Earnings Call Transcript - JOYY Q3 2025

Operator, Operator

Thank you all for joining us today for JOYY Inc.'s Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I will now turn the call over to your host, Jane Xie, the Senior Manager of Investor Relations. Please proceed, Jane.

Tingzhen Xie, Senior Manager of Investor Relations

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to JOYY's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today are Ms. Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO of JOYY; and Mr. Alex Liu, the Vice President of Finance. For today's call, management will first provide a review of the quarter, and then we will conduct a Q&A session. The financial results and webcast of this conference call are available at ir.joyy.com. A replay of this call will also be available on our website in a few hours. Before we continue, I'd like to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, the future development of our products and businesses, expected financial performance, our share repurchases and other future events, which are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from our current expectations. For detailed discussions of the risks and uncertainties, please refer to our latest annual report on Form 20-F and other documents filed with the SEC. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures that are included as additional clarifying items to aid investors in further understanding the company's performance and the impact that these items and events had on the financial results. The non-GAAP financial measures provided above should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. You may find a reconciliation of the differences between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures in our earnings release. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in U.S. dollars. I will now turn the call over to our Chairperson and CEO, Ms. Ting Li. Please go ahead, Ms. Li.

Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO

Hello, everyone. I'm Li Ting. Thank you for joining us today. This quarter, we have taken another firm step towards becoming a global technology company powered by multiple growth engines and a strong synergistic ecosystem. Starting with our Q3 results. Livestreaming revenues sustained steady sequential recovery, while our ad tech platform, BIGO Ads, accelerated top-line growth with its total ad revenue growing over 19.7% quarter-over-quarter. Meanwhile, we maintained a robust cash flow generation and continued to actively return value to shareholders. Last quarter, I expressed our long-term commitment to building a meaningful and lasting presence in the ad tech industry. This quarter, we made concrete progress towards that goal. BIGO Ads' daily growth revenue grew aggressively and reached new heights. As we further accumulate in scale and continuously iterate our AI algorithm, we are confident we will soon reach new milestones. We achieved total revenue of $540 million in the third quarter, up 6.4% quarter-over-quarter. Our livestreaming revenue was $388 million, up 3.5% Q-o-Q, making 2 consecutive quarters of sequential growth. Meanwhile, BIGO Ads recorded $104 million in revenue, with a year-over-year growth of 33.1%, bringing total non-livestreaming revenues, including ad revenues and others, to 28.1% of group revenues. Non-GAAP operating income reached $41 million, up 16.6% year-on-year. Non-GAAP EBITDA reached $51 million, up 16.8% year-on-year and 4.9% Q-o-Q. Operating cash flow for the quarter reached $73 million. As of September 30, we had $3.3 billion in net cash. This provides strong support for our ongoing competitive shareholders' returns. We will continue actively executing our share repurchase program. As we advance our strategic priorities alongside strong acquisitional momentum, we are positioned to deliver long-term value for our shareholders. As we approach year-end, I would like to outline our overall strategic direction for year 2026. In short, we will focus on 3 key priorities: strengthening ecosystem synergies, reinforcing organizational vision, vitality, and reigniting growth. Beginning in 2022, we accelerated the diversification of our revenue stream, cultivating our 2B initiatives in ad tech and SaaS. We have made steady progress advancing towards our strategic positioning as a global tech company powered by multiple growth engines in the past several years. Today, our livestreaming business serves as a reliable cash call, providing a solid foundation for profitable growth. In the meantime, our advertising platform and the e-commerce SaaS businesses have completed initial validation of their business models and are rapidly emerging as our net growth curve. In Q3, our total non-livestreaming revenues exceeded 28.1% of group revenues. We have created a highly synergistic system where our global traffic, advertising, and e-commerce SaaS businesses reinforce each other. The R&D capabilities, network infrastructure, local operations expertise, and first-party data access we accumulated through global social livestreaming are now powering our rapid 2B expansion. In turn, our 2B progress strengthens our competitive moat in both data and technology. We are just beginning to unlock the full strategic value of this integrated business ecosystem. We are transforming our high-growth ad tech business by establishing BIGO Ads as an AI-powered global platform for performance-driven, multichannel advertising across different verticals. In 2026, we expect to substantially extend our traffic coverage. On mobile traffic, we are exploring partnerships with meditation platform and developers like Google AdMob to accelerate traffic expansion. On web traffic, we are extending traffic coverage through partnerships with channels like Microsoft Xandr and Google AdX. On the demand side, as we establish web-to-web advertising capabilities and integrate our web models, we expect to capture continued growth from web-based advertising. For mobile-based advertising, we are enhancing our IAA D7 ROAS product to improve advertiser ROI for IAA, while advancing the optimization of our Target CPE and other products for IAP to expand into new areas. Finally, on platform technology, we expect to establish and strengthen our iOS ecosystem in 2026, which will enable us to unlock substantial incremental growth potential from iOS high-quality traffic. We will also continue investing in AI, building our team and resources to accelerate model development and optimization. These enhanced models will leverage deep user behavior and conversion data across channels and verticals, enabling more precise targeting and better performance for our advertisers. We have clear strategies in place to drive continued growth in 2026 across all dimensions, including multichannels, traffic expansion, vertical-specific demand development, and enhanced AI modeling capabilities. These initiatives will create powerful flywheel effects, which will compound enabling us to deliver increasing value to advertisers while accelerating our own growth. We believe 2026 will be a milestone year for JOYY's ad tech business, and we are excited about the possibilities ahead. Turning to Shopline, we remain bullish on the long-term prospects of the SaaS-based e-commerce sector. Unlike walled garden marketplace platforms, Shopline provides an open and extensible solution to merchants, through which merchants have full data ownership for advanced operations. For the past several years, Shopline's core mission has been product excellence. We have made a substantial investment in R&D to evolve from a storefront builder into a full-scale e-commerce system seamlessly, combining SaaS infrastructure, payments, and integrated making tools into one powerful closed loop. With the rise of AI, we are now embedding advanced AI capabilities deeply into every part of the merchant's journey, continuously sharpening our product edge to drive real business success for our customers. Since last year, we have seen accelerated growth in certain key regions with steady expansion in gross margins. This is an important strategic milestone for Shopline. Our long-standing commitment to R&D, excellence, and talent recruitment has built the deep technological foundation that supports our success across all business segments. Through our modular organizational structure, we enhanced synergies by sharing resources and capabilities across business lines. Our approach enables us to remain agile and execution-focused while giving new ventures competitive advantages from day 1 and creating significant operating leverage as we scale. As we expand and diversify into new initiatives, our results-driven incentive mechanisms provide our top talent with equitable opportunities and broader career development takeaways. By fostering an entrepreneurial spirit, embracing innovation, and leveraging competitive incentives to attract and retain excellent talent while ensuring high strategic goal alignment between management and the core team members, we drive more efficient corporate development. From a management strategic priority standpoint, we have a balanced framework incorporating both operating metrics and long-term shareholder value accretion, which promotes strong alignment with shareholders' interests. After several quarters of adjustment, our livestreaming business has returned to a sequential recovery trajectory. We believe it is positioned for steady year-over-year growth in 2026. Meanwhile, we expect our ad tech and SaaS business will sustain robust double-digit revenue growth year-on-year in the coming year. This sets the stage for year-over-year group revenue growth starting in Q4 2025, as reflected in our newly announced guidance, and continue into 2026 and beyond. This is not just a return to growth, but rather the launchpad for unlocking a vastly larger addressable market. Next, let me share with you our latest operational update and our outlook for the future. In the third quarter, our global average mobile monthly active users (MAUs) reached 266 million, up 1.4% quarter-over-quarter. Our organic user growth continued to be strong, driven by our instant messaging platform. In Q3, the IMO product MAUs grew by 600 million Q-o-Q, with the average time spent per user up 10.8% year-over-year. The product retention rate continued to improve year-on-year, driven by our ongoing enhancements to core IMO features. On user acquisition, we maintained a disciplined ROI forecast, targeting users with strong monetization potential. BIGO LIVE's 30-day ROI from new devices improved 6.7% quarter-over-quarter as a result. In Q3, group livestreaming revenues reached $388 million. BIGO LIVE streaming revenue was $368 million, up 3.5% Q-o-Q, maintaining their sequential growth trend. BIGO's total paying users grew 0.8% Q-o-Q, while ARPPU increased 3.4% Q-o-Q. BIGO LIVE delivered positive sequential growth for the second consecutive quarter. This recovery reflects our comprehensive integrated approach, where we have leveraged effective streamer inclusive programs, a healthy and diverse high-quality content ecosystem, AI-powered user touchpoint enhancements that improve content discovery and payment experiences, and strong local operational campaigns. These initiatives together drove renewed growth. Since the second half of last year, we have restructured our streamer incentive mechanism across regions, shifting support towards middle-tier streamers. We are now seeing significantly improved streamer engagement and content quality across the platform. In Q3, average streaming hours for newly signed streamers on BIGO LIVE rose 3.5% Q-o-Q, and the average viewer numbers increased 3.9% Q-o-Q. We continue advancing AI-powered improvement across content, distribution, and payment experiences by incorporating future user signals through AI and optimizing strategies for cross-regional and in-app scenarios in BIGO LIVE. We enhanced viewing experiences and drove users' average viewing time up 3.4% Q-o-Q. Meanwhile, our real-time transition title now supports 15 languages, significantly improving user interaction across different regions. We are also using AIGC technology to efficiently generate localized virtual gifts. In October, AI-powered interactive gifts represented 25% of total virtual gift consumption, demonstrating strong user adoption of AI-enhanced features. We have used package strategies to further optimize BIGO LIVE tiered paying users' benefit system. In Q3, mid-tier user ARPPU increased 2% Q-o-Q, while the total number of premium paying users achieved double-digit Q-o-Q growth. Looking ahead to 2026, we are confident that our streamer incentives, content cultivation, and AI-driven optimization will position BIGO LIVE to regain momentum for growth. We are also advancing payment infrastructure improvements to deliver more diverse, localized payment options for global users. We believe this will be a tailwind to drive payment rate improvements across all products over time. Overall, we are confident that livestreaming will return to steady growth in 2026 and continue contributing sustainable cash flow for the group. Turning to BIGO Ads, in Q3, BIGO Ads achieved $104 million in advertising revenue, up 33.1% year-on-year and 19.7% Q-o-Q, while first-party ad revenue and profit remained stable with single-digit Q-o-Q growth. Our third-party BIGO audience network was particularly strong, recording mid-double-digit year-on-year and 25% sequential growth. On the traffic side, BIGO audience network traffic continued to grow this quarter. SDK ad requests were up 228% year-on-year and 29% Q-o-Q, representing significant growth. On the technology front, we upgraded our IAA D7 ROAS optimization with AI-driven real-time prediction and smart billing capabilities. By leveraging cross-channel and cross-vertical user behavior and attrition data, the enhanced model delivered significantly improved prediction accuracy and generalization, enabling advertisers to scale budgets with greater confidence, acquiring higher-quality users while sustaining strong return efficiency. We saw strong growth across the board, driven by algorithm integration, elevated traffic, new market expansion, and strong advertiser demand across multiple verticals. BIGO Ads' daily gross revenue reached new heights and continued on its upward trajectory with strong momentum. Web-based demand primarily for lead generation maintained teens growth Q-o-Q, and we are optimistic about its Q4 growth prospects as we enter the peak season. Meanwhile, improved IAA delivery and efficiency substantially drove IAA advertisers spending up by mid-double-digit Q-o-Q. During the third quarter, total spending from key cohorts increased by 30% Q-o-Q. At the same time, performance gains attracted a steady influx of new advertisers, with the number of key cohorts up by 17% Q-o-Q. From a regional perspective, we continued to deepen our penetration in developed countries, with BIGO Audience network revenue from North America growing 22% Q-o-Q, while Western Europe growing 41% Q-o-Q. We delivered exceptional results in Q3, driven by rapid network traffic expansion, continuous algorithm optimization, delivery efficiency improvements, and rapid growth across net verticals. As we outlined in last quarter's earnings call, BIGO Ads represents our identified second growth engine and the core long-term strategic initiative. We are committed to building a meaningful and lasting presence in this space and see significant opportunities ahead. Turning to capital return, as of November 14, we have repurchased $88.6 million under our share buyback program. Given our strong financial position and operating momentum, we believe our shares remain undervalued, and we will continue actively executing share repurchases as part of our commitment to returning value to shareholders. Looking forward, with our livestreaming business stabilizing and driving revenue and profit from advertising and other emerging businesses, we expect the company's consolidated operating profit to continue to improve and our shareholders to benefit from long-term profitable growth. In summary, we are optimistic about the positive trends we are driving across our business units. Our core livestreaming business is on a positive trajectory and continues to show sequential growth, and we expect livestreaming to gradually regain momentum for growth. BIGO Ads is scaling rapidly as our identified second growth engine, driven by traffic readiness, vertical expansion, and algorithm optimization. We are strengthening Shopline's product capability and strategic advancements as a fully integrated SaaS platform with anticipated synergies with our ad tech platform on the horizon. As I mentioned earlier, we are just beginning to unlock the full strategic value of our integrated business ecosystem. We anticipate that 2026 will mark a period of renewed progress and serve as a launchpad for our next phase of growth. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alex Liu, the Vice President of Finance, to provide our financial update.

Fuyong Liu, Vice President of Finance

Thanks, Ms. Li. Hello, everyone. In the third quarter of 2025, we recorded total net revenues of $540.2 million, securing a quarter-over-quarter growth of 6.4%. Our livestreaming business delivered its second sequential recovery with its livestreaming revenues increasing by 3.5% quarter-over-quarter. Our advertising business, in particular, BIGO Ads has demonstrated accelerating growth. BIGO Ads revenues was up by 33.1% year-over-year and 19.7% quarter-over-quarter to $103.9 million. Our non-GAAP EBITDA for the quarter was $50.6 million, up by 16.8% year-over-year and 4.9% quarter-over-quarter. Operating cash flow remained strong at $73.4 million in quarter 3, and we ended the quarter with $3.3 billion in net cash. We accelerated share buybacks during the quarter. In quarter 3, we bought back $30.8 million worth of our shares. Between January 1 and November 14, we had bought back 1.7 million of our ADS for $88.6 million in 2025. I will now dive deeper into our detailed financial performance. Looking at our livestreaming business, our total livestreaming revenue was $388.5 million for the third quarter, $367.7 million of which was from the BIGO segment, both up quarter-over-quarter. Global MAU was $266.2 million during the quarter, up by 1.4% quarter-over-quarter, driven by a healthy growth of the user pool of our instant messenger. Our ROI-oriented user acquisition, continued AI-driven optimization of our content quality and paying user experience have contributed to improved paying sentiment, with BIGO's total paying user and app increasing by 0.8% and 3.4% quarter-over-quarter. By region, the group's total livestreaming revenues from developed countries increased by 7.6% quarter-over-quarter, while livestreaming revenues from Southeast Asia increased by 4.4% quarter-over-quarter. Our total non-livestreaming revenues were $151.7 million during the third quarter, up by 27.3% year-over-year. Non-livestreaming now contributes 28.1% of our total group revenues, up from only 21.3% contribution in the same period last year. We are presenting advertising revenues as a separate line item in the financial statements this quarter to help investors better understand the performance of our emerging business. BIGO's advertising revenues increased by 33.1% year-over-year and 19.7% quarter-over-quarter to $103.9 million. In particular, our third-party BIGO Audience network delivered exceptional results, recording mid-double-digit year-over-year and 25% sequential growth. We are making substantial progress on all fronts. On the traffic front, SDK network ad requests were up by 228% year-over-year and 29% quarter-on-quarter in quarter 3, leveraging multichannel and cross-industry user behavior and attrition data. We continued to train and optimize our algorithms to further improve our campaign performance, which drove advertiser spending. In Q3, the number of key cohorts was up by 17% quarter-over-quarter, with total spending from key cohorts up by 30% quarter-over-quarter. BIGO Ads has certainly emerged as our second major growth engine, and it continued to make a positive contribution to our bottom line. The group's gross profit was $193.1 million in the quarter, with a gross margin of 35.8%, up by 4.3% quarter-over-quarter. BIGO's gross margin was slightly down quarter-over-quarter due to the shift in our revenue mix, which saw an increased contribution from our low-margin network ad revenues. All other segments' gross margin was up by 3 percentage points year-over-year to 42.6% due to growth in higher margin SaaS revenues. Our group's operating expenses for the quarter were $174.2 million compared with $192 million in the same period of 2024. For our sales and marketing expenses, we are consistently optimizing our user acquisition expenses to enhance ROI. For our R&D and G&A expenses, we maintained a prudent and disciplined approach in our total spending through enhanced resource-sharing and operational synergy across different business units, while strategically allocating an incremental share of our R&D resources towards BIGO Ads. Our group's non-GAAP operating income for the quarter was $40.7 million, up by 16.6% year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income attributable to controlling interest of JOYY in the quarter was $72.4 million, up by 18.4% year-over-year. The group's non-GAAP net income margin was 13.4% in the quarter. For the third quarter of 2025, we booked net cash inflows from operating activities of $73.4 million. Our benefits remain healthy with a strong net cash position of $3.3 billion as of September 30, 2025. Shareholder return continued to be an important component of our capital allocation strategy. We have returned $147.9 million to our shareholders through dividends and repurchased $88.6 million worth of our shares during the year as of November 14, 2025. We believe we are still substantially undervalued, and we will remain firmly committed to actively utilizing our outstanding share repurchase program. Turning now to our business outlook. At the group level, we expect our net revenues for the fourth quarter of 2025 to be between $563 million and $578 million. This implies a 2.5% to 5.2% year-over-year growth for the group's revenue in quarter 4. As Ms. Li highlighted in her prepared remarks, we are now repositioned for growth, particularly with advertising entering into the peak season of the year, we are expecting continued accelerating growth from BIGO Ads, with its total advertising revenue particularly delivering mid-double-digit year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. Based on the trends we are seeing across our business, we have clear visibility for the group to achieve year-over-year revenue growth in 2026, and we are extremely excited about the tremendous synergy potential and powerful flywheel momentum that our business segments will deliver in the medium to long term. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we'd now like to open up the call to questions. Thanks.

Operator, Operator

Your first question comes from Xueqing Zhang from CICC.

Xueqing Zhang, Analyst

Congratulations on the strong quarter. My question is about the livestreaming business. We have noticed some growth in livestreaming quarter-on-quarter for two consecutive quarters. How should we view the long-term trend of the livestreaming business?

Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO

Thank you for your question. This is Li Ting. I will address your inquiry. In the third quarter, our livestreaming business has shown a steady sequential recovery, bolstered by growth in both our paying users and ARPPU. Developed countries and Southeast Asia have demonstrated resilience and continued the positive trend observed in recent quarters. Over the last several quarters, we have focused on implementing structural enhancements within our ecosystem, such as improving streamer incentive programs, diversifying content supply and distribution, expanding the use of AI for content distribution, and optimizing the payment experience. These efforts have complemented each other and contributed to a healthier growth in livestreaming. Looking ahead to 2026, we anticipate a return to year-over-year growth in livestreaming. The operational adjustments we made earlier this year are mostly behind us. Going forward, we will prioritize high-value paying users in developed countries while enhancing our global operations by improving content supply, user segmentation, incentive structures, and strengthening our payment infrastructure. This strategy is expected to enhance our conversion rates and ARPPU. Additionally, we foresee some additional revenue from our new product initiatives in the Middle East in 2026. With these factors in place, we are confident that livestreaming is poised for steady year-over-year growth in the upcoming year. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Yuan Liao from Citic.

Yuan Liao, Analyst

Congratulations on the strong quarterly results. My question is about your advertising business. Could management outline the long-term strategic goals for this segment and share the operational plans for 2026?

Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO

Thank you, Liao Yuan. This is Li Ting. I will take your question. We are transforming our high-growth ad tech business by establishing BIGO Ads as a global platform for performance-driven multichannel advertising across different verticals. We expect to create a multi-channel layout that allows monetization for various suppliers, including web open networks and mobile app developers, which will significantly expand our supply base. We anticipate our advertiser base will become more diversified and cover a broader range of advertiser types. For instance, in the in-app advertising segment, we will deepen our penetration into casual games and tool and utility apps. In the in-app purchase segment, we plan to explore core verticals like mid- to hardcore games, content, social, and e-commerce marketplaces. In web-based advertising, we also aim to penetrate verticals such as finance, direct-to-customer, and e-commerce. Building on this, as our advertising verticals diversify and we expand advertiser coverage, along with increasing traffic and diversifying traffic channels, we will accumulate more data. This will enhance our full-domain user profiling, allowing us to optimize performance and efficiency. Geographically, BIGO Ads will maintain a global presence while focusing on developed regions like North America and Europe. Globalization is a clear strategy as we continue our expansion. For BIGO Ads in 2026, we expect growth drivers to come from four areas: continued traffic expansion, strong growth in the number of in-app advertising and web-based advertisers, improvement of our advertising data infrastructure, and geographic market expansion based on solid results from 2025. We have strong confidence in our development and are eager to see what we can achieve in 2026.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Thomas Chong from Jefferies.

Thomas Chong, Analyst

I will translate myself. My question is about the outlook for 2026. Can management provide insights on the trends in users and revenue? Additionally, can management discuss the trends in expenses and the outlook for profitability?

Ting Li, Chairperson and CEO

Thank you, Thomas. This is Li Ting. I will address your first question. As we look towards 2026, we are still finalizing our detailed operational plan, and at this moment, we are not able to provide specific quantitative guidance. However, based on the trends we're observing in our major businesses, we have clear visibility regarding a return to positive year-over-year revenue growth for the group in 2026, and we are very confident about this. Firstly, regarding livestreaming, the business has stabilized and is now on a growing trajectory after the adjustments made in previous quarters. We anticipate that livestreaming will continue to show steady year-over-year growth in 2026. In terms of advertising and e-commerce SaaS, both have demonstrated strong momentum this year. BIGO Ads experienced approximately 30% year-over-year growth in the first three quarters of 2025, and our e-commerce SaaS business achieved double-digit growth. Looking ahead to 2026, we expect both segments to maintain strong double-digit growth. For advertising, we have high visibility in areas such as traffic expansion, model capabilities, advertiser coverage, and regional penetration. As for SaaS, enhanced product capabilities and rapid growth in key markets will support our top-line growth. All these factors combined suggest that as livestreaming returns to year-over-year growth, alongside advertising and SaaS maintaining robust performance, the group is entering a new growth cycle. We foresee our top line recovering to a stable positive year-over-year growth trajectory, with promising long-term opportunities ahead. On the user front, we will keep focusing on traffic quality. In Q3, around 78% of our overall MAU base still comes from our Instant Messenger product, which is highly engaging and organically acquired. Our IM product has consistently grown over the past three quarters in terms of MAU, and we expect this steady momentum to persist. For our broader social entertainment product portfolio, we will continue to emphasize ROI and aim to acquire high-quality global users. Overall, at the group level, we expect our MAU to remain stable in 2026, with ongoing improvements in our user community providing a solid foundation for livestreaming monetization and other monetization opportunities, particularly our first-party ads.

Fuyong Liu, Vice President of Finance

Thank you, Thomas. This is Alex. I will address your second question. First, let's review our third-quarter performance. We achieved profits that exceeded expectations, with our non-GAAP operating profit reaching $40.7 million, an increase of 16.6% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP EBITDA rose by 16.8% year-over-year and 4.9% quarter-over-quarter to $50.6 million. In the BIGO segment, our non-GAAP gross profit margin was 35% in Q3, slightly down quarter-over-quarter, primarily due to our changing revenue mix as the growth of our third-party BIGO Audience network diluted our segment gross margin. This was partially countered by our ongoing efforts to optimize content costs and improve efficiency in livestreaming. Consequently, BIGO's non-GAAP operating margin remained stable at 14% in Q3. In all other segments, the non-GAAP gross margin improved from 40% to 42.9% year-over-year, driven by revenue growth and increased contributions from our higher-margin SaaS business. The operating non-GAAP loss in this area continued to shrink to $25.5 million, down from $38 million in Q3 last year, reflecting our disciplined approach to operating expenses. Looking ahead to Q4, we anticipate the group's non-GAAP operating profit will continue to improve quarter-over-quarter, which indicates that for the full year of 2025, our group's total non-GAAP operating profit will see a nearly double-digit year-over-year increase compared to 2024. For 2026, with livestreaming returning to year-over-year growth, continued top-line growth, stable profitability, and increasing contributions from BIGO Ads while e-commerce SaaS narrows its operating losses, we expect the group's total non-GAAP operating profit and non-GAAP EBITDA to maintain the positive trend we've achieved this year and grow steadily in 2026.

Operator, Operator

Your next question comes from Raphael Chen from BOCI Research.

Yiqun Chen, Analyst

Congrats on the third quarter. Could management share their latest thoughts and strategies regarding our shareholder return initiatives?

Fuyong Liu, Vice President of Finance

Thank you, Raphael. This is Alex. I will address your question. At the beginning of the year, we introduced a three-year shareholder return program amounting to $900 million for 2025 to 2027, and we are currently implementing this plan smoothly and are on track to achieve it. As of November 14, we have paid out a total of $148 million in dividends and repurchased $88.6 million worth of our shares, with the pace of share buybacks increasing in the third quarter. As Ms. Li mentioned, we are entering a new growth phase and the group's revenue will regain a growth path, leading to broader market opportunities. Although our share price remains relatively low, we plan to actively increase our share buybacks moving forward. Looking ahead, as our operating profit grows, we anticipate that shareholders will see enhanced returns over time. That concludes our questions. Thank you for joining our call, and we look forward to connecting with everyone next quarter. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. This conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.