Guangzhou-based Joyy (NASDAQ: YY) on Friday reported RMB 3.78 billion (USD 579.9 million) in revenue for the final quarter of 2020, up 77.5% year-on-year (YoY), excluding YY Live, which was sold to Baidu.
Proceeds from its livestreaming business increased by 93.3% YoY to RMB 3.59 million, accounting for nearly 95% of the company’s entire revenue. The upswing came thanks to continued user base growth and enhanced monetization capabilities of Bigo Live, the livestreaming app, and short-video app Likee, a direct competitor of ByteDance’s TikTok.
Average mobile MAUs (monthly active users) of Likee increased by 4.2% YoY to 120.1 million in the fourth quarter, while the number for Bigo Live increased 24.5% to 28.7 million, compared with 23.1 million in the same quarter of 2019.
However, average mobile MAUs of Hago, a casual game app, dropped by about 50% YoY to 16.5 million due to the impact of measures by the Indian government to block Chinese-owned apps in the market.
Despite the strong growth in the last quarter, Joyy still generated a net loss of RMB 791.9 million (USD 121.4 million), less than the RMB 816.6 million deficit from a year earlier, as Bigo was able to reduce its operational loss.
“For the whole year of 2020, our overseas business segment Bigo generated larger revenue than YY Live,” founder and chairman David Xueling Li said in a statement.
Total number of paying users of YY Live decreased by 1.1% to 4.25 million in the fourth quarter, as the impact of COVID-19 adversely affected the sentiment of some of its users, according to Joyy. The sale of its China business YY Live for USD 3.6 billion was substantially completed in February.
For the first quarter of 2021, the firm expects net revenues of USD 590 million to USD 605 million, a year-over-year growth of between 72.5% and 76.9%, according to the release.
