Kuaishou Reports $3.2 Billion Total Revenue, Expanded Net Loss in Q3

Chinese short video platform Kuaishou Technology announced its financial results for the third quarter this year on Tuesday. The company’s total revenue increased by 33.4% to 20.5 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) from 15.4 billion yuan for the same period of 2020. Its net loss reached 7.09 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 75.8%.

Amongst total revenues, online marketing services increased by 76.5% to 10.9 billion yuan. As a percentage of the total revenue, online marketing services contributed 53.2%. Brand advertisement remains one of Kuaishou’s strategic priorities.

As one of the pillars of Kuaishou, its live streaming ecosystem continues to prosper with revenue reaching 7.7 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2021, improving with a 7.4% quarter-over-quarter growth. In particular, during the third quarter of 2021, the average MPUs for live streaming increased by 3.6% quarter-over-quarter to 46.1 million, while monthly ARPPU also increased by 8.8% year-over-year and 3.7% quarter-over-quarter to 55.9 yuan.

Kuaishou’s other services delivered revenue of 1.9 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2021, increasing by 53.0% year-over-year, primarily driven by e-commerce. Its e-commerce GMV reached 175.8 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2021, representing an 86.1% year-over-year increase. The repeat purchase rate of its e-commerce business further improved to over 70% in September.

Kwai Shop, the closed-loop mode of Kuaishou’s e-commerce business, increased its contribution to the total e-commerce GMV for the third quarter of 2021 to 90.0% from 71.4% in the same period of 2020.

Kuaishou Selection accounted for an increasing proportion of their company’s total e-commerce GMV in the third quarter of 2021. Data shows that during the Kuaishou 116 Quality Shopping Festival (October 20-November 11), its turnover increased by 1076% compared with the same period of last year.

Kuaishou mentioned in its financial report that, as the changes in June to realign its user and product teams and facilitate full-cycle user management started to take effect, the number of users in Kuaishou increased significantly in the third quarter of 2021.

The average daily active users (DAUs) on the platform in the third quarter were 320.4 million, a year-on-year increase of 17.9%. Average daily time spent per DAU was 119.1 minutes, up 35.0% year-on-year. The average monthly active users were 572.9 million, a year-on-year increase of 19.5%.

In terms of content, Kuaishou pointed out that Kuaishou Playlet has attracted a growing number of creators to produce more premium short videos, which encouraged continuous content consumption and strengthened user stickiness. In the third quarter of 2021, more than 850 short videos had been viewed more than 100 million times.

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Sports is another content vertical in which Kuaishou excels. With more than 40 sports categories covered, total user time spent on sports content in the third quarter of 2021 was more than 1.5 times higher than the same period of last year. In particular, as the short video and broadcasting partner in China for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, Kuaishou drove Olympics-related video views to an aggregate total of 73 billion views, with a total of 6 billion interactions on Kuaishou’s App throughout August 2021.