Kuaishou releases Q4 results: strong ad sales drive a surge in revenue
Kuaishou, TikTok’s Chinese rival, released its latest financial results on Tuesday, with ad sales driving a surge in fourth-quarter revenue.
Total revenue increased by 35% to 24.4 billion yuan ($3.83 billion)in the quarter, above the analysts’ prediction of 23.1 billion yuan. Among them, online marketing services increased by 55.5% to 13.2 billion yuan from 8.5 billion yuan in the same period in 2020, mainly driven by a vigorous growth of total traffic and continuously improve digitalized advertising products and operating capabilities.
According to the company, online marketing services contributed 54.2% of its revenue, while live streaming contributed 36.1%. The remaining 9.7% came from other services.
In the fourth-quarter, gross merchandise value (GMV) on the platform was 240.3 billion yuan, up 35.7% from 177.1 billion yuan in the same time in 2020.
Net loss narrowed to 6.2 billion yuan ($974.20 million), compared with the 6.3 billion yuan estimated loss. The company generated a positive operating net cash flow in the quarter by improving monetization efficiency and managing working capital more effectively.
The company believes that short video and live streaming can serve as an infrastructure to improve efficiency and boost digital economy. “We have gradually begun to explore other scenarios such as online recruitment and local services to empower more industries and people with short videos and live streaming,” said Chen Yixiao, CEO of Kuaishou, in the earnings call.
In recent days, the company has ramped up investment in Kuaizhaogong (快招工), an online recruiting service it launched in January for blue-collar workers.
“The number of blue-collar workers in China exceeds 400 million, which is more than twice that of white-collar workers… but online hiring penetration among blue-collar workers is just around 10%… Therefore, online recruiting services for blue-collar workers have the greatest growth potential,” said the CEO.
As for the overseas market, the company said that it had witnessed a positive user growth in the first half of the year, and in the second half of the year, it began to explore monetization opportunities in advertising, live streaming, e-commerce and other sectors.
The Beijing-based company’s overseas business has been in turmoil recently. In this month, it lost its international business leader Tony Qiu due to personal reasons, and CEO Cheng Yixiao now supervises its Kwai and Snack Video apps directly. The two apps mainly targets users in Latin America.