NetEase, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTES) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Natalie Wu: My question, a party recorded quite a success recently. Just wondering how should we think about the success? As a matter of fact, we noticed that NetEase has been positive surprises with successful launch of new things more frequently in the past several years, or should I say, that may show up, becomes higher for company. That makes us wondering if it is more simple to view the party as randomly single title success or it is as a result of our refined development and operation skills. Just wondering any kind of new games in your pipeline that compelled every party with that we can expect. Another question for the games longevity. Actually some of your games enjoy quite great longevity like at PJ, but some titled months . Just curious from management point of view if there is a good way for us to have a better judgment on the games longevity forward, let’s say, how should we think about the longevity thing of the party? Thank you.

William Ding: Yeah, so any party is one of the very successful games we recently launched and this is the type of game that you have fun with, with your friends and family. So we think, what you worry about probably will not happen because we learn from our mistake. So we hope this is a game that will continue to bring joy to our gamers. We will dedicate more resources on to the game to ensure a longevity of that game. When we talk about longevity, we need at least 10 years, games like FWJ, has been running for more than two decades. So we hope to replicate the similar types of longevity when in all of our games. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Alex Poon with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Alex Poon: Thanks, management for taking my question. My first question is related to Naraka: Bladepoint, the console performance on Xbox and our future plans with PS4, PS5 and mobile version and international launch. My second question is related to our overall margin trend in the next 22 years, considering we have Youdao and Yanxuan. They are improving their margins and gaining business, we are investing more R&D and G&A in overseas market. Thank you very much.

William Ding: So our Naraka: Bladepoint was launched last June, our Xbox, and we are pleased to have joined the FCP program. And so since we have seen a huge number of gamers in China now again, and we have been optimizing using experience based on their feedback, and we’ve been working tirelessly with our Montreal office and to ensure we can deliver the best experience for our users. And based on those efforts we have a more — even more improved version with our PS5 version. And so we are going through testing for the PS5 version. And in terms of mobile games, also we’re going through — we are going through testing stages for that game, and we hope that — we’re pretty confident that the mobile game will kind of replicate the same level of use experience as one would on the original PC version. Thank you.

Charles Yang: Right, Alex. And, and to your second question on the margin outlook, the next two to three years, our game margin will remain relatively stable. You are right that for our overseas studios, they are in an investment phase and likely the games developed by our overseas seize game studios will only come into the market in 2025 and beyond. However, we do have a very strong and sizable existing portfolio of games that provides a very, very strong support to cash flow, to profitability, to the margins. And for our subsidiaries like Cloud Music, Youdao, they have already demonstrated a clear trend of narrowing down the losses. We are very confident give them another six to eight quarter, both businesses are very, very optimistic to be self-sustainable and breaking even.