Tencent Music Entertainment Group (NYSE:TME) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Wei Xiong: Hi. Good evening management and thank you for taking my question. I want to get some of your thoughts around AIGC. As management mentioned, we are exploring possibilities and leveraging technology in that area. So, how do we assess TME’s strategic positioning around AIGC? What are some of the potential benefits and business opportunities that we plan to pursue this year? And what could be the potential investment or cost implications related to that? Thank you

Cussion Pang: We have always invested in AI, in particular, recently with a focus in LLM, large language models. Clearly, that will lead to more applications. We will continue to leverage partnerships with Tencent. Examples of our applications would include recommendation as well as playlist in a more conversational setting. Other examples would include music posters, greeting cards, synthetic voice, all of which are already currently being applied to our platform. Into 2023, we will invest in our own R&D in LLM to drive music-related conversational applications and also to help musicians dramatically reduce the barrier to their creativity. And overall, that should result in more creativity and high-quality content, which is good for the overall industry.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Xueqing Zhang from CICC. Xueqing, your line is open. Please un-mute yourself and go ahead.

Xueqing Zhang: Hey. Thanks for taking the question. And just a follow-up on a pool of music subscription business. We noticed that the program music side continued to improve this quarter? And how does management think about the improvement in the first quarter in content industry? You mentioned in the prepared remarks, it may be driven by optimized content quality, more attractive member privileges, more sales channels and more effective promotions, so give us more color on this way. Thank you.

Tony Yip: Well, the short answer is yes. We do expect the ARPU to continue to improve, driven by all the things that we mentioned. So, a combination of continued improvement in the quality of our membership offering, the quality and the comprehensiveness of the privileges in our membership, more broadened sales channels which include internal kind of within platform channels as well as external outside of our platform channels as well as more effective promotions. And by more effective promotions, obviously, that would lead to a higher ROI when we do engage in promotions, which are helpful to ARPPU.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Thomas, your line is open. Please un-mute yourself and go ahead.

Thomas Chong: Hi. Good evening. Thanks management for taking my questions and congratulations on good set of result. My question is about the competitive landscape. Given that in terms of the sales and marketing spending and margin improvement, are we seeing the competitive landscape more stabilized and that’s less threat from the short form video? And my second question is about online music services surpassing social entertainment at some point for this year. I just want to get some color with regard to the long-term revenue mix, how should we think about online music services revenue contribution in the long-term? Thank you.

Tony Yip: I will tackle the second part first about the revenue mix. As we mentioned, we do expect the music €“ online music services revenue to surpass social entertainment. And so clearly, what that would mean over the long run, we expect that to continue into the long run. So, we do expect the online music services to be the primary revenue source going forward as opposed to being a one-off effect. Within online music services, obviously in the fourth quarter, you have seen that music subscription grew just north of 20% and then non-subscription revenue grow at a faster pace than that, primarily due to the low base in 2021. And then looking into 2023, we obviously think that the effects will be slightly different. Music subscription will grow at over 20% on a year-over-year basis, as I mentioned.