Ticker: WB

Quarter: Q4 2025

Date: 2026-03-18 00:00:00

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Weibo Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Sandra Zhang, IR Representative. Please go ahead.

Sandra Zhang: Thank you, operator. Welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are Chief Executive Officer, Gaofei Wang; and our Chief Financial Officer, Fei Cao. The conference call is also being broadcasted on the Internet and is available on Weibo's IR website. Before the management remarks, I would like to read you the safe harbor statement in connection with today's conference call. During today's conference call, we may make forward-looking statements, statements that are not historical facts, including statements of our beliefs and expectations. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. Weibo assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements in this conference call and elsewhere. Further information regarding this and other risks is included in Weibo's annual report on Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC. All the information provided in this press release is occurring as the date hereof. Weibo assumes no obligation to update such information, except as required under applicable law. Additionally, I'd like to remind you that our discussion today includes certain non-GAAP measures, which excludes stock-based compensation and certain other expenses. We use non-GAAP financial measures to gain a better understanding of Weibo's comparative operating performance and the future prospects. Our non-GAAP financials exclude certain expenses, gains or losses and other items that are not expected to result in future cash payments or are nonrecurring in nature or are not indicative of our core operating results and outlook. Please refer to our press release for more information about our non-GAAP measures. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the lines for a brief Q&A session. With this, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Gaofei Wang.

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On today's call, I'll share with you highlights on Weibo's product and monetization, review the progress made in 2025, elaborate our strategies for 2026. Starting from our financial performance in the fourth quarter, our total revenues in the fourth quarter reached USD 473.3 million, an increase of 4% year-over-year. Our total revenues reached USD 403.8 million, an increase of 5% year-over-year. Our value-added service revenues reached USD 69.5 million, a decrease of 2% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter reached USD 100.4 million, representing operating margin of 21%. For full year 2025, our total revenues reached USD 1.76 billion, relatively flat year-over-year. Our total ad revenues reached USD 1.5 billion, relatively flat year-over-year. Our value-added service revenues reached USD 255.6 million, relatively flat year-over-year. For the full year 2025, our non-GAAP operating income reached USD 523.6 million, representing a non-GAAP operating margin of 30%. On the user front, in December 2025, Weibo's MAUs reached 567 million and average DAUs reached 252 million. Throughout 2025, we focused on enhancing user value, solidifying Weibo's leading position in hot topics and entertainment content ecosystem and strengthening the competitiveness of our social products. At the same time, we leveraged to improve our recommendation and search systems, driving both user base and engagement. Next, I will highlight key development in Weibo's product operation and monetization in the fourth quarter. On user growth and engagement, in late July, we completed a structural upgrade of our core homepage and officially rolled out the new homepage with interest-based feed as a primary interface. Our key objective of this upgrade was to leverage in social products while expanding from only relying on relationship-based mechanism to distribute content -- user to discover high-quality content more efficiently and providing greater visibility for vertical content across the platform. In terms of execution in the third quarter, we focused on ensuring smooth transition of the product and minimize the impact on user behaviors. In the fourth quarter, we prioritized 2 key initiatives. First, we continue to refine our recommendation algorithm to improve recommendation to efficiency by leveraging real-time user behavior, coding clicks, time spent and engagement. We strengthened our instant recommendation capabilities and facilitated more in-depth content consumption. As a result, in the fourth quarter, both the average information feed viewership and time spent per user increased quarter-over-quarter. That, we rolled out an algorithm-driven audience segmentation strategy to deliver more granular targeted content recommendation for users to engage on the platform. We maintained a stable distribution of relationship-based content within their interest-based feed, keeping a balance between relationship-based content and interest-based content, satisfying users' demand for social content consumption while improving the precision of content. Among the social users, the average viewership and time spent per refresh and engagement per 1,000 viewership all increased quarter-over-quarter in the fourth quarter. We also revamped the new homepage with easier onboarding experience for new users. With continued recommendation algorithms, new users average information feed consumption per refresh and have exhibited upward trends. In the meantime, we also recognize that compared with the relationship-based feed, the market for the interest-based recommendation feed is highly competitive. In the transitional period, some user metrics remain volatile, which is within our expectation. Nevertheless, the strong content consumption by social users and new users have fully validated our current direction. Going forward, we will continue to leverage Weibo's social product and hot topics, further enhance the distribution of Weibo's unique content. Meanwhile, we will focus on establishing a more stable and predictable content consumption experience and enhancing user trust and stickiness with the homepage information feed, which laid a solid foundation for long-term user growth, engagement and monetization. As the interest-based feed became the core scenario for distribution, this will facilitate the distribution of our video content, which were previously mainly through relationship-based feed. For video strategy in the second half 2025, we focused on 2 key initiatives: first, enhancing video efficiency by strengthening the synergy between content and scenarios; second, improve the quality of video content. This involves incentivizing top-tier KOLs to produce more competitive content for the platform, while systematically managing low-quality video content to optimize the supply structure. In the second half of 2025, both the average daily video view time and the per user video view time on the video playback page achieved double-digit growth compared with first half of 2025. Furthermore, during the spring, the release and widespread adoption of AI video technology and tools significantly lowered the barrier for video creation. During the period, both the number of original videos and the number of original video content creators among Golden and grew over 40% year-over-year. Looking ahead, as AI technologies continue to evolve and advance video production efficiency and quality are expected to improve further. In response, we will leverage the product in content in hot topics and vertical IPs, providing content creators with AI creation tools to support secondary content production and content expansion around vertical IPs. This further strengthen the competitiveness of Weibo video content ecosystem. For example, among those movies released during the spring festival, we will partner with the Belgian, the Blade launch a fan creation contest where content creators use AI tools to produce creative adaptation based on the flow and characters. Over 100 creators participate through the contest and over -- the main production team interacted active platform. The campaign sparked a diverse discussion and engaged audience from all verticals, providing a replicable marketing model. Subsequently, this AI-powered edition model is also being used for the current hit drama, helping to boost the show's visibility. Turning to search products. In the first quarter, we continued to focus on providing users with more intelligent and convenient search experience. First, we continue our AI capabilities to improve the accuracy of understanding users' needs and content. In high-frequency search scenarios such as hot topics and public figure search, we leveraged intelligent search to optimize search effectiveness and user experience, strengthening the mind share of search among Weibo users. Second, we upgraded the product form, evolving Weibo intelligent search from a single round Q&A model to a multi-round conversational assistant, which better meets users' needs for more coherent and in-depth information discovery and exploration. Third, we expanded implementation of intelligence more key scenarios, including content consumption and social interactions, reaching a broader user base. These initiatives lead to continued growth in intelligent search user scale and engagement in the fourth quarter. In December, Weibo's intelligent search MAU surpassed 80 million with average DAUs and search queries booked double-digit growth quarter-over-quarter, driving overall platform search query volume further to improve. Moving on to monetization. In 2025, our ad product and sales teams consistently focused on 2 strategic priorities. First, continuing to promote Weibo's unique content marketing positioning across all industries; and second, systematically improving ad performance and conversion capabilities by leveraging AI technologies. In the fourth quarter, Weibo's ad revenues grew by 5% year-over-year. By industry, in the fourth quarter, we focused on capturing marketing opportunities sector with high budget visibility with e-commerce, automobile and local service serving as the primary driver of top line growth. Leveraging Weibo's strength in social products and hot trends, Weibo gained stronger recognition from e-commerce clients in delivering key and acquiring high-value users. As a result, the e-commerce sector booked notable year-over-year growth. Meanwhile, we successfully replicate this model to local service sectors, helping service-oriented advertisers such as food delivery platforms to achieve effective user acquisition in a highly competitive environment. We are pleased to see solid ad growth from local service sector. The automobile sector also sustained steady growth, underpinned by Weibo's vertical ecosystem advantages. On flip side, the handset industry experienced traction factoring into product launch, product launch schedules and subsidy policy fluctuations. The online game sector continued to face pressure, mainly due to the lack of blockbuster game releases. Since the fourth quarter, with the tailwind from intensive release of large language models, Weibo has become the go-to platform for companies to launch new products, promote AI technologies and build brand awareness, leveraging Weibo's well-established KOL ecosystem and professional discussion environment in the digital and technology sectors. Recent integration of major AI models such as in Qwen by Alibaba and Doubao by ByteDance drove nearly 50% increase in related discussion on Weibo compared with that around 50 rollout last year. This technological upgrade went viral on our platform, which also attracted trends-related ad budget. The AI sector is becoming a clear growth driver for our platforms. For the full year, despite temporary fluctuation in ad budget due to macroeconomics and industry-specific factors, our revenue structure demonstrated stronger resilience with content marketing consistently contributing 50% of total ad revenues. Throughout 2025, we continuously optimize the marketing combo of high-quality native content production by KOLs and precise information feed targeting, thereby enhancing Weibo's overall competitiveness in brand awareness and conversion. Taking the new product we launch programs as an example. In 2025, we serve over brand clients across 22 industries, leveraging synergy between high-quality celebrity and KOL content and feed ad placement. We established a full funnel campaign model from amplify brand awareness to drive conversion. This campaign model significantly improved clients' marketing effectiveness of our trends, creating a positive synergy between our monetization and -- in performance-based advertising, our AI application made notable progress. In December, AI-generated ad creatives already accounted for 40% of consumption in promoted feed ad offerings and the real-time bidding systems. AI integration has not only enabled us to greatly reduce advertisers' creative cost, but also improve traffic monetization efficiency through ongoing optimization of bidding models and conversion paths. Overall, Weibo has achieved its annual ad revenue target as we beef up organizational execution, AI-empowered capability in 2025. We are pleased to further solidify and enhance competitiveness of Weibo's monetization ecosystem. Entering 2026, we will continue to create value for users with focus on optimizing user experience and driving long-term retention. By balancing traffic operation efficiency with quality, we are committed to strengthening Weibo's ecosystem and reinforcing its long-term competitiveness while further growing our user community and engagement. Next, let me share some color on our key strategies for 2026 on 3 key fronts: user growth and engagement, content ecosystem and monetization. On user growth and engagement, we will prioritize retention of quality users in the hope of building a sustainable growth path featuring high value and deeply engaged user community. First, on the channel strategy, we will upgrade our full life cycle operation framework to optimize the entire new user journey from activation and onboarding to stable usage and thus enhancing the conversion of acquired users into core active users. Second, for the information feed products built upon the homepage revamp and capability building in 2025, '26 will mark a new phase of user experience improvement and refined operation. We will continue to optimize Weibo's algorithm and strengthen engagement with the homepage information feeds so as to drive steady growth in both user engagement and time spent. Third, video will become our key strategic driver of user retention and time spent in 2026. The homepage revamp in 2025 has paved the way for more efficient video distribution across the platforms. We have already achieved solid progress in improving content quality and fostering user mindset of video consumption on Weibo. In 2026, we will step up investment and leverage AI technologies to enhance video understanding and recommendation efficiency. Meanwhile, we will work to diversify our video content offerings, including original videos, mindshare-focused videos and short format. Through comprehensive upgrade across content, algorithms and product experience, we expect video to play an increasingly important role in driving user time spent and retention, supporting continued growth of our user base. On the content, in 2026, we will continue to focus on 3 core pillars: our trends, social product and search products to further our content ecosystem and strengthen our core competitiveness. First, on hot trends, we'll explore the synchronization of feed distribution and hot trend charts. On top of reinforcing the credibility of the hot search product, we aim to enhance recommendation efficiency of hot topics within the information feed and expand the scale of users engaging in discussion, which will enable us to reinforce core advantages in hot topic consumption and fashion. Second, on social product, we will continue to beef up investment in super topic products. We will focus specifically on the interest-based needs of young users, deepen the operation of interest-based communities and enhance their experience. By cultivating social relationship and interactive mindset on the platform, we aim to further boost user sense of belonging and engagement on Weibo. Third, on search product, building on the full rollout of Weibo intelligent search capability in 2025, we will focus on cultivating a differentiating of our search product in 2026. To elaborate, we seek to highlight in our search features, including searching people, IPs and hot trends. By integrating intelligent Q&A and conversational search experience, we aim to provide users with more accurate, efficient and differentiated search services. Moving on to monetization. In 2026, our key initiative is to capture our volume share in the brand and market through resource investment, specifically towards invest, leveraging Weibo's cumulative strength in IP hot trends, celebrity ecosystem, we are pleased to see a broad-based trend with more and more brands showing recognition to step up ad budgets in our celebrity and web marketing. In light of this trend, we upgrade our full-service IP marketing framework to enhance Weibo's competitive edge in brand and market, leveraging service and a comprehensive metric of celebrity ad playbook. We will try to deepen partnership with clients and participate in their decision-making process, thereby wallet share in the brand and content marketing ad budget. Meanwhile, we will make the prudent resource allocation among selected core marketing scenarios to build a portfolio with stronger competitive moats. This resource deployment will largely be structured around our existing marketing ecosystem. While the fluctuation in profit margin in the short term, the overall pacing will be strictly managed based on the ROI and kept within a controllable budget cap. As we continue to refine product ecosystem and client service capabilities, we expect this initiative to gradually yield returns from the second half of 2026 onwards. In the mid to long term, this initiative will help further elevate Weibo's position within clients' marketing decision-making chains, driving more sustainable revenue growth. In terms of performance-based advertising, we maintain steady operations across core industries. Furthermore, empowered by AI technology, we will focus on further enhancing both ad targeting position, the overall user experience. Finally, on value-added service, we aim for steady growth by refining the privilege system for paid users and expanding the coverage of V plus membership among top-tier content creators in the hope of promoting the creation of the V plus ecosystem to achieve significant revenue breakthroughs. On organizational efficiency, in 2026, AI to drive front-end business growth, we will focus on expanding AI adoption across internal operations, enabling teams in product development, operations and monetization to drive AI tools to enhance execution efficiency. We believe enhanced technological capabilities and organizational efficiency will be the cornerstone for achieving our strategic goals for 2026. With that, let me turn the call over to Fei Cao for the financial review of the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2025.

Cao Fei: Thank you, Gaofei, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Weibo's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Let's start with user metrics. In December 2025, Weibo's MAUs and average DAUs reached 567 million and 252 million, respectively, in 2025. Thanks to the tailwinds of ever-evolving AI technologies, they are highly focused on exploring AI features to transform the whole user experience. AI is now deeply integrated into Weibo's recommendation engine, content generation and search functions, et cetera. Notably, user sales and search queries from Weibo intelligent search feature grew robustly this year with intelligent search MAUs exceeding -- heading into 2026, we will continue to invest in AI as the cornerstone and growth multiplier for our business, driving a more engaging experience for Weibo's user community. Turning -- as a reminder, my prepared remarks will focus on non-GAAP results. Monetary amounts are in U.S. dollar terms and all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. Now let me walk you through our financial highlights and fiscal year 2025. Weibo's fourth quarter 2025 net revenues were USD 473.3 million, an increase of 4% or 1% on a constant currency basis. Operating income was USD 100.4 million, representing operating margin of 21%. Net income attributable to Weibo reached USD 66.4 million, and diluted EPS was $0.25. For full year 2025, total revenue reached USD 1.76 billion, relatively flat year-over-year. Operating income was USD 523.6 million, representing operating margin of 30%. Net income attributable to Weibo reached USD 439.8 million and diluted EPS was $1.65. Let me give you more color on fourth quarter and full year 2025 revenue performance. First, our advertising business. Weibo's advertising and marketing revenues for the fourth quarter 2025 were USD 403.8 million, an increase of 5% or 2% -- Mobile ad revenues were USD 379.2 million, contributing approximately 94% of total ad revenues. We ended 2025 on a solid note. Advertising business for the fourth quarter trended better than our expectations despite weak consumption data by industry. Our largest 3 verticals were e-commerce, 3P products and FMCG. In terms of growth, e-commerce, local services, Internet services and automobile were the key contributors. We are pleased to see strong momentum of the e-commerce and local service sectors. Weibo has not only demonstrated its value proposition in driving brand exposure during mega shopping festivals, but also fulfilled the platform user acquisition needs amid intensified market share competition. The automobile sector sustained solid growth this quarter, benefiting from Weibo's robust auto-related content ecosystem and ad spend from ICE vehicle brands. On top line growth -- pull back from the product sector. We faced tough comparison with handset manufacturers for the fourth quarter last year when the trading subsidies took effect. The online game sector continued to underperform, mainly due to budget contraction from game developers. Full year 2025 advertising and marketing revenues reached USD 1.5 billion, largely flat compared to 2024, reflecting diverging performance across our key verticals. Mobile ad revenues contributed 95% of total ad revenue. Our largest vertical FMCG, e-commerce and 3C products, where e-commerce, Internet services and automobile growth. Leveraging closer partnership and stimulus policies, we captured higher wallet share from both the e-commerce and automobile sectors. However, our pillar industries, FMCG, 3C products and online games were on a descending trend, partially due to tough comparison resulting from incremental ad budget from the Paris Olympics and blockbuster game releases in 2024. By ad product, promoted feed ad was the largest, followed by social display and topics and search. In 2025, we further amplified the synergy between content and monetization ecosystem, reinforcing Weibo's market differentiation around celebrities, IP and content marketing. On top of these initiatives, we focus on AI-powered ad technology upgrade to revamp Weibo's ad infrastructure. Our real-time bidding feed ad was a clear beneficiary of AI integration, which could facilitate smarter ad targeting and generative AI ad creative solutions. Ad revenues from Alibaba for the fourth quarter were USD 50 million and 24%, taking the year 2025 with sustained robust growth. We are encouraged to see Weibo's content and celebrity ad playbook regain traction with Alibaba amid the current competition and budget allocation dynamics. Full year ad revenues from Alibaba were USD 173.8 million, an increase of 49%, driven by a deeper collaboration during key e-commerce marketing windows and Alibaba's increased ad spend on its local services initiatives. Moving on to value-added service, VAS. VAS revenues were USD 69.5 million in the fourth quarter, a modest decrease of 2%. For full year 2025, VAS revenues recorded a flattish trend, reaching USD 255.6 million, which reflected a small increase in membership revenues, offset by decrease in game-related revenues. Turning to costs and expenses. Total cost and expenses for the fourth quarter were USD 372.8 million, an increase of 16%, mainly attributable to higher ad production costs and the step-up in marketing expenses. Full year cost and expenses reached USD 1.23 billion, an increase of 5%. Operating income in the fourth quarter was USD 100.4 million, representing operating margin of 21% compared to 30% in the same period last year. Operating income for full year 2025 was USD 523.6 million, representing operating margin of 30% compared to 33% in 2024. Turning to income tax under GAAP measure. Income tax expenses for the fourth quarter were USD 31.3 million compared to USD 20 million last year. The increase of income tax expenses was primarily due to withholding tax accrued related to all the company's wholly foreign-owned enterprises of earnings to be remitted to Weibo Hong Kong Limited in the foreseeable future to fund its demand for U.S. dollars in business operations and potential investments, et cetera. Full year income tax expenses were USD 144.5 million compared to USD 110.6 million in 2024. The increase was primarily due to withholding tax accrued related to all of the company's WUFI entities earnings to be remitted to Weibo Hong Kong Limited in the foreseeable future to fund its demand for U.S. dollars in business and potential investments, et cetera as well as the recognition of deferred tax liabilities related to equity pickup gains in 2025. Net income attributable to Weibo in the fourth quarter was USD 66.4 million, representing a net margin of 14% compared to 23% last year, primarily due to above-mentioned impact from operating margin and income tax. Net income for full year 2025 was USD 439.8 million, representing a net margin of 25% to 27% in 2024. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow items as of December 31, 2025, Weibo's cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totaled USD 2.41 billion. Fourth quarter cash provided by operating activities was USD 181.4 million. Capital expenditures totaled USD 10.4 million. And depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to USD 15.3 million on a full year basis. Cash provided by operating activities was USD 519.5 million. Capital expenditures totaled USD 42.4 million. And depreciation and amortization expenses amounted to USD 59.1 million. In light of Weibo's solid profitability and healthy cash flow, we are pleased to announce that our Board of Directors has approved an annual cash dividend of $0.61 per ordinary share or ADS for the fiscal year 2025 under Weibo's annual dividend policy. The total dividend payout will be approximately USD 150 million with payment expected to be made in May 2026. Looking ahead, we are committed to capitalizing on the transformative AI opportunities and unlocking the potential of our social media platform while maintaining robust financial health despite uncertainties with consumption sentiment and competition landscape. Our disciplined capital allocation supports our long-term strategies and ensures financial stability, enabling us to deliver sustainable returns to our shareholders. With that, let me now turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A session.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Due to no response, we'll move on to the next question. Our next question comes from the line of Xueqing Zhang from CICC.

Xueqing Zhang: [Interpreted] My question about AI strategy. As you mentioned in the prepared remarks, since the beginning of 2026, we have seen rapid development across AI landscape, including significant improvements in AI video generation models as well as the increasing adoption of AI agents on the application side. We think this could fundamentally reshape both content creation and user interaction. So could management share what's your strategy in the AI era and what's our key focus for AI application in 2026? In addition, what's the plan to integrate the latest AI technologies into platform operations, for example, in content distribution, user engagement, video strategy and monetization. And lastly, could management give us an update on, including its current progress and the role in your AI strategy?

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] This is actually a very good question. I would like to answer this from 2 points. The first one is that what is the AI role and also what is the AI planning on Weibo as a product and also what is our competitive positioning of AI if we regard Weibo as a platform. First part is about the Weibo as a product. Last year, in 2025, I think that the only product that we have launched targeting the consumer side was intelligence search. But of course, on back of that, we had a lot of other plans and strategic plans related to the launch of AI capabilities. Of course, in the past, in terms of the capabilities of the large language models, most of them were focusing on the improvement of the capabilities that are non-multimodel related. So if you're talking about the only product that we have launched in 2025 targeting the user side, this will be with the tens of millions of users at a scale. So of course, we have been doing a lot of trials and experiments on the other related model capabilities. So in 2025, Q4, especially in December and in Q1 of 2026, we have been doing a lot of researches and also focus on the improvement of the capabilities. The first one is that I think that is a very good timing in terms of the front-end use by having a very good improvement of the capabilities by combining agents with skills altogether. And of course, second point I would like to say is that in terms of the AI product, of course, you could see that we've been seeing a very good improvement of the capability of -- and especially this year, combining the capability of agents and multimodel based. So for instance, in the past, this particular as a product was pretty much focusing on the summary based on text. But now it is able to have the dialogue generation and also multi-question and query answering capability. And if you're interested, you can actually test this feature of -- on the website of Weibo or on the app of Weibo. And second part is about the productization of other ends. So in the past, you know that our Weibo's core capability was still based on the text and image, and of course, we try to make some of the core content creators of those text and images to commit them or -- I mean, to shift them to become the video creators. Of course, in the past, that kind of transformation was quite successful. But later on, we have been seeing some of the constraints and limitations. So now with the improvement of the capabilities of AI, those content creators are going to be more creative and also increasing the capabilities of the storytelling and expressions as well. So that is exactly the reason that we've been investing a lot on this particular technology related to video generation and also we've been investing heavily into the computational power improvement and increasing. And also in Q1 of this year, you've been seeing a very good growth of our video generation and video content on Weibo platform quarter-by-quarter or year-by-year. And also, we've been seeing a very good profitability against this. And I believe that this is going to be the major source of our revenue growth as well as the profit growth. So the AI enhanced content creation or those content creators are now going to be having more capabilities with the empowerment of AI to actually generate more videos directly or using the AI or Gen AI capability to actually convert the text images into videos. And the second big part of the answer would be that we regard Weibo as a platform and how we are facilitating this particular AI notion. So first of all, that now on Weibo platform, we were actively disseminating the knowledge related to the AI and AI application and also promoting the AI-related content. Because of our large user base, and especially those active content creators on the science and technology realm or on a digital product realm still -- are still quite active in generating content and helping disseminate knowledge about AI on Weibo platform and using Weibo platform. So as a platform, we are going to keep continuously doing that. And also this help us to generate a lot of traffic and attract the users, especially during the Chinese New Year period, for instance. So last year, it was pretty much about DeepSeek and the connectivity with that. But still this year, we've been seeing more AI models and getting connected on Weibo platform like the Qwen or OpenClaw, which is getting very, very popular recently. But still relating to those new models, I think that the major content on our platform will be the discussions that we have promoted to generate in terms of how to use and how to apply those new model -- new AI or Gen AI. So in the past, we always regarded as the open platform and of course, provide our capability to connect with the large language models like Kiwi, Qwen or -- recently, which are all doing their own version of the OpenClaw-related agentic AI. So we are now getting a very good connectivity with those Claw like agentic AI capabilities. And of course, now Weibo as a platform has already been successfully switched to a platform that is servicing the need of AI application and also the dissemination of AI-related content. So for instance, with Qwen, we have been successfully getting API connection in terms of the commenting features. So the volume of the comment through Qwen has already been reached to the same level as for that of the feature or commenting feature. So in total, I believe that all those AI models or agentic AIs we're actively using the large user base of Weibo and also on our platform doing a lot of more interactions with the users about AI-related content.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup.

Alicis a Yap: [Interpreted] Can management share with us in light of the current macro situation and also the intensified competition of the AI product, how is management see the advertiser budget sentiment and their ad spend? And what is the growth expectation that management has set for Weibo for 2026? And what is the overall advertising strategy and how Weibo can leverage and embrace the AI applications to enhance the ad growth? And also how Weibo has been using the AI to improve the operating efficiency.

Gaofei Wang: [Interpreted] So thank you for this question. First of all, we had about the ad revenue growth of about 2% to 3% in Q4. And in Q1, in terms of the growth rate itself, we had a single-digit growth. We're going to have a single-digit growth versus the same period of last year. And also second point I would like to say is that because of the traffic growth, especially the AI-related traffic growth, we have been bringing in a lot of new customers onto our platform. And of course, in February, we had the Winter Olympics took place in Milano and that helped us to also generate a little bit on the revenue as well. And in terms of consumption, so we had a slowdown in Q4 versus the Q3 area in terms of the ad revenue from the consumption area. But still this year, the national government has made a plan of having around 4% of the growth in the total consumption area. So talking about different verticals. So first of all, e-commerce and automotive, we believe that there will be a very good growth happening to these 2 verticals in 2026 as well as for the handset and the gaming industries, there are some of the uncertainties. For the handset, I would like to say that probably the growth is happening on a periodic basis. Now because of the memory price is increasing. So we've been seeing a lot of the selling price increase for some low to medium-end models of the handset. But still, on our platform for most of the advertisers of the mobile phone makers, most of them are actually spending money to do advertisements on the medium to high-end models. So still there are some of the uncertainties. So approximately, the handset industry is going to be experiencing a flat performance of this year. So the next point I would like to answer is for the point about different kind of advertisements. So according to what we have mentioned in the prepared script, in 2026, we've been seeing a kind of very good improvement of that. But still, we experienced a very intense competition in terms of the performance-based ad and something like that. So of course, in 2025, we have been observing that some of the advertisers were coming back to the original marketing mechanisms, for instance, the KOL celebrity-based or the event-driven. So in 2025, we've been seeing a very good increase in terms of the celebrity-based advertisements in terms of the sales volume, but not necessarily the improvement of the ARPU itself. So in 2026, we have certain strategies to deal with that situation. First of all, as we have already mentioned that the service provision system is going to be totally updated. So now we focus more on the quality service provision and helping us to actually embed into the upstream of the decision-making chain of our customers, i.e., advertisers. And in 2026, we've been seeing a lot of -- we are very confident to generate a lot of ad revenue growth from this area. And also second point is for those return trends, which is KOL-based marketing or the celebrity-based marketing. And we've been seeing a very positive trend of some of the advertisers of coming back to this notion of doing marketing. So of course, at the current stage, as I have already said that the ARPU wasn't that much improved because of less than -- or because of less diversification of the choices of the KOLs. So I think that we will, first of all, put some several products into one as a package and deliver to our customers. And second, that we provide a very good cost base advantage to our customers in order to deal with the situation, helping to actually improve and increase the ARPU in the same place at the same time. And the third one will be the content-based marketing. And for different verticals, we had been experiencing some volatility there. But still, overall speaking, the content-based marketing had been seeing a very good growth. And at the current stage, of course, we've been seeing that it is contributing to about 50% of our total ad revenue. And in 2026, we will be focusing more on the investment onto those KOLs and trying to actually achieve a very good momentum carrying on effect. And the next point I would like to say is the performance-based ad, of course. So we had a very good growth in 2025. And this performance-based ad is contributing or is accounting for about 17% of our total revenue -- ad revenue and which increased by about 3 to 4 percentage points versus the year before. So now what we have as strategies are, first of all, optimizing the algorithms and second of all, helping to actually improve and increase the CPI based effects.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. So I'll hand the conference back to Sandra for closing remarks.

Sandra Zhang: Thank you, operator. This wraps up our conference call today. We'll see you next quarter.

Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]