JOYY Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a global technology company. Through its social product matrix and communication technology, the company enables people to connect with friends and family, discover and explore their interests, and share their experiences and ideas with a global audience through photos, audio, and videos. The company’s diverse product matrix covers live streaming, short videos, instant messaging, casual games, and beyond.
The company serves a global user ba...
JOYY Inc., together with its subsidiaries, operates as a global technology company. Through its social product matrix and communication technology, the company enables people to connect with friends and family, discover and explore their interests, and share their experiences and ideas with a global audience through photos, audio, and videos. The company’s diverse product matrix covers live streaming, short videos, instant messaging, casual games, and beyond.
The company serves a global user base, covering North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Pacific regions, and more. The number of the company’s global monthly active users on its social platforms increased by 2.6% year over year to 274.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. The company operates in the global social entertainment sector.
The company is exploring innovative technologies and initiatives to further expand its offerings beyond social entertainment, tapping into new addressable markets worldwide. Since 2022, the company has also operated a global smart commerce platform that empowers merchants to build their brand online and sell their products to customers around the world.
The company mainly operates its global business through the following significant subsidiaries: Bigo Technology Pte. Ltd.; Likeme Pte. Ltd.; PageBites, Inc.; Guangzhou BaiGuo Yuan Information Technology Co., Ltd.; and Guangzhou Huanju Shidai Information Technology Co., Ltd.
The company also conducts part of its business in mainland China primarily through the following significant variable interest entities and some of their subsidiaries: Guangzhou Huaduo Network Technology Co., Ltd.; and Guangzhou BaiGuo Yuan Network Technology Co., Ltd.
BIGO segment
Live streaming Platform: Bigo Live is a leading global social live streaming platform. Bigo Live provides an interactive online stage for global users to host and watch live streaming sessions, share their life moments, showcase their talents and interact with people around the world. Bigo Live has an extensive presence in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Eastern Pacific regions, among others.
Short Video Platform: Likee is a global short video social platform. Likee empowers its users to easily discover, create and share short videos, with simple, all-in-one powerful video creation tools and personalized feeds. Likee is committed to building long-term relationships with content creators, aiming to increase user engagement and boost connectivity. Likee has an extensive presence in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Instant Messenger: imo is a global instant messenger that provides audio and video communication services. It offers frictionless audio and video calls and other communication tools, such as group calls, document sharing and more, catering to a variety of personal and business communication needs. imo has attracted a growing and highly engaged user base in South Asia and the Middle East.
All other segment
Social Networking Platform: Hago is a social networking platform. It offers over 500 casual games, integrating social features, such as audio and video multi-user chatrooms and 3D virtual interactive party games, which encourage users to establish and strengthen connections while having fun. Hago has an extensive presence in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America.
Smart Commerce Solution Provider: Shopline is a global smart commerce platform that offers solutions and services to empower merchants to create and grow their brands online and reach customers worldwide, across different sales channels, including e-commerce platforms, social commerce and physical retail stores. Shopline provides merchants with various services to optimize their business, such as inventory and sales management, logistics, payment, marketing and data analytics. As of the date of this annual report, Shopline has helped over 600,000 merchants to launch and scale up their online businesses.
The company primarily monetizes its products and services through virtual tips for live streaming, which accounted for 87.3% of its revenues in 2023. The company also generates revenues through advertising, e-commerce and subscriptions, which collectively accounted for 12.7% of its revenues in 2023.
Strategy
Globalization through localization is the company’s foremost strategy, and its strong global localized operational capabilities are the cornerstone of its global success. The company has built an extensive global operational network with over 30 regional offices and more than 6,000 local staff worldwide. The company designs its social products, cultivate local content, and launch online and offline marketing campaigns tailored to the nuances of local cultures and the preferences of its target markets. The company also collaborates with a diverse array of local key opinion leaders, creators, agencies, and brands. The collaboration deepens the company’s integration with local communities and drives brand awareness across different regions. The company’s localized approach enables it to resonate with users from different cultural backgrounds and differentiates its products from other platforms.
Technology is essential to the company’s business success. The company has integrated artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics into all critical aspects of its services and broader business operations. This integration empowers the company to gain deeper insights into its users and deliver personalized content recommendations tailored to their preferences. Innovative features powered by AI, such as digital avatars, improve user engagement and overall user experience. AI has also proven to be a powerful tool for improving content quality and cultivating the company’s content ecosystem.
The company’s video and audio technology helps ensure a smooth user experience for its substantial global user base. The company offers low latency video and audio product experience for different communication networks (3G/4G/5G/Wi-Fi, etc.), serving nearly 274.9 million users in 150 countries worldwide, many of whom are located in less developed countries with limited internet infrastructure. The company’s patented video codec innovation algorithm automatically adapts to different hardware platforms and environments, and optimizes the indicators of sound quality, code rate, and transmission fluency.
Through ongoing product feature innovations and optimizations, the company has expanded interactive tools and social scenarios to enrich interactions between users. As it enables user interactions in a range of virtual environments, such as live streaming sessions, interest-based communities, and other social channels, the company caters to a broader and much more diverse set of social needs. The company seeks to further expand users’ social connections, facilitate immersive interactions, and help users forge meaningful relationships with others. Through its continued creator support and extensive incentive programs, the company has accumulated a large pool of professional and amateur creators, contributing to a vast reservoir of contents. In addition, leveraging its localized operational network, the company has partnered with gaming companies, TV show producers, and entertainment agencies, to expand its premium content offerings.
With its diverse product offerings focusing on optimizing social and content experience, extensive global operational network, established technological capabilities and effective monetization model, the company is well positioned to further grow its global presence and capitalize on growth opportunities.
Platforms and Products
Bigo Live
Bigo Live is a leading global social live streaming platform. Bigo Live enables its users to share their life moments, showcase their talents, socialize and connect with other users from all around the world through live streaming. Launched in 2016, Bigo Live has a strong presence in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Eastern Pacific regions, among others. Bigo Live is an international platform, available in 23 languages and approximately 150 countries.
Bigo Live has built an engaged, interactive and diverse community. Through extensive incentive programs, localized campaigns, and cross-industry partnerships, Bigo Live has attracted a substantial pool of creators and accumulated localized content across various categories, including music, dance, comedy, gaming and lifestyle.
Bigo Live’s continual innovation of its product features, combined with localized campaigns and activities, enhance the quality and efficiency of users’ social experience. Its Family feature, launched in 2019, has been a vital bonding element for Bigo Live’s user community, as it brings together streamers, fans, and others united by similar interests to uphold the honor of their respective Families. In 2023, Bigo Live launched Family Month and held a number of activities and contests to further strengthen these bonds. Meanwhile, Bigo Live’s newly launched Real Match feature helped users connect through a matching process that paired up users with similar interests.
Bigo Live monetizes its user base mainly through virtual tips for live streaming. Users can purchase in-app virtual items and send them as virtual gifts to their favorite streamers to show their appreciation.
Among the various platforms operated by the company, Bigo Live is the largest revenue contributor.
Likee
Likee is a global short video social platform. Likee enables users to easily discover, create and share short videos, empowered by its easy, all-in-one video creation tools, such as filters and special effects, and its AI-backed personalized feed. Launched in 2017, Likee has a strong presence in the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia. The average mobile monthly active users on Likee declined year over year in each quarter of 2023, primarily due to reduced spending on user acquisition via advertisement.
Over the past several years, Likee has been dedicated to cultivating a localized and diverse content community. Likee offers comprehensive creator support programs, providing creators across various genres with user traffic, creation tools, professional guidance, and diverse monetization methods to pave a path for their long-term personal growth and career development.
Likee monetizes its user base mainly through virtual tips for live streaming and advertisements. Likee has made steady progress in enhancing its monetization efficiency and diversifying revenue streams.
imo
imo is a global instant messenger that provides audio and video communication service to its users. It offers smooth and stable international video calls in addition to other features, such as group calls and document sharing, catering to a variety of personal and business communication needs. imo has a large and engaged user base in South Asia and the Middle East.
In 2023, imo introduced a number of new features, such as Block Screenshot for Calls, Zero Noise, and Light to enhance privacy protection and communication experience. As a result of an improved user experience, imo achieved solid user growth in 2023.
imo monetizes its user base mainly through advertisements and live streaming. In 2021, to further enhance user social interactivity and explore additional monetization beyond advertisements, imo launched VoiceClub, an online real-time voice chat communication space, enabling users to establish connections with users beyond their existing network. VoiceClub also enables users to send virtual gifts to their friends to express their support and appreciation.
Hago
Hago is a social networking platform that encourages users to connect and have fun. Launched in 2018, Hago has a presence mainly in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America. The average mobile monthly active users on Hago declined year over year in each quarter of 2023, primarily due to reduced spending on user acquisition via advertisement.
Following strategic changes over the past several years, Hago has evolved from a casual games platform to a social platform that offers a variety of tools for users to engage and interact. Users can make new acquaintances by playing multiplayer casual games (approximately 500 casual games are available on the platform), join video and audio chat rooms based on their interests, create and customize their 3D avatars in Hago Space and join Groups or Families with like-minded people to foster more frequent communication.
Hago monetizes its user base mainly through virtual tips for live streaming. It is also exploring other monetization opportunities, such as pay-to-play games, advertisements, and virtual items. Hago was ranked among the Top 10 Social Apps in Indonesia and the Philippines in terms of consumer spend in 2023, according to the State of Mobile report from data.ai.
Shopline
Shopline is a global smart commerce platform offering solutions and services to empower merchants to create and grow their brands online and reach customers worldwide, across different sales channels, including e-commerce platforms, social commerce, and physical retail stores. Shopline provides merchants with various services to optimize their business, such as inventory and sales management, logistics, payment, marketing and data analytics, among others. Shopline has helped over 600,000 merchants to launch and scale their online businesses.
Shopline generates revenues through the sale of different subscription plans of its software solutions, and ancillary fees and commissions from provision of related value-added solutions.
Global Branding and Marketing
Branding Strategy
With its growing global presence and its diverse product offerings, the company positions itself as a global technology company with a mission to enrich lives through technology. The company’s global brands, primarily including Bigo Live, Likee, imo, Hago and Shopline, enable it to reach a wide variety of coveted user and customer bases around the world.
Marketing Activities
The company executes a variety of marketing plans specifically designed for each of its respective businesses and markets. For its social entertainment businesses, the company utilizes a combination of advertising and diverse marketing activities to enhance its global brand recognition and attract users to its platforms. In particular, the company employs outdoor physical advertisements, online performance-based advertising, social network marketing campaigns, and promotion through search engines and web portals, with an emphasis on efficiency and delivering measurable results. Moreover, the company hosts or participates in various forms of local events and activities, such as exhibitions, roadshows, regional galas, and campaigns. The company also collaborates with a wide range of partners including application distributors, hardware manufacturers, TV programs, online shows and dramas, gaming companies, key opinion leaders, and others, to promote its brand recognition in local communities. For its smart commerce business, the company utilizes both online and offline marketing to maximize its brand awareness and attract new merchants and ecosystem partners. The company organizes product marketing and awareness-driven campaigns aimed at inspiring entrepreneurship and encouraging digitalized commerce. By attending offline exhibitions and industry summits, hosting global events and customer meetings, and promoting its digital community (Shopline Blog) and other educational materials, the company intends to expand its customer reach and educate more small and medium-sized businesses on how to improve their operating efficiency and achieve business success with Shopline.
Seasonality
The company’s results of operations of various products and services are subject to seasonal fluctuations, many of which are outside its control.
Competition
In relation to its global business, the company’s competitors primarily include global short video platforms such as TikTok, and live streaming platforms, such as Twitch in certain regions. The company also faces competition from companies that provide smart commerce solutions for merchants, such as Shopify.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2023, the company held 1,487 registered domain names, including joyy.com, joyy.sg, Bigo.TV, Duowan.com, bigolive.sg, likee.com, shopline.com, 840 software copyrights and other copyrights, 1,630 patents and 2,294 trademarks and service marks. In addition, as of December 31, 2023, the company had filed 3,764 patent applications, covering certain of its proprietary technologies, and 3,518 trademark applications. For the avoidance of confusion, the above numbers exclude intellectual property rights in relation to YY Live.
Research and Development Expenses
The company’s research and development expenses included US$295.5 million in 2023.
Regulations
Section 43A provides that the company is subject to civil liability to compensate for wrongful loss or gain to any person arising from negligence in implementing and maintaining reasonable security practices and procedures with respect to sensitive personal data or information that the company possesses, deals with or handles in its computer systems, networks, databases and software.
With the sale of YY Live being substantially completed with certain customary matters remaining to be completed in the future, including necessary regulatory approvals from government authorities, the majority of the company’s business, especially its global platforms that it operates outside China, is not subject to the above regulations. Yet as the company maintained some of its audio and video capabilities and functions and cross-border smart commerce solution services in mainland China, its remaining business operations in mainland China are subject to regulations issued by the below authorities, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; the Ministry of Culture, currently known as the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; the National Press and Publication Administration; the National Radio and Television Administration; the National Copyright Administration; the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, known as the State Administration for Market Regulation, or the SAMR; the State Council Information Office; the Ministry of Commerce; the Bureau of Protection of State Secrets; the Ministry of Public Security; and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, or the SAFE.
History
The company was founded in 2005. It was incorporated in 2011. The company was formerly known as YY Inc. and changed its name to JOYY Inc. in 2019.
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