Hello Group Inc. (NASDAQ:MOMO) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Leo Chiang: Thank you, management for taking my question. I have two questions about Tantan. The first question is. Has Tantan may you already reach pattern? What is the strategy — sales and marketing strategy in 2023 and how can we expect the MAU trend in 2023? My second question is. What is the revenue outlook in 2023? And what is the key majors to help reach breakeven? Thank you.

Tang Yan: Before we initiating our strategy to reduce cost and improve marketing efficiency, we estimated that the reduction in Tantan’s channel investment will lead to a roughly 20% decrease in MAUs plus or minus 5%, depending on the extent of the pandemic control measures. And the decline MAUs in the third quarter exceeded our expectations as the COVID resurgence was worse than we expected in August. Based on the current situation, we expect Tantan’s MAUs to bottom out around 18 million to 19 million. Of course, the number can fluctuate because of the uncertainties around the pandemic. As for Tantan’s user trend in 2023, it depends first on how the pandemic evolves and second on our marketing strategy, and Tantan’s channel investment will be ROI oriented.

And in other words, we will moderately increase marketing spend based on positive ROI. There are two factors I play here. One is the recovery of the offline social sentiment, as China relaxes it’s a COVID control policy, which should lead to improvement in user retention and paying conversion. And the other is the enhancement in product experience, which should also drive retention in ARPU growth and drive retention in ARPU growth. If any of those two factors can drive our ROI to Tantan positive or in other words to generate profit with what we spend, then we will increase marketing investment and pursue growth on top of self-sustaining positive cycle. With respect to financials, I’ll leave it to Peng.

Peng Hui: I’ve heard two questions. One is how we’re going to reach breakeven point and the other thing is about the revenue outlook for 2023. Maybe I’ll answer the breakeven question first. As you can see, from Tantan segment reporting in Q3 by cutting down on the low efficiency channels, we’ve already narrowed the net loss from close to RMB120 million in Q3 to within RMB40 million in Q3. From there, I guess several things need to happen before we reach, ultimately reach breakeven point, one is that COVID has to come completely off people’s mind as a deterrent that keeps young people away from dating and more generally from meeting someone that you just got to know on the internet in real life occasions. Right now, we are indeed seeing a pretty substantial relaxation on COVID containment measures as well as lockdowns.

But sentiment wise, I think it’s still going to take some time for the dating sentiment to fully come back. And the second is that we need to continue, as Tang Yan said, to make progress on the product side including both consumer experience as well as monetization features in order to drive retention and ARPU. These are the key operational targets for the team for the Tantan team next year. With regards to the financial outlook, I hate to say this, but as you can imagine, it’s still a little bit too early to give any reliable guidance into 2023. But here are some things I can point toward, which hopefully can give you guys some color about how to think about 2023. I’ll generally put them into two buckets. One is external factors and the other one is internal factors.