Weibo Achieves Total 2021 Revenue of $2.26B

Popular Chinese microblogging platform Weibo released its financial results for the fourth quarter and whole year of 2021 on Thursday. In Q4, Weibo’s revenue was $616 million, up 20% year-on-year, and its net revenue based on non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) was 196 million yuan ($31.02 million), down 8.1% year-on-year. In 2021, Weibo’s total revenue was $2.26 billion, up 33.7% over the previous year, and its net revenue based on non-GAAP was $719 million, up 25% over the previous year’s $575 million.

In terms of specific business sectors, Weibo’s revenue from advertising and marketing in 2021 was $1.98 billion, up 33% year-on-year, accounting for about 87.6% of the total revenue, of which revenue from Q4 2021 was $550 million, up 21% year-on-year, accounting for 89.3% of the total revenue.

According to the financial report, advertising and marketing revenue in 2021, when excluding income from Alibaba Group Holding Limited, was $1.84 billion, a year-on-year increase of 38%.

As for the growth of its advertising business, Weibo said that it was mainly driven by the solid growth of customer advertising expenditure in most key industries. It is reported that in Q4 2021, the social platform maintained considerable revenue growth in beauty care, food and beverage, 3C products, automobile and other industries, while luxury goods and shoes and clothing industries, which Weibo has focused on developing, also contributed higher revenue growth.

In addition, Weibo’s revenue from value-added services in 2021 was $280 million, up 36% year-on-year, accounting for about 12.4%, of which the revenue from Q4 was $65.6 million, up 9% year-on-year, accounting for about 10.7%.

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CEO of Weibo Wang Gaofei said that in terms of commercialization, the company’s revenue exceeded $2 billion in 2021, and its operating efficiency was further improved, fully reflecting the strong momentum and resilience of business recovery efforts following the pandemic. In 2022, the company will continue to improve its product functions, enrich its platform content ecology, devote itself to serving a wider user group, and provide customers with a more efficient and innovative marketing model.

By the end of 2021, the social platform had 573 million monthly active users, a net increase of about 52 million year-on-year, unchanged from Q3. The average number of daily active users was 249 million, a net increase of about 25 million year-on-year and a slight increase from the previous month.