Zhihu Inc (ZH) 2022 Q3 法說會逐字稿

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  • Operator

  • Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Zhihu Inc. Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Today's conference is being recorded.

  • At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Jingjing Du, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

  • Jingjing Du

  • Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, welcome to our third quarter 2022 financial results conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Zhou Yuan, our Chairman and CEO of Zhihu; and Mr. Sun Wei, our CFO.

  • Before we start, we would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from those mentioned in today's announcement and the discussions. The company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for comparison purposes only. For a definition of non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results, please see our earnings release issued earlier today. In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our website at ir.zhihu.com.

  • I will now turn the call over to Mr. Sun Wei, our CFO.

  • Wei Sun - CFO & Director

  • Thank you, Jingjing. I'm pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Zhou Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zhihu. Thank you for joining Zhihu's third quarter 2022 earnings call. We delivered another quarter of solid execution on our community ecosystem first strategy and are delighted with the strides we have made promoting our community first strategy. Starting from the beginning of this year, we shifted our strategic focus towards growing quality users and further bolstering the strength and resilience of our content-centric business model. In Q3, the estimate rate of our app users, DAU over MAU, reached its highest level in the past 3 quarters of this year and the time spent per daily active users climbed both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter.

  • Despite the still challenging macro environment, our community ecosystem demonstrated strength and resilience during the third quarter. Total revenues were up by double digits on a year-over-year basis as we continued to expand and optimize our content offerings and enhanced our content creators' user experience. Furthermore, our initiative to heighten operating efficiencies drove significant improvements in our bottom line performance for the quarter.

  • In Q3, total revenues reached RMB 911.7 million, increasing by 11% compared with the same period last year and net loss narrowed by 39% quarter-over-quarter. Our paid membership retained robust growth momentum, increasing by 88% year-over-year and contributed 37% of the total revenue during the quarter. Meanwhile, vocational training services continued to accelerate their contribution to total revenue with a 458% growth rate year-over-year. Continuing efforts to refine our business lines and improve operational efficiencies during the quarter helped make our ecosystem stronger and more resilient. The Zhihu community is thriving and becoming more healthier and healthier. The results of our efforts gives us further confidence to invest in long-term growth while striving for profitability in the near term.

  • Now I'd like to share some more details on third quarter achievements. The first part is about users. At Zhihu, our differentiated fulfilling content and a unique content-centric ecosystem not only resonate with users, but also well position us to address their evolving demands. In turn, increasing user interaction attracts more content-creators and inspires their creations, driving the healthy and sustainable growth -- community growth. With this in mind, since the beginning of this year, we have shifted our focus from user expansion to quality user growth, which has produced remarkable achievements in the third quarter on top of our record high [activeness] rate for our app monthly active users, DAU over MAU, in Q3. The time spent per user grew by 26% year-over-year and 14% quarter-over-quarter, reaching 29 minutes. Average MAUs were down in Q3 by approximately 4% year-over-year as expected. We continuously expand the breadth and depth of our high-quality content to support user interaction and introduce timely and fulfilling new content. For example, our gaokao-related content significantly drove up the time that young users spend on our platform during the summer vacation period. Moreover, our timely content offerings during the quarter not only attracted more [male] users, but also encouraged them to engage more deeply in rational discussions within the community.

  • In Q3, we also continued to innovate in content format development, aiming to encourage user interactions in more diversified content formats. In particular, our new [talk] format has caught on quickly among creators and users alike. Thanks to its flexible nature and broad appeal, it's now becoming a more frequent format for both content creation and content consumption. Accordingly, in Q3, the new active (inaudible), one of the ways that our users interact with each other, grew by 16% year-over-year and 19% quarter-over-quarter.

  • Second part is about content. We believe that when we better meet user demand for more high-quality content, higher quality user growth is a natural result. In Q3, we continued to improve user experience and enhanced our competitiveness by expanding our content offering, diversifying our multimedia content formats and further enhancing our recommendation algorithm. As of the end of Q3, the cumulative pieces of content in our community reached 579 million, representing a 26% year-over-year increase. Of this, 485 million were questions and answers, representing a year-over-year increase of 22%. Our scenario-oriented content cultivation approach has proven to be effective not only in exploring and satisfying the demand of our various user group, but also in motivating content creation and boosting content consumption.

  • For example, during the last summer vacation period, we presented Wilderness Talk (inaudible) an 8-part series of high-quality self-produced programs wherein our content creators, (inaudible) exchanged their thoughts with other young people on how Generation Z sees the world. Through this innovation format, we were able to share a brand new world from Gen Z perspective and helped our viewers better understand their view on life. The serious resonating content attracted many young viewers, generating a DAU penetration rate of 28.4% for the quarter. Content offerings associated with self-improvement also proved popular with users between 18 and 25. Driven effectively by the scenario-oriented activities, the percentage of new users between 18 and 25 among our total new MAUs was 4 percentage points higher compared to the same period last year.

  • In September, we further expanded our content offerings in our career development segment to diverse content formats, including [TV], live streaming, and (inaudible) picture [TNA]. The expanded content format generated huge interest. For example, the thought provoking [video speech], how we should get along with our work, presented by (inaudible) produced over 20 million views within just 2 weeks. During September, more than 13% of our DAUs consumed career development-related content. And their retention rate was higher than that of our overall DAU by 15 percentage points.

  • Moving to content creators. Our content creators are the most important assets in driving sustainable growth within our community ecosystem. At the end of Q3, our cumulative number of creators has reached a new high, reaching 61.2 million, a year-on-year increase of [15%]. We are committed to providing our content creators with an enhanced creation experience as well as fruitful rewards. We work towards this goal by leveraging the solid foundation of our content-centric ecosystem and by providing a broad array of creator-centric programs. In Q3, we are delighted to see thousands of content creators from a cross-section of ranking levels and verticals, including e-sports, career development and education, received financial incentives from the RMB 100 million fund and the [sea salt] plan. In Q3, average income per content creator increased by 47% compared with the same period last year. Furthermore, on September 13, we officially launched the [Beacon] prize, a new fund program under the sea salt plan. The Beacon prize will award specific subsidies to the top 10 content creators who make significant contributions in the field of science or humanities.

  • The third part is about community culture. In line with our community ecosystem first strategy, we are committed to better serving our users and content creators with a clearer community rules and guidance, better products and feature and enhanced protection. In Q3, our regular survey showed significantly increased user satisfaction with our community governance and services. In addition, this survey also indicated a significant improvement in content creators' net promoter scores across an array of sub-category scores, including creating 2 growth guide, creator benefits and copyright protection. As a leading online content community, during the quarter, we continued to fulfill our social responsibilities by leveraging our technological capabilities to promote rational, multidimensional and constructive discussions on our timely content offerings. For example, we enhanced the emotional monitoring function on our Zhihu (inaudible) to ensure a professional and rational community environment.

  • Next part is about monetization. Our ever-growing content library, thriving creator ecosystem and flourishing community are the assets that differentiates us in the fast evolving and highly competitive market. During the third quarter, our high-quality content-centric community drove sustainable improvements in our monetization ecosystem, enhancing the resilience of our business model and creating new growth drivers for our longer-term development. Our paid membership has maintained a year-over-year growth every quarter for the past 3 years. In the third quarter of 2022, revenue from paid membership increased by 88% year-over-year, contributing 37% to our total revenues. At the same time, our average monthly paying users exceeded 10 million for the quarter. These achievements were driven by the expansion of our premium content library, especially in the verticals targeting, male users. Meanwhile, the enhanced influence of our premium content endorsed with the exclusive [e-book lite] also contributed to this growth.

  • Better satisfied user demand for a sustainable supply of premium content will further lend support for premium content creators to encourage their creation efforts and enhance their creation experience. In Q3, we were pleased to see an increasing number of our premium content become mature commercial IP. This, in turn, rewarded their creators with a better income. Furthermore, our upgraded copyright protection features helped deepen creator trust and reliance on the Zhihu community. In the third quarter, the average income earned by premium content creators increased by almost 30% compared to the same period last year. Earlier this year, we set a target to have 100 creators earn more than RMB 1 million, grow our paid membership plan. We are now setting a new target and planning to launch a new ambitious program [to achieve]. The new [Super Nova] program established under the sea salt plan will have greater funding resources and will aim to help 500 content creators earn more than RMB 1 million over the coming 3 years.

  • We first established our vocational training business team in 2019 to better meet our users' evolving need for knowledge-related content. Now after nearly 3 years of development, we are well positioned in the rising demand market with our trusted brand, improved technical capabilities and a matured team structure. In the third quarter, revenue from our vocational training business quadrupled year-over-year and contributed 9% to our total revenue, clearly cementing this business segment as our emerging growth driver. During the quarter, we continued to expand our course offerings, basing on our users on-the-go needs scenario and in 2 major categories, academic improvement and career promotion. We further enhanced our technical capabilities, including our CRM system and improved our operational efficiency to better support the robust growth of this business.

  • Our effective customer acquisition strategy paired with diverse high-quality program drove a 300% year-over-year increase in vocational training users in the quarter. In Q3, we acquired a new vocational training brand [Zhixuetang] that specialize in professional teacher qualification certifications. In doing so, we further broadened our vocational training program coverage to better meet our users' needs. Going forward, we will continue to explore greater growth opportunities to drive the sustainable development of our community ecosystem.

  • Now moving to our advertising and content commerce solutions. Faced by challenging macro dynamics in Q3, Zhihu continued to gain traction in marketing budget share and increased greater recognition from brands and merchants. Our CCS and advertising business maintained its growth in our leading industry, including IP and 3C, automotive and games. The quarter's top 5 revenue contributors for CCS and advertising were IP and 3C, cosmetics, e-commerce, automotive and education. We continued to upgrade our Cheese Platform in the third quarter with additional improvements in the platform infrastructure. We also released a new version of the commercial value index to further improve matching efficiency between brands and content creators. Due to continuing weak market conditions for online advertising, CCS revenue decreased slightly in Q3 year-over-year, but showed a double-digit quarter-over-quarter growth. Total income earned by content creators through the Cheese Platform continued sustainable growth in Q3.

  • We have long been dedicated to delivering better marketing performance through technology and innovation. As such, our inventive IP-based marketing campaign has become an effective extension of our traditional advertising program. The IP-based campaign we released, including [Curiosity Lab, Auto Lab, Ingredients Lab] and the (inaudible) have gained great market recognition by (technical difficulty) various industries, such as consumer goods, automobile and e-commerce.

  • In Q3, we launched a new visiting factory IP campaign. Commentators and experts in different fields were encouraged to visit the factories and R&D facilities of different brands, seeking answers submitted by our users. This campaign has received positive feedback from both our users and the brands. The resulting high-quality content helps our users better understand each brand's products and enhance their trust in each brand through transparent communication.

  • To sum up, our long-term strength are intact and our fulfilling content and user quality are well recognized by brands and merchants. We expect that we will continue to win market share in the growing content marketing industry. And moving forward, we will continue to expand our portfolio of marketing solutions to empower our clients in reaching their goals. Meanwhile, we will continue to enhance Zhihu's competitiveness to broaden our fulfillment content, drive user engagements, improve operating efficiency and further enhance our trustworthy community culture. The road ahead is long and will involve many challenges, but with determination, perseverance and our growing size, Zhihu is well positioned for the path to growth and profitability.

  • This concludes Mr. Yuan's remarks. I will now turn to our financials.

  • In the third quarter, our community ecosystem first strategy continued to effectively strengthen the resilience of our content-centric business model, as evidenced by our solid operating and financial performance. Total revenue grew by 11% year-over-year, reaching RMB 911.7 million in Q3. And our net loss margin narrowed significantly by 26 percentage points over Q2, thanks to our disciplined cost control measures. The strength of our multiple growth engines in the content-centric business model once again proved itself in the third quarter with further balanced revenue structure.

  • CCS and our advertising business combined contributed 51% of our total revenue. At the same time, the paid membership and vocational education accounted for 37% and 9% of total revenue, respectively, in the quarter, up 4 and 3 percentage points quarter-over-quarter, respectively. Our paid membership maintained rapid growth momentum in Q3, with revenue increasing by 88% year-over-year to RMB 3.4 billion. The average number of monthly paying users reached a record high of 10.9 million, representing a percentage rate of 11.2% among the total average MAU in the Zhihu community. And notably, the revenue from our emerging growth engines, vocational training was an over 4-fold year-over-year increase to RMB 78 million in the quarter. Revenue from CCS and our advertising business came under pressure in Q3, impacted by the overall weak market conditions for online advertising. Total combined revenue for CCS and advertising for the quarter was down 23% year-over-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter.

  • Gross profit for Q3 was RMB 4.4 billion. Gross margin was 48.7%, up 1 percentage point compared to the last quarter, remaining at the high end across the industry. The quarter-over-quarter improvement in gross margin was mainly attributable to our continuous vigorous cost control and ongoing efficiency improvements. During the quarter, our relatively fixed cost, mainly including cloud services, bandwidth and personnel costs, along with the content costs continued to decline as a percentage of total revenue. Continuing our efforts, starting from the beginning of this year, we further worked to optimize operating expenses and streamlined operating efficiency in the third quarter. Our work is yielding fruit.

  • Total operating expenses for the quarter -- for the third quarter were RMB 7.2 billion, leading to our improved operating margin both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. As we continued shifting our focus from user expansion to user engagement, sales and marketing expenses decreased by more than 10% quarter-over-quarter. For our R&D and G&A expenses, we continued to optimize the expense structure to improve our operational efficiency and R&D and G&A expenses as a percentage of revenue decreased by 9 percentage points and 3 percentage points quarter-over-quarter, respectively.

  • We are steadily reducing our net loss. Our GAAP net loss for the quarter was RMB 297.6 million compared with a net loss of RMB 487 million in previous quarter. Our adjusted net loss, which primarily excludes share-based compensation expenses was RMB 250.6 million for Q3 compared with RMB 443.8 million last quarter.

  • As of September 30, 2022, the company had cash and cash equivalents, term deposits, restricted cash and short-term investments of RMB 6.6 billion. And as of September 30, 2022, we have repurchased approximately 4.9 million Class A ordinary shares at a total cost of USD13.2 million.

  • This concludes my prepared remarks on our financial performance for this quarter. Let's turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A session. Thank you.

  • Operator

  • (Operator Instructions) Thank you. Today's first question comes from Steve Qu with Goldman Sachs.

  • Steven Qu

  • (foreign language) Congrats on the progress of cost-cutting initiatives. I have a question on MAU. So noticing that your MAU has declined over the quarter, yet the time spend and monetization efficiency was much better. Could you shift your strategy from pursuing absolute MAU growth to extract the lifetime value for high-quality users? And could you share some insights on our long-term user growth potential?

  • Yuan Zhou - Founder, Chairman & CEO

  • [Interpreted] Thank you for this question. The answer is from Mr. Zhou Yuan, the CEO of the company. At the beginning of the year, we set our annual strategy as a year of transitioning, that is to keep our community ecosystem first. And that means a good experience for content creators, fulfilling content as well as a good atmosphere for the community, and more importantly, that is to have a commercialization that goes in line with our current community or simply to achieve stability -- profitability as soon as possible.

  • Interpreted In a year where we are pushing forward our strategy of year of transitioning and community ecosystem first, we had made some adjustments. We believe that our volume numbers remained quite stable, and we have hit our strategy targets such as revenue and volume output targets.

  • Interpreted In the past year, we have made quite a lot of effort in fulfilling content optimization, quality control as well as the algorithm improvement on the user side, the rewarding to the content creators as well as upgrades of our product. And I would like to talk a little bit more details about this.

  • Interpreted To be more specific, we keep improving the experience of the content creators. They are more active on our community. High-level content creators this quarter had an increase of 27%, increase of daily activity rate, and they keep injecting high-quality professional content to our community. And in May this year, we have launched our Haiyan Plan 4.0. And in this system, the content creators with specialties in key areas are enjoying better tools and growth support as well as rewards to their content creation. And the average income per income-making creator had a revenue increase of 47% in Q3 year-over-year.

  • Interpreted Second is ever growing fulfillment content that we have due to the optimization on the product and algorithm that we provide to the users and they have better experience in consuming our content and they go deeper in consumption and as well as the intensity of content consumption gets better. In the third quarter, you can see that our daily time spent per user has been as long as 29 minutes with an increase of 26% year-over-year and 14% quarter-over-quarter.

  • Interpreted The third point is that we keep optimizing our community atmosphere and our community services, both for the users and content creators. On the users side, their satisfaction rate for our governance of community and services both increased significantly. And on the content creator side, their net promoter scores as well as other sub-categories for satisfaction rates such as creator tools, growth as well as revenues are all seeing very nice growth.

  • Interpreted And the last point is that our users are getting more active. For instance, our app DAU and MAU are getting increased for 3 quarters consecutively. And also, we believe that we focus more on the commercialization that goes more in line with our community and so that our high-quality users will keep giving us drivers for commercial growth so that we can develop a virtuous cycle of healthy community and sustainable business growth. In the third quarter, our [OpCo] had a year-over-year growth of over 15%.

  • Interpreted So overall speaking, we believe that improvement for the ecosystem takes time, and there are a lot of details to attend to, and it takes time for us to generate greater value for the community through a better ecosystem. And if you improve the user experience, this will organically drive up the user base in a more sustainable way. And for the long term, we believe that it is the most efficient method that we have for the user base growth.

  • Interpreted Overall speaking, our target remain unchanged, that is to drive profitability. And for the short term, we do see some slightly changes in our users and for the third quarter, to be more specifically, our monthly viewers grew by 23% year-over-year, and we see that our users are getting more consumption on our content, and we'll keep increasing and improving their content consuming experiences and create more commercial values out of our community.

  • Operator

  • And our next question today comes from Xueqing Zhang with CICC.

  • Xueqing Zhang - Analyst

  • (foreign language) My question is related to paid membership business. The membership business once again demonstrated strong growth this quarter. So could management share more details about the reason behind it? And how should we think about this business in the long term?

  • Yuan Zhou - Founder, Chairman & CEO

  • [Interpreted] Thank you for this question. Well, it was 3 years ago since we're beginning to launch our membership program. And until now, you see our membership growth is faster than our expectation at the very beginning. We believe that the demand for the paying -- for the premium content is still there and will remain resilient for a long time. And the crux of the matter only relies on the supply of the good content that [was] paying for. And we believe our entire community serves as a supplier for great content, and that is why you see that we have entered into a very good cycle of supply and demand for premium content was paying for. And as a result, you could see that our membership business started off with losing money and now it's getting more and more sustainable in driving profit and also to the net profit we have as a whole community.

  • Interpreted Our membership growth is a healthy and a fast one. And as you can see, our high-quality content and high-quality content creators are the main drivers for our membership business. In the third quarter, our membership content creator -- member content creator had an increase of 40% year-over-year. And the income per member creator increased by 29% year-over-year. And our most popular YanPlus content had an increased offering of over 130% year-over-year. And this popular content has transformed more new members to us. For the third quarter, our monthly paying users is over 10 million and as of September, effective paying user number is over 11 million. And we see that this number keeps increasing. And we think that these had provided a very good driver for us for our paying members, both in and outside of the website. And so far, we haven't seen any sign of slowing down of member growth. And we think that this is thanks to the momentum that we cultivated through our community content-based business model.

  • Interpreted We do value the value created by our content creator YanPlus to our community. And in the past 3 years, they kept creating high-quality content for us. And we just launched our [Super Nova] program for the next 3 years as mentioned by my colleague, Mr. Sun Wei that we had hit this year's target ahead of schedule. So with our next 3 years program, we hope to create more content creators with revenue over RMB 1 million, and we hope that more people can join us and benefit from our platform for more growth and reward.

  • Interpreted Our membership business actually is emerged from our ecosystem and its ever-growing size proved again that our member paying system from premium content based on community [screening] is really powerful and highly potential. For the mid to long term, I think that our membership business will not be limited to the community growth. We think that premium content is attractive across the Internet. And there is this general growth of willingness to pay for premium content as a general trend across our industry, and this will help us to further grow our membership growth in the long term for the future.

  • Operator

  • And our next question today comes from Ashley Xu with Credit Suisse.

  • Ashley Xu - Research Analyst

  • (foreign language) I'll interpret -- I'll translate by myself. My question is related to the ad and the CCS revenue. What's the driver of third quarter decline? And how is the fourth quarter outlook? Could management provide more color by different verticals?

  • Wei Sun - CFO & Director

  • [Interpreted] Thank you very much for this question. The answer comes from our CFO, Mr. Sun Wei. Well, thank you. Overall speaking, in the third quarter, demand decreased -- slightly decreased from the ads and CCS business is mainly due to a weaker market environment as a whole and also a struggling environment due to COVID. I think overall speaking, if you compare advertisement and CCS as a whole, our CCS business remained more resilient against a struggling environment compared with traditional advertisement business. So they are rather resilient and they only had a single-digit decrease.

  • Interpreted Overall speaking, in our key and strength sectors, the results remain positive, especially in IP, 3C, automobile and games. They all registered year-over-year increase.

  • Interpreted And IP, 3C, automobile and games are exactly the strength areas that we have in our community and also in our content offerings. So that, in a way, proves that our content and our community are really popular amongst the users as well as the merchandisers on CCS area.

  • Interpreted And if you refer to the specific ARPU we get from our merchants, their spending per paying client still increased by 5 percentage points year-over-year even with a weaker macro environment. So this proves that we are still trustworthy method of marketing, and we keep gaining market share even despite some headwinds in the entire economic backlog.

  • Interpreted By way of protecting and gaining market share against these market headwinds, we try to iterate our product from the lab IP series to Cheese Platform to tree planting, we've tried various ways of marketing to showcase the brand so as to bring longer lasting and sustainable marketing values for our client. And I think this has been proven by our results and also in our premium content in our CCS product.

  • Interpreted Our advantage based on the commercial product, based on the premium content and community has always been our competitive advantage. And for the long term, this will remain so for the future. So when the market comes back, when the consumption recovers, we will be able to go back to a fast growth track due to our advantageous position in CCS and gain more market share in the marketing world.

  • Interpreted As for the lookout for the fourth quarter, we believe that we will register a double-digit growth, but compared with the high base in the fourth quarter of last year, the to-be business for advertisement and CCS in fourth quarter will probably be still subject to the COVID situation and the weaker economic environment.

  • Interpreted As for the [trajection] in 2023, I think it pretty much depends on the macro economy as well as the COVID policy evolution. So we're keeping a close eye on those market situations. But so far, we are not able to make an accurate prediction as to what will happen next year. (foreign language)

  • Operator

  • And our next question today comes from Yiwen Zhang with China Renaissance.

  • Yiwen Zhang - Research Analyst

  • (foreign language) So my question is regarding our vocational (technical difficulty) growth there. Can you share the latest update on that segment?

  • Yuan Zhou - Founder, Chairman & CEO

  • [Interpreted] Thank you very much. The answer from CEO, Mr. Zhou Yuan. So for our vocational training business, for this year, we had already registered multiple times of growth for 3 consecutive quarters. And for this quarter, particularly the contribution from vocational training to total revenue is expanding to over 8% and will continue to increase in the coming days. And our vocational training curriculum center around our target users' demand scenarios, i.e., academic improvement and career promotion, and we are expanding our paying curriculum offerings in these 2 specific areas for our users.

  • Interpreted We provide a diversity of curriculums to cater for the needs for the users to study and improve their skills. To be more specific, the graduate score examination related program saw a record high enrollment numbers. And our users are really happy and give us some positive feedback for our high-quality content. And exam related, for instance, CSA or CPA as well as some skills training, for instance, new media operation, writing courses as well as video editing are also main contributors and key contributors to our revenues. And in the third quarter, our paying user number increased by nearly 300% year-over-year and with quarter-over-quarter 40%. But still, right now, the paying users are relatively small and still has a great, great room for further growth. And we will keep diversifying and enriching our training programs to cater for their needs and to give them better content for their demand.

  • Interpreted Another point I want to make is to expand our vocational training business through M&A activities. In October this year, we had acquired a teacher qualification training company so as to make our offerings more comprehensive. And also thanks to the great branding value and word of mouth and reputation, we are able to attract more people in this area and to be supplementary in this area so as to attract users. And we are also relying on our brand in Zhihu and our technology advantages to empower the acquiree companies. For instance, as of this quarter, the revenue of our acquiree company had registered a 60% increase with ever-growing paying users.

  • Interpreted As about our future plan, well, actually, our vocational training business emerged from our community users' demand. And in 2019, we just started to launch our education or training part of our business, make our first trials in vocational training. And over the past 3 years, we had roughly developed a business presence, either by self-operating or acquisition or mergers or cooperation in operating of the businesses. And as we keep expanding it, we believe that this successful business model will gradually be expand and be able to provide premium content and drive commercialization for users across board.

  • Interpreted And we had made quite a lot of effort in launching products in this area. For instance, in June this year, the learning zone went live. And on those learning zone, we launched multiple popular programs, for instance, the AI, and we will also launch a special platform for training in December this year, which is an app called Zhixuetang, the official version will be released soon. And this will help us to cover the [fourth] category of training curriculum for the future development. So overall speaking, I think relying on our technology advantages, we will keep optimizing and transforming the content and also to increase the commercialization efficiency of vocational training for our business.

  • Interpreted Overall speaking, vocational training will serve as an important second curve for our business revenue. We believe that this will continue to benefit the overall sector and also benefit our company, Zhihu. Thank you.

  • Operator

  • And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. At this time, I will turn the conference back to Jingjing for any additional or closing remarks.

  • Jingjing Du

  • Thank you all, once again, for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact our IR team directly or TPG Investor Relations team. Thank you. Bye.

  • Operator

  • Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines, and have a wonderful day.

  • [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]