Prepared remarks
Good evening, good morning, and welcome to Tencent Music Entertainment Group's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 earnings conference call. I'm Millicent T., Head of IR. We announced our financial results earlier today before the U.S. market opened. The earnings release is now available on our website and via newswire services. During today's call, you'll hear from Mr. Kar Shun Pang, our Executive Chairman; and Mr. Ross Liang, our CEO, who will share an overview of our company strategy and business updates. Then Ms. Min Hu, our CFO, will discuss our financial results before we open the call for questions. Before we continue, I refer you to the safe harbor statement in our earnings release, which applies to this call, as we make forward-looking statements. Please note that we discuss non-IFRS measures today, which are more thoroughly explained and reconciled to the most comparable measures reported under IFRS in our earnings release and filings with the SEC. The operator will provide instructions for the Q&A. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. With that, I will now turn the call over to Kar Shun Pang, Executive Chairman of TME.
Thank you, Millicent. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. In 2025, we remained disciplined in executing our dual-engine content and platform strategy, delivering accelerated revenue growth and sustained margin expansion. Our differentiated all-in-one music service platform has built solid subscription growth and strong momentum across our non-subscription offerings. This enabled us to unlock greater value from music IPs, create new opportunities for artists and address a larger market. As the competitive landscape continues to evolve, our proven ability to deliver integrated, expansive and multi-phased services gives us a distinct competitive advantage. With disciplined investment and continued innovation focused on long-term value creation, we are confident in leading the industry's advancement. Our competitive edge first and foremost stems from our industry-leading music copyright portfolio. Building on our high-quality IP access, we have expanded a comprehensive suite of music services to create holistic value for music creators and contribute to the long-term growth of the music industry. Leveraging our deep insights into the industry, we have amplified our content strength and addressed the evolving listening preferences of our users. First, our timeless and classic music catalog fostered deep emotional connections and serves as a cornerstone of our subscription business. This is why music can be so long-lasting and enduring in terms of monetization. Pushing forward from a position of strength, we recently renewed a contract with Warner Music Group and Bin Music, exploring new avenues for physical albums, merchandise and live performances. We also deepened alliance with Media Asian music, introducing Dolby Atmos to over 300 iconic tracks by legendary artists, including Eason Chan, Leslie Cheung, and Andy Lau, elevating the value of our classics with a more immersive listening experience. Second, we continue to deepen differentiation through our proprietary content. The streaming share of our self-produced content keeps growing as listeners seek unique, high-quality genres and musical experiences. For example, our Mid-Autumn-themed "Year after Year" performed by Xiao Zhan charted in 17 countries and regions and generated over 100 million social media views in a single day. Furthermore, our capability to produce hit OSTs continues to strengthen. In the fourth quarter, we produced a bespoke 14-track OST suite for Tencent Video's hit drama "Shine on Me," which topped multiple music charts during the drama's broadcast. In addition, several of our co-produced songs were featured on the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which quickly went viral with multiple tracks surpassing 10 million streams in just a few days. Third, we continue to gain share among younger users thanks to our coverage of genres that resonate well with these user cohorts. K-Pop, for instance, is capturing and increasing shares of streams. Our recently renewed partnership with P Nation Corporation secured a 30-day head-start benefit to new releases from top Korean artists and groups such as PSY, CRUSH, HWASA, Baby DON'T Cry and TMX, keeping users at the forefront of global trends. Our thriving Tencent Musician platform, an established avenue for indie and up-and-coming artists, is also vital to meeting the growing preference of young audiences for diverse music styles. This quarter, we partnered with the indie band Fine, a music group with over 1 million followers; their tracks, including the viral hit "Breathing Decision," sparked strong community interaction among young users. Years of dedicated efforts and our distinctive competitive edge within the content and platform ecosystem have enabled us to accelerate the comprehensive expansion of our music services. We believe this is quite unique to TME, enabling us to continue leading music consumption across the entire music industry chain. Beyond music subscription, we see tremendous potential in other music-related value-added services. We aim to grow and expand our total addressable market sustainably, guided by our deeply rooted conviction in serving, protecting and unlocking the full value of music IPs. Building on our momentum, we continue to push boundaries by hosting more high-quality live experiences that empower artists in expanding their audience reach. First, let me begin by highlighting that in 2025, we showcased our production capabilities with multiple flagship events, including G-DRAGON's world tour. The 20-concert tour across 8 cities in Asia Pacific attracted over 260,000 fans. This highly sought-after tour featured two landmark shows at the Taipei Dome in the fourth quarter, drawing over 75,000 fans. The large-scale events that we have hosted for him demonstrate our ability to execute complex, high-profile tours and laid a solid foundation for future collaborations with top-tier international artists. Secondly, through continuous investment across the music value chain, we have built a diverse and robust lineup of strategic artists. We collaborate with them across music promotion, live performances, artist management and merchandise, and these investments have begun to bear fruit, contributing to strong growth in our non-subscription revenue in 2025. Our strategic artist portfolio includes a range of top artists. Through these efforts, we offer fans a richer array of music consumption and well-run entertainment experiences, while transforming music and artists into influential IPs, further extending their value and impact. Third, beyond live concerts, we continue to introduce innovative merchandise formats to spark new waves of fan-based consumption. A prime example was the KIT album for Ed Sheeran's latest release "= (Equals) / Play," marking our first partnership with a top-tier Western artist using this hybrid physical-digital format. We also enhanced Esther Yu's physical album "Spicy Honey" with a suite of collectible elements, pushing fan engagement. In addition, we made a breakthrough in expanding artist merchandise with new tour-themed collectibles, which are highly valued by fans as tangible extensions of the live concert experience and emotional connections with their favorite artists. Our exclusive additions, two special commemorative gift boxes and the special release of LUHAN's SEASON4 ASIA TOUR commemorative album integrated with SVIP privileges, both achieved strong sales across the board. I'm pleased to say that we more than doubled revenues of IP-related merchandise and fan-based consumption as we exceeded targets in 2025. As advertising and other IP-related offerings scale, and as multi-tiered membership for online music subscription evolves, the business impact of each paid membership varies. Given the significant evolution of our business model in recent years, our focus has moved beyond the number of paid subscribers and ARPPU, the operating metrics for our online music services adopted at our listing. Instead, we are increasingly focused on revenue and profit as our primary performance indicators. Reflecting this shift, starting from the next quarter, we will discontinue disclosure of certain operating metrics on a quarterly basis. Going forward, we will report annually the number of total paying users across our music services as of year-end. Last but not least, we have social responsibilities embedded in our core strategy. We continue to improve accessibility and inclusive design, making our products more user-friendly. For example, QQ Music introduced a hearing protection mode for children, leveraging AI and user insights to reduce sharp and sensitive sounds for a safer and more comfortable listening experience. Meanwhile, WeSing upgraded its large front mode to better serve more users with adoption exceeding 50%. To wrap up, our thriving dual-engine ecosystem, anchored by content advantage, comprehensive service offerings and innovation excellence enable us to effectively serve a diverse range of users, creators and fans while unlocking IP value and enhancing monetization efficiencies. Looking ahead, we will continue to reinforce our core strength and broaden our reach to capture the significant growth opportunities before us. Now I would like to hand the call over to Ross for a deeper dive into our overall platform development. Ross, please go ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, Kar Shun. Hello, everyone. In an era of rapid technological advancement and emerging consumption expectations, apart from what Kar Shun just discussed, we are acting proactively across the board to serve our users better and keep the flywheel of our content platform growing. With our deeper commitment to user value we have built a comprehensive multi-pronged membership system designed to drive effective subscriber conversion, stronger engagement and a deeper share of wallet. We continue to lead music consumption trends through ongoing technological and product innovation, inspiring users to explore a broader range of music genres and discover artists, driven by differentiated content privileges as well as immersive experiences. We ended 2025 with over 20 million SVIP users with ARPPU trending slightly upward. Our new ad-supported subscription plan is also gaining initial traction. Over time, it will allow us to broaden our audience and attract new users to our platform. We continue to innovate product features to deliver highly differentiated offerings that make music consumption seamless and accessible anytime, anywhere. First, we further deepen and integrate our presence across multiple devices. While mobile apps remain our core access point, we have also penetrated further into PC, in-car, smart speaker and wearable ecosystems. This makes music consumption an integral part of users' daily lives whether they are commuting, at home or at work. Second, our multi-platform portfolio enables us to cater to a wider range of user habits and preferences. While Kugou Music and QQ Music offer comprehensive premium services to highly engaged users with a strong willingness to pay, light versions such as Kugou Concept serve our casual listeners effectively. Third, we are integrating social features to amplify users' reach and boost user acquisition, conversion and engagement. In Q4, QQ Music introduced Weverse DM onboarding 170 artists from HYBE and other labels to broaden artist-fan interaction channels. Bubble upgrade is a functionality based on intelligent song recognition that automatically detects song titles, screenshots or links shared by artists and enables one-tap playback. Together with the launch of live streaming for domestic artists, these enhancements drove higher time spent and retention. It's also worthwhile to mention that this year's new music report campaign added handwritten letters and AI-generated voice messages from artists, further strengthening user engagement and encouraging widespread sharing. As our expanding use cases result in broadened audience reach, we remain focused on harnessing AI to improve music creation and elevate user experiences. From music creation and production to distribution and consumption, we are making music consumption more fun and personalized. First, our AI tools are increasing content supply. Today, over 10 million users and more than 150,000 professional creators use our one-stop AI music production platform. Features such as track refinement and AI-generated vocal demos accelerate music creation. In addition, AI auto-captures chorus highlights and generates video clips based on lyrics, delivering more engaging audio-video experiences through quick listen mode. Second, we are deepening core operations across the broader Tencent ecosystem to enhance content distribution and consumption. We enhanced our self-developed multimodal large model driving our recommendation system to a record high. We also deepened collaboration with Weixin Video accounts by co-creating trending music tasks and adding music links in the comment section for the joint promotion of hit songs. Meanwhile, Yuanbao has also been embedded into QQ Music. This has not only boosted user engagement but also provided deep insights into our user preferences and needs, thereby improving distribution efficiency. Third, we have integrated AI across the end-to-end music consumption journey. Powered by Yuanbao, QQ Music's AI agent has evolved into a system allowing users to handle complex multi-step tasks using natural language commands. For example, beyond music discovery, the AI agent provides direct access to digital albums and merchandise purchase, creating an intent-to-action experience that has driven conversion. Last but not least, we continue to scale and differentiate our SVIP membership, capturing new audience segments and leveraging our uniquely comprehensive ecosystem to deepen music consumption and unlock substantial monetization opportunities, particularly through our growing fan-based economy. As we constantly deepen collaboration with music labels and artists and introduce new high-value benefits, our SVIP users surpassed the 20 million milestone, confirming the success of our strategy. Our further enriched membership benefits fulfill the diverse needs of a broadened user base during both SVIP sign-ups and retention. For example, the appointment of Ryan Ding, Ding Yuxi, Ju Jingyi, Karry Wang and Wang Junkai as QQ Music SVIP brand ambassadors, and Liu Yuning as Kugou's first-ever brand ambassador, paired with limited edition physical and virtual gifts for SVIP subscriptions. The brand-organized SVIP ticket package for the Annual Gala of Melody Journey 2 and the QQ Music Top Music Night 2026 also resulted in effective SVIP adoption. We also grew our Starlight Card roster to include Korean artists like Ivy and NMIXX, enriching the card pool and attracting fan participation. At the same time, feature-related perks continue to drive SVIP acquisition and retention. Highlights include QQ Music's co-branded TTIX and the proprietary NAC sound format, Kugou Music's scenario-specific DTS song effects for festivals and the co-branded skins with renowned artists like Chen Yixun, Silence Wang Sulong, and Zhou Shen. All of this adds to a more immersive listening experience and deeper fan engagement. To summarize, our commitment to product excellence, innovation and value creation has propelled resilient growth in a dynamic and competitive market environment. Looking ahead, we remain dedicated to this long-term user-centric approach, sitting at the forefront to capture new growth in a sustainable music ecosystem. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Min, our CFO, for a deep dive into our financials.
Thank you, Ross, and greetings to all. Let me now turn to our financial results. We closed 2025 with outstanding financial performance in both top line and bottom line. We achieved robust growth in music subscription, advertising revenue and artist-related merchandise sales and successfully implemented our ROI-focused approach for promotional expenses. I'll first talk about Q4 2025 performance. In Q4 2025, our total revenues grew 15% year-on-year to RMB 8.6 billion, driven by strong growth in online music services. Music subscription revenues continued their momentum, up 13% year-on-year and reached RMB 4.6 billion in Q4 2025. Revenues from music services other than music subscription were RMB 2.5 billion, up 41% year-on-year. For music subscription revenues, as Ross discussed earlier, we have built a multi-pronged membership system that includes an ad-supported membership, standard membership and SVIP to serve users with different needs and preferences. This system has been well received and has successfully helped increase user retention and growth in music subscription revenues. We continuously enrich privileges and benefits and provide limited-time opportunities for our SVIP members. In Q4, we appointed Liu Yuning as Kugou's first-ever brand ambassador, together with limited edition physical and virtual gift sales. In addition, we offered priority ticketing for the Melody Journey 2 Gala entrance tickets for our SVIP members. Advertising revenue continued its strong growth, both year-on-year and sequentially, primarily driven by the following. First, our ad-supported model continued its robust growth as a result of an increased number of advertisers, higher entry fees and higher eCPM. The Double 11 shopping festival also contributed to the sequential revenue growth. Second, sponsorship advertising achieved strong growth. Offline performances and music festivals have broadened our user scenarios and effectively attracted more brands, thereby driving growth in sponsorship advertising revenues. Over the past few quarters, our offline performances and artist-related merchandise sales have made significant progress and delivered impressive results. In Q4, we hosted two brand shows in Taipei for G-Dragon and provided artist-related merchandise sales during the show, which were exceptionally well received. We also collaborated with Silence Wang to deliver a series of successful concerts, providing fans with distinctive experiences. Meanwhile, we have established cooperation with strategic artists across music promotion, brand performances and artist-related merchandise to provide a more immersive experience for fans and help enrich privileges of SVIP membership. Revenues from social entertainment services and others were RMB 1.5 billion, down 5% year-on-year. Our gross margin in Q4 2025 was 44.7%, up 1.1 percentage points year-on-year, which was mainly attributable to strong growth in music subscription and advertising revenues, alongside a lower revenue sharing ratio in social entertainment services. As we continue to invest in new business such as offline performance and artist-related merchandise sales, changes in the revenue mix may cause fluctuations in overall gross margin. Moving on to operating expenses. They amounted to RMB 1.2 billion, representing 14.4% of our total revenues in Q4 2025 compared with 15.7% in the same period last year. Selling and marketing expenses were RMB 266 million, up 7% year-on-year, primarily due to higher channel spending and content promotion expenses. We will keep monitoring market conditions and adjust content promotion and channel spending as needed with ROI-focused financial discipline. General and administrative expenses were RMB 981 million, up 6% year-on-year, primarily due to growth in employment-related expenses. Our effective tax rate for Q4 2025 was 70.5%. For Q4 2025, our net profit increased 10% to RMB 2.3 billion and net profit attributable to equity holders of the company increased 13% to RMB 2.2 billion. Non-IFRS net profit increased 8% to RMB 2.6 billion and non-IFRS net profit attributable to equity holders increased 9% to RMB 2.5 billion. Our diluted earnings per ADS this quarter was RMB 1.41, up 12% year-on-year, and non-IFRS diluted earnings per ADS was RMB 1.60, up 9% year-on-year. As of December 31, 2025, our combined balance of cash, cash equivalents, term deposits and short-term investments was RMB 38 billion, as compared to RMB 36.1 billion as of September 30, 2025. This combined balance was affected by changes in the exchange rate of RMB to USD at different balance sheet dates. Next, I will discuss our performance for the full year of 2025. Total revenues were RMB 32.9 billion, up 16% year-over-year. Revenues from online music services were RMB 26.7 billion, up 23% year-over-year. The increase was driven by strong growth in music subscription revenues supplemented by growth in revenues from offline performances, advertising services and artist-related merchandise. Our music subscription revenues were RMB 17.7 billion, up 16% year-over-year, primarily driven by continuous expansion of membership privileges, such as early access to live performances, artist-related merchandise and a wider range of premium offerings. Revenues from social entertainment services climbed 7% year-over-year. Gross margin in 2025 was 44.2%, up 1.9 percentage points year-over-year for the reasons discussed earlier. Total operating expenses for 2025 were RMB 4.9 billion, up 4% year-over-year, primarily due to growth in employee-related expenses and higher content promotion and channel spending. In 2025, Tencent Music's net profit increased 60% to RMB 11.4 billion and net profit attributable to equity holders of the company increased about 66% to RMB 11.1 billion. We recognized a gain of RMB 2.4 billion from the disposal of an associate in the first quarter of 2025. Non-IFRS net profit increased 22% to RMB 9.9 billion, and non-IFRS net profit attributable to equity holders increased 25% to RMB 9.6 billion. In March 2026, we declared a cash dividend of USD 0.24 per ADS for the year ended December 31, 2025. The cash dividend of approximately USD 368 million is expected to be paid in the second quarter of 2026. Finally, I'll continue with some remarks on the outlook. Looking ahead, we will continue our strategy to invest in content and technology. We will keep focusing on IP development and user-focused content while advancing innovative integrated products with content and the platform to build a greater and more dynamic music and entertainment ecosystem. We remain confident in the health of our business and are committed to delivering returns for our shareholders. This concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are ready to open the call for questions.
Questions and answers
The operator provided instructions for the Q&A. The first question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup.
In light of the AI wave and also the growing industry competition, what is the company's strategic growth outlook for 2026? How does the company plan to capture the opportunities and address the challenges that arise?
Thank you, Alicia, for your question. I will try to answer it from both TME's internal and external perspectives. Internally, first of all, TME delivered very solid results in 2025, including both top line and bottom line, with healthy growth of subscription and impressive momentum across our non-subscription offerings. In particular, our non-subscription business continued to grow and scale, further endorsing our content-platform flywheel. And for music subscription, as we mentioned, we have built a three-tier membership system to drive effective member conversions, strong engagement and a deeper share of wallet. Our SVIP continued to scale, surpassing 20 million SVIP subscribers in just two years. We also piloted our advertising-supported membership in late 2025, allowing us to broaden and attract new audiences, setting the stage for long-term growth. On the non-subscription side, we have further deepened collaborations with artists and labels and penetrated further into offline experiences such as live concerts and merchandise. We believe this is just the beginning. These initiatives are important to enrich SVIP benefits and allow us to unlock new growth possibilities while strengthening our competitive advantage. From the external perspective, competition is not new to us, and our historical performance has proven that we can remain agile and compete effectively. We remain focused on long-term value creation, and we believe that our unique content and platform strategy will continue to deliver high-quality growth in a healthy way. We firmly believe that content will have lasting value if it is IP-driven. Robust IPs will enjoy long legacies and their value will be further enhanced through broad distribution, cross-media collaborations and diverse monetization opportunities. The rapid revenue growth of our expansive non-subscription services over the past two years illustrates our strength and capability in this regard. For 2026, subscription revenue may experience some short-term pressure due to intense competition. But we believe our three-tier membership and vibrant non-subscription services will allow us to grow holistically and sustainably. Finally, on AI, we continue to embrace AI to improve our user experience and to use AI technology as a tool to improve efficiencies in content creation and promotion. With our proficiencies in IP creation and management, AI will further strengthen our competitive advantage and create business value in the long run.
The next question comes from the line of an analyst.
Congrats on the solid financial results in 2025. My question is about AI. I want to understand management's thoughts around AI impacting the overall music value chain. How would TME embrace AI as we integrate it into our products and ecosystem, and what is management's thinking around AI's impact on music labels, streaming platforms and user behavior?
Under the current circumstances, especially in the recent three months, we're aware that AI is profoundly changing not only the music industry but also the broader content ecosystem in terms of content creation and distribution. We've already seen some hit songs in the recent months created with AI. That brings huge challenges to streaming platforms because for us, we still want to promote original songs. We'll continue to embrace AI technologies and provide the most effective and convenient creation tools for creators to reduce the threshold for creation. Musical content remains the most important thing, and we will continue to give more distribution resources to human-created content while also allocating some traffic to AI-generated content. We've noticed that there are many low-cost productions, some of which risk copyright infringement; some AI-generated content may infringe original copyrights. We're spending substantial effort educating the market to ensure responsible practices and to serve as a positive driver for this market. We believe we remain in a leading position in the music industry. We are one of the first companies to integrate AI into the music workflow at scale. We've provided a one-stop AI music production tool to tens of millions of users and over 150,000 professional creators already use our tools. We're also one of the very first platforms domestically to achieve commercial value on AI-generated content. We believe with the further improvement of AI-generated tools, we can continue to tap more potential customers and commercial value. More importantly, we're operating an AI agent to help users fulfill their goals on our platform. TME indeed faces many challenges posed by AI. It is a big challenge, but we believe it remains a huge opportunity. We are embracing AI, and we believe AI will serve as an important driver for TME. Additional comments beyond what Ross discussed: At TME, we're trying to make user creation more convenient and to provide a better user experience. AI tools are making music creation and production more accessible, but IP remains critical. In the future, we'll continue to invest in IP creation. Our offline music experiences also matter—live concerts, fan-based economy, merchandise—elements that cannot be fully replaced by AI. We will keep investing in optimizing our IP and, at the same time, leverage AI to improve the efficiency of music production.
The next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies.
We talked about investment in content, IP development and innovative products in the prepared remarks. From a financial perspective, how should we think about the trend in gross profit margin, operating expenses and earnings growth for this year?
In general, our 2026 gross profit will stay close to 2025, and could be a little bit lower than 2025. First, continued growth of our subscription business and advertising business, and continued optimization of our costs, will support overall gross profit. The sustained growth of subscription and advertising will contribute positively to our gross margin and total gross profit. Additionally, recent adjustments to iOS commission fees are a positive driver for our gross margin. We will continue to strengthen product cooperation with high-quality IP and produce more self-produced content to improve competitiveness. We will also deepen and expand collaboration with top-tier labels and artists to create more revenue from live concerts and merchandise. At the beginning of the development of these businesses, there may be minor negative impacts on our gross margin due to changes in the revenue mix and seasonal fluctuations. In the long run, with more diversified services, we expect to generate higher ARPPU per user. Investment in IP and copyright will help improve content cost structure. Deep bundling with important industry players will provide diversified services and improve efficiency across businesses. We believe in the long run we will keep growing our top line and gross margin and maintain gross margin at a sound and steady level. Regarding operating profit, we acknowledge the fierce competitive landscape and the changes brought by AI. We will continue to invest in content and remain strategic in operations. We will not indiscriminately increase marketing spend; instead, we will focus on ROI. We will invest in self-produced content and optimize channel costs. Based on ROI calculations and tests of value on paid users, we aim for steady and sustained growth. Into 2026, our total net profit should improve and margins will be similar to 2025, although they might be slightly lower.
The next question comes from Alex Yao from JPMorgan.
I have two questions. First, regarding the impact from AI-generated music content, particularly on the demand side: are we seeing AI-generated content add incremental demand for music consumption, or is this more of a zero-sum game in terms of total consumer time spent on music content? Second, regarding the royalty pool: if medium to longer term AI reduces the price of music content generation, will that gradually eat into the royalty pool from a monetization perspective? If so, should we consider changes to our business model to fit the new supply-side dynamics?
These are very interesting questions. First, AI is already changing the nature of the music industry. Historically, we saw many hit songs from the Internet where the singer was unknown; in the recent months, we have seen hits influenced by AI. Short-form video platforms have given a big boost to some AI-generated music, but many of these songs are not original compositions; they are often re-sung or reinterpreted. The quality and nature of the content are changing. In the long run, AI re-singing will develop rapidly. But regarding consumption of original songs, we have not observed major changes so far. For UGC, you may see a trend similar to UGC text and video—many people will create music, similar to taking photos and videos today. Distribution will likely be concentrated among familiar-user networks on social platforms. For copyright royalties and revenue sharing, PGC and OGC remain the primary revenue drivers today. UGC may be distributed broadly among social users, but we do not expect material changes to royalty and revenue sharing in the near term. We are investing a lot of effort in making our platform attractive for users to create and produce music, and we hope that TME can be a social platform for music content creation.
I'd like to add some comments. This question deserves more thought and is indeed critical. If AI-generated music is still sung by human voices, the revenue-sharing mechanism should remain similar to the traditional model. If content is wholly AI-generated, then a different royalty-sharing model may be required. On UGC platforms, incentive models could apply, but we do not see a material impact on our core business today.
We will have time for one more question. It goes to Maggie from CLSA.
Since this is the last one, I'll ask a housekeeping question. Do you have any update you can share regarding the proposed Ximalaya acquisition deal? And related to that, what's management's latest thought on the share repurchase program? We noticed there's still a large quota remaining.
We are still communicating with the regulator on the Ximalaya deal. If there is any update, we will disclose it at that time.
We have always valued shareholder returns. This year, as you can see, our dividend payout is significantly higher than last year, which shows our strong emphasis on shareholders. Regarding share buybacks, we will adhere to the previous plan and respond to market needs while meeting regulatory requirements.
Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact the IR team. This concludes today's call.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Portions of this transcript that were marked as interpreted were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.