Agora, Inc. (API) Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Agora, Inc. (API 0.20%)
Q4 2020 Earnings Call
Feb 22, 2021, 8:00 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to 4Q and fiscal-year 2020 financial results conference call. [Operator instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ms.

Fionna Chen. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Fionna Chen -- Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, operator. Good evening, and good morning, everyone. My name is Fionna. I'm the investor relations at Agora.

Thank you for joining Agora's fourth-quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Tony Zhao, founder, chairman, and CEO; and Jingbo Wang, our CFO. Our earnings results, press release and a slide deck can be found on our IR website at investor.agora.io. Reconciliations between our GAAP and the non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings press release.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements about our future financial performance and other future events and trends, including guidance. These statements are only projections that are based on what we believe today, and actual results may differ materially. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could affect our financial results and the performance of our business. We will discuss some in details in our filings with the SEC, including today's earnings press release.

And the risk factors and other information contained in the final prospectus relating to our initial public offering. Agora assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements we may make on today's call. With that, let me turn it over to Tony.

Tony Zhao -- Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Fionna, and welcome, everyone. Reflecting on the year, the global economic has brought tremendous challenges to everyone of us. Despite the year of turmoil, we have seen a significant acceleration in demand for online ways of living and working. There is a growing need for contextual real-time video or voice engagement in almost any app we use.

We are proud to be there when the world needed the real-time engagement more than ever before. Now on earnings, we finished the fourth quarter with revenue of $33.3 million, up 74% year over year. We reached more than 270,000 registered apps at the end of December, adding nearly 9,000 per month in the fourth quarter. Our number of active customers reached nearly 2,100, up 101% year over year.

For full year of 2020, our revenue was $134 million, which represents an increase of 107% year over year. Besides numbers, 2020 was a year of innovation. We crossed a number of noteworthy milestones such as powering 48 billion minutes of engagement per month. We continue to create industry first, such as our experience level agreement or XLA.

We further broadened our product offerings, optimized our technology and helped developers around the world to create many innovative use cases. Out of the many new use cases we impart, I want to elaborate on two of them here. The first one is interactive lecture hall. A large-sized -- with more than 100 students is vitally considered as the most economical model for live online education.

Previously, such classes are taught through one-way video broadcasting powered by traditional content delivery technology where latencies anywhere between three and 10 seconds or even more. Given the high-end user latency, there is very little room for students to interact with teacher or among themselves. Recently, we have been working with leading online education institutions on redefining the lecture hall experience. Here, the interactive lecture hall runs entirely on our real-time engagement platform and switch between one-way broadcasting session and fully interactive breakout sessions.

During the one-way broadcasting session, students can enjoy real-time nonvideo impactions such as voting and posting emojis. During the breakout sessions, students form small groups to work on assignments together. We believe that interactive lecture hall combines engaging learning experience of small class and the cost effectiveness of large classrooms and it is an emerging trend in online education. The second one is audio live cast.

I believe most people are familiar with audio podcast but what is audio live cast. Podcast is like video channels. There is one speaker or sometimes multiple speakers in the same physical room, and all the audience simply listen to the speakers. Live cast on the other hand, create a virtual in-the-same-room experience.

Here, multiple speakers can join from different locations worldwide and discuss spontaneously thanks to ultra-latency audio. Instead of just listening, the audience can reach in their hand and come on stage to join the speakers anytime. We believe live cast represents a new way for people to connect the learn, and we are particularly proud that our proprietary NOVA audio codec further enhanced experience by offering crystal-clear actually audio. These are just two examples out of the many new use cases we see, such as virtual events, remote assistance, remote collaboration and virtual tours.

We are really encouraged by the [inaudible] season and creativity from our developers. We also made solid progresses on new products in this quarter. Recently, we released the first version of Agora flexible classroom, a low-code application PaaS solution for education providers. It combines video, voice, messaging, whiteboard and recording functionalities into one cloud-based solution that allows developers to build an online platform in a matter of minutes.

Compared with our standard SDK, Agora flexible classroom can significantly simplify software development and shorten time to market. Compared with out-of-the-box SaaS solution, Agora flexible classroom allows developers to use their own brands and have complete control of their own user data. In addition, Agora flexible classroom is modular, which means developers can customize their applications to create differentiated user experience. Agora flexible classroom is an important step in our low-code no-code effort, which we believe will reduce the friction of adoption and expand our addressable markets.

Moving on to the M&A slide. We recently agreed to acquire Easemob, a leading instant messaging API provider, and a leading interactive whiteboard API provider. Both companies share our developer-first philosophy, and they bring highly complementary APIs to our product portfolio, which our developers and customers often ask for. As a pioneer and longtime market leader, Easemob also has a large and vibrant development community.

We believe that with these two acquisitions, we are uniquely well positioned to help developers build more immersive, real-time engagement use cases. Last but not the least, security, content and privacy protection are critical to our success. Recently, we received SOC 2 Type one certificate as certified by Deloitte, our network penetration, application vulnerability and compliance assessment were also recently completed by Trustwave Holdings, a global security specialist. Looking forward, we will continue to work with leading experts to ensure that our security practice remains back in PaaS.

Overall, 2020 was a milestone year for us in many ways. We launched Agora seven years ago and its meaning how much we have accomplished in the past seven years. I want to take this moment to thank all the developers, customers, partners and investors for your trust in us. And above all, to our awards, including new agreements from Easemob.

Thank you for your hard work and commitment to serving our developers and customers. There is a long journey high of us toward ubiquitous real-time engagement. Let's start fresh just like seven years ago. Now let me turn things over to Jingbo who will review our financial results.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Let me start first by reviewing our financial results for Q4, and then I will discuss our outlook for the fiscal year of 2021. Total revenues grew 74% year-over-year to USD 33.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Total revenues for the fiscal year 2020 were USD 133.6 million, which represented 107% year-over-year growth and exceeded the high end of our guidance by $3.6 million. In 2020, we have powered more than 500 billion minutes of real-time engagements in total. As we mentioned in previous earnings calls, our revenues in Q1 and Q2 this year were positively impacted by the spike of usage due to COVID-19 in China. In order to help investors better understand our organic growth, excluding such short-term impact, we calculate Q1 and Q2 adjusted total revenues as follows: for each customer in China, we use is revenue in Q4 2019 as a starting point, and revenue in Q3 2020 at the end point and calculate its adjusted revenue in Q1, Q2 and an arithmetic progression from a starting point to the end point.

Revenues from customers outside China remain unchanged. This would lead to adjusted total revenues of $22.2 million in Q1 and $27 million in Q2. And the adjusted total revenues for the full year of 2020 were $113.3 million. Our trailing 12-month constant currency dollar-based net expansion rate is 179%.

If we use adjusted total revenues, the adjusted expense rate would be 149%. Now turning to cost, expense and margin. I will focus on non-GAAP results, which exclude share-based compensation expense. Non-GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter was 60.5%, which was 5.9% lower than Q4 last year and 2% lower than Q3 this year.

The decrease in gross margin was mainly due to international expansion into regions with higher infrastructure costs, such as Southeast Asia, South America and Oceania as well as capacity expansion in anticipation of future usage growth. Non-GAAP R&D expense were $13 million in Q4, up 88% year over year as we continue to build our R&D team. Non-GAAP R&D expenses were 39.2% of total revenues in the quarter compared with 36.4% in Q4 last year. Looking forward, we'll continue to invest significant resources in our R&D capabilities in order to further strengthen our technology leadership and broaden our API portfolio.

Non-GAAP sales and marketing expenses were $6.9 million in Q4, up 34% year over year, mainly attributable to team expansion and the increased advertising and event expenses. For example, our RTE virtual conferences in October. Sales and marketing expenses represented 20.8% of total revenues in the quarter compared to 27.1% in Q4 last year. We believe this has again demonstrated the efficiency and scalability of our developer-centric go-to-market model.

Non-GAAP G&A expenses were $5.7 million in Q4, up 163% year over year mainly due to team expansion and professional service fees. G&A expenses represented 17% of total revenues in the quarter compared to 11.2% in Q4 last year. Non-GAAP operating loss was $4.8 million, translating to a 14.4% non-GAAP operating loss margin fourth quarter compared to a net loss margin of 8.1% in Q4 last year. Turning to cash flow.

Our operating cash flow was positive $2 million in Q4 compared to positive $2.1 million last year. Free cash flow was negative $1.4 million compared to positive $0.9 million last year. Net cash outflow in Q4 was mainly due to the purchase of servers and network equipment as we continue to scale our business. Moving on to balance sheet.

We ended Q4 with $635.4 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments compared to $635 million at the end of Q3. Subsequently, we raised $250 million by issuing ordinary shares to a credit investor earlier this month. Now turning to guidance. COVID-19 is still an unprecedented variable to our business model, where historical experience may not apply.

Our guidance on full year revenue reflects a number of assumptions that are subject to change based on the uncertainties related to the impact of COVID-19. With that, we currently expect total revenues for the fiscal year 2021 to be in the range of $178 million to $182 million, which would represent approximately 35% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, or if we use adjusted total revenues for 2020, 59% year-over-year growth at midpoint. In closing, we executed very well, and are proud of our strong performance we delivered in our first year as a public company. We'll continue to empower developers and meet customer needs around the world.

Thank you to the entire Agora team for the hard work this past year, and hope you're healthy and safe. Let's open up for questions.

Questions & Answers:

Operator

[Operator instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Yang Liu. Please ask your question.

Yang Liu -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Thank you for the opportunity to ask questions.Three questions from my side. The first one is can management share the revenue upside from penetrating the all you live broadcast use cases. How should the way you think about -- or how do we think about the revenue upside and how to quantify that. And do we have other customers beyond Clubhouse? The second question is how much is Easemob's revenue contribution in the full year 2021 guidance.

And what is the organic revenue growth in the guidance. The last question is gross margin outlook because we have new use cases, new acquisition, etc. Do you think the fourth-quarter 2020 gross margin is sustainable going forward? Thank you.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you. So I guess I'll take all the three questions. On the first question, first of all, we have internal policies on customer disclosure, and we cannot comment on particular customers other than what's already disclosed on our website. So we will not comment on any particular customer names.

Regarding this use case, it's actually not an entirely new use case. Basically, what we call the audio Catalan, were they existing use case for along the hard. And obviously, recently, there have been developments in the area. We do see a significant pickup in usage.

With that said, because audio price per minute is much lower than medium price per minute. So audio live cast. As a whole, the revenue contribution is that significant. If you think about the overall picture.

So we wouldn't guide a very significant revenue upside from this one use case alone, given we have so many use cases on the platform. On the second question, Easemob has a revenue run rate of around $1 million a month. And we are only in the closing stage of the acquisition, we expect the acquisition to complete in the next few weeks. So with that, I would say, the full year contribution would be something around $10 million.

And lastly, on gross margin. Current view is we think there will be a short-term pressure on gross margin in the near term. We do not believe it will be very different from whatever already seen in Q4. There are mainly two factors at play.

The first factor is international expansion. As we mentioned before, are given smaller scale in certain markets and higher infrastructure costs in those markets. Our margin is relatively lower in those new markets. As our revenue contribution from these markets increase, that will cause a drag on the overall margin.

The second factor is all the technical optimizations we are implementing. So in the short term, it's likely that the first factor will be stronger. So we'll have some pressure on the margin, but we expect sales should recover in a few quarters' time as more and more optimization take effect [inaudible]

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Rich Valera from Needham. Please ask your question.

Rich Valera -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Thank you. First question is a follow-up on the new voice model that you've been talking about. And just wanted to get a sense of how you actually get paid on that. Is it fair to think that each room in one of these voice-based social apps would be one live interactive audio stream, and you could have many participants in that stream that would effectively be free? I just wanted to try to understand how to think about that.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks. We actually charge based on per minute per participant. So let's say, there are 10 participants in that room. There is 10 minutes of engagement.

So that will be 10 times 10, 100 minutes charged.

Rich Valera -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

OK. Got it. On that. And then one of the things I think you can say about your new active customer additions have been quite strong for the last several quarters.

And just wondering how you're seeing them ramp relative to pre-COVID. Are you seeing similar ramps? I wanted to get any sense of how your new customers have been ramping over the last couple of quarters.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Overall, I would say, the ramp-up is normal. However, one thing I don't need to stress is similar to what we -- that was the adjusted revenue and adjusted expansion rate. There was a short-term impact from COVID particularly in China. So during the height of the COVID situation.

Obviously, a lot of new apps, new developers came to the platform, and they start to experiment. And as you can imagine, as COVID quickly passed some of those developers and those use cases disappear. So that would cause some distortion in the revenue and also expansion rate as well as the number of customers. So that is the kind of abnormal factors here.

But if we take that out, I think everything else is pretty normal. Now totally different from what we saw before.

Rich Valera -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Got it. And my final one is on opex. I was wondering if you could give us any help for modeling in terms of how to think of opex in 2021 versus 2020, either in absolute dollars or in percentage of revenue?

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

We do not provide specific guidance on exact operating margin. However, as we mentioned earlier, we'll continue to invest very heavily on R&D. So R&D will remain the main component within OpEx. And G&A, the ratio we saw in Q4 is high.

We do think it will be lower than that, given we had a few professional fee projects related to security audit. As Tony mentioned earlier in his opening remarks, completed in Q4. So Q4, we have a few nonrecurring items. So the G&A expense would be lower as a percentage of revenue.

Sales and marketing would be around similar levels as this presentation of revenue compared to 2020.

Rich Valera -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Got it. Thank you very much.

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Emerson Chan from Bank of America. You ask your questions.

Emerson Chan -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Hi. Thank you. I have three questions. My first question is about our overseas market.

How much revenue is cost from overseas and what we see differently now versus, let's say, one year ago in terms of customer acquisition in the overseas market. In terms of course, our brand awareness and the developer of which. And my second question is regarding use case in the audio life cars we mentioned before. How should we think about our technology leadership in the audio use case, whether it is less significant on audios than the video use case given audio traffic may looks less demanding.

And what are our competitive advantage on the audio use case that our competitors do not offer? And my last question is about the usage of the audio live cast use case. I just wonder if listen-only audience also need to use LTE. And what are the alternative technology that can accommodate those listen-only audience. And what are their quality and cost difference versus our LTE.

Thank you.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you. Emerson. I will take the first question. Tony will take the other two questions.

So in terms of overseas revenue mix, in the most recent quarter in Q4, active revenue from U.S. and other markets, so non-China markets, was already close to 30%. It's a little less than 30%. So it's significantly more than, let's say, one year ago or two years ago.

And in terms of the overall situation in the over China market. We have seen developer sign up continue to be very strong worldwide. The monthly developer registration. The new app register on the platform outside China right now is almost three times as many as one year ago.

And if you just do some simple search engine search, on the main keywords like video or video streaming, you can see that a lot of times, we are already ahead of major competitors. So we have gone a long way, and we are in a much stronger situation compared to one or two years ago. But there's still a lot of work to do, we recently added quite a few development frameworks, such as React Native, Flutter on video, and we are working on a few more. And then we recently launched the start-up program.

So we will better help start-ups to get free credit, technical support, again better because they're innovative use cases. So overall, we think we are on the right track, but we still need to be more proactive and be more strategic to really solidify our position as the go-to platform for the APIs worldwide.

Emerson Chan -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

OK. I'll address a question around our technical technology leadership, whether it's less significant on audio-only use cases and about advantage. It's actually very clear to us that our technology leadership is not less significant on audio-only use cases. I'll explain why.

Because video is commonly known more demanding than audio in terms of traffic and CPU usage. But that doesn't mean auto is easy to do because people are more sensitive audio quality. For example, in the video call, is the video frame freeze for like a second or so have pass some color blocks for a few seconds. It's less than ideal, but you won't feel too uncomfortable or hard to continue the transition.

But if the audio breaks up for like a second or a few seconds, or there's a sharp noise happening like in this call, then you would very much likely to feel really uncomfortable or not able to continue the conversation. In terms of our advantage in all the use cases, there are at least three of those advantages. We have a proportion codec to provide higher quality and we have a much better network to cover global audience. And also we leverage AI technology to further enhance audio experience on our services.

We have a proprietary product called NOVA, which is widely used in today's live cast users, where they provide full-band audio is very low bit rate, which is a key feature for all the large cost use cases. And again, our network, which is called SD rtn, provides the best global coverage in this market. In any country, especially cross long distance. It's hard to really ensure the experience across region and various type of devices.

And we also use artificial talent to improve various aspects of auto quality. For example, we have this noise reduction and cancelation. On the third question were about listening-only audience use cases on RTE. I think it's important to understand that listen-only use cases is so-called podcast, and listen most of the time but can jump in anytime to discuss is hugely different from strictly listening only.

You need to understand because this is a new use case. We're psychologically, the audience or the participants feel really different from strictly listening only. Having the ability to interact gives people the feeling of being there or being together, whether they make any response or not, means a lot in that environment. And people do come on stage to interact from time to time when they hear something they are really passionate about, which makes the whole discussion more spontaneous.

So that's very different from strictly this only. That's why we see it's necessary for such use case to use RTE.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Colin Liu from China Renaissance. Please ask your question.

Colin Liu -- China Renaissance -- Analyst

Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to ask question. I have just one on the acquisition of Easemob. With the IM capabilities to be added to Agora's platform.

What do you think of the new business cases we should actually focus on? And all these new business cases going to bring some new customers that we may never -- in the past before? And also, I noticed that actually before the acquisition and the cooperation with Agora, Easemob also outlined some overseas expansion plan, particularly in the ASEAN market. So how do we see the potential opportunities in overseas markets regarding the cooperation with Easemob in the future? Thank you.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Well, I would say the acquisition of Easemob with the addition of instant messaging API is less about penetrating into customers we can never penetrate before. It's more about offering a more complete and more seamless solution to customers. Actually, this is not something we imagined. It's during our experience with developers and with customers.

In fact, instant messaging API is one of the most frequently requested feature from our developer community. So if you imagine, of the apps you have used, if app has a video or voice engagement functionality embedded. Actually, there's a very high chance it also needs instant messaging function. So now with APIs on the platform as well.

We can offer these development customers a more seamless integration of all the features. And if you think about it, actually, a primary way for people to interact in-app basically video, voice and messaging. So now we have all of these covered. So that's really the logic.

So we think this is a very natural move.

Tony Zhao -- Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer

I think to add a little bit to that, the instant messaging APIs falls under a bigger umbrella of RTE APIs which we have been working on for a long time. It does give us complementary features and more APIs to serve our customer base, which will help customer to more easily to build their actual use cases or their apps. This will definitely help us a lot in growing our developers. Plus on international expansion, there are past effort for Easemob to expand internationally.

I think with the acquisition they can leverage our existing operation globally, which is proven to be successful in past to further penetrate to serve global developers instead of in the past, more solving China developers.

Colin Liu -- China Renaissance -- Analyst

Very clear. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Eric Wen from Blue Lotus. Please ask your question.

Eric Wen -- Blue Lotus -- Analyst

Good morning. Thank you and Congratulations on the good quarter. My question is regarding this other revenues. We noticed that our other revenues has grown quite a bit this quarter.

Does this represent trial customers or more customization requirements or it represents a new class of revenues we plan to continue to develop in the future? And if you can comment on what is the gross margin profile of this other revenues would be very helpful. Thanks.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Sure. So this asset revenue is mainly due to one enterprise customer, where we provide essentially the same product, the same service. But the contract is structured as a license as requested by the customer. So it's booked as other revenue.

But essentially, it's really the same service. But given, say, with one particular customer, we actually don't think this will constitute a new land business. It seems like this will happen from time to time, but we don't consider that anything different from what we already do.

Operator

[Operator instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Akida Erkin from China Securities.

Akida Erkin -- China Securities -- Analyst

Thank you for taking my questions. So there were three questions from my side. The first one is about online education. So I was wondering you could management update us in terms of progressive penetrating online education customers.

So at present, what is the proportion of revenue contributed by small classes versus large classes? And how we see the potential market size of RTE online education sector in China? And my second question is about the strategy of product development and R&D. So what is the focus of R&D and product development currently. And what's the most challenging part. And apart from education and entertainment sectors, are there any innovative RTE application emerging from other fields such as finance and IoT and so on? And my third question is about overseas business.

So for 2021 and also for the mid to long term, what is the expected proportion of revenue contributed by overseas business. And it would be appreciated if you can talk a bit more about your strategy to do the global market. Thank you.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

So in terms of revenue contribution from different class formats, right now, we so the small class is still the majority format. We have about half of revenue from small class. And the other half, it's between one use cases and then a large class or lecture hall. But we believe lecture hall use case, as Tony discussed earlier, has a significant potential because as Tony explained, that platform at is most economical.

Again one teacher or few teachers teaching hundreds or even thousand students. So the model itself is very -- has great economics. So we do expect the contribution from large class lecture hall to increase substantially in the future. With that said, we think even for small class and one-on-one class, there is still a lot of room to grow.

Currently, the overall online education market is growing very rapidly, not just in China, but globally. And secondly, there is still significant volume, significant usage currently served by in-house solutions, and we are working hard to convert more and more customers to switch from in-house solutions to professional third-party solution like online solution. So that's the first question. On the second one, we actually don't think the technology is perfect.

In fact, we think the technology is far from perfect at the moment. If you actually ask some of our customers, they will tell you they like our quality relative to competitors, but they don't think the quality is good enough in absolute sense. So if our quality can be a 20%, 30% better, they are more than happy to pay us more. So if you think about use cases like high definition, 4K or VR/AR, or for a more challenging use case across geography, there's still a long way to go.

And if you think about the use cases, I would say, people talk about social and education. But actually, under these two umbrellas, there are numerous new innovative use cases. Like audio live cast, right? That's still social, but that's probably something people didn't do before. So even within the two verticals, I would think there's still a lot of room to grow.

It is hard to predict what new use case will emerge because, by definition, right? It's new because we don't know it yet. We haven't developed yet. So it's hard to predict. But as history has shown, right, people will always innovate and the need to learn and the need to interact will not go away.

So that's on the verticals. But we will not just stay at the PaaS or SDK level and wait for customers to build apps. We'll also, at the same time, try to verticalize ourselves. So the education aPaaS, Agora flexible classroom is one of the first efforts from us in terms of verticalization.

So this will -- because aPaaS is a local solution. So basically, it will reduce friction of adoption and allow companies with a smaller development team -- or let's say, a more traditional enterprise rather than a pure technology company will allow them to be able to adopt our technology and build apps much more easily. And that will expand the addressable market, addressable developer or customer base. And that can also create new revenue opportunities.

So that's the second question. The third question on overseas revenue. This year, it's hard to say, given a lot of things are moving, including the development of the COVID situation, right? But we expect revenue contribution from out of China will be similar or slightly higher than what we saw in Q4, so around 30%. And we do think the non-China market has huge potential given all the use cases starting to really ramp up and gain publicity.

So we do expect to revenues from outside China to revel revenues in China -- from within China in three to five years.

Akida Erkin -- China Securities -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

[Operator instructions] You have a follow-up question from the line of Emerson Chan from Bank of America. Please ask your questions.

Emerson Chan -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

May I have one follow-up questions on the overseas market. I know we have a global pricing plan. But as far as I know, large customer may have some discount. So I'm curious on what are the ASP difference in the overseas versus China after the discount we've given to our clients? And how should we think about the competition intensity in the overseas market versus China? Thank you.

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

In fact, in terms of ASP, in the most recent quarter, the two markets are not that different. Non-China market still has a slightly lower ASP but it's not drastically different. I'm talking about view SBC after discount ASP. But as we mentioned earlier, the challenge is really the infrastructure cost.

The scale in China, the metro capacity in China is much higher. So we are able to get a relatively efficient procurement cost. But in other China, also the overall scale is not as small, but that's distributed across many different geographies, many different countries. So in one particular country, the scale could be quite small, and that caused the infrastructure cost to be higher.

That's the challenge at the moment. In terms of competition, I guess people have saying that recently, there have been new entrants into the market, including some large companies, which we actually think, again, confirms the potential of this market. The difference -- I would say the non-China, U.S. and rest of world market, is less well-defined and still shaping up compared with China.

In China, the marquee has been well-defined primarily by us and the competitors who compete with us in a more direct way. But also China, I think we also play a key role in defining the market. But we see competitors from various different background, and they try to offer some overlapping products. But very few are competing with everything we do.

Some of them do a little bit of video calls. Some do a little bit of voice, some do streaming. But we don't see a lot of competitors really try to do the same thing we do. That is to power all kinds of immersive engagement use cases.

So I would say the market outside China overall is still less developed.

Operator

[Operator instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I would like to hand the conference back to today's presenters. Please continue.

Fionna Chen -- Head of Investor Relations

Thank you, everyone. We'll[Audio gap]hopefully to email us or contact us through investor.agora.io. Thank you again.

Operator

[Operator signoff]

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Thank you. Goodbye.

Duration: 53 minutes

Call participants:

Fionna Chen -- Head of Investor Relations

Tony Zhao -- Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer

Jingbo Wang -- Chief Financial Officer

Yang Liu -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Rich Valera -- Needham & Company -- Analyst

Emerson Chan -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst

Colin Liu -- China Renaissance -- Analyst

Eric Wen -- Blue Lotus -- Analyst

Akida Erkin -- China Securities -- Analyst

More API analysis

All earnings call transcripts