JOYY Inc. (JOYY)
NASDAQ: JOYY · Real-Time Price · USD
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Sep 16, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT - Market closed
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Earnings Call: Q1 2026

May 26, 2026

Summary

Q1 2026 saw 12.4% year-over-year revenue growth, with all three business segments—Social Entertainment, BIGO Ads, and Shopline—showing strong momentum. A new $1.5 billion shareholder return program was announced, supported by robust cash flow and profitability.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to JOYY Inc.'s first quarter 2026 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 like to hand the conference over to your host today, Jane Xie, the company's Senior Manager of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Jane.

Jane Xie
Senior Manager of Investor Relations, JOYY

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to JOYY's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us today are Ms. Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO of JOYY, and Mr. 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&A session. The financial results and webcasts of this conference call are available at ir.joyy.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 when we make forward-looking statements, including but not limited to the future development of our products and businesses, expected future financial performance of the company, our share repurchases, and other future events, which are entirely subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from our current expectations.

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 discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures that 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 the 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. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in US dollars. I would now turn the call over to our Chairperson and CEO, Ms. Ting Li. Please go ahead, Ting.

Ting Li
Chairperson and CEO, JOYY

Hello, everyone. I'm Ting Li. Thank you for joining us today. Apologize, but I have got a cold recently, and my voice is quite weak. For efficiency of this meeting, I'm going to have our IR team read through the prepared remarks for me. I'll be back to take your questions during the Q&A. Thank you for the understanding.

Jane Xie
Senior Manager of Investor Relations, JOYY

Thank you. As we enter 2026, our social entertainment business has returned to year-over-year growth, while our second growth curve, Ad Tech and Smart Commerce, is progressing with strong momentum. Our globally diversified ecosystem is taking shape with social entertainment, advertising, and Smart Commerce fostering one another in a self-reinforcing strategic flywheel. This flywheel is propelling JOYY into its next phase of growth. Let me begin with an overview of our Q1 results. Total revenues reached $556 million, up 12.4% year-over-year, marking our strongest year-over-year growth rate in recent years. Social entertainment revenue was $400 million, up 3.2% year-over-year. BIGO Ads contributed $125 million, up 55.6% year-over-year, among which our third party, BIGO Audience Network, delivered 78.8% year-over-year growth. Shopline revenue reached $31 million, up 16.1% year-over-year. Q1 non-GAAP operating profit and EBITDA reached $38 million and $46 million, up 22.5% and 13.2% year-over-year respectively.

Operating cash flow for the quarter was $46 million. As of March 31st, 2026, we held over $3.18 billion in net cash. Our strong cash generation continues to support meaningful shareholder returns. Since the start of 2026, we have accelerated our buyback program. Through May 22nd, 2026, we have repurchased a cumulative 88 million in shares and paid $69 million in dividends for a total return of $157 million to shareholders. In light of our solid operational performance and robust balance sheet, the board has just approved an updated shareholder return program totaling $1.5 billion, under which we could repurchase up to $600 million worth of our shares and distribute approximately $900 million in dividends over the next three years.

This underscores our strong confidence in the long-term potential of our business and demonstrates our continued commitment to delivering sustainable value to our shareholders and enabling shareholders to benefit from our operational improvements. This quarter marks the first quarter we are reporting results under our new three-segment structure, Social Entertainment, BIGO Ads, and Shopline. I would like to take this opportunity to reaffirm our long-term strategic vision. We are building a global technology ecosystem driven by AI. This ecosystem is designed to unlock compounding returns from our data assets through the deep integration of Social Entertainment, programmatic advertising, and omni-channel e-commerce, creating a self-reinforcing growth flywheel.

Social entertainment is our foundational business, providing the user base, data assets, and cash flow that support the broader ecosystem. By building a highly engaged global user community, we have accumulated a valuable first-party data asset and a scaled global traffic pool, supported by established technology infrastructure and localized operational networks across key markets. Social entertainment underpins our cash flow generation and serves as the long-term anchor of the group. BIGO Ads accelerates our flywheel, strengthening our data and algo advantages. Through advanced predictive models and algo optimization, we convert traffic into measurable, scalable advertising ROI. Each iteration further enriches our data assets and deepens our algo moat, building a network additive advantage. Shopline is the engine of our one-stop omni-channel e-commerce offering and provides merchants with open connectable infrastructure that puts data ownership back in their hands.

This control empowers them to maximize business performance across the full customer life cycle. AI is the backbone of this entire ecosystem, seamlessly connecting our social data assets, algos, and e-commerce capabilities. Together, these three pillars form a closed-loop system that deepens our economic moat and drives long-term value creation for JOYY. Now let me walk through our Q1 performance and share our outlook on the future. In Q1, social entertainment revenue returned to year-over-year growth of 3.2%, with live streaming revenue up 2.4% year-over-year. Core live streaming paying users grew 5.9% year-over-year. On the traffic side, global average mobile MAUs reached 276 million, up 6.1% year-over-year and 1.5% QoQ. Driven by high user stickiness and fully organic growth, traffic from the Instant Messenger increased by 3.1% QoQ.

For our flagship products, we improved our streamer incentive structure, launched targeted support programs for high-quality content categories, and integrated new AI capabilities. These initiatives drove ongoing gains in both content engagement and payment conversion. Streamer activity improved sequentially despite seasonal impacts. Number of active streamers increased 1.5% QoQ, and average effective streaming hours per streamer rose 1.4% QoQ. We have now fully rolled out our AI smart tools for streamers across key markets, meaningfully improving interaction efficiency. As of April, AI-generated interactive virtual gifts accounted for 34% of total virtual gift consumption on BIGO LIVE. Our new product lineup continued to gain traction, with revenue up over 500% year-over-year and 45% QoQ, setting new monthly revenue records. Our current Q2 guidance implies low to mid single-digit year-over-year growth for social entertainment revenue.

Building on this momentum, we are confident that our social entertainment business will achieve full-year revenue growth in 2026 and sustain this positive trajectory going forward. Moving to BIGO Ads. In Q1, BIGO Ads generated $125 million in advertising revenue, up 55.6% year-over-year. Our third-party business, the BIGO Audience Network, delivered 78.8% year-over-year, despite the seasonal softness of Q1. Broader traffic coverage, multi-vertical advertiser expansion, and ongoing algo optimization fueled this momentum. On supply side, SDK traffic maintained strong growth, up 109% year-over-year and 7% QoQ in Q1. On demand side, our strategic presence across multiple verticals, including lead generation, e-commerce, and IAA, drove an enrichment of our advertiser mix and enhanced ecosystem density. This multi-vertical approach not only accelerates data accumulation and algo iteration, but also strengthens our traffic bidding capabilities. Notably, web-based demand, primarily from lead gen and e-commerce advertisers, grew 90% year-over-year and delivered positive sequential growth.

Incremental spend from both new and existing advertisers fully offset the typical seasonal softness of Q1. IAA spending sustained 97% year-over-year growth. Geographically, we prioritize high-value developed markets. South America remains our largest market for BIGO Ads, while Western Europe delivered notable momentum, with revenue up 27% QoQ. On the algo side, we're carefully and prudently scaling our computing infrastructure and strengthening our R&D talent base. By integrating data feedback from advertisers across channels and leveraging the dual growth of traffic scale and advertiser density, we have built a rich behavioral data layer. This enables multidimensional precise user profiling and real-time model iteration, which in turn improves ad delivery efficiency. The fact that we're seeing positive feedback across multiple verticals validates the generalization capabilities of our model framework.

As our data scale accelerates and the vertical specific models mature, we expect our algo flywheel will increasingly serve as the primary engine of our revenue growth going forward. We reiterate our strategic commitment to reaching $1 billion in BIGO Audience Network revenue by 2028. As our third-party advertising business continues to scale, we expect a steady structural improvement in profitability. Turning to Shopline, this is the first quarter we're reporting Shopline as a standalone segment. The decision to do so now reflects our belief that Shopline has reached a critical mass in terms of its importance to the group, and that Shopline will become an increasingly meaningful contributor to our growth going forward. As global commerce enters the omnichannel era, merchants increasingly desire autonomy and full funnel data ownership. We have built Shopline as AI native, one-stop omnichannel e-commerce infrastructure.

What we offer merchants is not simply a storefront building tool and a fully open connectable retail operating system. Through deep integration with payments, logistics, and marketing modules, we empower merchants across every stage of their journey, from store setup and transactions, to fulfillment and full lifecycle customer retention. Globally, very few vendors are capable of delivering this kind of OS-level closed-loop solution. We are also accelerating the integration of a suite of AI-powered capabilities. Tools will drive Shopline's ongoing evolution from an enablement tool to an AI-driven commerce engine could represent a fundamental shift in how merchants operate. AI-powered traffic allocation and automated decision-making will unlock new growth opportunities and new levels of precision across omnichannel retail. On monetization, beyond high retention subscription fees, we generate revenue through transaction-based value-added services and payment and marketing. These reflect a fundamental distinction from traditional seat-based software tools.

This monetization model, deeply aligned with merchants' full lifecycle growth, will fuel Shopline's ongoing accelerating performance. Q1 is traditionally a slow season for e-commerce, yet Shopline delivered solid results. Revenue was $31 million, up 16.1% year-over-year, with gross margin expanding further to 51.5%. Revenue growth from cross-border merchants remained robust, sustaining over 60% year-over-year growth. Our Q2 guidance implies Shopline's revenue growth accelerating to above 25% year-over-year in Q2. This meaningful progress marks Shopline's transition from incubation to a phase of scaled growth. Propelled by accelerated revenue and gross profit growth, Shopline is on a clear and visible path to achieve breakeven by 2028. Additionally, as BIGO Ads makes steady progress in the DTC e-commerce vertical and moves past its cold start phase, we anticipate increasingly tangible synergies between these two businesses going forward.

These mark a crucial long-term strategic objective of JOYY, and we are committed to solid execution to unlock this untapped potential. Finally, in summary, our strategic layout and the unlocking of our ecosystem's values remain in their early stages. Looking ahead, we expect our three business segments to generate stronger structural synergy, further deepening our competitive moat and driving JOYY's long-term value to its next level. With that, I will now hand the call over to Alex Liu, our Vice President of Finance, to walk you through our financial results in detail.

Alex Liu
VP of Finance, JOYY

Thanks, Ms. Ting and Jane. Hello, everyone. Beginning this quarter, we are reporting Social Entertainment, BIGO Ads and Shopline as standalone segments. This reflects a strategic inflection point. BIGO Ads and Shopline have evolved from incubation projects into scalable growth engines. Let's turn to financial overview of the quarter. In the first quarter of 2026, we recorded total net revenues of $555.7 million, securing a year-over-year growth of 12.4%. Our strongest year-over-year growth rate in recent years. Our non-GAAP EBITDA for the quarter was $45.7 million, and our operating cash flow was $46 million in quarter one, and we ended the quarter with roughly $3.18 billion in net cash. As previously communicated, we executed share buyback since the [entry] into 2026, buying back $87.9 million worth of our shares as of May 22.

In light of our solid operational performance and robust benefit, we have just announced an updated shareholder return program totaling $1.5 billion, in which we could repurchase up to $600 million worth of our shares and distribute up to $900 million in dividends over the next three years. This represents a 67% expansion from the previous program, showing our strong confidence in the company's long-term prospects. I will now dive deeper into our detailed financial performance. Social entertainment revenues were $400.4 million for the first quarter, delivering its first year-over-year recovery of 3.2% year-over-year. In particular, live streaming revenues returned to 2.4% year-over-year growth, which marks an inflection point and a result of the strategic adjustments we executed over the past several quarters. Total streaming paying users increased by 5.9% year-over-year, while live streaming revenues from developed countries increased by 11.2% year-over-year.

BIGO Ads continued to deliver exceptional growth, with its revenue up by 55.6% year-over-year to $124.8 million. In particular, our third-party ads revenue, BIGO Audience Network, delivered outstanding results, recording 78.8% revenue growth year-over-year. On the traffic front, SDK network and request was up by 109% year-over-year and 7% quarter-on-quarter in quarter one. Our multi-industry strategy has helped us capture growing market opportunities. Web-based demand was up by 90% year-over-year. Mobile-based demand continued to be strong, with [audio distortion] up by 97% year-over-year. We are right on track to achieve our three-year strategic goal for BIGO Audience Network, which is maintaining high velocity growth and reaching three-year revenue milestone of $1 billion. While we are prudently investing in the expansion for our R&D and tools capabilities, as well as our network and computing infrastructure, all these networks' economics remain healthy.

We are confident that as we scale, we will remain profitable and potentially further enhance all the network economics in the medium term. Shopline kicked off its busiest quarter, generating revenue of $30.5 million, delivering a 16.1% year-over-year revenue growth. Cross-border merchant revenue was up by 66%, with its revenue contribution up by 8% compared to Q1 last year. We expect cross-border merchant revenue to maintain a high velocity growth going forward, while lasting revenue contribution from this merchant segment will lead to gradual acceleration of Shopline's overall revenue growth. Group's gross profit was $189.3 million in the quarter, with a gross margin of 34.1%. BIGO Ads gross margin was down quarter-over-quarter due to a shift in our revenue mix, which saw an increased contribution from our lower margin network ad revenues.

Shopline's gross margin was up by 6.8 percentage points year-over-year to 51.5%, primarily due to growth in high-margin subscription revenues, as well as improving gross margin for its value-added service revenues. Our group's operating expenses for the quarter were $183.4 million. Shopline marketing expenses were higher year-over-year, consistent with revenue increase. G&A expenses were also higher year-over-year, primarily due to increased share-based compensation expenses. Our group's non-GAAP operating income for the quarter was $38 million. Non-GAAP net income attributable to controlling interest of JOYY in the quarter was $55.9 million. The group's non-GAAP net income margin was 10.1% in the quarter. Our non-GAAP net income was lower due to higher FX loss of $13.6 million due to the weakening U.S. dollar. Excluding the impact of FX losses, our non-GAAP net income was $69.5 million, up by 8.7% year-over-year.

For the first quarter of 2026, we booked net cash inflows from operating activities of $46 million. Our balance sheet remains healthy, with a strong net cash position of $3.18 billion as of March 31st, 2026. As of May 22, we have returned $156.8 million to our shareholders through dividends and share buyback. Our accelerated share buybacks in the past quarters and the newly introduced three-year shareholder return program reaffirms our previous statement. Shareholder return has been and will continue to be an important component of our capital allocation strategy. We will remain focused on delivering strong results, actively executing our new programs, and enable our shareholders to benefit from our operational improvements. Turning now to our business outlook. At a group level, we expect our net revenues for the second quarter of 2026 to be between $562 million and $581 million.

This implies a 10.7%-14.4% year-over-year growth on the gross revenue. With Social Entertainment sustaining positive growth year-over-year, BIGO Ads delivering mid-double-digit growth, while Shopline growth accelerating in the second quarter. To summarize, Q1 2026 marks a pivotal milestone for JOYY. We have delivered our strongest year-over-year revenue growth in recent years. We aligned our reporting structure to match our strategic priorities and accelerated our commitment to capital returns through enhanced buybacks. Looking ahead, we are extremely excited about the tremendous synergetic potential and the powerful flywheel momentum that our business segments will deliver in medium to long term. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we would now like to open up the call to questions. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish 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. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong
Analyst, Jefferies

[Non-English content]

Hi, good morning. Thanks management for taking my question. My first question is that this is the first time the company disclosed its performance in three business segments, namely Social Entertainment, BIGO Ads and Shopline. For Social Entertainment, live streaming revenue achieved a positive year-over-year growth in Q1. Can management further elaborate whether this is a sustainable recovery? My second question is about our full year outlook. Can management comment about our 2026 revenue and profit guidance for each business line this year? Thank you.

Ting Li
Chairperson and CEO, JOYY

[Non-English content]

Speaker 9

Thank you, Thomas. I will answer your question. For the first question, for Q1, as expected, our social entertainment revenue was up by 3.2% year-over-year, with live streaming revenue up 2.4% on year-over-year, returning to a positive year-over-year growth trajectory. We have been executing a series of structural enhancements since the second half of 2024, particularly with our streamer incentive mechanisms. These, we believe, have continued to strengthen our live streaming ecosystem. Despite Q1 typically being a slow season for streamer activity, we still achieved a sequential increase in the number of active streamers and also the average effective streaming hours per streamer. Notably, the music streamers, which is one of our key quality content genre, also saw a meaningful uptick in streamer participation.

Building on the improved content supply and streamer engagement, we continue to refine our user segmentation and also upgrade our tiers paying user benefit system. Combined with AI-driven optimization on content distribution and also payment experience, these efforts drove further improvement in paying conversion, with core live streaming paying users growing nearly 6% year-over-year. Our new product lineup also continued to gain traction in Q1, with revenue up over 500%, setting new monthly records and contributing incremental revenue to Social Entertainment. Looking ahead, our current Q2 guidance implies a low to mid single-digit year-over-year growth for Social Entertainment revenue, which represent an acceleration from Q1. Building on this momentum, we are confident that live streaming revenue and also Social Entertainment revenue will achieve steady positive growth in 2026.

Alex Liu
VP of Finance, JOYY

[Non-English content]

Speaker 9

This is Alex. I will take your second question. For Q2, our current guidance implies 10.7%-14.4% year-over-year growth for our group revenue. By segment, we expect Social Entertainment to deliver low-to-mid-single-digit year-over-year growth. BIGO Ads to sustain mid-double-digit year-over-year growth and Shopline driving the growth to accelerate to above 25% year-over-year. For the full year of 2026, we expect Social Entertainment to deliver steady year-over-year growth rate. For BIGO Ads, with continued traffic expansion, deepening multi-vertical advertisement coverage and ongoing algo optimization, we expect a strong mid-double-digit year-over-year growth for full year. For Shopline, with accelerating cross-border merchant penetration and also new market expansion, we expect to sustain double-digit revenue growth.

With all three segments now entering into an upward trajectory, we are confident that the group will deliver positive solid revenue growth for the full year of 2026. Turning to operating profit, for Q2, we expect sequential improvement in the group operating profit in line with our QoQ revenue growth across our segments. For the full year, on Social Entertainment side, with live streaming revenue back to growth, we expect live streaming profit to remain stable or grow modestly. For BIGO Ads, our Audience Network is rapidly scaling and we will need to continue to invest in R&D, sales and also our network infrastructure. Given the healthy economics of the Audience Network at this stage, we are confident that as we scale, we will remain profitable and we expect to see further improvement in its economics over the medium term.

For Shopline, with its operating expenses relatively fixed and our revenue and gross profit growth will drive continued narrowing of its operating losses. Overall speaking, we expect the group's non-GAAP operating profit and EBITDA to continue the improving trend that we achieved in 2025, delivering a steady teens year-over-year growth in 2026. At a net profit level, I do want to provide some additional context on FX fluctuations. Due to the continued weakening of the U.S. dollar against RMB, we recorded significant unrealized FX losses in Q1, and we expect similar impact from FX in Q2. However, we'd like to remind you that these are non-operational mark to market fluctuations, so when the dollar strengthens, they will be reversed.

Jane Xie
Senior Manager of Investor Relations, JOYY

Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from Cici Cheng with CLSA. Please go ahead.

Cici Cheng
Analyst, CLSA

[Non-English content]

Ting Li
Chairperson and CEO, JOYY

[Non-English content]

[Non-English content]

Speaker 9

I will take your question. In Q1, BIGO has delivered 55.6% year-over-year growth, with third-party BIGO Audience Network growing by 78.8% year-over-year, also delivering a modest positive sequential growth. The overall performance was ahead of our expectations, I would attribute it to the following key drivers. First of all, our multi-vertical strategy is definitely delivering clear results, leveraging our established capabilities in lead generation, direct to customer e-commerce, and also IAA. Our web-based demand grew by 90% year-over-year in Q1, delivered positive sequential growth, despite Q1 being a slow season. IAA demand grew by 97%, this was the primary reason that we were able to deliver better than expected results during Q1. Secondly, the continuous upgrade of our algo capabilities.

We have been driving broader cross-channel data feedback from advertisers, combined with AI-powered labeling and richer user behavioral data, which significantly enhanced our user profiling and ad delivery efficiency on the platform. We've also completed a framework upgrade to our core predictive model with specialized optimizations across lead gen, IAA, and e-commerce verticals. As data accumulates and algo iterates, we are seeing sustained improvements in monetization efficiency with higher advertiser retention and also a growing average spend per advertiser, forming a self-reinforcing effect. Going forward, we will continue to optimize and iterate our algo models. The positive results that we have already achieved across multiple verticals have validated the generalization capability of our model framework.

As data continue to accumulate at an accelerating pace and vertical specific models continue to mature, the algo flywheel is gaining momentum and expected to increasingly serve as the primary engine for our advertiser revenue growth in the following stage, particularly in the second half and also even beyond. Regarding your question on mediation partnerships, on traffic side, we are actively advancing integrations with industry leading mediation platforms. One of our partnership has already entered the beta testing phase, and we expect to complete our official integration within 2026. Once live, it will enable advertisers to reach a broader pool of high quality traffic globally, further extending our traffic coverage in depth and breadth and injecting new momentum into the flywheel. We have very strong confidence in sustaining rapid growth for BIGO Audience Network. Thank you. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Raphael Chen with BOCI Research. Please go ahead.

Raphael Chen
Analyst, BOCI Research

[Non-English content ] Thanks management for the opportunity to ask question. Noticing that Shopline made its first standalone disclosure. Could management elaborate more insights on the latest business updates and the path to break even profitability? Thank you.

Ting Li
Chairperson and CEO, JOYY

[Non-English content]

Speaker 9

Thank you Raphael for your question. This is Li Ting. Yes, this is the first quarter that we are putting Shopline as a standalone segment. As we mentioned in our prepared remarks, we have positioned Shopline as an AI-native one-stop omni-channel commerce infrastructure. What we are building is not a simple storefront building tool, but rather an open and connectable extensible retail operating system that deeply integrates payments, logistics and marketing modules, allowing merchants to manage everything from store setup and transactions to fulfillment and full lifecycle customer retention on one single platform.

Globally speaking, very few vendors are capable of delivering this kind of OS-level closed-loop solution. In terms of revenue model, we have built a differentiated monetization framework anchored by high stickiness on subscription fees and accelerated by high growth value-added services. On one hand, a stable subscription revenue serves as the foundational entry point, building a robust merchant base and generating recurring revenue. On the other hand, through deeply penetrating the transaction loop and monetizing GMV through rapidly growing value-added services including payment and also marketing.

This monetization model, which is deeply aligned with the full lifecycle growth of merchants, will serve as the primary engine driving the continuous growth in Shopline's financial performance. When we look at Shopline's merchant base, we currently serve two major categories: local merchants and also cross-border merchants. Revenues from cross-border merchants, predominantly key accounts, the larger brands, have maintained high velocity growth since last year. Our R&D spend, which has been our primary OpEx, has largely stabilized, and the improvement in revenue and gross profit is generating operating leverage, and Shopline's losses are narrowing meaningfully. Looking ahead, we see a clear and achievable path for Shopline to reach breakeven by 2028, and we are fully committed to delivering on that. Thank you.

Jane Xie
Senior Manager of Investor Relations, JOYY

Maybe one last question, please.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Xueqing Zhang with CICC. Please go ahead.

Xueqing Zhang
Analyst, CICC

[Non-English content]

Thanks management for taking my question. My question about shareholder returns. The company announced a new three-year shareholder return plan of $1.5 billion this quarter, including $600 million in share buyback and $900 million in dividends. Can management share the thinking behind the significant increase in shareholder returns? Thank you.

Alex Liu
VP of Finance, JOYY

[Non-English content]

Speaker 9

Thank you Xueqing for your question. This is Alex. We are very pleased to announce this quarter our new three-year shareholder return plan totaling $1.5 billion, covering fiscal years 2026 through 2028. This replaces our previous program totaling $900 million, representing a roughly 67% expansion in our total commitment. Specifically, the new plan comprises two components: annual dividend of $300 million per year. That would be up by 50% from our previous $200 million per year. Our annual share buybacks, the share repurchase authorization per year, the annualized buyback quota would be $200 million, and that would be nearly doubling the average quota of $100 million under the previous plan. There were several key considerations behind our decision. First of all three business segments are now on a clear growth trajectory, providing a very, very solid foundation for a higher level of shareholder returns. At the same time, our strong net cash position.

As of the end of Q1, we still have around $3.2 billion of net cash on hand. This gives us the full financial capacity to execute on this commitment. We do believe that the current share price still materially undervalues our long term potential, and our commitment to increasing buyback is a very direct expression of the management's strong conviction in the future of the company. Looking ahead over the next three years, we are firmly committed to executing this plan and enabling our shareholders to benefit from improving operations.

Jane Xie
Senior Manager of Investor Relations, JOYY

That was the last question. Thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with everyone next quarter. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. This conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.