional revenue guidance range. Again the outstanding top line performance came in together with significant bottom-line expansion powered by the strong operating leverage based on our efficient business model. For the fourth quarter of 2016 non-GAAP net income reached $91.5 million up 675% from the same period last year. Now quickly on the operating metrics, total MAUs on the Momo platform reached 81.1 million for the quarter, compared with 69.8 million a year ago, and representing a 3.7 million net addition from the previous quarter. Same as before, the total MAUs we are disclosing here does not include the active users on our stand-alone live-streaming application Hani. I would like to highlight here that after four consecutive quarters of steady rebound our MAU has already exceeded our historical peak level back in early 2015. We view that as an important milestone for our platform as a testament that we have the right strategy, a solid execution capability to penetrate deeper into our addressable market and drive continuous expansion in our user base. In addition to the growth in user scale 2016 was also a year where we saw meaningful improvement in user engagements. Time span for DAU in Q4 2016 increased more than 10% as compared to the year ago period. Over that same period of time, the number of relationships formed on the platform reached an important reflection of the stability and stickiness of our social platform also increased by 48%. All of these shows that by optimizing the existing social experience and…

Jonathan Zhang

Analyst

Thanks, Cathy. Thanks, Tang Yan. Hi everyone, thanks for joining our conference call today. We concluded fiscal year 2016 with a very solid fourth quarter performance operationally and financially. As Tang Yan talked to you earlier we achieved user base recovery for the fourth consecutive quarter, our monthly active users or MAU was over 81 million at the end of the year which surpassed our 78 million historical level at second quarter 2015. That demonstrated our video social focus product development initiatives is heading to the right direction and gave us the confidence to further expand our user base in the year of 2017 and beyond. We are extremely excited that total revenue for the fourth quarter grew by 524% year-over-year to $246 million. Continued from previous quarters with the benefit from continued growth in our revenues our highly skilled efficient business model resulted in another record level profitability for the fourth quarter. Non-GAAP net income was $91.5 million for the quarter representing 37.2% non-GAAP net margin. Compared to $11.8 million were 29.9% in the same quarter last year respectively. With the solid fourth quarter financial performance our total revenues for the fiscal year 2016 was $553 million compared to 134 million for 2015, 313% growth year-on-year. Non-GAAP net income for 2016 was a 177 million compared to 31 million for 2015, a 469% growth. Non-GAAP net margin were 32% and 23.2% for 2016 and 2015 respectively. Now looking into the key revenue line items. In the fourth quarter of 2016 revenue from live streaming service continued its strong growth momentum reaching a $194.8 million up 79% sequentially. The growth of live streaming revenues were driven by both paying user growth as well as an increase in ARPPU. Paying users for the fourth quarter of 2016 reached 3.5 million compared…

Cathy Peng

Analyst

Actually just one quick reminder before the Q&A, for those who can speak Chinese please ask the question in Chinese followed by English translation that would help us to ensure the quality of the translation to the maximum extent and we will also appreciate if you could limit the number of question to one per person. Thank you. Operator, please go ahead. We're ready for questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Zoe Jau from Credit Suisse. Please ask the question.

Zoe Jau

Analyst

[Foreign Language]

Tang Yan

Analyst

Our users growth trajectory during the past year has been steadily rebound since the beginning of 2016 and the quarterly net additions has been somewhere around 2 million to three million per quarter. If you look at our current retention rate the newly required users as well as the resurrected users trend that kind of trajectory in terms of a quarterly net addition can be safely maintained. Of course on top of that the team has bigger ambitions to drive and acceleration in MAU growth and there are two areas that we are working hard on in order to make that happen. Number one on the products side the initiatives that we have been taking around the video efforts as well as adding more entertaining content has been having a very positive impact on the user growth as well as the user engagement growth. That proves that the whole video transition as well as providing more entertaining content consumption use cases on the platform are really synergetic to the activities in an open social environment. In the year of 2017 we will further drive the video transition on our platform and try to provide more and better entertaining content to our users and by doing that it could help us very substantially deemphasize the totalitarian aspect of our application and expand our use case as well as our user base. On the other hand Momo has been around for more than five years and if you look at the real registered user base on our platform it has already exceeded 300 million so that's a pretty large -- that's an application with a pretty large registered user base for such an application to see an acceleration in MAU growth of course the product innovation and the expansion in use case…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Claire Chow from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question.

Claire Chow

Analyst

My question is regarding the concentration level of the [indiscernible] income and management share as a percentage of revenue contribution from our top performer, top agencies as well as the top users.

Tang Yan

Analyst

Let me just briefly talk about the revenue concentration in our live streaming service. During the fourth quarter because of the competition event that we run the revenue concentration among the top performers as well as the top paying users have all gone not -- however the concentration went back down after the competition events. On the broadcaster side in the month of December we had somewhere 540,000 revenue generated broadcasters and that number compared to 400,000 in the month of September among those revenue generators live broadcasters in the month of December if you look at the top layer of broadcasters who can bring in more than RMB30,000 per month per person, their revenue contribution represented a little bit over 50 percentage that you saw in September however that concentration went back down to the normal level after the year end event. In terms of the concentration among the paying users same in the December months if you look at the high paying users who spend more than RMB5000 per person per month we had a good over 15,000 such kind of high paying users and that number was less than 10,000 in the month of September and the revenue contribution from these top layer of paying users their contribution was also a little bit over the 50% as you saw in the month of September and same as the concentration among the broadcasters, the concentration went back down after the event the year-end gala was over. Overall because of the social attribute of the Momo platform and the fact that our traffic dispatching system really encourages the talent in new performers as opposed to the top [indiscernible] celebrities. We believe if you compare our revenue concentration with other competitors out there in the market, our revenue distribution among the broadcasters should be more longtail oriented. In terms of the revenue from the agency controlled broadcaster in the month of December we had somewhere around 70,000 broadcasters who were under certain type of agency organization and they contributed less than 50% of the total revenues from live streaming service. We believe the concentration among different agencies tend to be very fragmented on the Momo platform. For example the number one agency in December only represented somewhere around 3% of the total revenues from live stream service and the Top 10 you know in aggregate represented somewhere around 16%.

Cathy Peng

Analyst

Right. I think we're already running out of time maybe -- that concludes our call for today. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentleman that does conclude our conference for today. You may all disconnect.