JOYY Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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May 26, 2025
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Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Joy Inc. First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I'd now like to turn the conference over to your host today, Jane See, the company's Senior Manager of Investor Relations.

Operator

Please go ahead, Jane.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Joy's First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today are Ms. Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO of Joy and Mr.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Alex Liu, the Vice President of Finance. For today's call, management will first provide a review of the quarter and then we will conduct a Q and A session. The financial results and webcast of this conference call are available at ir.joy.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our website in a few hours. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we may make forward looking statements, which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from our current expectations.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

For detailed discussions of the risks and uncertainties, please refer to our latest annual report on Form 20 F and other documents filed with the SEC. We will also talk or discuss certain non GAAP financial measures. They are included as additional clarifying items to aid investors in further understanding the company's performance and the impact that these items and events had on the financial results. The non GAAP financial measures provided above should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. You may find a reconciliation of the differences between GAAP and non GAAP financial measures in our earnings release.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in U. S. Dollar. I will now turn the call over to our Chairperson and CEO, Ms. Ting Li.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Please go ahead, Ms. Li.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Hello, everyone. I'm Li Ting. Welcome to our fourth quarter twenty twenty five earnings call. 2025 makes a key milestone for both Joy and for me personally. Joy has just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, growing into a global technology leader with a sizable, engaged user base worldwide.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

We diversified growth strategy as driving clear results as non live streaming revenue continues to expand rapidly, affirming the strength of our business model. As 2025 makes my first complete for fiscal year as CEO, I'm excited to outline our medium to long term strategy provision and operational roadmap as we advance into our next decade of growth. First, looking at our performance. We recorded total revenue of 494,000,000 in the first quarter of twenty twenty five. Our non live streaming revenue reached 123,000,000, a year over year increase of 25.3 with non live streaming revenue accounting for 25% of the group's total revenue for the first time.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

In the first quarter, we achieved a non GAAP operating profit of 31,000,000, a year over year increase of processing metering 25%. Meanwhile, we maintained strong operating cash flow, which reached 58,000,000. During the fourth quarter, we distributed approximately 49,100,000.0 in dividends to shareholders. On top of that, we repurchased approximately 22,500,000.0 worth of our shares as of May 23, reinforcing our commitment to returning value to our shareholders. In the past, we forecast on expanding the global reach and the influence of our user community, leveraging our diverse portfolio of products, spending live streaming, short videos, instant messaging, and more.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

We have successfully monetized our global user base through live streaming and delivered consistent profitability, which demonstrates our industry insight, operational, and strong execution. Over the past two years, we have stepped up our innovation to develop new revenue streams, achieving significant progress toward our growth objectives of cultivating a mountain fisted ecosystem. Since 2024, our global programmatic advertising platform, Bigot Ace, has achieved remarkable growth, capitalizing on our global user base of approximately 260,000,000 users. Present military, young and middle aged Internet users with promising purchasing power, we have attracted a closing number of advertisers. Bigel Ace had further expanded its traffic pool by integrating premium publisher traffic with our first party traffic.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Consecently, delivery strong minimal results for the advertisers. This success has filled the rapid expansion of our advertising revenue, reinforcing our confidence to further diversifying and expanding our ecosystem. Looking at the full picture of our non live streaming businesses, We believe that our advertising platform and smart commerce platform are also strategically complementary, driving synergy across an ecosystem as Bigo eight expand its traffic pool and enhances its data driven texting capabilities. It will empower merchants to scale its market presence through pieces and efficient customer packaging. This integrated approach generates significant value across our ecosystem and created a virtuous circle of growth for both Big O Aids and our smart commerce platform.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Looking forward, we anticipate our non live streaming businesses, including our advertising and smart commerce platform, will emerge as a joy second growth engine. Our initial accomplishments in these areas have been encouraging, and I'm confident that this multi agent approach will establish a sustainable long term growth roadmap for Joy that will deliver major lasting value and enhance the returns for our shareholders. Next, let me share with you our latest business update and operational strategies. First, our live streaming business, in the fourth quarter, the group's live streaming revenue was 371,000,000, with Bigo contributing 352,000,000, in line with our expectations. At present, we observe distinct retinal divergence in online entertainment spending.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Especially, users in the market have shown this life where those in emerging economics and the long tail paying users have reduced spending due to economics headwind. To address that trend, we've adopted prudent strategies and efficient operational results allocation. First, we are continuously optimizing our user acquisition strategy by prioritizing advertising spend on higher quality paying users in core market. Second, we are by turning our renew sharing, particularly by streaming under performance agencies and the channels that fail to deliver positive ROI. And third, we continue to strengthen our community content safety measures while improving content operations to boost user engagement.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

These strategic changes have already brought constructive results. While last June revenue has fluctuated temporarily, we have achieved a significant improvement in operating profit from our flagship product Bigelife. Despite this transitional phase, we remain confident in the fundamental interactive value that live streaming can offer to users and its monetization sales potential. Two, reaccelebrate growth. Our strategy forecast on two actionable points.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

First, we will continue to optimize results allocation based on ROI and improve traffic quality, prioritizing user growth in core market such as developed countries and The Middle East. Second, we will drive content, product features, and operational innovations to boost user engagement, improve paying users' experiences, and increase conversion rates. By better identifying quality users and improving payment conversion, we expect a regress in high quality paying users, stabilizing live streaming revenue, and driving renewed growth. Next, let's look at the performance of our core product across key markets. First, the developed countries rating.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

In the fourth quarter, live streaming revenue in developed countries continued to outperform. In particular, Bigo Life's North American region saw q one MAU growth exceeding 7% year over year. At the same time, the number of paying users in the rating increased by approximately 4% q o q. Next, the Middle is rating. Remodern in 2025 started earlier this year with the entire month falling within the fourth quarter, which caused expected seasonal impacts.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Even so, our products actively promoted a series of original activities, which drove regional user activity and helped boost our brand influence among our users. In the long run, The Middle East market continues to be one of our strategic priorities. Given its strong monetization potential as demonstrated by top tier ARPU and the users from Xfinity for interactive live streaming and the high engagement. We have remained a leader in the market, and we are committed to depending our penetration in The Middle East through our expanding device product portfolio. Looking at product improvements, our teams have made important product feature updates that are creating clear operational benefits.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

In the first quarter, BigoLife launched entirely. We designed VIP benefit system and improved its gifting experience, upgrading gift features for high value users. These efforts delivered a 3% q o q increase in ARPU among BigoLife's high end user cohort. Likee also advanced its content strategy by building a more device and engaging content library. This led to impressive engagement metrics during the quarter.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Videos viewed per user rose by 7% compared to the previous quarter, with overshow video consumption time increasing by 10% over the same period. Our refined approach to top streamer measurement and the development also produced a notable 3% q o q increase in likely average paying ratio during the quarter. In the fourth quarter, Bigo achieved approximately 18,000,000 in advertising revenue, a year over year growth of about 27%. Here, I would like to share my insights into the macro and industry changes in advertising business and how we plan establish our long term competitive advantage in advertising in the current environment. At UC, we believe Joy's unique position to take advantage and current conditions of the advertising space to drive our long term growth.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

First, the global macro landscape is highly dynamic with major shift taking place to advertising placement channels across key markets. Advertisers need placement strategies spanning both domestic and international channels to maintain and grow their market share. This change actually favors organization with our unique profile, especially those with both strong localized operations and extensive global reach. As such, we believe Joy benefits clearly from this resilient shift in the advertising landscape. Our market insight, premium global traffic, and the localized operations have helped us build strong credibility with advertisers.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

This chart has allowed our Bigger Ads platform to grow quickly, which has increased both our manager traffic volume and overall platform scale. Second, in this evolving landscape, advertisers now demand better returns from their placements along with clearer measurement and proof of placement impact. Specifically, they want to directly connect their ad cost to revenue and profit growth. This means that more than ever before, platform must find and engage specific audio segments and efficiency turn these interactions into miracle new customers. Joy is unique positioned to meet this changing needs with our large user base of 260,000,000 people worldwide.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Our users include the key target groups for many important advertising categories, and we understand their behaviors and the preferences deeply. This creates an advertising system with detailed user profiles that helps advertisers consistently reach their most valuable customers. Third, we are leveraging AI to transform our advertising strategy. The rapid advancement of AI technologies and infrastructure have greatly enhanced Joy's capability, enabling us to capitalize on our diverse application scenarios and proprietary data assets. Bigel eight use our extensive global audience and the years of quality data to build its own virtual model.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Integrating coding edge generated AI technologies. This has helped us build a intelligent end to end advertising platform that covers user insights, creative development, precise packaging, and real time optimization. Our AI usage improves ad performance and ad returns while creating better revenue opportunities for our publisher partners. This success attracts both more advertiser spending and the more publisher traffic, helping the Big O eight platform grow quickly. Fourth, our advertising business enjoyed significant economic advantages thanks to our established global operational team, R and D capabilities, and our network infrastructure.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

In particular, bandwidth and network related expenses, a key complement of operating cost and advertising platform are optimized through our global network infrastructure originally, but built for our social and into treatment products. This allowed Big O Ads to enjoy significant cost savings. As our advertising business scales, our server cost per unit decrease across the company, steadily enhance overall operational efficiency. In summary, our advertising business has delivered consistently strong growth in past quarter and continue to be profitable to the company. This success comes from our local operations, our advertisers, and the user base, our industry leading algorithm, and our global network infrastructure.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Given this proven strength and our growing market position, we are confident our advertising business will continue to contribute to growth in our revenue and profitability over the long term. Now moving to our thoughts on capital allocation. With the preliminary progress that we made a device to sell our businesses, We are active monitoring our business development and resources and carefully assessing long term capital allocation opportunities to support our non live streaming business. In short term, we expect prudently expand the hand calls and the marketing resources to support our advertising business while maintaining healthy profit margins. In the medium to long term, once our non live streaming business reach a certain scale, Investment in infrastructure upgrades, technology development, talent, impact expansion, and the marketing efforts are all potentially high return capital allocation options.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

We aim to extend our competitive advantages through efficient capital use. On shareholder returns, Joy has established a consistent track record of delivery returns to our investors. Looking forward with our live streaming business, stabilizing under the rising revenue and the profit from advertising and other emerging businesses, We expect the company's consolidated operating profit to continue to improve and our shareholders to benefit from our long term profitable growth. We remain deeply committed to this client capital allocation and the balance of strategic reinvestment with competitive shareholder return. In short, we are currently experiencing a strategic transition in Joyce business structure and reshaping our results allocation.

Ting Li
Ting Li
Chairperson of the Board & CEO at JOYY

Focusing on high quality organic growth with the rapid advancement in our non live streaming businesses. We expect 2025 will be a year of implementation and validation of our market growth engine strategy. I'm confident that our forecast on value effective organic growth will drive expanding business and financial benefits, ultimately creating lasting value values for our shareholders. I will now turn the call over to mister F Liu, the vice president of finance, to provide our financial update.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

Thanks, Misty. Hello, everyone. Please note that the financial information mentioned during this conference call is presented on a continuing operations basis unless advice specifically stated. In the first quarter of twenty twenty five, we recorded total net revenues of hundred and $94,400,000 delivering the higher end of our previous guidance. Our non GAAP operating profit was 31,000,000, also exceeding market expectations.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

Building on this inspiring presentation of our strategy, we have made significant strides in die diversifying our revenue streams and fostering a dynamic multifaceted ecosystem. I will now dive deeper into our financial performance for the first quarter. Our live streaming revenues was 351,300,000.0 for the first quarter. '3 hundred and '50 '1 point '6 million of which was from V Go segment, in line with our expectations. In the past few quarters, we have been continuously optimizing our user acquisition strategy by prioritizing advertising spend on high quality paying users in core markets and simultaneously adjusting our revenue sharing mechanism by streamlining underperforming purchases and channels that still to deliver positive ROI.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

This together with the impact of big seasonality has led to short term fluctuations of our live streaming revenue and user metrics. Our prudent and efficient operational resource allocation have yield positive measurable results. The percentage of total live streaming revenues from developed countries have increased by 2.8 percentage points year over year to 47.4. The operating margin of our flagship product BIGO Live has also been substantially improved year over year. Our non live streaming revenue were 123,000,000 during the first quarter, contributing 24.9% of our total group revenues, up from only 17.4% contribution in the same period last year.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

This reflects a strategic transition in our revenue mix. In particular, BIGO's non live streaming revenues, primarily advertising revenues increased by 27.3% year over year to 80,300,000.0. As Ms. Bin mentioned earlier, built on our high quality first party global user traffic, technology, and network infrastructure, as well as AI capabilities, Bigo Edge has emerged as a competitive programmatic advertising platform and attracted a meaningful base of global advertisers and the publisher traffic. As we are currently accumulating in scale and enhancing our algorithm, we expect to further improve campaign performance and ROI for our advertisers, which in turn will drive our accelerating growth in our advertiser space and the publisher traffic pool.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

At the present, Bigo Edge has made a positive contribution to our bottom line. We expect it to be increasingly meaningful and eventually become another growth engine for our profit over time. Our other segments, non live streaming revenues was 43,200,000.0, increasing by 21.6% year over year. Group's gross profit was $178,600,000 in the quarter with a gross margin of 36.1%. While BIGO's gross margin was relatively stable.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

All other segments gross margin was substantially up by 9.8 percentage points year over year to 41.7% due to segments enhanced monetization, particularly growth in non live streaming revenues. Our gross operating expenses for the quarter were $167,200,000 compared with hundred and $95,400,000 in the same period of 2024. The decline in our operating expenses was in line with our current operating strategies across both live streams and the non live streaming business. For our live live streaming business, we have continuously optimized our sales and marketing expenses to enhance ROI for our non live streaming business. While it has shaped robust revenue growth.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

We have maintained a prudent and disciplined spending with operating expenses rising at a slower rate than revenue. Our disciplined execution has slightly enhanced operational efficiency. Our group's non GAAP operating income for the quarter was $31,000,000 in this quarter, up by 24.9% from $24,800,000 year over year. Non GAAP net income attributable to controlling interest of Joy in the quarter was 63,200,000.0. The group's non GAAP net income margin was 12.8% in the quarter.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

Our non GAAP net income was lower this year, primarily due to lower interest income due to a decrease in our cash balance as we fully repaid our CB in June and a lower interest rate. For the first quarter of twenty twenty five, we booked net cash inflows from operating activities of 58,000,000. Our balance sheet remains healthy with a strong net cash per basic of 3,400,000,000.0 as of 03/31/2025. Now moving to capital allocation. Shareholder return continued to be an important component of our capital allocation strategy.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

We have retained $49,100,000 to our shareholders through dividends during the first quarter and repurchased $22,500,000 worth of our shares during the year as of 05/23/2025. Going forward, we remain firmly committed to unlocking shareholder value through our capital return initiatives. Turning now to our business outlook. At the group level, we expect our net revenues for the second quarter of twenty twenty five to be between EUR $499,000,000 and $590,000,000. Our guidance accounts for certain seasonality like to assess and reflect our preliminary views on the current market.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

Aboriginal conditions and the business adjustment decisions, which are subject to changes. In conclusion, the rapid growth of V Go Edge and our other non live streaming business has driving substantial progress in building a dynamic global multifaceted ecosystem. As we strategically realign our resource allocation to prioritize high quality organic growth and operational efficiency. We remain confident in our ability to deliver sustainable, profitable growth and the long term value for our shareholders. That concludes our prepared remarks.

Fuyong Liu
Fuyong Liu
Vice President of Finance at JOYY

Operator, we would now like to open up the call to questions. Thanks.

Operator

Thank

Operator

star one on your telephone and wait for your name

Operator

to be announced. If you wish

Operator

to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. When asking a question, please state your question in Chinese first, then repeat your question in English for the convenience of everyone on the call. Your first question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies.

Thomas Chong
Thomas Chong
Managing Director at Jefferies

Thanks management for taking my question. I have two questions about the second half business outlook. Can management comment about the overall monetization trend in the second half, in particular for, Bigo Life? And, my second question is about, cost optimization and the trend in operating expenses and the margin outlook in 2025. Thank you.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Thank you, Thomas, your question. This is Ping Li. I will take your first question. First of all, you may notice that in our communications in our recent communications, we will be giving updates based on revenue types, live streaming and non live streaming rather than the previous BIGO and all other segments. This is mainly because our live streaming and non live streaming businesses are currently quite distinct in terms of growth momentum and phase of development.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Updating by revenue type would make it easier for everyone to understand the trends and changes that is happening in our current business mix. So I will I'll try to answer answer your question in line with with the previous mentioned framework and category. First regarding our live streaming business. Overall, since the third quarter of last year, we have rolled out a series of adjustments including changes to the feature of our non core audio live streaming product, optimizing revenue sharing mechanism, phasing out negative ROI channels and upgrading the content safety mechanisms and systems. As a result, our live streaming revenue has indeed experienced some fluctuations.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

From a Q o Q perspective, we believe that these adjustments have largely been fully implemented. Therefore, we expect live streaming revenue to likely stabilize starting in second quarter and resume a positive quarter over quarter growth. When you look at our user acquisition strategy for live streaming, we will continue to allocate our prioritize our budget towards high quality users in developed countries based on real time ROI. Simultaneously, we'll continue to optimize the design of pay features and user benefits systems tailored to different user segments to improve our paying conversion efficiency. We've seen some encouraging data from BIGO LIVE in February and March that the revenues in certain developed countries such as North American countries have already redeemed to positive month over month growth driven by increase in the number of paying users.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

And looking at non live streaming businesses, our advertising revenue from BIGO segment and our SaaS revenue from all other segments are both maintaining year over year exceeding 20% in Q1. As our live non live streaming businesses, particularly advertising enters into its busier seasons in the second half of the year, we expect our revenue sequential growth for both non live streaming businesses to accelerate in the following quarters. And this is Alex. I will take your second question. First, let's have a quick look at our Q1 performance.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

For the BIGO segment alone, our non GAAP gross margin for Q1 for the BIGO segment was 35.5% with a non GAAP OP of 13.3% both showing improvement compared to our Q1 level last year. This was primarily due to live streaming business where we optimize our content cost mechanism and also upgraded our user acquisition strategies to enhance ROI leading to significant improvement in BIGO LIVE's gross margin and non GAAP OP margins in Q1. For the all other segments, our non GAAP gross margin also was substantially improved year over year, rising from 32.4% last year to 42.1% in Q1 this year, which was 9.7 percentage points increase, mainly driven by strong growth in our non live streaming revenue in the segment. The non GAAP operating loss for Q1 was million, which despite being in the off season was narrowed by 23% compared to the previous quarter. And this was primarily due to our disciplined spending in our non live streaming businesses with a noticeable Q o Q decline in our operating expenses together with the impact of certain seasonality fluctuations in certain expenses.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

While looking ahead to Q2, with BIGO segment's revenue resuming to positive Q o Q growth, we also anticipate BIGO's non GAAP operating profit will also return the amount of BIGO's non GAAP operating profit will also return to positive Q o Q growth. For the full year of 2025, excluding the impact that we the adjustment that we made to the non core audio live streaming product features in BIGO since Q3 last year. We expect BIGO's overall non GAAP operating profit amount to remain stable with certain potential for growth in the full year. And for all other segments, we expect that with improving monetization and disciplined spending, its R and D expenses as a percentage of total revenue will continue to decline and we foresee a meaningful reduction in its amount of non GAAP operating loss in 2025 compared to the previous year. At group level, we do believe that our group's non GAAP operating profit amount will show an improving trend for the full year of 2025.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Next question please.

Operator

Your next question comes from Leking Xu with Goldman Sachs.

Analyst

Thanks management for the opportunity to ask a question and can management share more updates on new initiatives in the twenty twenty twenty five? And, also, can management give us your color on the underlying reasons behind Bigel advertising's accelerating growth and also the outlook for bigger advertising? Thank you.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Thank you, Lu Xin, for your question. This is Ms. Li Qing. I will take your question. Why BIGO Ads can accelerate growth?

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

First of all, when we talk about BIGO Ads, we refer to both its in house first party traffic and also the third party traffic advertising revenue. And when we look at that, we look at it from both the advertisers perspective, our traffic pool and also the embedded advantage that we empower as a platform. First of all, let's look at advertisers side. We believe that is non so to the growing advertisers needs. We've noticed that advertisers need to allocate their placement budgets across multiple channels and they demand a high ROI for their ad investments.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

And factors such as geopolitical tensions and anti monopoly measures have led to changes in the advertising market that caused advertisers to demand a further diversification over their placement channels. And second, because we have those existing relations with the advertisers, such relation has driven publishers and aggregation platforms to join our network leading to a platform growth, a rapid growth in our traffic pool of Bigo ads. And thirdly, because of those extensive user base and years of quality data and also our deep expertise and knowledge in user profiling, that was the foundation of effective and precise targeting and enabled us to deliver a positive ROI for advertisers. And as we continue to roll out a deeper training of our model, we expect our specific user scenario is going to improve our model, which is going to bring further improvements in our delivery results to the advertisers. And you've also may notice that we mentioned that Bigo Ads in general as a whole has already begin to make a positive contribution in terms of operating profit.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

And we believe that the reason that we can achieve profitability at such a scale is due to a few reasons. First of all, it's always about ROI. Because of the fact that we have approximately two hundred and fifty million first party user traffic together with third party traffic that is accumulating and that we have the AI empowered user targeting model enabled us to deliver a positive ROI for advertisers. And together with an in house algorithm such as our pacing strategies, which can optimize our ad delivery to balance advertisers' goals. For example, they have a higher ROI goals, but we can balance it between their goal with our platform revenue.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

And that actually as we continue to improve our medical model, we expect that our algorithm is going to help us efficiently balance our advertisers' needs and our own revenue growth. And thirdly, Bigo Ads obviously benefits from the group's prior investments in our global infrastructure, network infrastructure and also our R and D infrastructure. And that enables Bigo Ads to enjoy strong economic advantages with lower cost per unit. So in summary, our advertising business has delivered consistently strong growth in the past quarters and continue to be profitable for the company. And this success actually comes from our localized operations, our existing advertisers and traffic pool, our industry leading algorithm and also our global network infrastructure.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Given this proven strength in our growing market position, we are confident that our advertising business is going to contribute to long term growth to our revenue and profitability. Next question please.

Operator

Your next question comes from Rafael Chen with BOCI Research.

Raphael Chen
Associate at BOCI Research Limited

Congrats on the solid quarter. Could management give us some insights about shareholder return policies and other capital return strategies? Thanks.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Thank you, Rafael. This is Alex. I will take your question on capital allocation. First of all, shareholder returns remain a key component of our capital allocation strategy. In the first quarter, we continue to execute our commitment to our shareholders, distributing million in dividends and repurchasing CNY22.5 million worth of our shares as of May 23, consistently fulfilling our commitment to provide a competitive return to our shareholders.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

Additionally, as Ms. Li just shared, we are also actively monitoring our business development and resources and carefully assessing long term capital allocation opportunities based on the current stage and performance of our respective businesses. Currently speaking, the live streaming business maintained a relatively stable growth in cash flow and we are actively optimizing our resource allocation to improve its ROI. Meanwhile, for our non live streaming business such as advertising and SaaS are in a phase of accelerated growth. In the short term, we expect to prudently expand our headcount and marketing resources to these non live streaming businesses to support their growth while maintaining improving trends in their respective economics.

Jane Xie
Jane Xie
Senior Manager, IR at JOYY

In the long term, we will continue to enhance our competitive advantage through prudent and efficient resource allocation. We remain confident in our ability to drive, sustain, diversify growth in our global revenue and operating profit while maintaining competitive shareholder returns. Thank you. And that was the last question. Thank you so much for joining our call today.

Executives
    • Jane Xie
      Jane Xie
      Senior Manager, IR
    • Ting Li
      Ting Li
      Chairperson of the Board & CEO
    • Fuyong Liu
      Fuyong Liu
      Vice President of Finance
Analysts
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Key Takeaways

  • In Q1 2025, Joy reported total revenue of $494 M and non-GAAP operating profit of $31 M (+25% YoY), generating $58 M in operating cash flow, and returned $49.1 M in dividends while repurchasing $22.5 M of shares.
  • Non-live streaming revenue grew 25.3% YoY to $123 M (25% of total), driven by BigO Edge’s programmatic advertising platform, which delivered 27% YoY growth in ad revenues and is now profitable.
  • Economic headwinds in emerging markets led to reduced live streaming spending among long-tail users, prompting Joy to cut underperforming channels, reallocate marketing to core markets, and optimize content safety, resulting in short-term revenue fluctuations.
  • Product enhancements, including a VIP benefit system for Bigo Live (3% QoQ ARPU lift among high-end users) and enriched content on Likee (+7% videos per user and +10% watch time QoQ), boosted user engagement and monetization.
  • For Q2 2025, Joy expects revenues of $499 M–$590 M, plans to expand headcount and marketing in non-live streaming businesses, and will continue balancing strategic reinvestment with competitive shareholder returns.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
JOYY Q1 2025
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