Douyu International Holdings Ltd (DOYU) 2020 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, and welcome to DouYu International Holdings Limited Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions)

I will now turn the call over to the first speaker today, Ms. Mao Mao, Vice President of Capital Markets of DouYu. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Earnings Call. Joining us today are Mr. Shaojie Chen, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Mingming Su, Chief Strategy Officer; and Mr. Hao Cao, Vice President of Finance. You can refer to our fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results on our IR website at ir.douyu.com. You can also check a replay of this call when it becomes available in a few hours on our IR site.

Before we start, please note that this call may contain forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions for the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and observations that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors not under the company's control which may cause actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from results, performance or expectations implied by these forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements, risk factors and details of the company's filing with the SEC. The company undertakes no duty to revise or update any forward-looking statements for selected events or circumstances after the date of this conference call.

I will now speak on behalf of our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Shaojie Chen.

During the fourth quarter of 2020, both our financial and operating results maintained their steady growth momentum as we total -- our total revenue went up by 10% year-over-year to reach RMB 2.27 billion in the period. At the same time, our average mobile MAUs increased by 6.9% year-over-year to 68.2 million. And our quarterly paying users expanded by 4.6% year-over-year to 7.6 million.

While the residual impact of COVID-19 persists throughout the macro environment, our game-centric live stream platform continued to flourish and attract additional users in the period. In the fourth quarter of 2020, our total average MAUs grew by 5.2% year-over-year to 134 million. This healthy expansion was mainly due to 4 factors.

First, broadcasting large-scale eSports tournaments, including the League of Legends Season 10 and KPL Fall 2020; along with the rising popularity of our self-organized tournaments, including PUBG Golden Grand Tournament Season 11 and Peacekeeper Golden Grand Tournament Season 1, continues to fuel our user base expansion.

Second, the releases of multiple new titles, including Call of Duty Mobile, World of Warcraft 9.0, Moonlight Blade Mobile and [DnF Q-Rock] further enriched our platform content and attracted new users.

Third, our in-depth cooperation with game developers, such as Peacekeeper, Honor of King and the League of Legends for the joint operation of tournaments and refinements of platform operations for different games helps to cultivate an increasingly engaging and active platform environment.

Finally, our efforts to build diverse communities and provide a wider range of content viewing options through our video segment serves to be better satisfy the full spectrum of user demand.

Now let me turn to our content update. During the quarter, we remain committed to cementing our industry leadership, fueling the growth of our game-centric live streaming business and expanding the depth and breadth of our content offerings across all segments, not close to continuing the various call, we also launched the version 7.0 of our DouYu [APP], through which we have established our video content and further refined our community segment to develop a fully integrated system along the eSports value chain.

In the fourth quarter, our efforts to sponsor high-quality eSports teams delivered exceptional results. Usually, eSports teams have continued to occupy a key role in the broader eSports industry, and therefore, we have continued to invest in this area. During the quarter, our sponsored LoL team, TES, won the Demacia Cup 2020 Championship. And our self-developed Honor of Kings team, DYG, won the King Pro League Fall 2020 Championship. We were pleased to see our cooperating teams deliver first-rate performance and believe that such efforts will continue to both supercharge our brand influence and compound our differentiated eSports advantages going forward.

Beyond this success, we also continue to take our tournament broadcasting and self-produced events to the next level. As such, during the quarter, our game developer collaboration [thrived], reaching more than 90 large-scale eSports tournaments in total and featuring the 2020 League of Legends World Championship, King's Pro League. More particularly, through our close collaboration with the Crossfire Mobile team during the Crossfire Mobile League, we developed a joint membership with them which pioneered a more creative way to cooperate with game developers.

For in-house events, our self-produced Peacekeeper Golden Grand Tournament Season 1 proved to be so popular that it became one of the most widely anticipated and commented-on Peacekeeper tournaments in December. At an event place, of 30 PEL, NP and League teams came together to compete, viewers were brought to the edge of their seats during the one of a kind tournament experience.

Importantly, we self-produced more than 50 tournaments, which enabled us to establish a solid foundation for future growth in this area. And we plan to organize more tournaments in-house to drive growth going forward.

Looking ahead, in terms of content operations strategy, we plan to continue building our community and video business on top of our solid game live streaming foundation. By leveraging these strengths, we will drive parallel business development and build an integrated ecosystem. For live streaming, we remain focused on developing newer best in the land eSports content, which will include both partners and self-produced eSports tournaments and programs. For videos, we have already completed the initial stage of infrastructure development and experimenting with multiple quality PGC content. Going forward, we plan to engage with more quality short-form video content creators in order to further enrich and expand our library of video offerings.

Finally, for our community, we plan to further amplify users' game discovery, introduction and discussions through the cultivation of more interest groups based on our previous events.

Now let's turn to our monetization program. During the quarter, as we continue to refine our monetization products and introduce more paid scenarios to enhance our user paying experience, we increased our quarterly users by 4.6% year-over-year to 7.6 million and grew our paying ratio to 4.4%. Our quarterly ARPPU also increased by 4.6% year-over-year to RMB 273.

Looking ahead, we plan to continue rolling out more innovative initiatives and events to enlarge our paying user base. Furthermore, we remain committed to the ongoing exploration of innovative product function and monetization events as well as refining each segment of our content operations. Such efforts will help to augment our platform operating efficiency, improve the monetization efficiency of our content segment and live streaming rooms.

We also continue to make good progress on the R&D front. As a result of our collaboration with Tencent, for example, we became one of the first content platform to utilize the video streaming protocol, RMPP over SRT, on our mobile application in the quarter. This technology enables streamers to livestream smoothly regardless of which network environment, which impacted loss rate of up to 40% and has now significantly expanded the range of live streaming scenarios available to users on our platform. For example, with the support of the new technology, our outdoor gamers are able to diversify their content menu, live stream and deliver high-quality streams in the environment of fast Internet connection.

On the international front, we have continued investing toward the potential of the Japanese market. Building our Japanese game live streaming products continued to benefit from the inroads we are making in Japan, our ongoing investments in the platform and our deep expertise in the game live streaming space. As a result, Mildom has continued to perform well, maintaining its leading position in Japan.

In summary, during the fourth quarter of 2020, we continued to enhance our operational and financial performance at a healthy pace. Going forward, we plan to leverage our established foundation in live streaming to further develop and refine and integrated ecosystem. We will offer the 3 core business: Live streaming, video and community. In order to advance -- or in advance -- in order to advance our platform monetization capabilities and financial performance, we will continue to implement initiatives in several areas, including product development streamer management and content operations. Such efforts will not only help to fuel our long-term business growth, but will also serve to unlock the additional value up and down the game live streaming industry value chain while providing our shareholders with long-term value.

With that, I will now turn the call to our Executive President of Finance, Mr. Hao Cao, to go through the details of our financial performance in the fourth quarter.

Thank you, Mao Mao. Hello, everyone. Overall, total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 10% year-over-year to RMB 2.27 billion, while total revenue in the full year of 2020 increased by 31.8% year-over-year to RMB 9.6 billion. Additionally, in the full year of 2020, adjusted net income was RMB 541.6 million, and adjusted net margin reached 5.6%, implying a net increase of approximately 80 basis points from the prior year.

Total net revenues in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 10% year-over-year to RMB 2.27 billion, with around 91.3% of total revenues generated from live streaming and the remaining portion generated from advertising and others.

Live streaming revenues in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 9.4% to RMB 2.07 billion from RMB 1.89 billion in the same period of 2019. This increase was primarily attributable to our platform's improved user paying experience, which continues to be driven by our ongoing product refinement efforts as well as also in relation of user paying habits resulting from our increased application of platform paying scenarios. As a result, paying users in the fourth quarter of 2019 increased to 7.6 million from 7.3 million in the same period of 2019.

In addition, the in-house diversification of our content ecosystem helped to improve the monetization efficiency of both game and nongame segments on platform. As such, our -- increased to RMB 273 in the fourth quarter of 2020 from RMB 261 in the same period of last year.

Advertising and other revenues increased by 16.5% year-over-year to RMB 198.5 million, mainly driven by our expanded brand influence and corresponding increase in advertising demand for competitive advertising and promotion solutions.

Cost of revenues in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 23.7% to RMB 2.09 billion from RMB 1.69 billion in the same period of 2019. more specifically, revenue share fees and content cost increased by 25.6% year-over-year to RMB 1.85 billion, which could generally be explained by the following drivers. First, our content cost increased as we invested more in the broadcasting rights for eSports tournaments and the in-house production of proprietary events to further enrich content on platform. Second, our revenue share fees increased, which was in line with our total revenue growth. Third, we continue to invest quality streamers in the overseas market.

Bandwidth cost in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 12.7% to RMB 170.7 million from RMB 151.4 million in the same period of 2019. This was mainly due to our introduction of more high-quality viewing options, such as 4K high-definition live streaming content, which provided users with better viewing experiences and further satisfies users' viewing demands.

Gross profit in the fourth quarter of 2020 was RMB 182.2 million compared with RMB 375.2 million in the same period of last year. Gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2020 was 8% compared with 18.2% in the same period of 2019. The decrease in gross margin was mainly due to the increase in revenue share fees and content costs as a percentage of our total revenues.

Sales and marketing expenses in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 27.3% to RMB 170.7 million from RMB 134.1 million in the same period of 2019, mainly driven by the increase in the promotional activities of key tournaments as well as the increase in prices for our self-produced events.

Research and development expenses in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 18.6% to RMB 118.9 million from RMB 100.2 million in the same period of 2019. This increase was primarily due to our development and improvement of video-related technologies as well as our application upgrades.

General and administrative expenses in the fourth quarter of 2020 increased by 54% to RMB 117.7 million from RMB 76.4 million in the same period 2019 mainly due to the increase in professional service fees related to our potential merger with Huya.

Adjusted operating loss in the fourth quarter of 2020, which excludes share-based compensation expenses, was RMB 199.1 million compared to adjusted operating income of RMB 141.5 million in the same period of 2019. Net loss in the fourth quarter of 2020 was RMB 228.7 million compared to net income of RMB 157.4 million in the same period of last year. Adjusted net loss in the fourth quarter of 2020, which excludes share-based compensation expenses, share of loss in equity method investments and impairment loss of investments, was RMB 176.9 million compared to adjusted net income of RMB 186.4 million in the same period of 2019. For the fourth quarter of 2020, basic and diluted net loss per ADS were RMB 0.61 and RMB 0.59, respectively, while adjusted basic and diluted net loss per ADS were RMB 0.45 and RMB 0.45, respectively.

Going forward, we will continue to explore our monetization capacity and efficiency. We will also further utilize our operating leverage while staying [faithful] to the sustainable development of our platform.

This concludes our prepared remarks for today. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.

(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Lei Zhang from Bank of America.

(foreign language)

My question mainly regarding the merger deal with Huya. Do we still maintain your time line to complete the deal by first half of this year?

Secondly, regarding the anti-trust regulation about the Internet space. Do you see any impact to our major deal yet?

Okay. Thank you for your question. And currently, the potential merger between DouYu and Huya is still on track. Our teams are efficiently collaborating with third-party entities and working around the clock. But the exact timing of the closing also depends on the approval process by the SEC and the relevant domestic regulators. As such, we are not able to share the closing date for now.

And for your second question, as we know, authorities have gradually improved the industry policies and the regulations following the rapid development of the domestic Internet industry over the past few years. We can see that the regulators have issued a revised antitrust guidelines with the goal of promoting positive and fair competition among Internet industry participators. So relative to the guidelines, we expect a level playing field across the industry, which will also support DouYu's long-term development.

For the entire pan-entertainment segment, we look at industry competition is still relatively fierce as of this stage, while the overall competitive landscape continues to change. We believe that DouYu has the potential to further improve its user scale and revenue performance.

One of the key goals of our merger with Huya is to further integrate the high-quality resources of the 2 platform, improving our operational efficiency and work with Tencent to jointly expand our service offerings along the [digital] value chain as well as in the online pan-entertainment segment. This will increase the overall value of the combined platform and unlock greater growth potential in the future.

The next question comes from Daniel Chen from JPMorgan.

(foreign language)

I will translate myself. So my question is related to the competition landscape. So could management give us some update on the competition landscape since the fourth quarter this year in the game streaming industry?

And also, after the potential merger with Huya, what kind of change are we going to see in the market in terms of the competition? And also, as we have already signed a merger agreement, so what kind of important procedure are we going to see in the future before the transaction happen?

(foreign language)

[Interpreted] So regarding your question on the competition, we believe that the industry's competitive landscape has not changed significantly since the fourth quarter last year. As the leading game-centric live streaming platform, we would continue to build our game-centric content ecosystem and explore other game-related areas, such as video and community segment, on top of our live streaming content.

And so I think short-form media platform enters the game live streaming market, we have seen both new traffic and customer applications increase, which has also helped to raise the ceiling of the entire game live streaming market. We took this opportunity and launched the version 7.0 of our app at the end of last year. And with the updated and refined video and community content, we can now provide more diversified content to our users.

From the competition perspective, we believe that the industry competition in the short run mainly revolve around the refinement of segment operations, the high-quality content and the diversification of monetization as well as rapid deployment of blockbuster games. And in the long run, we expect that competition will focus on the rapid product upgrade and innovation of content forms, such as video entertainment content; the development of communities, which are the inflow of community; and the integration of resources and both content down the industry value chain.

And we have been focused on building a game-centric content platform since inception, and we have clear advantage in terms of professional content creation and content accumulation, vertical game user base formation and build-up of talent agency as well as cultivation of professional eSports content ecosystem. Now we have created a stronger content barrier. And as a result, we have clear leading advantage in terms of attracting and maintaining the core game user base.

So looking forward, we believe that with the lifted ceiling of the entire industry, we will take advantage of the demand for content and [management] strength to further expand our user coverage and user traffic.

And after the merger, we expect more in-depth commercial cooperation between the 2 platforms as well as with Tencent, which we believe will further enhance the positioning of the combined entity.

And to your second question, as Mr. Su just responded, currently, the merger is still ongoing. And we are looking forward to our next steps, including getting approval from the SEC and from the relevant domestic regulators. And for now, we cannot really tell the timing for the deal.

The next question is from Alex Liu from China Renaissance.

(foreign language)

I'll translate myself. I noticed that since the company has made a notable investment on short video and the virtual community in the past few months, could management share more color there?

And the second question is on the League of Legends Championship. What are the major takeaways and observations from that event?

And finally, what are the major revenue drivers for [World of War]?

(foreign language)

[Interpreted] Okay. Regarding your first question, we are currently developing the video and community segments on top of our live streaming products content and expect the 3 avenues to become the key pillars for our integrated game-centric content ecosystem. For live streaming, we will continue to produce high-quality, informed content. In addition to our existing games, we will also closely monitor any new blockbuster games in the market, explore new multiple games attractive to our users, develop our own eSports events and programs and produce more content related to official interest [group].

And secondly, on the video business, we have already completed the first phase of infrastructure development, and we have already launched the Version 7.0 app with updated video and community segment at the end of last year. And we have also introduced video content creator intuitive program to accelerate for UGC generation on our platform. And together with our PGC, we have established extensive content library to satisfy users' diverse demand.

In addition, for our community business, we upgraded the community segment based on the [bar] and created interest groups focusing on game discovery, introduction and discussion.

Let me answer your second and third question. The third -- the second question is about the active tournament. As we know, the League of Legends, the World Championship is the [premier] League of Legends official annual tournament and has always attracted a larger number of viewers. In the first half of 2020, many large-scale offline eSports tournaments were postponed or canceled because of the pandemic, making [the tourney] one of the few global eSports events of 2020. Organized in Shanghai, the tourney attracted a strong domestic viewership and was widely followed by Internet users in China.

The League of Legends has always been a strong segment on DouYu's platform. In fact, we have a large number of well-known streamers with DouYu and a marketed streamer and content system for this segment. In addition, we signed contract with many famous domestic and international League of Legends eSports teams, such as [Arteezy], [CDG], TES and DWG.

Combined with this strength, our exclusive partnerships with multiple social platforms make us the most popular game live streaming platform for the LoL Championship and saw record-high operating metrics during the tournament. It also helps us attract more high-quality user traffic to cement our platform as the go-to destination for watching LoL tournaments.

And for your third question, about how to increase revenue. We will continue to direct and refine our monetization products, tailor these product features based on deeper -- user profile, improve existing users' ARPPU and cultivate new users paying habit to further improve daily revenue contribution and paying ratio.

To maintain sustainable revenue growth, we plan to leverage our platform-wide event and most scale monetization events to raise our penetration rate of paying users and ARPPU.

Under our game-centric content ecosystem, we will further diversify our content offerings and increase revenue contribution of our nongame segments by channeling user traffic to segments with a relatively high monetization efficiency, such as paying entertainment and [shows].

The next question is from Feiya Zhao from Haitong International.

(foreign language)

So my first question is, what is the revenue split by game and nongame content? And our outlook of the ARPPU and number of paying users in 2021?

And my second question is, could you please give us the breakdown of the content cost in the [third] quarter and also the trend of the signing-up bonus of the broadcasters in the past few quarters? And how should we think about return going forward?

Let me answer the first question. We expect our game segment to continue to be the major live streaming revenue contributor to our platform. The game segment has demonstrated a strong growth potential in both ARPPU and total paying users.

Revenue generated from our games segment is expected to account for 50% of our total revenue in 2021 and we plan to increase this percentage going forward. For nongame segment, we will increase the revenue contribution by strategically allocating traffic between segments.

As we continue to focus on platform-wide monetization events and increase the penetrating of small-scale monetization events, explore more [scenarios] to cultivate users' paying habits and increase their willingness to pay, both our total paying users and ARPPU will further increase.

Regarding your question on the signing bonus. The quarter-over-quarter increase of streamer signing bonus during the fourth quarter was due to 2 reasons. First, we continue to recruit new streamers for a newly launched game segment to maintain a high-quality content offerings on our platform. Second, we increased our investment of foreign streamers in the overseas market.

Looking ahead, the signing bonus will increase at a stable rate due to our rapid international expansion and increasing signing bonus of overseas streamers and house streamers from new game titles.

Our last question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies.

(foreign language)

I have a question regarding the bandwidth cost. Can management comment about the sequential trend in Q4 as well as how we should think about the driver or the bandwidth cost going forward?

On the other hand, for sales and marketing expenses, can you also comment about the sequential change as well as the driver for sales and marketing going forward?

Okay. With respect to the bandwidth cost. In the fourth quarter, bandwidth costs increased slightly because of intensive tournaments and more frequent peak usage period. Apart from that, we provided users with more high-quality live streaming video options, such as 4K high-definition video. We expect bandwidth cost in 2021 to increase along with the increase in users. However, bandwidth costs as a percentage of total revenue will continue to decrease.

The second question is about the sales and marketing expenses. Sales and marketing expenses, excluding share-based compensation, mainly includes staff salaries and other related expenses, channel promotion costs, sponsorship fees for our eSports teams as well as expenses for offline and online events. In the fourth quarter of 2020, sales and marketing expenses, excluding SBC, increased on a sequential basis. This increase was due to more eSports tournaments resulting to an increased marketing expenses and increased prizes for our self-organized eSports tournaments.

We are quite positive towards the development of the eSports industry in the long run, and we will continue to increase our investments in eSports-related activities and each of our team sponsorships going forward. Meanwhile, we believe our user conversion will increase because of the updated features of platform, and we plan to in-house our channel promotions. Therefore, in the future, the absolute value of our sales and marketing expenses will increase, while as a percentage of our total revenue, sales and marketing expenses will continue to optimize.

There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us or request to our IR site. Thank you, and have a good day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.