This allows us to directly reach more than 2 billion users in over 25 countries or regions translating the global growth of the Chinese brand. Notably, we have recently become an authorized advertising agency for the TikTok, which will further support our expansion in the international market in the future. Secondly, we explore the potential of the vertical industry, just like online games. We have several advantages in the serving game class including capabilities in AD material production, deep understanding of gaming and [indiscernible] in content marketing. In the latter half of the last year, we began to collaborate more closely with NetEase Games. Moving forward, we will continue to leverage our robust AI capabilities and aforementioned plans to provide more comprehensive and tailored service to the client in vertical industries, aiming for a further tap into the growth of the advertisement business.
Thank you.
Feng Zhou: Yes, this is Feng Zhou. I’d like to add a point. We got asked a lot recently about why and how we achieve this significant growth in the advertisement business, yes. Let me try to answer the question here. I believe the key to our past and future success in ads is our ability to combine strong business operations and deep advertisement technology. Youdao’s ad business is unique. We are not a monetization team of our on traffic nor a brand advancement agency. We are a technology-based performance ad platform business. So in addition to our own and upgraded assets and traffic, we also deliver performance ads for third-party traffic. So every page view and every click contributes a tiny bit of revenue. So in this kind of business, efficiency is key to business.
That’s why our AI and large language model capability is a good fit for this. And it is very useful in learning and adapting the ad delivery process to maximize the efficiency and value creation. So a lot of ad companies on the market, they have a strong business ability, good sales and acquiring customers. But not necessarily good at technology. A lot of — on the other hand, a lot of ad tech teams do not really have strong business operations. So through their years of experience our team have, so I think we have acquired both skills. So business operations and deep understanding of ad technology. So that is why we have seen such growth in the past year. And I believe also whether if we can do those skills better, that also will determine whether we can continue to be successful in the future.
I hope this is helpful in understanding how we think about the ad business, yes.
Operator: The next question is from [Bo Zhang] with Huatai Securities.
Unidentified Analyst: Hello. Good evening, management. This is [indiscernible]. Thanks for taking my questions. In 2023, Smart Device business faced a challenge. In 2024, how to return to growth?
Feng Zhou: I’ve discussed the recent progress on Devices in the prepared remarks. So let me provide some more details on the most recent product launch and some thoughts on the future directions. The A6 Pro Dictionary Pen, the launch exceeded our expectations as we talked about with over 50,000 units sold in the first week. In terms of the product itself, the A6 Pro Pen has the best screen and best content within the price range and support high-quality off-line translation and AI features like grammar instruction and word instruction. So moreover, our supply chain team did a really good job of delivering very good quality and a good value for a relatively affordable price, yes. So also live video selling on Douyin contributed to the launch momentum.
So that’s kind of a rough breakdown of the A6 Pro launch. It is worth pointing out that although the A6 Pro is more affordable for consumers than our higher-end products, it actually has a similar gross margin ratio for us compared to our higher-priced products. So we are not sacrificing margin for selling more units. We are able to maintain a competitive gross margin ratio for this product because of our strong in-house design abilities and also our close collaboration with our IC supplier with our other supply chain partners. The other product, the listening part, E6 also met our expectations. It is the #1 selling product in its category right now. This is a good start for the Devices team this year, and I expect the team to keep delivering good launches in the coming months.
Going forward, we have more device launches in Q1 and Q2 planned, yes. If you look at our products last year and before, we have been mostly focused on higher-priced products compared to our peers. The plan going forward is to cover both higher and a little bit lower price points with both — with leading products in their category. So we — we’re able to do this because it is finally possible to deliver premium quality and experience for this slightly lower priced products because of the experience of our team accumulated over time over the years and the maturity of the supply chains. So now we believe it is the right time to reach more users with this product combination. For future premium products and let me say a few words. So I believe AI and hardware features, unique hardware features provide a lot of opportunity for creating value for users for more premium products.
For example, yes, running large language models on the device itself is very attractive because now that [indiscernible] features are like grammar instruction become popular with our users. Naturally, users want to run them on device. As it is more convenient, it is — response time is better. So one of the most asked questions we got for the dictionary pen is actually whether it supports off-line translation. Yes, of course, all our dictionary pen supports off line translation, yes. But that reflects the thinking of the user that a key deciding factor in the purchase is whether it can support these offline operations. So on device AI are very interesting. So we think we — yes, yes, we will have more to share when we have them. So lastly, the sales channel reorganization is done.
So we’ve transitioned to a more online focused, more agile sales and supply structure. The recent launch is kind of a first testament to the team’s ability. The Douyin’s live video sales, the [AOL] recommendations brought significant momentum to the launch. The team still has a lot of work ahead of them, and they need to build out more sales — new sales and marketing channels and also optimize to get good ROIs from the sales channels. So nonetheless, the launch is a very good start. So I hope that answers your question.
