JOYY Q1 Earnings: AI Accelerates Three Core Businesses, Redefining the Growth Landscape

On May 26 Beijing time, JOYY released its fastest year-over-year revenue growth in recent years. Starting this quarter, due to changes in its business model, JOYY has adjusted its financial reporting structure and adopted a new way of presenting its performance.Over the past year, beyond its well-known live streaming segment, JOYY’s non-live-streaming businesses have gradually emerged. In its latest earnings report, a new strategic logic—powered by AI integration—has begun to take shape.

Summary

1. In Q1, JOYY reported total revenue of approximately USD 560 million, up 12.4% year-over-year,marking the first time the company disclosed results across three business segments: Social Entertainment, BIGO Ads, and SHOPLINE.. The foundational Social Entertainment segment returned to year-over-year growth, while BIGO Ads and SHOPLINE—representing the company’s second growth curve—both posted strong increases. Together, these three segments form a synergistic strategic growth flywheel, laying the groundwork for a diversified global ecosystem.

2. AI is the connective tissue binding these three businesses together. Serving as the foundational layer of the entire ecosystem, AI enhances content recommendation, advertising efficiency, and merchant operations. Through cross-business synergy, it powers a self-reinforcing flywheel. This collaboration goes beyond conceptual rhetoric; against a backdrop of continuous technological advancement, AI will act as a catalyst, enabling richer value exchange among social data, ad algorithms, and e-commerce.

3. Profitability quality and shareholder returns strengthened in tandem.Both non-GAAP operating profit and EBITDA grew faster than revenue. As of the end of March, JOYY held net cash of USD 3.18 billion—roughly equivalent to its market capitalization.Leveraging this strong financial position, on the day of its earnings release, JOYY significantly increased its three-year shareholder return program from USD 900 million to USD 1.5 billion—raising its annual dividend from USD 200 million to USD 300 million and doubling its annual share repurchase authorization from USD 100 million to USD 200 million.

Breaking down JOYY’s total revenue reveals a significant structural shift: the live-streaming-dominated Social Entertainment segment has stabilized, while non-live-streaming businesses—primarily advertising and e-commerce—generated combined revenue of USD 175 million, surging 42.6% year-over-year. Their share of total revenue rose from 24.9% to 31.6% within a year. In terms of incremental contribution, this non-live-streaming segment has become the primary driver of the group’s new revenue growth.

Social entertainment, the cornerstone of JOYY's business, generated USD 400 million in revenue in Q1, up 3.2% year-over-year. Live streaming—the primary driver—contributed USD 380 million, a 2.4% year-over-year increase, which the earnings report described as a critical inflection point signaling the core business’s recovery. Quality of growth also held strong: core live-streaming paying users rose to 1.54 million, up 5.9% year-over-year, while global social monthly active users reached 276.3 million, growing 6.1% year-over-year.

The key to renewed growth lies in how AI is revitalizing live streaming—a seemingly 'traditional' business. Bigo Live has implemented tiered incentives based on streamer types, leading to sequential increases in both the number of broadcasters going live and average broadcasting hours per user. Core-region rollout of AI-powered tools for streamers has been fully completed. AI-generated interactive gifts now account for a significantly higher share, enabling rapid creation of localized designs aligned with trending topics and holidays—users are voting with their wallets. By April this year, AI-generated interactive gifts already made up 34% of total gift consumption on Bigo Live. Coupled with localized operations—including the Seoul annual gala, regional events in Indonesia and the Philippines, North American content contests, and Ramadan programming—daily active users and retention rates have been consistently lifted, continuously feeding traffic to advertising and e-commerce businesses.

Traffic generated from social entertainment must be monetized through a second growth curve—and advertising is taking the lead. JOYY’s decision to separately disclose BIGO Ads and SHOPLINE in this earnings release is itself a signal: these two segments have evolved from early-stage incubation projects into independent growth engines, marking a genuine shift in the company’s business structure.

BIGO Ads, an AI-driven programmatic advertising platform, reported revenue of USD 124.8 million, up 55.6% year-over-year—significantly outpacing the broader global mobile ad market. The fastest-growing component was BIGO Audience Network, which serves third-party traffic, with revenue surging 78.8% year-over-year as more external apps choose to monetize their ad inventory through it.

At its core, advertising is about delivering the right ad to the right person and charging advertisers a fair price for that match. BIGO Ads is accelerating because both supply and demand sides are deepening: on the supply side, SDK ad requests rose 109% year-over-year, complemented by JOYY’s own hundreds of millions of monthly active users, giving it a traffic base that smaller platforms lack; on the demand side, advertiser categories are expanding rapidly, with both web and in-app ad budgets nearly doubling year-over-year.

With stronger supply and demand, the platform’s underlying models become increasingly effective: full-funnel data feedback from advertisers enables ever-more-precise user profiling and bidding optimization, which in turn attracts more budget, generating new data to further refine the models. During this earnings call, management reaffirmed a three-year target, setting an ambitious revenue goal specifically for the third-party BIGO Audience Network—one worth watching closely.

Among the businesses disclosed this quarter, SHOPLINE made its debut as a standalone segment. Let’s emphasize this: don’t mistake it for yet another SaaS tool for building online stores—that’s not what JOYY is aiming for at all. Instead, it’s an AI-powered, open, and interconnected omnichannel retail operating system. Merchants can run their entire journey—from store setup, customer acquisition, payments, fulfillment, to data asset management—on this platform. This is fundamentally different from generic website builders: SHOPLINE offers merchants not just a simple webpage template, but true operational autonomy and full control over their end-to-end data.

This quarter, SHOPLINE generated USD 30.5 million in revenue, up 16.1% year-over-year, with gross margin improving to 51.5%. Revenue from cross-border merchants grew even faster—at over 60% year-over-year. Its monetization model features highly sticky subscriptions as the foundation: once merchants deploy their full operations on the platform, they typically establish stable, long-term partnerships. On top of subscriptions, value-added services like payments and marketing allow SHOPLINE to capture a share of the upside as merchants’ transaction volumes scale—this GMV-linked revenue is where the real momentum lies. SHOPLINE Payments, the company’s proprietary payment solution, obtained a Singapore payment license in December last year, completing the closed-loop transaction ecosystem.

Globally, very few providers can offer such an 'operating-system-level' end-to-end closed-loop service. This business is now transitioning from its incubation phase into scale-up mode: during the earnings call, management guided that SHOPLINE’s revenue growth will accelerate to over 25% in Q2 and reiterated an aggressive long-term target for this segment by 2028.

On the surface, these three businesses appear to be growing independently—but digging deeper reveals a common foundation: AI-driven infrastructure. It’s not merely a feature added to individual products; rather, it underpins the entire ecosystem. Consider this reinforcing loop: vast behavioral data accumulated from social entertainment serves as high-quality training data for ad algorithms—this is one key reason behind BIGO Ads’ strong growth. In turn, the audience insights and targeting efficiency honed in advertising can be fed back to enhance performance across diverse scenarios, including social entertainment.

Once this flywheel starts spinning, it accelerates itself: the richer the data, the more accurate the models become, and the smoother each business segment operates. Yet the market continues to value JOYY as if it were merely a 'single live-streaming company.' However, this earnings report reveals a different reality—driven by AI, all three business segments are growing across the board, and JOYY’s net cash on hand is now roughly equal to the company’s entire market capitalization. When the old label diverges this sharply from the new facts, JOYY’s valuation framework will inevitably undergo a reassessment. $JOYY Inc (JOYY.US)$

Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for learning and communication purposes and does not constitute investment advice.

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