Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Third Quarter 2024 Hello Group Inc Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded today. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ms. Ashley Jing. Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Hello Group's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. The company's results were released earlier today and are available on the company's IR website. On the call today are Mr. Tang Yan, CEO of the company; Ms. Zhang Sichuan, COO of the company and Ms. Peng Hui, CFO of the company. They will discuss the company's business operations and highlights, as well as 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 provision 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 and 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 this and other risks, uncertainties, and factors is included in the company's findings 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 due to events or otherwise, except as required under law. I will now pass the call over to our COO, Ms. Zhang Sichuan. Ms. Zhang, please.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our call. I would now like to – I’ll now give you an update on our business on Q3 2024. Starting with an overview of our financial performance. For Q3 2024, total group revenue was RMB2.67 billion, close to the high end of our guidance, down 12% from the year ago, with [a smaller] (ph) year-over-year decrease than in Q2. Adjusted operating income was RMB455 million, down 33% year-over-year, representing a margin of 17%, down 5.4 percentage points from a year ago. Looking at the Momo app and standalone new app, total revenue was RMB2.46 billion, down 10% year-over-year. The decrease was mainly due to the 17% year-over-year decline in the Momo app resulting from our proactive product adjustment and the spending softness amid the weak macroeconomy. The decrease was partially offset by the accelerated 41% year-over-year revenue growth in standalone new app, driven by our overseas business. Adjusted operating income was RMB440 million, down 33% year-over-year, with a margin of 17.8% down 5.9 percentage points year-over-year, mainly due to the declines in revenue and margin of the Momo app. For Tantan, Q3's total revenue was RMB212 million, down 28% year-over-year due to the decreased number of paying users. Adjusted operating income was $15.17 million compared with $27.58 million from the year ago, representing a margin of 7.2% down 2.2 percentage points year-over-year. Now I will give you an update on executing our strategic priorities for each business-line. Our main goal for the Momo app this year is to maintain the productivity of this cash cow business with a healthy social ecosystem. Tantan's goal is to continue improving the core dating experience and build an efficient business model that drives profitable growth. As for our new endeavors, our goal is to enrich…

Sure. Thanks, Sic. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. Now let me briefly take you through the financial review. Total revenue for the third quarter 2024 was RMB2.67 billion, down 12% year-on-year, and a slight decrease of 0.6% quarter-on-quarter. Non-GAAP net income attributable to the company was RMB493.3 million, down 19% year-on-year, but up 10% from the last quarter. Looking into the key revenue items for Q3. Firstly, on live broadcasting. Total revenue from live broadcasting business for the third quarter of 2024 was RMB1.29 billion, down 16% year-over-year and 1% quarter-over-quarter. The year-over-year decrease was largely attributable to a decline in the core Momo live-streaming business and to a lesser extent the decrease in Tantan. The sequential decrease was due to the decline in Tantan live streaming, whereas Momo remained relatively stable. In terms of segments, Momo live broadcasting revenue totaled RMB1.22 billion for the quarter, down 14% year-over-year and flat from last quarter. The year-over-year decrease was due to our proactive product and operational adjustments to scale back from revenue-oriented competition events and the soft spending sentiment amid the weak macroeconomy. Tantan’s live-broadcasting revenue amounting to RMB66.6 million, down 45% year-over-year and 20% quarter-over-quarter. The decrease was due to our strategic decision to de-emphasize the less dating-centric service. Revenue from the value-added services for the third quarter of 2024 was RMB1.36 million, down 8% from Q3 last year, but up 1% sequentially. The year-over-year decrease was due to a decline in both Momo and Tantan. However, the growth of the standalone new apps partially offset the downward revenue pressure. The sequential growth of value-added service revenue was driven by the growth of new endeavors. Revenue from VAS on an ex-Tantan basis was RMB1.22 billion in the third quarter of 2024, down 6% from Q3…

Thank you. Just a quick reminder before we just ask questions, for those who can speak Chinese, please ask your questions in Chinese first and followed by English translation by yourself. And please also limit the number of questions to one to two, so we can take more people. Okay, so operator, we're ready for questions. Thank you.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Raphael Chen from BOCI Research. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] I will translate myself. Thanks for taking my question. Congrats on the strong growth momentum of overseas business. Could management share the main contributors driving the overseas business growth rate in the third quarter, also we have the latest revenue and profit figures for the overseas business and growth outlook for the fourth quarter and [2025] (ph).

[Foreign Language] Okay, let me transulate. The sequential growth of our overseas business in the first half of the year was slower than we had anticipated at the beginning of 2024, primarily due to the need to address many areas for improvement in local operations, which required more time than we thought. Revenue growth accelerated in the third quarter thanks to the optimization of cross-border personnel management. As a result, the operational efficiency of the social team got significantly improved. Our strategy of empowering local staff in product operations will help us better address the unique social preferences and needs of users from different cultural backgrounds. By leveraging the strengths of our local team, we have been able to strengthen cooperation with the local supply side. With the rapid growth of our overseas business, our operational markets and regions are also becoming more diverse. Therefore, we will continue to optimize cross-border management, establish offices in key markets, recruit more local talents, and drive continuous growth in revenue and profit through robust focus on localization. [Foreign Language] Let me translate first. In the third quarter, total revenue of the new apps reached close to RMB220 million with [Social] (ph) contributing 60 to 70%. Social has now surpassed the revenue scale of Tantan. And its revenue in the third quarter was up more than 50% year-on-year. And as we strengthen our localized operation capabilities, We expect Social to continue to grow rapidly next year. Meanwhile, we expect our other two Middle Eastern apps to enter into a period of rapid revenue growth and possibly breakeven next year. The incremental revenue and profit generated by our overseas business partially offset the decline in revenue and profit from the Momo app. We believe that compared with our domestic business, which face many uncertainties such as macroeconomic and regulatory issues. The growth potential and trajectory of our overseas business are relatively clear. This is particularly true in the social field where we have distinct product and operational advantages. That's why we have prioritized the allocation of human and financial resources to the operation and expansion of our overseas business in recent years. We believe that our overseas business will play an increasingly significant role in driving the group's revenue and profit in the future, which will be clearly reflected next year. And as for the financial outlook, I will leave that to Cathy, please.

Okay, let's see our [work] (ph). In our Q4 guidance, we are assuming Social to grow probably by 40 plus percent year-over-year. That would close out 2024 with a year-over-year growth rate of close to 50%. As the app gets bigger, obviously the growth rate could slow down a little bit. However, our two other social entertainment apps in the Middle East, North Africa area have been ramping up rapidly recently. We do expect these two apps to start bearing fruits and contributing to the bottom-line in a – contributing to both the top-line and bottom-line in a meaningful way in 2025. With these three oversea apps, we believe oversea revenues will continue to grow pretty fast and hopefully could accelerate its growth rate next year. The other thing worth mentioning is that if you look at the way we manage our overseas business, we are not pursuing just top-line growth at the expense of bottom-line. We always want what we call profitable growth. That means next year as oversea apps continue to grow at top-line, bottom-line performance for these three apps are going to continue to improve as well. Hopefully that answers your question. I'm handing back to Ashley for next question.

Operator next question please.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Jenny Wang from UBS. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] So let me transmit myself. So thanks management for taking my question and congrats on the good results. My question is regarding the outlook for cash cow business. So core Momo has been ongoing product adjustments for a year since the end of third quarter last year. Could you please share with us these adjustments we are continuing going forward and when we might see a recovery in growth for quarter-on-quarter and year-over-year and how should we view the [profit] (ph) sustainability of the cash cow business going forward. So thank you.

[Foreign Language] Okay, so last year we implemented operational adjustments to live-streaming and audio and video based VAS experiences, with a focus on reducing revenue oriented competition events. And although this impacted our financial performance, it has played a positive role in reducing revenue concentration and creating a more stable and healthier social ecosystem for our cash cow business. So we remain committed to this operational strategy in the fourth quarter and further de-emphasizing high revenue competition events. For the live streaming business, this means that the incremental revenue from the year-end competition event will be very limited compared to the previous years. And in the audio and video based of VAS experiences, we believe there's still room for further optimization of some agency dominant use cases and gamify play. So we will continue to fine tune our operation in the fourth quarter. [Foreign Language] As Sic mentioned earlier, in order to offset the decline in revenue from competition events, we have increased the monetization of mid to long-tail paying users in live streaming and value added services experiences. So we rolled out more interactive features and contents suitable for this kind of cohort of users, and increasing the penetration and paying ratio while driving steady growth in organic revenue. So our primary operational focus in the current macroeconomy and regulatory environment is to enhance our platform's ability to accommodate mid-to-long tail users and expand their revenue scale. [Foreign Language] After about a year of adjustments, we are quite satisfied with the overall content and ecosystem of the Momo app. I believe this has laid a solid foundation for us to maintain the productivity of the cash cow business next year. As for the specific financial outlook, I will leave that to Cathy.

Okay. Before I talk about 2025, perhaps let me first quickly review the way we've been managing the productivity of the cash cow business throughout last year and then point toward the directions we move toward next year. The biggest theme of 2024 for the cash cow was to de-emphasize the promotional slash stimulating agency driven events in order to improve the healthiness of our ecosystem in view of the current macro environment both from a regulatory and from an economic point of view. As we took different steps to enable such operational changes, the revenue has been gradually coming down. So in order to maintain the productivity of the cash cow business, we have also been taking measures to control spending more tightly. At the beginning of 2024, the original plan was to put all the adjustments into Q1 and make the revenue impact one-off. However, as we move deeper into the year, it turned out that we did a pretty good job in cost control and thus over delivered in terms of profit. As a result, the team decided to take this opportunity to continue to put in additional adjustment measures to scale back on bonus driven promotional events in the second half. And in turn, we saw the top-line of the cash cow business continuing to trend downward throughout 2025 from Q2 onwards. With that in mind, looking out to 2025, well, first of all, I won't be able to talk about next year in very quantitative terms before we finalize the financial planning next year, early next year. But as in previous years, there are several points to share to help you think about the performance of the cash cow at least trend-wise for the coming few quarters. First of all, as Tang Yan said, after…

Hi, Operator. Next question please. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Good evening, thanks management for taking my question. My question is about Tantan. Just now, management mentioned in prepared remarks that there are various updates to our product offerings, but also highlight the impact is yet to be seen such as on the user retention side and also we are seeing user scale and revenue remains soft. My question is about which product ideas or solutions management gets more positive? How long does it take about the upgrade and the timeline? And how should we think about Tantan Q4 and 2025 outlook? Thank you.

[Foreign Language] Okay, let me give you more details regarding your question. For Tantan's goal is to continue to improve the core dating experience and build an efficient business model that drives profitable growth. And currently Tantan needs to address two issues. One is product experience, and the other is business model. So in terms of product, some users feel the experience is unrealistic, and chat interaction after matching is quite low. And therefore, although users have a real strong demand for dating, but Tantan cannot really meet the needs of many of our users. And the second issue is insufficient branding and low organic traffic, which makes unit acquisition costs too high to form a positive business cycle to achieve a profitable growth. So we believe that we must first improve the product experience to a reasonable level and then develop a new sustainable business model. [Foreign Language] So over the past two quarters and for the next quarter or two, we have focused and will continue to focus on addressing two user experience issues. One is users' uncertainty about the authenticity of their matches' identity. And the other is the lack of a response to chats post-matching. Our team encouraged the users to enrich their profile information and guide them in choosing the proper style for their profile pictures. And these efforts significantly increased the proportion of high quality profiles on our platform. And to effectively increase the overall real person verification rate, we offered rewards such as extra swipes to users who completed the real person verification process. Previously, paying users had a clear advantage over non-paying users in terms of product experience. Moving forward, our goal is to give verified users a distinct user experience advantage over those non-verified users and to encourage more users to…

Okay. With regards to financial performance, the simple answer is that the top-line is likely to continue to trend down sequentially due to two reasons. The first one is, as Tang Yan mentioned just now, Tantan has not reached a self-sustaining positive business cycle yet. User number is still trending down. The second reason is that, although there is still room to pull up the ARPU, the focus at this point is to get the dating experience right. And therefore, we do not want to put too much pressure on the team, so they won't let monetization get in the way when consumer experience is the most crucial priority. With regards to profits, this year Tantan is on track to achieve, I think, RMB50 million plus minus in terms of segment profits. However, The bottom-line has also been trending down slightly throughout the year due to the top-line pressure. So before we reach, I would say that before we reach the tipping point on top-line performance, we do need to take some steps to cut down on the cost and expenses front so that Tantan won't slide back to loss. That's one of the key priorities for our financial planning for Tantan 2025. I think on that I'm going to have more details for you on our next earnings call when we finish planning for 2025. Back to Ashley.

In the interest of time, Let's take one last question before we [close the day] (ph). Operator, please.

Thank you. Your final question comes from Zhuaiqing Cheng from CICC. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language] Thanks management, for taking my question about shareholder returns. Firstly, regarding dividends, the company has a track record of six consecutive years of special dividends. So what's your dividend plan for this year? Additionally, regarding shared buyback, the company has a buyback nearly $150 million year-to-date. So the current buyback program which will expire in the middle of 2026 has less than [15 million quota] (ph). At the current pace of repurchase, we expect that this program will be exhausted by early 2025. So what's your plan for further share buyback? Thank you.

Okay, I'll take that question. As you correctly pointed out, during the past 12 months, we've bought back more than, I think, more than $150 million worth of Momo shares and paid around $100 million in cash dividends. For me, I really look at both approaches, meaning cash dividend and buyback, as ways to enhance shareholder value. But sometimes one works better than the other. If you take our Q3 balance sheet number and do a quick math, we are, you will be looking at somewhere around $8.7 per share in net cash. And that's a growing number, as we continue to make profit. And yet, our stock is trading at I believe, below $7 per share at this point. I would say in view of such a significant undervaluation, we should give buyback bigger priority in comparison with cash dividends. However, how much we could buyback is limited to a number of factors, the biggest of which is the liquidity out there in the market. If you look at the past couple of quarters, our repurchase has been running at from $30 million per quarter to around $60 million per quarter. With the limited liquidity we have, it's hard to exceed that run rate in terms of how much we buy back. That means it's quite likely that we may continue to have excess cash on top of buyback. If that continues to be the case, we will certainly continue to consider cash dividend as an additional way to return cash to the shareholders, so we can share our prosperity. The other question you have is will be -- at the current run rate, we'll probably use up the repurchase already authorized by the Board of Directors. But I think we're not limited to that cap. If the current program is used up, I'm sure that the Board of Directors will continue to make decisions that make sense in terms of enhancing the shareholder value. So that's what I can say at this point. Maybe back to Ashley to conclude the call.

Okay, well thank you everyone for participating in the call and I think that's going to be the end of it and we'll see you next year. Thank you.

Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.