Hello Group Inc. (NASDAQ:MOMO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Looking into next year, I think Momo is going to continue to benefit from the stable and — from that stable and loyal user base. What that means as far as P&L is concerned, is that we’re going to be able to maintain the scale of users and revenue and at the same time, continue to optimize on personnel and user acquisition costs. So that leads to — that naturally leads to the question on profitability, the cash cow business. Looking out to next year, we expect gross margin to continue to be stable as is the case for — as is the case throughout this year. With respect to operating expenses, for the reason that I just mentioned, we have a good opportunity to further cut the OpEx down with continuous efforts to improve cost efficiency. So if you put these different things together in a nutshell, I’m pretty optimistic that we’ll be doing a decent job in maintaining the product activity of the cash cow business.

There was a question on cash use. Okay. I guess it’s really a question of how does the company utilize this cash and allocate its capital resources. I’ve said before that there are three priorities for the company in terms of capital allocation. Number one is, of course, to reinvest back into the business for organic growth. And the second priority is if there are good strategic investment opportunities that could help us grow beyond what we can achieve organically, we would go for those strategic opportunities, and we prefer to use cash rather than through a stock deal. And the third priority is, if we have excess cash as we as has been the situation in the past, we would return the excess cash to the shareholders in the form of either cash dividends or share repurchase.

We have an ongoing repurchase plan of $200 million. Under that plan, I think so far, we brought back — we bought back slightly under $90 million worth of shares. So under that plan, we still have $110 million to go. We will continue to take advantage of the undervalued share price and make good use of our excess cash to enhance shareholder value. In terms of dividends, we have distributed special dividend five years in a row, starting from the year, I think, 2019. This is — this way has proven our sincerity in sharing the fruit of our work with shareholders. Unless we have an opportunity to either reinvest our cash to drive organic business growth or through strategic investments, I think we’re going to continue to return cash to shareholders in the form of cash dividends.

I guess that’s the end of this conference call. I’m handing back to Ashley for closing remarks.

Ashley Jing: Thank you all for your time. And I think that’s it for the quarter. We will see you next year. Thank you. Bye.

Operator: Thank you for participating in today’s conference. You may now disconnect.

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