With Tencent in open talks to acquire a 10-20% stake in Universal Music Group, its Tencent Music’s earnings report is receiving additional scrutiny.
Late Monday, the Chinese streaming service posting record Q2 revenue of RMB5.90 billion ($859 million), an increase of 31.0% year-over-year. Net profit for the digital music platform was RMB927 million (US$135 million), showing a modest improvement of 2.5% from the same quarter in 2018.
“We are pleased with second-quarter results driven by the strength of both our online music and social entertainment businesses,” said Mr. Cussion Pang, Chief Executive Officer of Tencent Music. “The growth in our online music paying users accelerated during the quarter, with 2.6 million paying users added sequentially. ”
The company’s unaudited financial filings also provided some insight into the company’s subscription numbers, with reaching a record 31 million after adding 2.6 million net additional users for the quarter. The new users count is up markedly from the first quarter, when the company reported adding 23.3 million users and the quarter the largest expansion of the company’s paid subscription base since the first quarter of 2018.
Slow User Growth
However, the company revealed that it’s monthly active users hit 652 million for the quarter, which was only a slight improvement of 1.2% year-over-year.
During the second quarter, Tencent released an updated version of its QQ Music app that proved popular with users and included an updated visual and interactive experience and a newly-added personalization tab.
Tencent also debuted short-form music videos added on their Kugou music streaming page.