Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Kuaishou Technology second quarter and interim 2026 financial results conference call. Please know that english simultaneous interpretation will be provided for management's prepared remarks. This english line will be in listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Matthew Zhao, VP of Capital Market and IR at Kuaishou Technology.
Thank you, operator. Good evening and good morning to everyone. Welcome to Kuaishou Technology second quarter and interim 2026 financial conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Cheng Yixiao, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO, and Mr. Jin Bing, our CFO. Before we start, please know that today's discussion may contain Forward-Looking statements which involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ from those discussed. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any Forward-Looking information except as required by law.
For all important information about this call, including Forward-Looking statements, please refer to the company's public information for the second quarter and interim 2026 results announcement ended June 30, 2026, issued earlier today. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-IFRS financial measures. These are provided for additional information and should not replace IFRS-based financial results. For a definition of non-IFRS financial measures and reconciliation of IFRS to non-IFRS financial results and related risk factors, please refer to our second quarter and interim 2026 results announcement.
For today's call, management will use Chinese as the main language. A third-party interpreter will provide simultaneous English interpretation in the prepared remarks session and a consecutive interpretation during the Q&A session. Please know that English interpretation is for convenience purposes only. In case of any discrepancy, management's original statements will prevail. Lastly, unless otherwise stated, all currency units mentioned are in RMB. I will now hand the call over to Yixiao.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Kuaishou second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. In Q2, amid a complex macroeconomic environment and industry competition, we remain committed to our long-term vision and strategic AI investments, and we achieved high-quality growth. In Q2, the average DAUs on the Kuaishou App reached 412 million. Total revenues increased by 1.4% year-over-year to RMB 35.5 billion . Revenues from our core commercial business, including online marketing services and other services, primarily e-commerce and Kling AI, increased by 7.4% year-over-year. Adjusted net profit reached RMB 3.9 billion with an adjusted net margin of 11%. Overall profitability remains stable. Further demonstrating the resilience of our business operations, now I'll elaborate the progress of each segment in Q2. First, our AI strategy and progress of our large video generation model, Kling AI.
In Q2, Kling AI continued advancing its vision of empowering everyone to craft captivating stories with AI through model breakthroughs, product feature upgrades, and a global creative ecosystem expansion. Kling AI reinforced its global leadership in multimodal video generation. Kling AI launched a native 4K video output in Kling 3.0 series. As the industry's first video generation model to support native 4K output, it enables one-click generation of cinema-grade 4K video. Designed for film, TV, and advertising professional, it delivers high-resolution features without complex post-production, achieving industrial-grade cinematic visual effects. Kling AI also released the Kling 3.0 Turbo model, which maintains stable, high-quality dynamic output and precise audiovisual sync while improving creative efficiency and reducing production costs. Kling MCP and Kling CLI were officially launched as well, enabling AI agents to dispatch Kling AI for batch content creation and expanding its use case in workflow automation and intelligent orchestration.
Kling AI continues to empower professional content creation with its technical innovation and creative achievements, earning broad industry recognition. At the 2026 Cannes Lions, two advertising videos generated by Kling AI won one Silver Lion and two Bronze Lions, demonstrating recognition of its creative capabilities by one of the world's premier creative awards program. At the 2026 Beijing International Film Festival, multiple Kling AI-created works, including Paper Smartphone, were selected for the AIGC section. Stroke of Genius, with Liu Cixin serving as literary supervisor, won the annual featured work in Short Play, Micro Short Play award, highlighting Kling AI's strengths in empowering professional filmmaking and content creation. Driven by model breakthroughs, continuous product enhancements, and deeper penetration, Kling AI's commercialization maintained strong growth momentum. in Q2, Kling AI generated revenue of over RMB 850 million , up over 200% year-over-year, continuing to lead global AI video commercialization.
In Q2, we made solid progress advancing the research and application of our general-purpose large models. We released Keye-VL-2.0, an upgraded multi-model that enables deep perception across 256,000 ultra-long context and delivers nearly lossless reasoning for long video temporal understanding. It also became the first Keye-based model with a built-in agent collaboration mechanism, demonstrating the potential for code parsing and tool invocation. We introduced AgentX, a self-evolving AI agent for industrial recommendation systems that autonomously handles recommendation model and strategy design, performance evaluation, and knowledge accumulation, significantly improving the iteration efficiency of our recommendation algorithms. It enables recommendation systems to autonomously drive recommendation model and strategies design, evaluate performance, and accumulate insights, significantly boosting the iteration efficiency in our recommendation algorithms. In Q2, we developed scenario-based agent capabilities for generating marketing materials across our online marketing services.
Tailored to different industries and client needs, we achieved over 70% year-over-year growth in AIGC short and video marketing spend in Q2. We also extended our generative recommendation and intelligent bidding models to live streaming, search, and pan-shelf based e-commerce scenarios. This improved marketing content recommendation effectiveness and unlocked more client marketing spend budgets. In Q2, our self-developed general purpose agent, My Flicker, has integrated skills across key internal system, began serving all employees. By June, over 92% of employees were using our AI agents, and the AI code contribution rhythm on R&D engineers reached 60%. Meanwhile, Kuaishou Vanchin, our enterprise grade large model platform, integrates high performance model inference, cost efficient model customization, and fully managed service. Kuaishou Vanchin supports Kuaishou's internal AI use cases, and also external enterprise clients with large model infrastructure.
On OpenRouter, a global AI model aggregation platform, several Kuaishou Vanchin hosted open source models ranked among the top by API call consumption. Second, user growth and content ecosystem. In Q2, average DAU on the Kuaishou App reached 412 million. The average MAU reached 797 million. We leveraged AI powered smart placement to improve the user acquisition efficiency and boost retention among new and reactivated users. We consistently refine our traffic management to better serve our highly active core users. We also continue to emphasize our social features. Users with mutual followers engaging in private messaging grew over 15% year-over-year. We also optimized the Kuaishou App's core features, comprehensively elevating the user experience through systematic improvements to product features, video playback smoothness, and intelligent interaction. We believe in the power of community and remain committed to strengthening our differentiated high-quality content ecosystem.
In June and July, we leveraged the World Cup buzz to launch our native IP, Kuaishou World Cup Fans Trophy. Beyond covering trending topics, we launched original events, including the Kuaishou X.Y.Style FC and Dream Chasers Youth Football Tournament. Through trend driven operations, engaging interactions, and community co-creation, we built a sports hub where Kuaishou users could participate. These activities generate 68.2 billion impressions and 360 million in cumulative livestream views. We also continued innovating our copyrighted content partnerships using a joint operation model to deliver more high value content to users. We used an e-commerce livestreaming model to secure live broadcasting rights for 2026 CBA season. We also introduced a paid livestreaming model for online music performance. In April, we hosted the TOP concert, generating over RMB 10 million in sales, achieving a synergy between content and commercialization.
This model also driven grassroots sports events, achieving a notable regional scale, especially in Northwest China. Third, online marketing services. In Q2, revenue from online marketing services reached RMB 20.6 billion , up 4.4% year-over-year. Our non-e-commerce marketing services continued expanding across content consumption, lifestyle services, and AI applications. Supported by our omni-domain traffic synergy strategy and dedicated programs for brand merchants, e-commerce marketing services remained resilient. We also continued deepening AI applications across the full marketing services lifecycle. In Q2, the content consumption, lifestyle services, and AI applications continued to drive the year-on-year growth in our non-e-commerce marketing services revenue. In content consumption, AI lowered production costs and reduced creation barriers, driving rapid short play supply growth that cater to a broader user preferences. This enriched our content ecosystem and boosted the related marketing demand.
By June, short play supply on Kuaishou, both live action and AI generated, had grown over five-fold from January. In Q2, short play driven marketing spend grew over 100% year-over-year. In lifestyle services, we deepen our presence in sub-verticals like comprehensive and local services while exploring incremental growth opportunities. We also optimized the deep conversion capabilities, enhanced the full stack lead driven marketing solutions, and launched a user cohort exploration AI agent. These efforts helped clients to more effectively identify high intent users, improving lead quality and conversion. In AI applications, we worked closely with the clients to align ad placement with in-app conversion, helping them to improve user retention and conversion. This further strengthened our competitiveness in capturing ad spend from AI application clients. For e-commerce marketing services in Q2, we strengthened our omni-domain traffic synergy across e-commerce and commercialization business to improve merchant traffic matching efficiency.
We conducted a more granular merchant segmentation with tiered operations, tailoring product strategies to address merchants' core needs. We also took a content supply side approach by managing marketing materials, including incentivizing first launch content and increasing recommendation diversity. These initiatives optimized the e-commerce marketing material content mix, enabling high quality content to reach relevant traffic more efficiently and improving our long-term commercial ecosystem. Despite the macro and merchant challenges, we remain committed to traffic support for high-quality merchants. The T2000 brand initiatives launched in Q4 last year has delivered promising early results. Brand merchant marketing spend outperformed our broader e-commerce marketing in Q2. Its revenue contribution continues to grow. At the product level, our net transaction ROI product continues to evolve by enhancing our many scenario transaction bidding capabilities and refining bidding mechanisms and model strategies.
Client penetration rose from 45% in Q1 to 55% in Q2, effectively helping merchants reduce return rates. In Q2, we continued optimizing AI applications across industry-specific scenarios, improving clients' marketing placement efficiency, and strengthening our capacity to capture incremental marketing budgets across sectors. In content consumption through content understanding, user matching, and smart placement, AI helped quality content reach users more efficiently. In lifestyle services, AI is applied to marketing material generation, digital human live streaming, conversational business operations, user intent identification, and deep conversation prediction. These help merchants lower costs across content creation, placement, and customer services. Number four, our e-commerce business. In Q2, we advanced our strategy across three areas, growing our paying user base, expanding supply, and deepening e-commerce and commercialization traffic integration. We optimized our merchant ecosystem and mix, strengthened brand and new merchant acquisition and their growth, drove synergies between e-commerce and commercialization.
During the quarter, we focused on growing high-quality buyers while active paying users remained largely stable quarter-over-quarter. As users' how-many domain consumption habits continue developing, we've strengthened our private domain advantages by aligning traffic across diverse scenarios. This enabled a content-driven product recommendation, shelf-based conversion, store repurchases to reinforce one another in a positive growth cycle. We also enhanced cross-scenario synergies and optimized subsidy efficiency, driving balanced growth across content-based and pen shelf-based scenarios. On the supply side in Q2, we continued onboarding new merchants and advancing brand expansion through cost reduction, efficiency improvement, growth incentives, product empowerment, and operational support. We helped the new and small medium-sized merchants grow while further improving our merchant mix. We launched our upgraded Starlight Initiative, offering tiered support programs for brand merchants, large merchants, industry zone merchants, and SME merchants, helping more merchants scale faster.
Supported by these initiatives, newly onboarded merchants grew year-over-year and rose nearly 10% quarter-over-quarter. New merchants achieving scaled growth in their second month rose nearly 30% year-over-year, reflecting continued improvements in new merchant quality. On the brand merchant side, self-operated GMV from T2000 brands maintained strong year-over-year growth, while their contribution to how-many domain GMV steadily increased. Marketing spend on the brand commercialization also grew rapidly year-over-year, further boosting brand merchants' contribution to both overall e-commerce GMV and online marketing revenue. By industry leveraging content-based e-commerce trends, merchants counts in tea, alcohol, and health products, beauty and cosmetics, and fresh food continued growing, unlocking structural growth opportunities. We continue to improve our KOL ecosystem and structure, enhancing content supply quality.
We deepen collaboration with the top-tier KOLs, increasing support for mid-tier KOLs in our strong verticals like San-nong and Anime, and improved the consistency of existing KOLs' performance, reinforcing our e-commerce content foundation. By integrating KOL resources with the distinctive product offerings nationwide, we deepened our penetration in industry zones and launched content marketing initiatives like product origin tracking live streams. These efforts strengthened the synergy content and supply, empowered KOLs, and improved merchants' conversion. We also expanded our KOL base through in-platform incubation, talent agency partnerships, and external acquisition. To boost the streaming frequency, we refined our incentive policies. In Q2, the number of streamers with over 10,000 followers grew year-over-year, while KOL streaming frequency continued to increase steadily. On the distribution pool development, we leveraged AI to enhance product capabilities, creating a more targeted system, further boosting the vibrancy of our distribution system.
In Q2, active KOLs distribution penetration continued rising year-over-year, and merchant KOL merchants matches grew over 20% year-over-year. In Q2, throughout the full lifecycle merchants, we continued optimizing AI capabilities across e-commerce scenarios, helping merchants reduce costs, improve efficiency, and driving intelligent operations. These initiatives validated AI's evolution from a productivity tool into a comprehensive business execution solution. In Q2, over 850,000 merchants used our free AI business tools across product selection and listing, marketing material creation, business analysis, smart placement, and AI-powered customer service. These AI tools provided merchants with end-to-end operational support and capability enhancements. Next, our live streaming business. Q2 live streaming revenue reached RMB 8.7 billion . We focused on supply side health and leveraged AI to empower live streaming products, driving ecosystem quality and product innovation.
On the supply side, we launched the Confluence Initiative, providing streamer acquisition incentives, early-stage growth support, and ecosystem governance to steadily expand the supply of new streamers from talent agencies and improve their early traction efficiency. We also strengthened independent streamer operations. Focusing on identifying high-value independent streamers to solidify our live streaming supply foundation. We also encourage the top streamers to expand into group live-streaming formats, leveraging their traffic and influence to enrich high-quality live streaming content supply. On the product and technology front, AI further empowered live streaming rooms powered by Kling AI. AI gifts with customizable special effects continue to evolve, offering more formats and capabilities, and boosting users' willingness to pay. In Q2, AI gifts sent by users passed 6 million. AI-driven content understanding continued optimizing our live streaming recommendation strategies, enabling more precise matching between streamers and users, supporting paying users' growth.
Intelligent live streaming gift recommendation and ranking features based on real-time multimodal signals improved the users' payment experience and efficiency. AI tools like AI interaction systems and digital avatar solution will further refine improving streamers' service efficiency. Finally, our overseas business progress. In Q2, we remain committed to high-value growth strategies, strengthening our overseas foundation in profitability, long-term operation, and localization. On traffic and content, we maintain refined user acquisition, enhance local content, and expanded community creator networks, fostering an engaging atmosphere around real-life scenarios and deepening content consumption among core users. For overseas online marketing services, we capitalize on major events such as Fiesta Junina and the World Cup, driven by AI, in-depth ROI analysis, user group insights, innovative product features, and industry-specific strategies. We helped marketing clients capture key marketing periods and achieve rapid growth. We also unlocked the monetization potential in short plays and other content formats.
Together with our marketing services capabilities, this formed a dual-engine growth model while accelerating expansion into growth sectors such as e-commerce. Our e-commerce GMV and order volume continued solid year-over-year growth in Q2. At the same time, we drove growth in average order value through product mix optimization and quality supply, while maintaining solid operational efficiency and profitability. Looking ahead to second half, amid growing external challenges, we will remain steadfast in advancing our core AI strategy, leveraging our technological and ecosystem strength to navigate headwinds.
While we will face short-term revenue pressure and heavy AI investment, we will maintain our long-term focus and continue expanding the commercial exploration of AI to empower Kuaishou's content and commercial ecosystems. As we pursue near-term breakthroughs and high-quality growth over the long term, we remain committed to creating long-term value for our users and platform partners. That concludes my prepared remarks. Next, I will hand it over to Jin Bing, who will review the company's financial update for the second quarter.
Thank you, Yixiao, and hello, everyone. In Q2, we continued to deeply integrate AI technologies across our business scenarios. As a result, we achieved high-quality growth throughout our overall business amid a complex environment. The comprehensive application of AI has become an engine driving the company's long-term development. It continued to empower our content ecosystem, enhance user experience, and provide merchants and advertisers with end-to-end intelligent business operation tools. For our platform partners, these capabilities helped reduce costs and improve efficiency. It also injected a new growth and momentum into our business. In Q2, the group's total revenues reached RMB 35.5 billion . Adjusted net profit reached RMB 3.9 billion in the second quarter, with an adjusted net margin of 11%. The group's overall profitability remained at a healthy level.
Now let's take a closer look. Our total revenue grew 1.4% year-over-year to RMB 35.5 billion in Q2. The increase was mainly driven by growth of our online marketing services and Kling AI business. Online marketing services revenue increased 4.4% to RMB 20.6 billion in Q2 from RMB 19.8 billion in the same period last year. This growth was primarily attributable to a deepening application of AI in online marketing services, which effectively enhanced our client marketing placement efficiency, driving more marketing spend. Revenue from other services, including e-commerce and Kling AI business, reached RMB 6.2 billion in Q2, up 18.5% from RMB 5.2 billion in the same period last year. The increase was mainly driven by continued expansion of our Kling AI business. As Kling AI achieved breakthroughs in model capabilities, continuous product enhancements, and deeper penetration across professional creative scenarios, its commercialization continued to maintain strong growth momentum.
In Q2, our live streaming revenue was RMB 8.7 billion. We consistently cultivated high-quality content, leveraged AI-powered product innovations. It enhanced the quality of our ecosystem, developed a rich and healthy live streaming ecosystem, and diverse high-quality content. Cost of revenue increased 10.7% year-over-year to RMB 17.2 billion in Q2, accounting for 48.4% of the total revenues. The increase was mainly due to higher revenue sharing costs and related taxes in line with our revenue growth. Based on the above, our gross profit was RMB 18.3 billion in Q2, compared to RMB 19.5 billion in the same period last year. Gross profit margin was 51.6% compared to 55.7% in the same period last year. Turning to expenses in Q2, selling and marketing expenses were RMB 9.9 billion, compared to RMB 10.5 billion in the same period last year.
Selling and marketing expenses decreased to 27.9% of total revenues from 30% in Q2 last year, primarily attributable to the lower spending for promotion activities. R&D expenses increased 34.7% year-over-year to RMB 4.6 billion, accounting for 12.9% of total revenues. The increase was mainly due to increased investments in AI, including related training costs. Administrative expenses were RMB 895 million, compared to RMB 897 million in the same period last year, remaining relatively stable year-over-year.
Group level net profit for Q2 was RMB 3.2 billion. Group level adjusted net profit was RMB 3.9 billion with an adjusted net margin of 11%. Our balance sheet remains robust. Cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, and financial assets, and restricted cash totaled RMB 121.3 billion as of June 30, 2026. Net cash generated from operating activities in Q2 was RMB 5.9 billion. Additionally, we actively leverage and deliver on our commitment to shareholder returns based on market conditions. And today, we had reacquired approximately HKD 1,970 million, or around 43.3 million shares, representing about 1% of our total shares outstanding for 2026.
Looking ahead to the second half, as we mentioned, amid external challenges, we expect to face near-term challenges as pressure on revenue and our continued investment in AI growth weigh on profitability. We will continue to uphold our technology-driven user-centric philosophy while maintaining a deep focus on our users' needs. We remain firmly committed to advancing AI and leveraging our leading AI technologies to further empower our content ecosystem and commercial value chain. At the same time, we will apply prudent financial discipline to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This will further strengthen the company's core competitiveness moat and create long-term value for our users, partners, and shareholders. That concludes our prepared remarks. Now we can open for the call for Q&A.
Kenneth Fong of UBS, please ask your question.
[Non-English content] Thank you management for taking my questions, and congrats on the very stable cooperation and robust growth of Kling. I have a question regarding Kling competitive landscape and the iteration direction. Recently, multiple video generation large language models have been updated successively. How should we view the current competitive landscape of the video generation models? What is Kling competitive strategy? Thank you.
[ Non-English content ] Thank you for your question. The global market for video content generation represents a massive $150 billion opportunity. AI video generation models have substantial potential for user adoption. We believe the AI video generation segment is currently in a vibrant phase, with diverse stakeholders maximizing their strengths to drive industry upside. As industry players leverage their respective platform ecosystems, vertical scenarios, and technological capabilities to compete through differentiation, the commercialization boundaries of AI video generation continue to expand across diverse scenarios, including advertising, e-commerce, films, short plays, and gaming. Compared with relatively fragmented competitive landscape of large language models, today's AI video generation segment features more concentrated market structure with clear dominant leaders and a higher level of concentration among tier 1 players. Video generation models also requires significantly greater levels of computing power, data, talent, and technology.
[ Non-English content ] Over the past two years, Kling AI has consistently remained among the tier 1 players in the AI video generation segment. The Kling AI team continued to demonstrate strategic foresight into the industry and strong execution capabilities. In June 2024, we launched the world's first commercially available video model product based on the DiT architecture. In April 2025, we introduced the world's first multi-modal visual language interaction architecture, MVL. In December 2025, we released the world's first Omni-Model-based multimodal video generation model. Our track record has consistently proven that the Kling AI team is among the industry's top teams worldwide, leading with strong research, engineering, and strategic execution capabilities. Recently, Kling AI closed an independent financing round, which will further enhance its competitiveness in the industry.
[ Non-English content ] Since its launch, Kling AI has focused on serving professional content creators by leveraging video generation large model technology to improve the productivity of professional creators who make video creation their career and have sustainable purchasing power. Kling AI features strong prompt understanding and controllable storyboard capabilities, enabling users to achieve precise and coherent creative expression. In terms of visual quality and production scalability, Kling AI also satisfies professional creators' needs for high-quality video content. Kling AI is the world's first video generation model supporting native 4K output. Users can generate 4K videos with a single click without the need for additional upscaling or post-processing, resulting in clearer visuals, richer details, and a more cinematic look and feel.
[ Non-English content ] Overall, we are highly confident in Kling AI's long-term competitiveness in the AI video generation segment. As model capabilities continuously iterate, product experience continues to improve, and professional creator ecosystem and commercialization scenarios further expanded. At the same time, the AI video generation sector is rapidly gaining broader adoption, and Kling AI will consistently unlock greater growth potential. Thank you.
Thank you, operator. Next question please.
[Non-English content] The next question comes from Lincoln Kong of Goldman Sachs. Please ask your question.
[Non-English content] Thank you management for taking my question. My question is also about AI strategy. Other than Kling AI this quarter, what are the other areas in terms of the AI development? Thank you.
[ Non-English content ] During the quarter, our AI advancements extended beyond Kling AI iteration. We also made tangible achievements across organizational efficiency, AI applications in online marketing services scenarios, and our core recommendation systems iterations.
[ Non-English content ] Regarding AI applications in online marketing services scenarios, we have deeply integrated AI across key processes including the generation of AIGC marketing materials, intelligent bidding, and generative recommendation. In the generation of marketing materials, we connected user interest modeling with video production capabilities, enabling an upgrade from searching for marketing material for videos to creating videos tailored for users. On the intelligent bidding front, leveraging marketing clients' historical account data on marketing placement and conversion goals, our agent system develops self-learning and continuously optimized automated bidding strategies. This effectively improved long-term customer value and marketing placement performance, delivering strong ROIs. For generative recommendation, our models can truly understand advertising content and user needs. By converting products, live streams, search queries, and industry information into semantic representations, we improved user product matching efficiency.
[ Non-English content ] Regarding the iteration of our recommendation systems, we launched AgentX, an agent-driven R&D closed loop. In the past, taking a recommendation strategy from idea to launch often involved multiple steps, including data analysis, solution design, product code modification, experiment configuration, A/B testing and monitoring, metric attribution, and post-launch review. This process relied heavily on manual execution by algorithm engineers, which limited efficiency. Today, our agent serves as the execution engine for recommendation iteration, freeing engineers from a wide range of repetitive tasks and enabling them to focus on goal setting, critical reviews, and higher-level judgment and decision making. As a result, we significantly enhanced both the iteration efficiency and performance of our recommendation strategies.
[ Non-English content ] In terms of organizational efficiency improvement and organizational enablement, our in-house developed agent tools, including My Flicker, have achieved over 90% employee adoption. They fully cover diverse functions including technology R&D, data analytics, business operations. These tools have significantly enhanced our internal productivity. Using technological R&D productivity as an example, in the second quarter of 2026, our technological R&D team's average delivery cycle was shortened by more than 10% compared with the first quarter. Meanwhile, the average daily lines of code submitted on AI-assisted R&D increased by over 70% sequentially. AI's contribution rate to newly added code exceeded 60%. Kuaishou Vanchin not only efficiently supports internal AI use cases, but also provides large model infrastructure services to a wide range of external enterprise clients, achieving strong revenue growth.
[ Non-English content ] In summary, we will consistently harness AI to deeply empower our business and organization, continue to expand the boundaries of AI applications, and work together with our partners to jointly explore and create more innovative business value and greater growth upside. Thank you.
Thank you. Operator, next question please.
[Non-English content] The next question comes from Thomas Chong of Jefferies. Please ask your question.
[Non-English content] Good evening. Thanks management for taking my questions. In light of the uncertainties of macro environment and industry competition, what are our strategies to reduce merchants' operational pressure and empower merchants to growth? On the other hand, how should we think about the online shopping outlook in second half? Thank you.
[ Non-English content ] Thank you for your question. in Q2, macro demand remained under pressure while industry competition remained intense. Against this backdrop, merchants are seeking greater visibility and certainty in their business operations. This also shapes our merchant side initiatives. We segmented merchants based on their business profiles and implemented tiered operations. By offering more tailored operational support, initiatives, and resources, we helped merchants of all types find the right growth opportunities on Kuaishou.
[ Non-English content ] First, starting in Q2, we restructured our merchant facing teams by business type, aligning differentiated strategies with each segment's core needs, and bringing policies and resources back to more appropriate levels. Previously, support was misaligned. Brand merchants lacked dedicated professional services. Ad-driven merchants received e-commerce resources disproportionate to their revenue contribution. Influencer and content-driven merchants, already rich in organic traffic, needed sustainability above all. We have since centralized brand merchants under a specialized team. We allocated mismatched resources away from ad-driven merchants, and used full platform fan reach to improve long-term viability for influencer and content-driven merchants. Building on this, we continue tiered targeted support for brands, large merchants, industry zone merchants, and SMBs, maintaining policy stability and continuity while ensuring more precise resource allocation.
[ Non-English content] Meanwhile, we deeply integrated AI capabilities into merchants' daily operations and cost management across areas such as marketing material creation, intelligent marketing, intelligent after-sales services, and AI-powered customer service. This helped merchants reinvest into more productive growth initiatives.
[ Non-English content] This year, brands and industry zones remained our two strategic priorities on the supply side. Since Q4 last year, tightening relevant compliance regulations has narrowed the gap in compliance costs across different merchants, leading merchants to set higher ROI requirements for their marketing investments. Against this backdrop, brand merchants' advantages in operational capabilities and business stability became increasingly evident. Meanwhile, AI has significantly lowered the barriers to content creation. We have further focused brand subsidies on key blockbuster products. As a result, brand merchants have entered a positive growth cycle on Kuaishou. We were pleased to see brand merchants demonstrate a genuine commitment to the platform and a focus on building and growing their businesses, rather than simply using Kuaishou for brand exposure or to drive transaction off the platform.
In Q2, the contribution of self-operated GMV from brands to overall GMV increased steadily, while the share of marketing spend from brand merchants in total marketing spend also grew steadily. On the industry zone side, we leveraged service providers to deepen our presence across industry zones nationwide and empower local merchants. This year, we have gradually rolled out this model in regions including Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Shandong, and Jiangsu. Through these operational initiatives and growth incentives, we provide tangible support to merchants with distinctive regional offerings, helping them establish a foothold on Kuaishou and scale their businesses.
[ Non-English content] Looking ahead to the second half, we believe the overall consumer demand will continue its moderate recovery, while the shift in consumer spending from discretionary to essential categories will persist. This means that merchants will increasingly prioritize greater predictability in their business operations, and the days of relying purely on traffic dividends to drive business growth are behind us. While we continue to provide merchants with traffic resources and commission rate support, we expect e-commerce marketing service revenue and commission income to face pressure in the second half. For the platform, this represents both challenges and opportunities. We will continue to steer our traffic synergy strategy toward brands and balanced profile merchants with both the capability and commitment to sustain long-term operations, while further strengthening our intelligent placement and capabilities to help merchants achieve greater predictability in their marketing placement.
We believe that by strengthening our tiered merchant operations and optimizing our supply structure, we will capture structural opportunities to drive high-quality growth in our e-commerce business. This is also essential to rising above short-term cycles and achieving sustainable long-term growth. Thank you.
Thank you all. Bring it to our next question, please.
[Non-English content] The next question comes from Daniel Chen of JP Morgan. Please ask your question.
Thank you, management, for giving me the opportunity to ask questions. I want to ask about the trend of non-e-commerce online marketing services, which is advertising, in the second half of this year. Also, what has been the enablement and impact of AI on the online marketing service for this quarter? Thank you.
[ Non-English content ] Thank you for the question. The growth of the online marketing services is affected by the broader macro environment and our clients' marketing budgets. Looking into the second half of this year, we believe visibility on the external environment remains limited. Meanwhile, AI applications and instant retail, which grew rapidly in the second half of last year, will face a relatively high base in the second half of this year. Customer budgets may also be affected by industry competition dynamics and changes in marketing strategies. That said, we continue to see structural opportunities in some industries.
[ Non-English content ] First, in the content consumption sector, led by short plays, we believe that this market still has room to grow. AI continues to reshape the supply side of short plays segment, significantly reducing production costs and shortening production cycles while enabling a broader range of genres, content formats, and richer supply. In 2025, the number of comic style short plays episodes on Kuaishou was 60,000, and we expected this number to reach 500,000 in 2026. Going forward, we expect the industry to gradually shift from quantity expansion to content quality improvement. Meanwhile, the value of short plays content ecosystem has become increasingly evident, with the daily impressions on Kuaishou short plays reaching 230 million in July 2026. The monetization model for short plays has also evolved.
In-app ads account for an increasingly larger share, indicating that short plays are gradually developing into an ecosystem-based business model that combines content consumption value with incremental marketing inventory. Looking ahead, content formats could potentially extend beyond traditional viewing into areas such as IP adaptation and spin-offs, interactive short plays and virtual companionship, and integrating content with cultural tourism and creative industries. These new formats could unlock new opportunities for content consumption and monetization. Against these trends, we expect to capture the growth opportunities in content consumption through revenue sharing incentives, omni-domain traffic support, and partnership with high-quality content copyright holders. Our platform's high-quality content will achieve more stable traffic and monetization returns.
[ Non-English content ] Second, we still have room to grow in certain verticals where our penetration remains insufficient. For example, in the lifestyle services sector, the business is closely tied to the broader macro environment, but it also covers a wide range of verticals, each with substantially different merchant operating models, user decision-making journeys, and conversion goals. This will allow us to continue unlocking incremental growth opportunities in verticals such as beauty and wellness, home renovation and decoration, and real estate through more refined industry-specific operations.
In the gaming vertical, there is strong gaming content consumption on Kuaishou, but monetization is still catching up. We are currently exploring opportunities to better connect gaming live streaming and game content with marketing budgets to unlock more monetization potential. In the AI era, the barriers to developing mini games are also becoming even lower, which could drive more supply and incremental marketing demand. [ Non-English content] Regarding AI's empowerment of online marketing services, as our clients place greater emphasis on operating efficiency and marketing placement ROI, AI has become an important lever for us to help clients improve efficiency, reduce costs, and unlock additional marketing budgets. Specifically for marketing materials, AI has significantly lowered the barriers to content creation.
For example, in industries such as local services and AI tools, AI helps customers and service providers produce content and marketing materials that are more suitable for Kuaishou users in a faster and more cost-effective way, which has also driven growth in marketing demand from these industries. Secondly, in customer operations, AI is being applied to more workflows such as business opportunity insights, product selection suggestions, placement diagnostics, and performance review, as well as customer service. This helps customers and service providers standardize and automate processes that previously relied heavily on manual work, thereby improving operating efficiency.
Meanwhile, on the platform side, we continue to see AI models to improve the matching and conversion efficiency of our advertising system. For example, through better understanding of marketing materials and user interests, as well as intelligent bidding and intelligent price adjustment capabilities, we can help advertisers match their budgets more efficiently with the right users and scenarios.
[ Non-English content] In summary, structural growth opportunities for online marketing services will continue to emerge in the second half. We will continue to harness AI as a key capability to optimize marketing efficiency and marketing placement ROI, driving operational efficiency improvements and commercialization growth for our clients. Thank you.
Thank you, operator. The last question please.
[Non-English content] The last question comes from Yuan Liao of CITIC Securities. Please ask your question.
[ Non-English content] Good evening management. Thanks for taking my questions. After Kling AI finished its financing, what is the impact on Kuaishou's cash flow? Looking forward to the second half year, what is your plan for cash flow expenditure and the total cash flow situation? Thank you.
[ Non-English content] After the completion of Kling AI's financing, we will have more flexibility in managing cash flow expenditures, including addressing additional computing power needs through leasing and other approaches. This will further optimize capital allocation and to some extent improve the group's overall cash flow position. Regarding cash management and capital expenditures, we will continue to adhere to a prudent financial strategy. In terms of execution, the majority of our CapEx was heavily front-loaded in the first half of the year. As a result, the company achieved a positive cash flow in the second quarter, and our objective is to maintain positive group level free cash flow in the second half of this year.
[ Non-English content] On shareholder returns, we have always focused on creating long-term value and consistently executed a proactive shareholder return strategy. Since the beginning of the year, the company has completed share repurchases at an aggregated consideration of approximately HKD 2 billion , and the company has paid HKD 3 billion in cash dividends. Total shareholder returns have already reached close to last year's full-year level. While remaining firmly committed to investing in our AI strategy, we have steadily enhanced shareholder returns. We expect total shareholder returns for the 2026 full-year to exceed last year's level. These initiatives not only represent a tangible return to our shareholders, but also demonstrate the company's ability to generate sustainable cash flows and its confidence in the long-term development of our business.
[ Non-English content] We fully embrace the AI era, and at the same time, we will continue to safeguard and strengthen our company's financial foundation. We are committed to driving cost reductions and efficiency improvements through prudent financial discipline while maintaining a robust and healthy cash position. Harnessing our resilient financial structure as the cornerstone, we will achieve a healthy and sustainable balance between business expansion and shareholder returns, laying a solid foundation for high quality long term growth. Thank you.
Thank you, operator, that's the end of the Q&A session.
[ Non-English content]
Thank you, operator. [ Non-English content] Thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact our capital market and IR team at any time. Thank you.