Welcome to the JOYY Inc.'s fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Jane Xie, the company Senior Manager of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Jane.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to JOYY's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. Joining us today are Mr. David Xueling Li, Chairman and CEO of JOYY, our CFO, Mr. Bing Jin, and COO, Ms. Ting Li. For today's call, management will first provide a review of the quarter, and then we will conduct a Q&A section. The fourth quarter 2020 financial results and webcast of this conference call are available at ir.joyy.sg. A replay of this call will also be available on our website in a few hours. Before we continue, I refer you to our safe harbor statement in our earnings press release, which apply to this call as we will make forward-looking statements. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in renminbi.
I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mr. David Xueling Li. Please go ahead, sir.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to our fourth quarter 2020 earnings conference call.
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2020 marks a turning point in our company's development. In 2010, when we initially launched YY Live, we envisioned a business that connected people and enriched their lives. Since then, our vision has led us to successfully develop and capitalize on a number of growth initiatives, including YY Live, Huya, Bigo Live, Likee, Hago, and more. Today, excluding YY Live, JOYY serves over 350 million users worldwide through a diverse portfolio of online entertainment products in live streaming, short-form video, casual games, instant messaging, and audio-based social media. After nearly five years of development, our overseas business, Bigo, has already generated larger revenue than YY Live in 2020. Our track record of success has validated not only our long-term growth strategy, but also our unique capability in leading continuous innovation and our commitment to generating impressive ROI for shareholders.
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Going forward, we will remain focused on fueling our live streaming and short-form video growth engines, accelerating our overseas expansion, and building JOYY into an increasingly vibrant, diverse, and engaging social entertainment ecosystem. We firmly believe that Bigo Live has the potential to grow to at least four times the scale of YY Live in terms of revenue. We also foresee great monetization potential for Likee, as it enjoys substantial competitive advantage in low entry barrier for user content production, high user engagement and interactivity, and intrinsic social features. We plan to realize the potential of both platforms through a combination of global footprints and localized operation.
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To further localize our product offerings and business operations, we will further strengthen our talent team with technology expertise, global vision, and local knowledge. As of December 2020, over 25% of Bigo staff were hired locally.
Armed with local language, cultural background, and consumer insights, our employees are able to tailor our products to the unique user preferences in each target market and thus expand our local user base。
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Now turning to our quarterly performance.
As we prepare our next phase of growth in the post-pandemic world, we continue to witness a rising demand for online entertainment and socialization, as evidenced by our solid financial and operational results in the fourth quarter.
Bigo's revenue increased by 87.9% year-over-year to CNY 3.4 billion in the fourth quarter, primarily driven by continued user base growth and improved monetization capabilities of several platforms.
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In the fourth quarter, Bigo Live's revenue increased by 100.4% year-over-year, while increasing its MAUs outside of India by 54.2% year-over-year to 28.7 million.
Developed markets also continued to perform strongly in the quarter, as Bigo Live's revenue in developed markets increased by 198.8% year-over-year, driven by a 68.2% year-over-year increase in MAUs and a 131.6% year-over-year increase in paying users.
Additionally, revenues in the Middle East grew by 87.4% year-over-year, driven by a 63% year-over-year increase in MAUs and 85.4% year-over-year increase in paying users。
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During the fourth quarter, in addition to fulfilling users' needs for pan-entertainment content, Bigo Live also augmented its user activity and engagement by continuously innovating its social interaction features.
For example, our newly released features enabled users to seamlessly move between single and multi-user group chat rooms, empowering ordinary users to easily integrate live streaming into their regular social interactions. As a result, on a sequential basis, our user base penetration rates increased by 10.9% for multi-user video chat rooms and 2.3% for multi-user audio chat rooms.
As we continue executing such product strategy, we are laying a solid foundation for sustainable growth going forward.
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On the brand enhancement front, we hosted the second annual BIGO Awards Gala in January, which featured a variety of live performances including fire dances, DJ sets, and K-pop dances by top streamers from around the world. Although this year's gala was held entirely online due to travel and social gathering restrictions, Bigo's influential brand attracted approximately four million views globally and over 20 million viewers votes for their favorite performances.
To further boost Bigo's brand recognition, we placed billboards for award-winning streamers at landmarks across 23 different countries, including N.Y.C.'s Times Square, Seoul's COEX Convention Center, Istanbul's Istanbul Sapphire, and many others.
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We further expanded Likee's user base and accelerated its commercialization. In the first quarter, Likee's MAUs outside India grew by 119% year-over-year to 114 million. In addition, its user base continued to expand rapidly in many regions, with MAUs ramping up by 55.3% year-over-year in developed countries and 233.9% year-over-year in the Middle East.
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While maintaining its rapid global user base expansion in the fourth quarter, Likee also made significant progress in monetization, mainly through live streaming. Consequently, Likee's revenue increased by 407.5% year-over-year and 41.4% quarter-over-quarter, largely driven by growth in developed worlds and the Middle East. Revenue from developed markets grew by 299% year-over-year, while revenue from the Middle East multiplied by 31 x year-over-year.
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To help Likee's users further enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of their content production, we continue to improve the platform's video capturing and image enhancement tools in the quarter. Our upgrade of AI-powered music recommendation feature can automatically provide users with suitable background music options for their self-produced videos. As a result, the average daily number of video uploads featuring our recommended soundtracks increased by 300,000 in a quarter. Moreover, by continuously optimizing our search engine algorithms, we were able to boost our user search satisfaction rate by 3% quarter-over-quarter.
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As the leading global short-form video platform, we prioritize the quality and availability of content at the core engine to drive Likee's sustainable growth.
As such, we seek to attract top-tier content creators, optimize content recommendation algorithms, and refine our user experiences continuously. In 2021, we plan to further localize Likee's content ecosystem and social community by reducing its entry barriers to content production, boosting its content creators' enthusiasm and productivity, and empowering content creators in all aspects. With its social community DNA, user interaction propensity, and accelerated monetization via live streaming, Likee enables the talented creators to reach large audience and gain more economic rewards, who in turn produce more quality content for Likee, thus forming a virtuous cycle.
As a result, we believe that we are able to attract a broader range of content creators, further enrich our content offerings, and ultimately bring new users to the platform.
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As Hago increased its quarterly prepaid user count by 121.2%, its revenue grew by 69.4% year-over-year. In line with our previous forecasts, Hago achieved the first single breakeven month in the fourth quarter of 2020 and narrowed its quarterly loss as compared to the average of the first three quarters in 2020. Product wise, we introduced a game feature called Party, so that multiple users can play casual games and interact with one another through our audio chat rooms at the same time. Such update enhanced user interactions on the platform as the user base penetration rate for our feature channels improved by 51% year-over-year to 41.9%.
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Summary, during the fourth quarter, we achieved rapid user growth and promising monetization progress for selected products. Going forward, we will uphold our mission to connect people and enrich their lives through video, expand our global footprint through localization, and construct an increasingly diversified social entertainment ecosystem.
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Beyond expanding our existing business, we also stay attuned to new opportunities in the industrial AI Internet and cross-border e-commerce sectors. In addition, leveraging on our established technical expertise in real-time audio and video interactions, as well as our extensive social entertainment applications, we have already made preliminary exploration in cloud-based enterprise services. Looking ahead, we will continue to explore new business development opportunities and generate greater returns for our long-term shareholders.
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Before I turn the call to our CFO, Bing Jin, I would like to take a moment to thank him for his years of dedication and contributions to JOYY. As previously disclosed in our SEC filing, Bing is pursuing a new job opportunity and will leave his position as the Company CFO at the end of April. On behalf of all of our colleagues here at JOYY, I wish him the best in his future endeavors. In the meantime, we have commenced a search process for a new CFO.
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That concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn the call to Bing for a more detailed explanation of our public financial results.
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Due to the connection problem, I'll have the operator call me again. Please bear with us for seconds.
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Please go ahead.
Thanks, David. Hello, everyone. As David noted, I will leave my current position as the company's CFO at the end of April to pursue a new job opportunity. I would like to start off by saying that it has been a true honor to serve as JOYY's CFO and grow together with the company over the past several years. I will always cherish this experience and would like to thank David and all of my colleagues here for their guidance, support, and friendship. Looking ahead, I firmly believe that this company remains well-positioned to continue developing its competitive advantage, increasing its share of global social entertainment market, and delivering outstanding results.
Now as JOYY's CFO, I will talk about the financial results. Please note that the financial information and non-GAAP financial information disclosed in our fourth quarter earnings press release is presented on a continuing operations basis unless otherwise specifically stated. After the deconsolidation of Huya, the company accounts for our investment in Huya as an equity method investment and applied the equity method accounting one quarter in arrears to enable us to provide financial disclosures independent of the reporting schedule of Huya. As the company entered into definitive agreements with Baidu on November 16th, 2020, pursuant to which Baidu will acquire JOYY's domestic video-based entertainment live streaming business, YY Live, and the sale of YY Live was substantially completed on February 8th, 2021. The historical financial results of YY Live are reflected in the company's consolidated financial statements as discontinued operations accordingly, starting from the fourth quarter of 2020.
During the fourth quarter of 2020, we maintained our strong momentum and delivered robust financial and operating metrics. Our total net revenue for the fourth quarter increased by 77.5% year-over-year to CNY 3.78 billion from CNY 2.13 billion in the same period of 2019. In particular, our live streaming revenues for the fourth quarter increased by 93.3% year-over-year to CNY 3.59 billion, driven by live streaming revenues growth from Bigo. Other revenues in the fourth quarter decreased by 30.5% to CNY 189.6 million. Cost of revenues for the fourth quarter increased by 76.6% year-over-year to CNY 2.67 billion.
Revenue sharing fees and content costs increased to CNY 1.69 billion in the fourth quarter from CNY 708.6 million in the same period of 2019, which was in line with the increase in live streaming revenues. Bandwidth costs decreased to CNY 179.5 million from CNY 221.8 million in the same period of 2019, primarily related to the company's improved efficiency and the termination of bandwidth usage from users in India after its measures to block certain Chinese mobile apps in late June 2020, partially offset by the continued user base expansion outside India. Gross profit increased by 79.6% year-over-year to CNY 1.11 billion.
Gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2020 improved to 29.3% from 29% in the same period of 2019. Operating expenses for the fourth quarter increased to CNY 1.68 billion from CNY 1.58 billion in the same period of 2019. Among the operating expenses, sales and marketing expenses increased to CNY 973.8 million in the period from CNY 782 million in the same period of 2019, primarily due to the company's increased efforts in sales marketing activities in overseas markets. Our general and administrative expenses for the first quarter decreased to CNY 236.3 million from CNY 319.8 million in the same period of 2019, mostly due to decrease in provision for loss allowances of receivables.
Our GAAP operating loss for the fourth quarter decreased to CNY 557.6 million from CNY 863.3 million in the same period of 2019. Operating loss margin for the first quarter was narrowed to 14.7% from 26.5% in the same period of 2019, primarily due to narrowing operating losses at Bigo. Non-GAAP operating loss for Q4, which excludes the effect from amortization of intangible assets from business acquisitions, as well as impairment of goodwill and investment and gain on disposal of subsidiaries and business, decreased by 60.7% to CNY 220.7 million, compared to CNY 561.5 million in the same period of 2019.
non-GAAP operating loss margin for the fourth quarter was narrowed to 5.8% from 26.3% in the prior year period. Notably, Bigo has achieved a positive non-GAAP operating income for the second consecutive quarter of CNY 49.2 million. With non-GAAP operating margin improved to 1.5% from negative 11.3% in the prior period. GAAP net loss attributable to controlling interests of JOYY for the fourth quarter of 2020 was CNY 791.9 million, compared to CNY 816.6 million in the same period of 2019. Net loss margin was 20.9% in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared to 38.3% in the corresponding period of 2019. non-GAAP net loss attributable to controlling interests and common shareholders of JOYY was CNY 149.4 million from CNY 455.7 million in the same period of 2019.
Non-GAAP net loss margin was narrowed to 3.9% in the fourth quarter of 2020 from 21.4% in the same period of 2019. Diluted net loss per ADS in the fourth quarter of 2020 was CNY 10.07, compared to CNY 10.43 in the same period of 2019. Non-GAAP diluted net loss per ADS was narrowed to CNY 1.86 from CNY 5.7 in the same period of 2019. Turning to our results for the full year of 2020. Our total net revenues increased by 112.1% year-over-year to CNY 13.23 billion, driven by the same factors that led to the quarterly increase. Our net loss attributable to continuing interests of JOYY for the full year of 2020 decreased by 79.7% to CNY 105.3 million from CNY 515.7 million in 2019.
Our non-GAAP net loss attributable to continuing interests and common shareholders of JOYY for the full year of 2020 was CNY 1.54 billion, compared to CNY 1.96 billion in 2019. Non-GAAP gross loss for the full year of 2020 was improved to 18.6%, compared to 31.5% in 2019. Diluted net loss per ADS for the full year of 2020 narrowed by 71.6% year over year to CNY 2.14 from CNY 7.54 in 2019. Non-GAAP diluted net loss per ADS for the full year of 2020 was narrowed to CNY 14.28, compared to CNY 25.42 in 2019.
In addition, in accordance with our quarterly dividend plan approved on August 11th, 2020, and on November 16th, we will be distributing a dividend of $0.51 per ADS for the fourt quarter of 2020, which is expected to be paid on April 30, 2021, to shareholders of record, as of the close of business on April 19, 2021. We would like to provide an update to our execution of the share repurchase program announced on May 2020, under which the company may repurchase up to $200 million of its shares till August 2021. As of December 31st, 2021, the company had repurchased approximately $139.5 million of its shares. As mentioned in David's speech, we will continue to invest in business development initiatives to further expand our global market reach, cultivate our highly engaged user community, and augment our high-quality content offerings.
We will also actively explore other ways to return value to our shareholders and maximize shareholder value, such as a potential dividend payout or share buyback programs. For the first quarter of 2021, we expect our net revenue to be between $590 million and $605 million, representing a year-over-year increase between 72.5%-76.9%, if excluding the revenue contribution from Huya and YY Live in the same period of last year. We currently have limited visibility surrounding the COVID-19 epidemic's long-term impact and geo-political uncertainties in our business and the markets in which we operate. Therefore, this forecast only reflects our current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we would now like to open up the call to questions. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. For the convenience of everyone on the call, please ask one question at a time. If you wish to ask more questions, please rejoin the queue. Also, when asking a question, please state your question in Chinese first, then immediately repeat your question in English. Thank you. Our first question comes from Thomas Chong at Jefferies. Please go ahead.
[Non-English Content ] Thanks management for taking my questions, congratulations on a strong set of results. My question is about Bigo Live. Can management share about the paying ratio as well as the ARPU at the moment? With regard to our 2020 revenue growth, what's the contribution coming from user paying ratio as well as ARPU?
Thank you.
Thank you, Thomas. Let me address those questions. In terms of the current paying ratio ARPU of Bigo Live. Let's talk about the paying ratio first. The paying ratio of Bigo Live is still lower than in China all in live, but we have seen a good ramp up of the paying ratio for Bigo Live, particularly Bigo Live strategies penetrating in the developed markets. Developed markets as revenue contribution to Bigo Live is over 43% already. As we have covered more developed markets, the paying behavior, the paying capability of those developed markets users obviously is much higher than the original emerging markets. We will continue to see a ramp up of the paying ratio, but it's still lower than in China at this stage. We see a good future potential. In terms of the ARPU, as we explained to the investor before, and analyst before, the general ARPU of Bigo Live is around 3 x of YY Live.
As we penetrate to more developed markets, we will also see a future ramp up of the ARPU level for Bigo Live in general. In terms of the contribution for our revenue in 2020, as you can see, we have achieved more than 110% year-on-year growth for revenue contribution. I will say roughly one third is from the user expansion, meaning the MAU growth for Bigo Live, particularly driven by developed markets, as I mentioned, and one third for paying ratio expansion, and also one third for ARPU expansion. Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Alex Poon at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
[Non-English content ] 。My question is related to Likee. Could management please share the user and revenue target in the next one to two years?
In terms of the user engagement, revenue diversification, geographical distribution, how is it different from Bigo Live? In terms of user behavior, is there any notable difference between Likee and short video platforms in China? Thank you very much.
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Hi, this is David. Let me answer your question. As I mentioned in the previous speech, Likee just started modernization recently. In the past three years of development, we have focused on user expansion and also on community cultivation. I believe that in the long run, we expect some changes to Likee's long term strategy in the following aspects, especially in terms of understanding of the competitive landscape. Would like to prioritize two features of our Likee.
First one is the social community and user interaction. Second, it's our content creators. I believe that if we continue to cultivate our social community, improve user interaction, and continue to empower our content creators in all aspects, we'll be able to achieve a differentiated competitive advantage against our competitors. Especially based on our understanding and our knowledge, we believe that a lot of our competitors are still having a very completely different ecosystem, whereby it's more like a media feature, whereby the KOLs are dominated platforms. While Likee is more content, it's more a community which emphasizes user interactions and also content creator-focused. I believe that based on such a long-term strategy, we'll be able to have a differentiated competitive advantage in the global industry, and that would also help the company and Likee to achieve a long-term sustainable growth. Thank you.
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Our next question comes from Yiwen Zhang at Citi. Please go ahead.
[Non-English content ]. Thank you management for taking my question. So my question is on the overseas live streaming. We entered in this market for five to six years, and we entered different markets in different time. Can we discuss what stage of live streaming in each market is?
Like Middle East and also America and Europe. Can you touch on any recent trends you've seen in live streaming industry in overseas market? Thank you.
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This is David. Let me take your question. I would love to clarify here is that, if you look at our quarter-over-quarter growth rate for Bigo in CNY, you might consider growth rate relatively flat with minor decrease. If you actually exclude the FX loss fluctuation, and you look at it on a constant currency basis in terms of US dollar, we actually accomplished a quarter-over-quarter increase of 4% and year-over-year increase of 82%. That actually proves our point that the overseas live streaming industry is actually growing at a very fast speed. Especially if you look at the scale of Bigo's revenue. Right now, we have already surpassed CNY 10 billion, in terms of revenue for the full year.
The fact that we'll be able to grow our revenue at such a rapid speed, at such scale, proves the potential of the overseas live streaming industry. Also, in the past, it was a tradition for the market to believe that the U.S. users do not actually have the habit of tipping on live streaming platforms. Well, actually, in the past few years of business practice, we've actually witnessed a very strong growth in the live streaming sector in the U.S. market. It's not a China-specific business model. It's already a well-established, and well-accepted business model to monetize your users.
We believe that it's actually a quite, not only mature, but a very user-friendly business model in a way that it does not interrupt the users from enjoying the use of these applications, and it does not interrupt the users' user experience improvement while using their app. It's actually a very good business model as compared to a lot of other monetization tools. If you look back, as we launched our audio live streaming and video live streaming back in 2010, I think that we've witnessed the growth process, the trajectory in the past 10 years. We've seen that today it has come to the point in China that almost all internet companies, small and big, have all included live streaming as a very essential and important, or even main monetization tool.
I think that it will be the same for U.S. and also the other overseas countries, especially in U.S., for platforms such as YouTube, Instagram or Facebook. I think it's very likely that it will all kick off monetization via live streaming soon. It's just a matter of time and the difference in terms of the stage of development between the PRC live streaming sector and the overseas sector. We believe that such evolution will continue to drive the market potential of the overseas live streaming sector to even larger, and also everyone will be able to contribute to the whole ecosystem. In China, we have seen that even with the major, the big conglomerates entering into the live streaming sector, it actually does not affect those existing players' market share or their revenue scale.
It's because what we saw was that the market began to recognize or increasingly recognize the business model and the scale of the total market began to increase to a new level. Also for the applications, it was previously mainly focused on entertainment live streaming. Throughout the development in several years, we began to see multiple applications via live streaming in areas such as education, e-commerce and also other abundant applications. I think that such trend is likely to replicate in the overseas sector, and we believe that we'll be able to see the potential of the whole market and be able to continue to capture such market potential. Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Our next question comes from Lei Zhang at Bank of America. Please go ahead.
[Non-English content ] 。Thanks management for taking my question.
Can you give us more color on the use of cash and the spending plans for Bigo's overseas markets? How should we look at the margin trend for Bigo in 2021? Thanks.
Thanks, [Johnny]. Let me address those two questions. First is regarding the use of proceeds. We have a good cash balance right now, and obviously after Baidu's acquisition of YY Live is completely done, we'll have additional [U.S. dollar] Coming in. We will have several methods of utilizing this cash. One is obviously we still need to organically grow our business, particularly given the global overseas market has much bigger potential. We'll continue to invest in terms of sales marketing on the artificial intelligence, et cetera. Secondly, we had a $1 billion convertible bond outstanding. At the right time, we will pay back that convertible bond. That's another $1 billion cash usage. Thirdly, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, we are thinking about a potential dividend or additional share buyback programs, obviously depending on the share price, of returning more values to shareholders.
We will keep flexible in terms of the cash usage. We will not do big scale M&A at this stage. In general, we will make sure that we generate good value for the shareholders. Secondly, in terms of the investment for Bigo, there are two parts. One is Bigo Live. Bigo Live is already very profitable, over 20% margin profile. I think the margin of Bigo Live will continue to improve, given that we will further enhance the overseas payment channel efficiency. Then with the revenue growth scale, we'll achieve more operating leverage on various expense and cost items. For Likee, the strategy going forward will be a more balanced approach.
We will pay more attention to the ROI of the spending and focus on the key areas where Likee has a very strong presence, and we will find a way of further monetizing Likee's user base. As a result, I think the investment of Likee will also be further, I would say, monitored according to the ROI return. In general, if you combine these two together, the non-GAAP net margin for Bigo will obviously be positive. As we said, we have already achieved breakeven for two consecutive quarters. If you look at the full year 2021, I think we will be able to achieve a kind of low single-digit margin profile for Bigo as a whole. Hopefully that answers your question.
Thank you. That's clear.
Thank you. That's all the time we have for questions. I will hand back to management for closing remarks.
Thank you for joining our call. We look forward to speaking with everyone next quarter.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Bye bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your attendance. You may now disconnect.