Joy Inc. (Ticker: JOY) has reported a robust financial performance for the third quarter of 2024, with group revenue reaching RMB 558.7 million. The company's core segment, Bigo, contributed significantly to this success with revenues of RMB 496 million. Joy Inc. has seen its non-GAAP operating profit increase by 15.4% quarter-over-quarter, with Bigo's profit rising by 5% to RMB 72.9 million. The company's strategic focus on globalization, operational efficiency, and revenue diversification has been pivotal in driving this growth.
Key Takeaways
- Joy Inc.'s Q3 2024 group revenue hit RMB 558.7 million.
- Bigo, Joy Inc.'s core segment, saw a slight year-over-year revenue increase to RMB 496 million.
- Group non-GAAP operating profit grew by 15.4% quarter-over-quarter to CNY 34.9 million.
- Non-live streaming revenue grew by 13.1% sequentially to RMB 119.2 million.
- The company repurchased 12% of outstanding ADS in 2024, showing a commitment to shareholder returns.
Company Outlook
- Bigo's paying users are expected to see a growth trend.
- Non-live streaming revenue is anticipated to continue its double-digit growth.
- The company is preparing for potential challenges due to adjustments in non-core audio live streaming products.
- Joy Inc. will maintain its focus on operational efficiency and sustainable growth.
Bearish Highlights
- The company anticipates potential challenges related to adjustments in non-core audio live streaming products.
Bullish Highlights
- Joy Inc. has experienced growth in developed countries, with Bigo Life end users increasing by 3.4% year-over-year.
- Paying users for Bigo Life grew by 9.1%.
- LIKI's focus on Middle East and European markets resulted in a 33.4% year-over-year increase in advertising revenue.
- HAGO's total revenue grew by 6.1% quarter-over-quarter.
Misses
- There are no specific misses reported in the provided summary.
Q&A Highlights
- Alex Liu, VP of Finance, emphasized the company's dedication to enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of global operations.
- CEO Ting Li discussed proactive adjustments aimed at developing a healthier profit model and a sustainable growth ecosystem.
- Ting Li also highlighted the strategy of focusing on high-quality premium users to drive an ROI-driven growth strategy.
Financial Guidance
- Joy Inc. expects Q4 2024 net revenues to be between RMB 546-563 million.
In conclusion, Joy Inc. is navigating the competitive landscape with strategic initiatives that have led to solid financial results in Q3 2024. The company's emphasis on globalization, operational efficiency, and revenue diversification, particularly through its Bigo segment, has positioned it for continued growth. With a clear focus on premium users and a commitment to shareholder returns, Joy Inc. is optimistic about its future prospects, despite potential challenges in the audio live streaming space.
Full transcript - JOYY Inc (NASDAQ:YY) Q3 2024:
Conference Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Joy Inc. Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Jane Shear, the company's Senior Manager of Investor Relations.
Please go ahead, Jane.
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Joy's Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today are Ms. Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO of Joy and Mr.
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance. For today's call, management will first provide a review of the quarter and then we will conduct a Q and A session. The financial results and webcast of this conference call are available at ir.joy.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our website in a few hours. Before we continue, I would like to remind you that we may make forward looking statements, which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from our current expectations.
For detailed discussions of the recent uncertainties, please refer to our latest annual report on Form 20 F and other documents filed with the SEC. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in U. S. Dollar. I will now turn the call over to our Chairperson and CEO, Ms.
Ting Li. Please go ahead, Ms. Li.
Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO, Joy Inc.: Hello, everyone. I'm Li Ting. Welcome to our Q3 2024 earnings call. Let's begin with a review of our overall performance during the Q3. During the Q3, we effectively executed our strategic priorities, maintaining a strong forecast on optimizing our products, deepening our market penetration in developed countries and enhancing our global operational capabilities and efficiencies.
These efforts yielded solid results in the Q3. Our group revenue reached RMB558.7 million. Our core business segment Bigo recorded revenues of RMB496 1,000,000 delivering a slight year over year increase. Our disciplined execution has led to improvements in operational efficiency at both the Bigo segment and group level. Our group non GAAP operating profit came in at CNY34.9 million, up 15.4% quarter over quarter.
Bigo's non GAAP operating profit expanded to RMB72.9 million, up 5% quarter over quarter, exceeding our expectations excluding the impact of FX losses. Bigo's non GAAP net profit was also up quarter over quarter. We briefly outlined our strategic priorities in our previous earnings call. Now, let me quickly touch on each of these. First, we continued to advance our globalization strategy in rating user interaction and content offerings, while building on our unique position as a global social platform.
As we have previously mentioned, Bigo Life is a highly global life product, offering content across 30 languages and fostering meaningful cross regional connections. This is particularly evident among our users in diverse countries who actively engage in cross cultural interactions. What truly set us apart is the global nature of our user community and the organic social connections that flourish across our platform, a unique value proposition that we are committed to amplifying To further enhance our global ecosystem, we have implemented a series of upgrades to boost the creation, quality and distribution of content on our platform. For example, we find our content recommendation algorithm to buy the facilitated content sharing within same language regions and expand cross regional content flow between highly interactive markets such as North and South America. We also launched global cross regional initiative based on user interaction patterns such as this quarter's Biggles Most Talent competition organized by our North America team.
The event brought together creatures from America, Southeast Asia and Africa highlighting our ability to unit cyber talent across high engagement bridgreens. On the technology front, we are preparing to introduce standardized global content guidelines and the comments are by testing of AI powered real time caption translation in the select languages. These enhancements will streamline our cross regional content delivery and better serve our users' growing appetite for global content and social connection. 2nd, we are listing forecast on operational efficiency By optimizing every aspect of our global localized operations from user acquisition to KOL management to our user engagement and monetization mechanism, we aim to comprehensively strengthen the efficiencies and capabilities of our global operations and drive steady expansion in product and group profitability. During the quarter, we conducted comprehensive ROI analyzed across product, regions and user acquisition channels.
Leveraging this insight, we optimize our resource allocation, redirecting our advertising spending from underperforming regions toward developed countries and the forecast on the acquisition of premier users with greater monetization potential. As a result, Bigo Life has achieved consistent year over year and a sequential user growth in developed countries
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: with
Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO, Joy Inc.: overall ROI improving by double digits from the previous quarter even with a 7.3% sequential reduction in its total user acquisition spending. In other underperforming regions, we have shifted some of our efforts from traditional advertising channels to more cost effective user acquisition methods such as KOL partnerships and leverage social features like Real Match to expand our product reach. This targeted initiative underscore our commitment to cultivating a sustainable high quality user base where substantively enhance content quality and social experience to drive long term user monetization potential. For Zaiqy, we have maintained a strategic forecast on our core market in the Middle East and Europe, successfully implementing monetization through both live streaming and advertising. This targeted approach has enabled us to achieve our initial milestone and profitability.
To further unlock lighted monetization potential, we recently redirected some of its operational resources, including personnel and traffic towards a new social live streaming product. This means that the resources currently allocated to non core markets, which do not contribute much to LIKAY's monetization, will be further optimized, potentially leading to declines in LIKAY's user metrics in the near term. However, we believe this advertising strategy will accelerate our new product development, strengthen our position in Like its core market and ultimately enhance Leica's monetization potential in the long run. 3rd, we have continued to cultivate long run initiatives that will further diversify our revenue streams. In the Q3, our group non live streaming revenue grew 13.1% sequentially to RMB119.2 million, representing 21.3 percent of group revenue.
Bigo's non live streaming revenue, primarily generated from advertising increased 15.5 percent quarter over quarter to RMB78.2 million. This growth was followed by strong momentum in Europe and North America, underscoring
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: our strategic
Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO, Joy Inc.: initiatives and commitment to expanding our footprint in this market. Building these new initiatives into meaningful revenue streams required patience and a sustained investment. We remain committed to nurturing these opportunities to utilize their full potential. We sustained our positive operating cash flow in the Q3, generating CNY61.1 million at the group level. Supported by our strong cash flow and healthy financial position, we actively advanced our shareholder return initiative.
In the Q3, we accelerated our share repurchase, buying back additional RMB 117,800,000 worth of our shares with 283,000,000 remaining unutilized under our repurchase program. We will continue to actively execute share buybacks to reward our shareholders ongoing support. Now, let's take a closer look at our product, starting with Big O Line. In the Q3, we sharpened our operational strategy by prioritizing our advertising investment and operational resources toward developed countries and premier users. This targeted approach yielded strong results in developed countries where end use grew 3.4% year over year and paying users increased 9.1% year over year.
We also saw encouraging momentum in the Middle East where Bigo Life revenue increased 5.6% sequentially. During the quarter, Bigo Life successfully organized the 3rd season of Bigo's most talented featuring categories including music, dance and beauty. The event attracted outstanding creatures from around the world. Building on previous seasons, we introduced a more comprehensive driving system incorporating key audience engagement metrics. This allowed a seamless merger of interactive live streaming with traditional talent show elements.
The season culminated in the grand final broadcast from Los Angeles on October 16. Captivating a global audience, the event resonated strongly with viewers, amassing an impressive 5.79000000 audience vote, highlighting the high level of engagement surrounding the competition. We also strengthened bonds with our business partners and our user community through a series of midyear scholars across Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. These gatherings brought together the cornerstone members of our ecosystem, top creators, users and partners to celebrate their achievements and vital contributions to our progress in the first half of the year. Throughout the quarter, we further developed Bigo Life's social engagement features, prioritizing improvements to Real Match and the messaging functionality.
This upgrade drove deeper user connections and more efficient follow convention. Notably, Real Match average DAU penetration rate increased significantly to 23.4% where the number of direct chat messages rose by 15.9% from the previous quarter. We also saw a 4.3% rise in average new followers per user, indicating stronger community building. By directing traffic to premier hearts and upgrading interactive features, we saw broader culture, participation and user engagement in multi guest rooms. We achieved a 3.9% sequential increase in the penetration rate of user hosting a live session in mountain guest rooms, alongside a 3.6% sequential increase in the overall rate of users going live as guest speakers.
Next (LON:NXT), moving to lighting. Our strategy for lighting remains rooted in the Middle East and the European markets, where we continue to build momentum and enhance monetization across both live streaming and advertising. As a result, lite advertising revenue grew 33.4% year over year in the Q3 and lite mentioned its profitability. During the quarter, we elevated LIKI's user experience across its core markets through enhanced content quality, interactively and community engagement. A standout community building initiative was our August music festival tour across 5 European cities, which brought together light top creators from music bloggers to dance groups alongside established performance and celebrities.
This unique event delivered unprecedented interactive experience for the LIKI community. In September, LIKI served as the official media partner for physical games 2024, providing 8 days of live streaming coverage to IMOS users and the competitive progress of top athletes in digital football, basketball, laser shooting and simulated dance. Our expanded premier content offerings and content diversity drove 12.3% quarter over quarter increase in users' video time spent. Finally, turning to HAGO. In the Q3, our targeted incentive strategy across different paying user segments drove improved monetization metrics.
We saw positive momentum in Hago's paying users and ARPU, with its total revenue growing 6.1% quarter over quarter. Hago's operating losses further narrowed from the previous quarter and its operating cash flow remained positive. Hagou's social engagement metrics remained strong in the 3rd quarter. Average time spent in social channels increased 2.5% quarter over quarter to 105 minutes. And lastly, retention rate showed certain improvements.
These positive trends underscore the success of our engagement strategy and reflect our commitment to enriching user experiences, while advancing monetization efforts within the platform. Looking ahead, our strategy roadmap continues to center on 3 core priorities: strengthening our position as a distinctive global social platform through enhanced user experiences developing diverse revenue streams to drive sustainable growth and advancing excellence across our global operations. Anchored by our strong cash flow and solid financial footing, we are dedicated to driving profitable growth and creating enduring value for our shareholders. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Erz Liu, the Vice President of Finance, to provide our financial update.
Thank you.
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance, Joy Inc.: Thanks, Misty. Hello, everyone. Before I go into the details, we would like to remind you that despite the latest divestment in the sale of VAMA Live, to the date of this press release, we have not opted control over VAMA Live and therefore have not consolidated the business. The financial results presented in our press release and this conference call primarily consisted of Bigo and all other segments, excluding Vamalife. I will now provide a recap of some key financial highlights for the Q3.
Our total net revenues were $568,700,000 in the 3rd quarter compared with $567,100,000 in the same period last year. Revenues from Bigo segment were $196,000,000 up slightly year over year. In particular, Bigo's non live streaming revenues were $38,200,000 which was up substantially year over year, primarily due to the increase of advertising revenues. Bigo's live streaming revenues was down year over year, mainly due to our proactive access to optimize Bigo Live's content and user acquisition costs and adjustments to Bigo's non car audio live streaming product in certain markets. We believe these changes in turn enhance our margin profile and contributed to long term business sustainability.
Geographically speaking, as we prioritized to allocate our operational resources towards the best countries and the acquisition of premier users with great monetization potential. Our group revenues from the best countries and regions was up by 25.6% year over year, with revenues from Middle East back to sequential growth of 2.1%. Cost of revenues for the quarter decreased by 2.1 percent to $350,500,000 primarily driven by a decrease in cost of revenues of our other segment, which was consistent with its revenue trend, partially offset by increase in cost of revenues of Bigo. Bigo's cost of revenues was $312,600,000 which was up by 4.5% year over year, mainly driven by increased traffic acquisition costs paid to third party partners in relation to our advertising business. Gross profit was $208,100,000 in the quarter, with a gross margin of 37.3 percent.
WIGO's gross profit was $183,400,000 with a gross margin of 37%. V Go's gross margin was lower year over year due to a safety in our revenue mix, which saw an increased contribution from our lower margin audience network advertising revenues. However, during the Q3, our digital plan execution has significantly improved the operational efficiency of Bigo's live streaming business, effectively offsetting the dilution impact on Bigo's gross margin. As a result, we observed a meaningful sequential improvement in Bigo's gross margin during the quarter. Our gross operating expenses for the quarter were RMB192 1,000,000 compared with RMB195.3 million in the same period of 2023.
Among the operating expenses, sales and marketing expenses decreased to $83,500,000 from $92,500,000 in the same period of 2023, primarily due to our reduced spending on user acquisition through advertising, as we continued to focus on ROI and the effectiveness of user acquisition. General and administrative expenses increased to $36,100,000 from $27,100,000 in the same period of 2023, primarily due to increase in salary and welfare expenses. Bigo's total operating expenses for the quarter were $120,700,000 decreased from $126,700,000 in the same period of 2023, primarily due to decreased in sales and marketing expenses. Our disciplined execution has driven enhanced operational efficiency at both the Group and Bigo segment. Our gross GAAP operating income for the quarter was $16,400,000 up by 623.5 percent quarter over quarter.
Our gross non GAAP operating income for the quarter, which excludes SBC expenses, amortization of intangible assets from business acquisitions, Gain on the consolidation and the borrow of subsidiaries as well as impairment of goodwill and investments was $34,900,000 in this quarter, up by 16.4% quarter over quarter. Bigo's GAAP operating income for the quarter was $62,700,000 and Bigo's non GAAP operating income was $72,900,000 up by 5% quarter over quarter. Amerigroup's GAAP net income attributable to controlling interest of Joy in the quarter was $60,600,000 compared to $72,900,000 in the same period of 2023. GAAP net income margin was 10.8% in the Q3 of 2024 compared to 12.9% in the same period of 2023. Our GAAP net margin was lower this year due to larger foreign currency exchange losses and the lower net interest income due to the decreased net cash balance after we fully repaid our CP in the 2nd quarter.
Bigo's GAAP net income in the quarter was $63,300,000 compared to $30,200,000 in the same period of 2023. Bigo's GAAP net margin was lower this year due to foreign currency exchange losses of $10,300,000 in the Q3 of 2024. Non GAAP net income attributable to controlling interest of Joy in the quarter was $61,200,000 compared to $85,200,000 in the same period of 2023. The gross non GAAP net income margin was 10.9 percent in the quarter compared to 14.3% in the same period of 2023. Bigo's non GAAP net income was $67,500,000 compared with $81,900,000 in the same period of 2023.
Bigo's non GAAP net margin was 13.5% in the quarter compared with 16.6% in the same period last year. For the Q3 of 2024, we booked net cash inflows from operating activities of $61,500,000 Our balance sheet remains healthy with a strong net cash pre leasing of RMB3.3 billion as of September 30, 2024. In the Q3, we continued to enhance returns to shareholders, repurchasing an additional approximately 115,800,000 worth of average shares. During the 1st 3 quarters of 2024, we have altogether repurchased 7.3000000 of our ADS for a total of $243,700,000 This was approximately 12% of our outstanding ADS as of December 31, 2023. Turning now to our business outlook.
As mentioned previously, we are fully dedicated to strengthen the efficiency and sustainability of our global operations. We have taken some proactive actions to optimize our content costs and introduced certain adjustments to Bigo's audio live streaming product to enhance risk control in recent quarters. We anticipate such a supplement might negatively affect Bigo's top line in Q4. At group level, we expect our net revenues for the Q4 of 2024 to be between RMB546 1,000,000 RMB563 1,000,000. Dollars This implies that for the full year of 2024, Bigo is still predicated on moderate top line growth.
Looking forward, we will remain dedicated to our strategic priorities, enhancing our unique value proposition as a global social platform, exploring diverse gross revenues and actively driving operational efficiency at all levels. Supported by our strong cash flow and healthy financial provision, We are well positioned to deliver sustainable profitable growth and create enduring value for our shareholders. Let's conclude our prepared remarks. Operator, we would now like to open up the call to questions. Thank you.
Conference Operator: Thank Your first question comes from Thomas Chong with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance, Joy Inc.: Good morning. Thanks management for taking my question. My question is about 2025 outlook. Can management comment about the trend in user as well as our revenue? On top of that, management also comments about the trend in operating expenses and profit?
Thank you.
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: Thank you, Thomas, for your question. I will take your first question first. And first of all, I'd like to add a few more comments regarding our performance in the Q3. You can see that in Q3, Bigo's non live streaming revenue continued to grow substantially year over year, while our live streaming revenue experienced a year over year decline. And we've mentioned the reasons behind the decline of our live streaming revenues, which reflect the combination of 2 factors.
First, we have optimized content cost in certain regions of Bigo Live. And second, we have made proactive adjustments to the features of Bigo's non core audio live streaming product in Q3 to enhance compliance and also for sustainable for building up a sustainable ecosystem. These adjustments together did have led to a short term fluctuation in Bigo's live streaming revenues in Q3, which we believe would likely continue in Q4 and it has been already been taken into account in our current revenue guidance in the 4th quarter. However, as we've mentioned in the last quarter, these proactive adjustments that we're making now are aimed at developing a adjustments that we're making now are aimed at developing a healthier profit model for our products and also for building a sustainable growth ecosystem. We've already seen some positive outcomes from these adjustments in Q3, including sequential improvements in Bigo's gross margin, ROI and also operating profit.
And looking ahead to the year 2025, as we are still in the process of formulating detailed operational plans for the next year and we believe that our expected growth would be varied based on the estimated operating resources that we intend to allocate. So I'd like to share a few key trends first. With the series of adjustments have already been implemented throughout the year 2024, we believe that both Bigo and Joy is poised for a fresh start for the year 2025. For Bigo segment, we will continue to concentrate our operating resources on developed countries and the acquisition of premium users. We expect Bigo's paying user will gradually return to sequential and even year over year growth in year 2025 together with a stabilizing ARPU, which we believe can drive the live streaming revenue of Bigo to be back on a growth trajectory compared to a previous year.
Additionally, we expect the non live streaming revenue of Bigo segment will continue to maintain double digit growth year over year. However, as we've mentioned just now, the adjustments to Bigo's non live streaming non core audio live streaming product would still exert certain negative impact on Bigo's overall growth rate, particularly when you consider the high base in the first half of the year 'twenty four, which could still possibly offset some of the positive mentions that we've just mentioned. And for the all other segments, we expect its non live streaming revenue to continue to grow, driving a top line growth of the whole segment. As for our group MAU, I believe you can observe that it's been under some fluctuation over the past two quarters and this is primarily due to our current proactive strategy of optimizing resources towards poor developed countries and premium users, while strategically direct some of our resources away from areas and users with limited long term monetization potential. While this strategy might have a short term negative impact on our overall MAU, we believe that by focusing on high quality premium users, we would be able to drive and also an ROI driven growth strategy would be able to enhance our user equality and monetization efficiency and therefore laying a more solid foundation for our long term sustainable growth.
And Alex will take your second question. This is Alex. So in the Q3, our disciplined execution has driven enhanced operational efficiency at both second level and also the group level. The group's non GAAP gross margin was 37.3%, which is up by nearly 2 percentage points compared to 35 0.3% in Q2. And the group's non GAAP operating profit margin was 6.2%, which was up by 0.9 percentage points compared to Q2.
And its absolute amount of non GAAP operating profit increased by 16.4% quarter over quarter. If you look at Bigo segment, in Q3, we saw a non GAAP gross margin of 36.9%, which is up by 1.4 percentage points from 35.5% in Q2. And Bigo's non GAAP operating margin was now expanded to 14.7%, up by 1 percentage points compared to Q2 with an absolute amount of non GAAP operating profit expanding by 5% quarter over quarter. And that was mainly due to optimized content cost of V Go Live and also savings of our sales and marketing expenses, particularly our user acquisition spending. And if you look at all other segments, the non GAAP gross margin was also substantially improved in the quarter, up from 34.5% in Q2 to 40% in Q3, which is up by 5.5 percentage points in the quarter.
And that was mainly due to a sequential quarter over quarter revenue recovery. And the operating the non GAAP operating loss was RMB38 1,000,000 during the quarter, narrowing by 3.7% compared to Q2, mainly due to our effective expenses control, particularly a steady decline in our R and D expenses as a percentage of our revenue. So looking ahead to the Q4, for Bigo segment, we anticipate Bigo Live's profit contribution to remain relatively stable. However, due to the adjustment that we made to our non core audio live streaming product, together with this seasonality impact as our sales and marketing expenses might increase in the end of the year, we expect a slight decline in our in Bigo's non GAAP operating profit as compared to Q3. For all other segments, we expect its non GAAP operating loss amount to further narrow in Q4.
Looking ahead for the year 'twenty five, we will continue to execute an ROI oriented operational strategy, persistently optimizing content cost and user acquisition strategies within Bigo segment. We anticipate the profit margins and absolute amount of profit contribution from Bigo Life to likely increase in the year 2025. Nonetheless, due to the adjustments that we've just mentioned that we made to the non core audio live streaming products under the Bigo segment, we believe which we believe will have a negative impact on the segment's profit, Considering the above mentioned two factors together, we expect that the overall non GAAP operating profit for Bigo segment will likely remain stable with certain potential for growth for the New Year. And in terms of the all other segments, we expect improving under the assumption of improving monetization, discipline spending with our R and D expenses as a percentage of our revenue continue to likely decline in the New Year,
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance, Joy Inc.: we
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: foresee a potential further narrowing of non GAAP operating losses in the year 2025 compared to 2024. Therefore, at group level, we believe that our non GAAP operating profit amount will continue to show an improving trend in the year 2025. All in all, we believe that efficiency optimization requires ongoing efforts and therefore we will continue to optimize every aspect of our global localized operation, enhance our operational efficiency in order to drive a sustainable profitable growth of our business. Thank you. Next question please.
Conference Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Rafael Chen with BOCI Research. Please go ahead.
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance, Joy Inc.: I will translate myself. Thanks management for taking my question. Could management share the general monetization trends across different key regions in fiscal year 2025? Thank you.
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: This is Liqing. I will take your question. At group level, the developed countries region continues to provide momentum of growth. In the Q3, revenues from developed countries increased by 21.6% year over year, outperforming all other regions with its revenue contribution to the group increasing to 54.9%. In terms of sequential trends, the group's revenues from the Middle East region grew by 2.1% quarter over quarter showing signs of rebound.
Looking at the long term, as we continue to execute on our ROI oriented operational strategy and prioritizing operational resources towards regions with high monetization potential, we expect that both the developed countries and also the Middle East will remain our top priority. Thank you. Next question please.
Conference Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Derek Fai with Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS). Please go ahead.
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance, Joy Inc.: I'll translate myself. Hi, Derek.
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: Thank you, Derek, for your question. This is Alex. I will answer your question. So if you look at our full year's execution, so far we've been very, very active in our shareholder return initiatives throughout the year. And in Q3, we repurchased an additional of 118,000,000 worth of our shares.
And for the 1st 3 quarters of the year, we have in total bought back 7,310,000 ADS for a total of 244,000,000, which accounts for an impressive 12% of our total shares outstanding as of the end of last year. While looking ahead to the year 2025, we will continue to consider shareholder returns as one of our strategic priorities and continue to create value for our shareholders. Next question please. And due to the limited time, I believe this will be our last question.
Conference Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Yuwong Jiang with China Renaissance. Please go ahead.
Alex Liu, Vice President of Finance, Joy Inc.: So thanks for taking my question. Can management discuss the outlook for our advertising and other new initiative business into 2025? Thank you.
Jane Shear, Senior Manager of Investor Relations, Joy Inc.: Thank you for your question. This is Liqing. I will take your question. In the Q3, Bigo's advertising revenue remained robust growth, which significantly increased its contribution to the segment's total revenue, now reaching 15.8%, among which the advertising revenue from our own social platform, LIKI, delivered a year over year growth of 33.4% and a sequential growth of 8.9%. Revenues from our advertising platform, Bigo Audience Network, continue to show strong momentum with a sequential growth exceeding 20%, primarily driven by Europe and North America.
Notably, the operating profit and OP margins of Bigo's audience network business have been improved sequentially during the quarter. Well, so far, the growth in our revenue advertising revenue from our own social platforms such as LIKY is mainly attributed to optimization of our ad inventory and our bidding strategies. Future sustained growth will be dependent on the expansion of its own DAU, while the growth of our advertising platform or Bigo audience network has been driven by multiple factors, including the expanding network DAU pool, entering into new markets or the exploration of new vertical or new clients. However, it always takes time to accumulate scale in order to drive further profit growth. In order to drive further growth, we will again take a long term view, continue to explore and refine our operations and drive a steady increase of our market share over time.
So that's the end of our questions, and thank you so much for joining our call. We look forward to speaking with everyone next quarter. Thank you.
Conference Operator: This conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.
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