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HUYA Inc. (HUYA 4.06%)
Q3Â 2019 Earnings Call
Nov 13, 2019, 8:00 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by for the Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call for HUYA Inc. [Operator Instructions]
I'll now turn the call over to Ms. Dana Cheng company, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Hello, everyone and welcome to HUYA's third quarter 2019 earnings conference. The company's financial and operational results were issued earlier today and are posted online. You can also view the earnings press release by visiting the IR website at ir.huya.com. A replay of the call will be available on the IR website in a few hours. Participants on today's call will be Mr. Rongjie Dong, Chief Executive Officer of HUYA and Mr. Henry Sha, Chief Financial Officer. Management will begin with prepared remarks and the call will conclude with a Q&A session.
Before we continue, please note that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, the company's results may be materially different from the views expressed today. Further information regarding these and other risks and uncertainties is included in the company's prospectus and other public filings as filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law. Please also note that Huya's earnings press release and this conference call include discussions of unaudited GAAP financial information, as well as unaudited non-GAAP financial measures. Huya's press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP measures to the unaudited most directly comparable GAAP measures.
I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Mr. Henry Sha. Please go ahead.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Now let me read the CEO remarks on behalf of Mr. Dong. Our third quarter 2019 results makes another quarter of successful reparation, where we beat our revenue guidance, continued to sustain growth in MAUs, were the positive strides across our strategic initiatives in gaming value chain deployment and technology upgrade. Now let me walk you through the metrics starting from traffic.
Total MAUs in the domestic market reached RMB146.1 million during the third quarter, representing a robust growth of 47.6% compared with the year ago period. This impressive growth was attributable to the high season of school summer break and e-sports tournaments hosted in the quarter. In addition to our further and large in mobile game streamer base for a breakdown of our MAUs. Mobile MAUs continued it's healthy growth to RMB63.8 million, up 29.1% year-over-year and a 14.1% quarter-over-quarter.
Non-mobile MAUs, which includes both PC and web active users also realized a substantial growth of 65.9% on a year-over-year basis. In this quarter, we successfully migrated a portion of non-mobile user into Huya mobile app, which led to a faster growth in our mobile MAU, also benefiting from our dominant position in China mobile game broadcasting space.
We are able to retain the users newly acquired from the WeChat mini program and in-game pop out of functions to be actively engaged with our mobile app during this peak season of e-sports activities. Our paying user base growth trend has recovered reaching RMB5.3 million in this period. Encouragingly Q3 paying user number is slightly better than our early expectation.
As the core of our content ecosystem, e-sports maintained the momentum of accelerated rise in viewer popularity. During the third quarter, we broadcasted over 110 e-sports tournaments, with a viewership of nearly 516 million including LPL, LCK, KPL, TNI [Phonetic] and PCL. As compared with 510 million viewership in the year ago period, spotlighting our compelling e-sports content, recently in October, we signed a strategic partnership with Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends to secure LCK broadcasting inclusivity with Huya in China between year 2020 and year 2022 and though as the current funding promotion and the business development rights across various Chinese marketing channels for the next three years. The exclusive partnership for this major world-class tournament further demonstrates our sterling brand image and the influence in the vast market of China's e-sports industry.
Our efforts to promote e-sports events continue to solidify our position as a leader in this space. For instance, in the recently concluded 2019 season of World Championship for League of Legends as known as Worlds 2019, we have established a comprehensive coverage on this high-profile event by offering various viewing angles for viewers such as the virtual HD live channel and a self-produced commentary channel featuring our broadcasters and former e-sports professionals.
Additionally, we align with four out of 16 participating teams of Worlds 2019 including RNG, FPX, GRF and Team Liquid for the exclusive streaming partnerships for the -- sorry for the participant teams of Worlds 2019 including RNG, FPX GRF and Team Liquid for the exclusive streaming partnerships in China. The broadcasting content of those top teams on Huya's platform has proven to be a effective driver in terms of user acquisition and time spent in the LL count in the sector, in addition to broadcasting the mobile game blockbusters that we have already sold as.
Besides broadcasting the above major world-class tournaments, which generated a significant viewership on our platform, we have also been proactively producing our self-organizing -- organized the tournaments and further complement the viewing experience of game enthusiasts. During the quarter, we successfully hosted 38 self organized tournaments, with a viewership of over 76 million, compared to 20 events with 49 million viewership in the year ago period.
Notably, average daily viewership of Huya PUBG Destiny Cup 2019 was almost doubled compared to a Destiny Cup spring season of last year. On special notes, our self-organized events cover not only top tier games like owner of the team or PUBG, but also long held games to meet various gamer's preference.
Now let's talk about continent diversification efforts. As discussed in previous earnings calls, nearly half of our active user up for non-gaming content, we think we have the platform and non-gaming content accounted for around 45% of streaming revenues. This explains why we incorporated a continent diversification in our long-term strategy, while paving our way in gaming content and e-sports. Amount of diversified genres that Huya has cultivated in it's non-gaming sector, anime and comic contents has been a essential category, given it's overlap in demographic with gaming contents.
In this quarter, anime and comics category continued its 100% year-over-year growth of viewing hours, thanks to our ever improved anime and comics content the production capability exemplified by our live comic video series called, Please Subscribe Me and [Indecipherable] in the categories, our production effort of PGC shows continue to optimize viewers all-in-one experience including Huya Season 4 of [Indecipherable] a long-standing wealth game show, Huya Golden college and other reality show focusing on campus life and Real Singer, a music talent show engaged with multiple Huya broadcasters.
Diversifying our revenue stream has always been a mission of Huya's management team. As mentioned previously, we had a pricing distribution platform that we launched in August has been receiving positive feedback from our enterprises, especially in game and advertising realm, nearly half of game advertisers. with Huya have placed advertising orders through the platform.
In addition, as part of our preliminary attempt in game publishing business, we published a Remedy's action-adventure game called Control in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan regions in this December. This is a key step in exploring more communities in the upstream of gaming value chain.
Now, talking about expanding the company's overseas footprint. In October, we officially established the presence of our NiMo TV in Argentina and further extended our operation in the Spanish language speaking regions after launch in Mexico. Our overseas MAU reached about 17 million in the third quarter, with our expansion plan well on the way to the 20 million MAU's target for overseas market by end of this year. We aim to continue geographic expansion for NiMo TV and increase the game title coverage to include more types of games on platform, while exploring overseas monetization opportunities in the meanwhile.
Last but not least, we have never stopped the advancement of our technology and the vision to underscore the openness of Huya. Most recently in November, we have had hold the live teleconference launching Huya open platform to engage and empower third-party ad application developers in the development of Huya's mini program, including broadcaster software, interactive features and their marketing tools. We believe our HUYA open platform will reshape the interactions between broadcasters and the users with innovative, fun and dynamic features.
In return, the upgraded interaction will strengthen user stickiness and the monetization capability of broadcasters and talent agencies. For example, we now have some mini programs of interactive games in the open platform that allow viewers to influence game results through virtual gifting, while broadcasters are playing the game. We estimate to invest approximately RMB1 billion worth of resources and capitals in supporting our open platform strategy within next three years.
We will allow third-party developers to leverage Huya's core technologies and capabilities on image technology, face and speech recognition, movement detect patient and data intelligence. There will also be a App Store on Huya platform, which we believe will yield income for the mini program developers. In conclusion, our robust third quarter performance across operating and financial metrics once again illustrates our strong execution capability and a substantial Huya's proven track record of outstanding performance. Having delivered six quarters in a row beating management's revenue guidance, I'm confident that Huya will sustain it's growth of core business of live streaming which gives a solid foundation for us to explore more business opportunities over the long-term.
Now let's move on to the financial results. We are delighted to deliver another strong momentum in revenue growth in this period to break down revenues and then drivers behind our growth. Live streaming revenue grew by 77.2% year-over-year, demonstrating solid growth trajectory in our core business as underpinned by increasingly enhanced user engagement. In this quarter, we achieved a sequential growth in both average user spending and a paying user base. I'd like to highlight that we were making product upgrade in the previous quarter. We have carried on a prudent strategy in monetization since then.
We were pleased to see the paying user number has been reinvigorated in our core services and product since the beginning of the third quarter. This increased our confidence in driving long-term sustainable growth with our strategic focus creating valuable contents and enhancing the vibrant gaming community to serve our streamers and gamers.
On the other hand, advertising and other revenues growth momentum continue with 81.3% year-over-year increase and a 22.5% quarter-over-quarter increase. Thanks to an increasing number of advertisers encouraged by our newly launched advertising distribution platform and higher spending from branding advertisers, boosted by Huya's enhanced brand awareness and market position. In the third quarter, 36% [Phonetic] of total advertisers have placed their advertisement orders through the new distribution platform. We believe our advertisement platform can create more value for our clients through further optimization.
We achieved a significant margin expansion in the quarter with gross margin being improved to 18.3% on a non-GAAP basis from 15.5% in the year ago period and a 16.9% sequentially. Thanks to leverage improvements across content cost and the bandwidth utilization. In addition, non-GAAP operating margin increased to 6.5% from 5.8% on a sequential basis, driven by operating leverage and the success of the ROI-oriented marketing expenditure strategy in the overseas market. During the third quarter, we granted a new batch of employee share awards under the existing 2017 share incentive plan to the management team and the key employees.
Those newly granted share awards impacted third quarter to a partial extent and we expect that they will have full quarter impact on SBC expenses in the following quarters starting from Q4. Going forward, we are confident that our faster growing user base, high quality content of value that we have created and our strengths in the competitive position through compelling strategies will remain as our drivers of strong top line growth and our efforts to efficiently manage cost by leveraging our growth scale, both of which will continue to serve as crucial pillars to generate healthy cash flows.
Now let me briefly go over the financial results for the third quarter. Total net revenues for the third quarter of 2019 increased by 77.4% to RMB2,265.1 million from RMB1,276.6 million in the same period of 2018. Live streaming revenue increased by 77.2% to RMB2,156.1 million in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB1,216.5 million in the same period of 2018, primarily due to the increase in both average spending per paying user and a number of paying users on our platform. The increase in average spending per paying user was primarily driven by the enhancement of content attractiveness, the improvement in user experience and the optimization of product features. The increase in number of paying users was primarily driven by our mobile strategy, diversification of content offerings and the continued efforts in promotion activities and then converting active users into paying users. Advertising and other revenues increased by 81.3% to RMB109 million in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB60.1 million in the same period of 2018.
The growth was mostly driven by increased demand from gaming advertisers. Our newly launched advertising distribution platform and further recognition of Huya's brand name in China's online advertising market. Cost of revenues increased by 71.7% to RMB1,858.8 million in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB1,082.9 million in the same period of 2018, primarily attributable to the increase in revenue sharing fees and our content costs, bandwidth costs as well as the increase in head count personnel involved in the operation of the company platforms.
Revenue sharing fees and content costs increased by 78.8% to RMB1,508.9 million in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB844 million in the same period of 2018. The increase was due to increased virtual item revenue sharing fees in addition to higher live streaming revenue and continued spending in e-sports content and content creators in both domestic and overseas markets, partially offset by benefits from economics of scale.
Bandwidth costs increased by 21% to RMB210.5 million in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB174 million in the same period of 2018, primarily due to the increase in bandwidth usage, as a result of the increased user base of Huya's platforms and enhanced live-streaming video quality, partially offset by improved efficiency in bandwidth utilization through continued deployment of new technologies in the content distribution.
Gross profit increased by 109.7% to RMB406.3 million in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB193.7 million in the same period of 2018. As such, by excluding share-based compensation expenses, non-GAAP gross margin increased to 18.3% in the third quarter of 2019 from 15.5% in the year ago period and 16.9% sequentially.
The increased non-GAAP gross margin was driven by the leverage in the cost paid to our content creators and improved efficiency in bandwidth usage. Research and development expenses increased by 80.9% to RMB135 million for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB74.6 million for the third quarter of 2018, mainly attributable to increases in headcount of R&D personnel and share-based compensation expenses related to the share awards newly granted in the third quarter of 2019.
Sales and marketing expenses increased by 98.2% to RMB122.3 million for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB61.7 million for the third quarter of 2018. The increase was primarily attributable to the increased marketing expenses associated with promoting our product and a brand name in both domestic and overseas market, including summer promotion activities for e-sports events and a cooperation with various marketing channels.
General and administrative expenses increased by 35.3% to RMB96.3 million for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB71.2 million for the third quarter of 2018, mainly due to increase in headcount and improvement in compensation of our general and administrative personnel. Operating income was RMB63.9 -- operating income was RMB63.9 million for the third quarter of 2019 compared with an operating loss of RMB2.7 million in the same period of 2018.
Non-GAAP operating income, which excludes share-based compensation expenses increased by 139% to RMB147 million for the third quarter of 2018 from RMB61.5 million in the same period of 2018.
Non-GAAP operating margin was 6.5% in the third quarter of 2019 compared with 5.8% in the second quarter of 2019 and 4.8% in the third quarter of 2018. Income tax expenses was RMB27.9 million for the third quarter of 2019, compared with income tax benefit of RMB8.6 million in the same period of 2018. Net income attributable to HUYA Inc. for the third quarter of 2019 increased by 117.1% to RMB123.2 million from RMB56.8 million in the same period of 2018.
GAAP net margin reached 5.4% in the third quarter of 2019, compared with 6.1% in the second quarter of 2019 and 4.4% in the third quarter of 2018. Non-GAAP net income attributable to HUYA Inc. in the third quarter of 2019, which excludes the share-based compensation expenses increased by 70.5% to RMB206.4 million from RMB121 million in the same period of 2018, mainly driven by the improved gross profit. Thanks to the leverage in content costs and improved efficiency in bandwidth usage.
Non-GAAP net margin was 9.1% in the third quarter of 2019 compared with 8.5% in the second quarter of 2019 and 9.5% from the same period last year. Diluted net income per ADS was RMB0.52 for the third quarter of 2019 compared with diluted net income per ADS of RMB0.26 for the same period of 2018, which each ADS represents one Class A Ordinary Share.
Non-GAAP diluted net income per ADS was RMB0.87 for the third quarter of 2019 compared with RMB0.55 for the same period of 2018. Now turning to our balance sheet and cash flows. As of September 30, 2019 the company had a cash, cash equivalents, short-term deposits and short-term investments of RMB9,537.2 million. Net cash provided by operating activities was RMB302.2 million for the third quarter of 2019 compared with RMB237.7 million in the same period of 2018.
Business outlook, for the fourth quarter of 2019, we are currently expecting total revenue -- net revenues to be in the range of RMB2,340 million to RMB2,420 million, representing a year-over-year growth between 55.5% and 60.8%. This forecast reflects our current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions which are subject to change. This concludes our prepared remarks.
We will now open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Here -- the first question is from Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Thomas Chong -- Jefferies -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] Thanks management for taking my questions and congratulations on a strong sets of results. I have two questions. My first question is about our content strategies. Can management comment about our strategy in game and non-game segments and the long-term potential as well as the time spent and the content mix between game and non-game segments going forward? And my second question is about the overseas landscape. Given we demonstrate quite solid execution in geographical expansion, can management comment about our competitive edge, as well as the landscape in overseas market. Thank you.
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
[Foreign Speech]
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Hi, Thomas. As a translation for your question regarding our content strategy in future, in the gaming contents, we will keep our efforts to improve our differentiation, so that we may gain more market share and we will keep on investing to the domestic e-sports tournaments and the PGC shows. And also another part of the investment will be spent on the overseas in terms of the sending on overseas broadcasters and acquire more is what -- tournaments broadcasting right. On the non-gaming side, more efforts will be realized and diversify our content streams, especially in the kind and categories of outdoor, Anime and also music.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
To compensate Mr. Dong's answers for the overseas strategy, actually we will still adhere to our localization on the mobilization strategy in the overseas markets. First, we believe that mobile game live broadcasting will have a good chance in those emerging markets. And secondly, I think our competitors will be majorly Twitch and YouTube game. So another competitive edge that we are trying to use the native speaker and local broadcaster gamers to serve the local user needs.
Operator
Your next question...
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Operator, yeah thank you.
Operator
Your next question is from Hillman Chan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hillman Chan -- Citigroup -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] Thank you management for taking my question, also to follow-up on the overseas expansion. Can you shed more color on the investment including content cost, marketing dollar and M&A strategy going forward and how should we think about the monetization level for MAU in overseas market, versus China now and in future please. And my second question is on the competition versus Kuaishou, how are you seeing the competitive landscape evolving in the past 1 to 2 quarters and going forward please. Thank you very much.
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
[Foreign Speech]
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Hi, Hillman, as a translation for your question regarding our overseas. For the third quarter of FY'19 we have achieved average MAU of 17 million. And on top of the user acquisition efforts that we have put out so far, we will also improve our endeavor in the monetization side. And from management's perspective for now, the existing regions we have established operational presence in like the Southeast Asian countries and countries in the South America, we wish to have a period break even point in the second half of 2020 and that is the forecast and expectation for now.
For your question regarding the competition with Kuaishou, we don't clearly know Kuaishou's exact plan in the game live streaming, but we have noticed, they have obtained some of the broadcasting rights of the e-sports tournaments and we have signed some of the top broadcasters. But we also notice that the year coverage no matter is for the amount of the e-sports tournament or types or the categories, it's quite limited. So for now, we can say, given our strong capabilities in the PGC and then PUGC, we remain confident about Pyshell's expansion into the game live streaming.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes, Hillman to clarify, so for the overseas business, we are still in the investment stage. The company does invest in the content production as other channel buy from the overseas marketing channels. And for next year, we're trying to achieve the break even by excluding those like operating expenses on the GP margin level for the overseas, but I think for the next several months, we'll have stronger visibility on this point. That's the answer for your questions.
Operator
Your next question is from Wendy Chen, your line -- from Goldman Sachs, line is open. Please go ahead.
Wendy Chen -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] So thanks management for taking my question and congratulations on the strong beat yet again. So my question or two questions here, one is about the mini program we announced. So just wondering what's the management's outlook on the monetization potential of the Huya mini program and whether this potential investments in the developer side could have some pressure on the margin going forward? And the second question is about operating data, wonder if management can candidly share some update on, for example, time spent of our platform and potentially compared to our competitor? Thanks.
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
[Foreign Speech]
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Hi, Wendy. As a translation, yeah, you're correct we had our Tech Conference a few days ago and we have launched Huya open platform. The platform is into connect and engage third party application developers for them to build out the mini program and the mini program get engaged, kit include broadcaster software and interactive features and marketing tools. And all of those will empower the broadcaster to create more and better content effectively.
For the -- to support the open platform, we will spend, right -- we will devote RMB1 billion worth of resources and capital as a whole. And we will also open our core technologies and then fundamental capabilities to those third-party application developers that include image technology, face recognition, speech recognition, movement detection to those developers and all of those will help them to create better features for our broadcaster.
And we will also establish a app store to host and display the mini programs on our platform, so that we may generate income for those third-party application developers. And from a very macro perspective, we think there are actually thousands of broadcasters that is actually -- they're a massive amount of broadcasters that is actually, actively stream with us every day and we have coming ones and these from -- demands are actually quite personalized. We wish by opening up this platform we will help those broadcasters -- we will help those third-party application developers to meet the long-term needs of the broadcasters, so that we can create a ecosystem for them to better create content and diversify our content offerings and so that we can also improve the user stickiness and user interactive needs. And all of that will as a result to help us improve the user monetization, yeah, that's it.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Wendy, I will help to provide some reference points for our user activities and user matrix for the third quarter. So actually I think we have been meeting with a very good quarter because of the popularity of the e-sports activities in the summer holidays. So we have seen the user time spent per every day per DAU every day is like more than 100 minutes in this quarter, which is largely in line or slightly higher than our original expectation. And second is our second amount retention rate for those users is more than like 70%, which also satisfy our like investment in those contents and bring us the return for the content creation and content creators. Also, we have been seeing happily the paying user numbers has been reaccelerated in this quarter to 5.3 million paying user numbers, which is slightly above our original expectation announced in our last earnings call, just for -- that's the user matrix for reference. Thanks.
Operator
Your next question is from Alex Boon [Phonetic] from MS. Your line is open.
Alex Poon -- MS -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] I'll translate my question. My first question is regarding the MAU sequential growth, you mentioned that a portion of the MAU growth -- sequential growth is coming from conversion from non-mobile devices to mobile devices, if we strip out this portion, how much is the new mobile user growth sequentially Q3 compared to Q2 and also compared to last year Q3. For my second question, how is management balancing top line growth and margin expansion at the same time. It looks like their opex in China, domestic portion is not really growing. It looks a little bit flattish. Thank you.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Alex, we'll discuss -- come back very soon.
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
[Foreign Speech]
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Hi, Alex. As a translation, we believe that with the e-sports tournaments and the gaming content are still serving as a major channel for us to generate the new users. Apart from that, we still -- we also see that anime is serving as a effective source for us to partner users as well. And all of that together with the open platform that we recently launched, we believe it has enabled us to perform better in terms of content -- in terms of content creation on an iterative basis.
And as we can see from our data shows that mobile user maximum retention rate still like at 70% and for your question regarding the non-mobile to the mobile the conversion, we have noticed that. in the second quarter, we did a pop-up feature with a in-game pop-up feature with some game developers and we had seen that the newly acquired traffic from that has been successfully converted to the mobile traffic.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Okay. Alex, I will be happy to answer your second question. So actually, for the company, I think we are still not to emphasized on the profit growth, but we're still very emphasized and still focusing on the top line growth, as well as the total MAU growth for the next two years, that's the answer for your questions.
Operator
Your next question is from Lei Zhang from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open.
Lei Zhang -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] I'll translate myself. Congrats on the strong quarter. My first question about content costs, launching now -- China going forward and do you think the [Indecipherable] expansion game industry may impact the content cost. Secondly, any color on your game publishing business in coming quarters? Thank you.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Okay. Thanks, Lei. I will help to answer your questions. Your first question about -- the broadcasters had a contract with us, that number is roughly between 4,000 to 5,000 broadcasters with us. And almost everyone with us like those 4,000 to 5,000 with exclusive contracts with us and we pay them like the relatively fixed salaries per month, according to their complements about their KPIs or their terms with us.
I think that's for your first question. And for the next one, we still believe that since -- because of the competition for the top-tier broadcasters has been mild down since the beginning of this year, we have been seeing some leverage from the cost to be paid out to those broadcasters generate revenues with us. So that's why as you can see, our GP margin has been slightly be improved in this quarter because of the leverage on this side, another side is because of the bandwidth utilization.
For your second question about like the impact from the content platform, actually we're still not very clear about their game live broadcasting strategy at this stage. But -- and our business frontier team also hasn't -- don't have like a lot of like the information like their movement on the signing those top-tier broadcasters or compete for those top broadcaster with us. We also don't see a sign from this angle, so that's your -- for the second question.
And the third question about game publishing, actually we have been starting -- publishing one adventure game called Control in the Greater China region, in Hong Kong, South Asia and Taiwan. Yeah, we consider it's a great trial internally and the publishing of gaming products will also be -- we stay optimistic on this new business and expect that, that will bring in the revenue in the future, but I think that will be for the next year. But for this year, we are trying to running through all the process and establish the publishing teams. I think we have already achieved our first goal. And for the next year, we're trying to do more to build up our game publishing pipeline for 2020. That's the answers for your questions.
Operator
Your next question is from Daniel Chen from JPMorgan. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Daniel Chen -- JPMorgan -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] I'd translate myself. My question -- I have two questions. First question is related to our lower-tier cities, as we see quite -- actually, quite a lot of e-sports audience in those regions, so wondering what's our strategy in this front? My second question is related to non-gaming payment content. So wondering what's the revenue contribution for non-gaming content this quarter? And also are you seeing competition from short video platforms, as they seem quite aggressive in terms of the talent show live broadcasting monetization, for example offering a very high revenue share ratio? Thank you.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Daniel, for your first question. So actually we haven't seen a major difference between the user behavior on our platform, I mean, between the sort of Tier 3, Tier 4 city users and Tier 1, Tier 2 city users. The user demographic and the user behavior -- the user attention to what kind of content are on our platform, there's no huge difference between each other. And I think we're still focusing on operation and the content creation of our platform in both gaming and non-gaming, but we do not divide the users into like a Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, we will have a different operational strategy.
But I believe -- I do believe that looking forward, I think we will try and do something to provide a more customized and content if they have the need -- if they have different demands, we were trying to provide the related content for them to help them to stay with us and to improve the user engagement from different areas -- from users from different areas.
For your second question about the payment. So as we discussed, as we -- in our prepared remarks, we disclosed that the non-gaming content still contributed more than 45% of the total revenue -- of the total streaming revenue in this quarter. According to your question, so we haven't -- feeling strongly from the competition from the short-form video platforms in China, but we do believe that a shorter video has the advantage in user engagement and the user acquisition with a relatively low cost.
But streaming is a quite different product from the short video. And streaming has more like a real-time interaction and higher user retention, higher user engagement with our core users and core payers. From this angle, we still believe that we do have some advancement at this point. That's our answers for your questions.
Operator
Your last question is from Alex Liu from China Renaissance. Your line is open.
Alex Liu -- China Renaissance -- Analyst
[Foreign Speech] I'll translate myself, so we know Tencent has options to increase the voting powering to HUYA at their discretion basically. And just wondering, how does the management think about the possibility of business cooperation with Tencent regardless of whether the increase to take or not into the next 1 to 3 years? Thank you.
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
[Foreign Speech]
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Hi, Alex, as translation, it is well aware that Tencent established the strategy in the gaming market whether it's home or abroad. And we think going forward given that Tencent is a strong gaming content provider, we wish to work with them in several respects including gaming and content streaming and e-sports tournaments, all of that as a whole would be the directions for future cooperations. On top of that, we will also be in close contact with Tencent to explore more opportunities to realize -- to seek for a new business model for us to work together in terms of game live streaming, I think that's it.
Operator
We don't have any other questions at the moment. Presenters, please continue.
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Thank you and again for joining us today and we look forward to speaking with you in the next quarter.
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, everyone. Thank you.
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
[Foreign Speech]
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 59 minutes
Call participants:
Dana Cheng -- Investor Relations
Henry Dachuan Sha -- Chief Financial Officer
Rongjie Dong -- Chief Executive Officer
Thomas Chong -- Jefferies -- Analyst
Hillman Chan -- Citigroup -- Analyst
Wendy Chen -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst
Alex Poon -- MS -- Analyst
Lei Zhang -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst
Daniel Chen -- JPMorgan -- Analyst
Alex Liu -- China Renaissance -- Analyst
