The company’s unaudited consolidated results reflect a significant surge in revenues, operating profit, and user engagement metrics, underscoring its dominant position in the digital economy.

A robust start to 2024

In Q1 2024, Kuaishou reported revenues of RMB 29.4 billion, marking a 16.6% increase compared to the same period in 2023.

This growth was accompanied by a notable rise in gross profit, which reached RMB 16.1 billion, up from RMB 11.7 billion in Q1 2023, reflecting a gross profit margin of 54.8%.

The company’s operating profit soared to RMB 3.99 billion, reversing the operating loss of RMB 698 million from the previous year.

Strategic initiatives driving growth

Kuaishou’s strategic initiatives have been pivotal in driving its growth. The company’s innovative traffic recommendation mechanism, enhanced monetization strategies, and robust e-commerce operations have all contributed to its strong financial performance.

In Q1 2024, Kuaishou rolled out a new traffic recommendation mechanism, aligning user experience improvements with increased monetization efficiency.

This strategy has attracted higher buyer budgets and boosted the company’s e-commerce business, which grew by 28.2% year-over-year to RMB 288.1 billion in GMV.

Financial highlights

Kuaishou’s financial metrics paint a picture of robust growth and strategic success. The company achieved an adjusted net profit of RMB 4.39 billion, a staggering increase from RMB 42 million in Q1 2023.

The adjusted EBITDA also saw a significant rise, reaching RMB 5.98 billion, up from RMB 1.99 billion in the same period last year. These metrics highlight Kuaishou’s effective cost management and revenue generation strategies.

User engagement and platform growth

Kuaishou’s user engagement metrics have shown impressive growth, with average DAUs reaching 393.8 million, up from 374.3 million in Q1 2023.

Average MAUs also increased to 697.4 million, reflecting the company’s successful user acquisition and retention strategies.

The average daily time spent per DAU on the Kuaishou app was 129.5 minutes, further emphasizing the platform’s ability to engage users effectively.

Kuaishou’s adjusted net profit of RMB 4.39 billion and adjusted EBITDA of RMB 5.98 billion are indicators of strong financial health. The substantial increase in these metrics from the previous year highlights the company’s effective cost management and revenue generation capabilities. Additionally, the significant reduction in administrative expenses by 49.7% year-over-year is a positive sign of operational discipline.

The growth in Kuaishou’s overseas business, with revenues reaching RMB 991 million, up 193.2% year-over-year, and the narrowing of operating losses in these markets, indicates successful international expansion. The company’s localized strategies and investments in content generation and platform optimization are paying off, contributing to overall revenue growth and improved operating efficiency.

Tencent continues to dominate mobile app usage time though its total share dropped to 35.7% from 39.5% while ByteDance increased its share to 21% from 15.8%.

Check out top mobile apps in 2021.

Kuaishou (Kwai) Technology and Jingdong (JD) Retail Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement on 27 May 2020 that enables users to buy JD products on Kuaishou platform directly.

The two companies will cooperate in the supply chain capability building, brand marketing, and data capabilities building of the Kuaishou Store, and jointly create a new ecosystem of short video live streaming.

Sales from Alibaba live streaming platform grew by 150% for 3 consecutive years.

JD Retail provides superior products to Kuaishou Stores and Kuaishou anchors will select and sell the products. Users can buy JD.com products directly on Kuaishou Shop and enjoy the delivery and post-sales services provided by JD.

This partnership is happening soon during China’s 618 Shopping Festival and will kick off during JD’s 17th Anniversary Grand Promotion (“618”) and Kuaishou’s June 16th Shopping Festival. From June 16th to 18th, products from JD’s first-party business will be available for to a portion of Kuaishou’s live streaming KOLs.

At the same time, JD Retail and Kuaishou will collaborate to strengthen brand marketing capabilities. Kuaishou’s anchors will do live streaming and short video marketing, and JD will provide joint marketing capabilities and fulfillment services, to enhance the core competitiveness of both brands.

The two parties will also explore targeted marketing based on JD’s insights on customer shopping behavior and Kuaishou’s understanding of short video and e-commerce live streaming.

“The retail industry is facing the opportunities and challenges of more and more diversified consumer demand and consumption scenarios. JD Retail has China’s leading retail supply chain, and is trusted by hundreds of millions of customers because of its quality product offerings and services. It is committed to driving the transformation of the retail industry through opening up its own capabilities. Kuaishou is a short video social platform loved by hundreds of millions of users. The partnership between JD Retail and Kuaishou will provide Chinese consumers with a high-quality experience in richer shopping scenarios,

said Lei Xu, CEO of JD Retail.

Since the beginning of this year, short video live streaming in e-commerce has been developing rapidly. Check out Taobao Live’s Stunning Growth in 2020.

As a short video live broadcast platform with more than 300 million daily active users, Kuaishou is the earliest explorer in the e-commerce live streaming industry with leading advantages in the number of users and the creation of new scenarios.

As early as June 2019, Kuaishou announced that users can view JD products in the Kuaishou app and be redirected to the JD app to make a purchase.

The latest cooperation is an upgrade and will supplement and advance Kuaishou in terms of product offering, and is also in line with Kuaishou’s goal to expand its boundaries to brands and high-quality goods.

JD will gain in terms of being able to reach new users and push into new scenarios in the emerging e-commerce live streaming market.

Explore 9 Brands’ great results from WeChat Mini Program live streaming campaigns

In 2019, a total number of 250 million users published on Kwai’s platform with accumulated likes of over 350 billion. Its competitor Douyin or Tiktok DAU exceeded 400 million in early 2020.

Find out how Kuaishou grew its DAU by 40 million in 5 months here.

Kuaishou generated RMB 50 billion (around $7.1 billion) in revenue in 2019, with live-streaming revenue accounting for the largest share with RMB 30 billion revenue, according to Chinese media Jiemian.

Kuaishou’s advertising revenues in 2019 reached RMB 13 billion with 20% from SME advertisers according to Tencent News. And, its target for 2020 is RMB 40 billion.

The DAU for Chinese short video apps reached 574 million during this year’s extended Spring Festival (Jan 24 to Feb 2) according to research company QuestMobile.

As the exclusive interactive partner of the 2020 Spring Festival Gala aired on the Chinese New Year’s Eve, January 24, Kuaishou Technology announced that 63.9 billion user engagements have been made during the live broadcast, which is the highest amount in the history of the gala according to its official press release.

Kuaishou handed out five rounds of virtual “red envelopes,” totaling a record-breaking 1 billion yuan ($144 million). During the event, 2.21 million people snatched envelopes with extra amount ranging from 66.6 yuan to 2020 yuan.

Kuaishou platform also supports live streaming; its daily active live streaming users exceeded 100 million in December 2019.

There are now over 990,000 creators of educational videos on Kuaishou, more than doubled in 2019 compared to the previous year. The educational live streaming platform now has over 100 million daily audiences.

See a comparison of Tik Tok vs. Kwai

ByteDance-owned TikTok and UC Browser (Alibaba) top App Annie‘s most downloaded app list in 2010s, ranking the 7th and 8th respectively.

By all-time consumer spend between 2010 and 2019, three video apps from China top the list: Tencent Video, iQiyi, and short-video app Kwai (Kuaishou).

Tencent’s Honour of Kings and Netease’ Fantasy Westward Journey are among the top mobile game apps by total spend in the past decade.

Check out who dominates China mobile app stores in 2019, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, or ByteDance?

The four main contents of Kuaishou fashion live broadcast are skincare, beauty makeup, hairdressing, and manicure. They have the largest number of anchors and total comments, and the largest amount of virtual gifts received.

Live broadcast has become a main growth driver for many e-commerce businesses in 2019. Anchor Han Chenghao sells high-end personal care in Kuaishou live broadcast. He only has 500 thousand fans but is able to sell up to 10 million yuan products overnight.

Live broadcasting has extended to unexpected products areas.

Major enterprises also use Kuaishou live broadcast to generate sales. Sany Heavy Industry sold 31 road rollers in one hour, each of which was sold for more than 350,000 yuan. Xiaopeng Automobile gained 4 billion exposures and more than 600 new test drive orders in five days of live broadcast. One live broadcast of Xinjiang Agriculture received more than 200 purchase intentions.

Kuaishou’s daily live broadcasting users under the gaming category has exceeded 51 million. The number of online viewers exceeded 25 million on the first day of this year’s live broadcast of the final of the League of Heroes (S9), and the total number of participants reached 74 million.

Kuaishou has been connected to e-commerce platforms including Taobao, Jingdong, Youzan. And, it has launched a shopping cart and Kwai Shop. The scale of e-commerce business is gradually expanding. Being a top competitor of short-video leader TikTok, Kuaishou expands from entertainment to education.

The number of Kuaishou e-commerce authors has exceeded 1 million, with a daily reach of 100 million consumers and 10% increase month-over-month according to its official data announced at a Youzan conference. The monthly income of e-commerce authors with 100,000 + fans can reach 50,000 yuan.

Tencent is in the final stages of negotiations with Kuaishou for a $2 billion investment in its $3 billion pre-IPO round, which would give Kuaishou a valuation of around $28.6 billion according to LatePost’s WeChat Official Account.

Check out How Kuaishou grew its DAU by 40M in 5 months or mobile shopping users and top e-commerce apps in China in Q3 2019

On October 17th, Kuaishou (Kwai) Big Data Research Institute released the “2019 Kuaishou Education Ecosystem Report”, which systematically reviewed Kuaishou’s education ecosystem for the first time.

The report shows that Kwai’s platform has generated as many as 200 million educational short videos so far. The average number of daily views has exceeded 2.2 billion, and the average number of daily “likes” has exceeded 60 million.

The revenues of China’s short video market grew by over 7 times to 46.7 billion yuan (US$6.6 bn) in 2018. It’s expected to continue the fast growth and exceed 100 billion yuan (US$14.16 bn) in 2019. TikTok (Douyin) and Kwai (Kuaishou) are the two leading short video platforms in China.

Short video has become a critical driver for e-commerce in China.

It is worth mentioning that there are now over 990,000 creators of educational videos on Kuaishou, more than doubled compared to last year. The educational live streaming platform now has over 100 million daily audiences. They contribute a daily average total viewing time equivalent to about 734 years and leave an average of over 20 million comments daily.

This is indeed a surprising result for many people. In the field of education, there are few products that can built such a solid product infrastructure step-by-step, while covering such a large and geographically diverse population.

Moving in stealth mode, Kwai’s education ecosystem has become a major player impossible to overlook. Now, the entire online education industry is facing huge pressure and begin to embrace short videos.

There exist huge market demands in the four vertical fields of EQO (Essential-qualities-oriented) education, agriculture education, vocational education, and subject-oriented education.

The average daily views of short videos on EQO education has exceeded 1 billion, with over 3.6 million “likes”. The contents range from calligraphy, hand-painting, Chinese folk art, to life hack, dancing, and photography.

The average daily views of videos on vocational education have exceeded 900 million. The contents range from repair & maintenance, driving, to cooking and fashion design.

Learning is a common need of Kwai’s users. Their enthusiasm for learning is high no matter their genders nor ages:

• Users under the age of 18 are not only interested in contents related to their school subjects, but also in computer science, anime hand-painting and gymnastics;
• users aged 18-30 prefer photography; users from 30 to 45 years old love agricultural machinery, calligraphy and saxophone;
• users from 45 to 60 years old focus more on investing and planting flowers; users over 60 years old like tea, chess and folk art.

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Vlog has become the new theme of user growth competition on several video platforms in China. One of the new players who recently joined the arena is iQiyi.

iQiyi, whose main content is professional copyright videos such as movies, TV dramas and variety shows, has recently launched a Vlog application called “iQiyi Suike”, which is obviously intended to share a piece of vlog market with the leaders such as Kwai, TikTok, Bilibili, Weibo, etc.

Vlog can be regarded as a kind of “video log” with popular themes of travel, food, pets and so on. Its production is relatively simple, the creator uses the camera to record what he sees and thinks in his daily life, and then through later editing, with music, text or stickers, can produce a Vlog.

Usually, it’s a little longer than the 15-second short video on TikTok, and a little shorter than the professional copyright content on iQiyi. It’s a little more delicate than the food broadcasting on Kwai.

In order to encourage users to create Vlogs, the design of iQiyi Suike App is very simple, with only three interfaces: main feed, publishing, and personal homepage. There is no search function for vloggers or content, nor any categories of bloggers or content. Users can get content by pulling down feed pages and triggering updates.

Several video platforms have started promoting vlog since the second half of 2018. Bilibili’s vlog content upload has increased by 7.6 times in April 2019, compared with April 2018, according to 36Kr.

This month, Kwai began to test the long video, limiting the video length to more than 57 seconds, less than 10 minutes. A month ago, its competitor TikTok also started internally testing videos of up to 15 minutes long. In April, TikTok opened the limit for 15 seconds longer short videos, and the original Vlog with a duration of more than 30 seconds can participate in the “Vlog Billion Incubation Plan”.

Xigua, another video platform under the same company Bytedance as TikTok, also launched their campaigns to support vlogger this month. In comparison, Weibo’s vlogger growth mainly focuses on celebrities.

From Baidu search trend shown below, we can see a surge of interest in vlog since the second half of 2018:

However, Vlog’s current penetration rate is still very low. Nearly 60% of the users surveyed, conducted by Tencent’s Penguin Intelligence, have never heard of Vlog, and 70% of users claim to have never seen Vlog. Vlog users are currently mainly high-education female, concentrated in the first- and second-tier cities. The main platforms are Weibo and TikTok.

42% of Weibo Vlog users are post-95s (those born between 1995 and 2000) in Q1 2019, followed by post-90s (22%) and post-00s (20%), according to Eefung Software. The number of views on Weibo topic #VLOG# is 4.57 billion, and the number of users in related discussions is nearly five million.

Weibo Vloggers with over 1-million followers only account for 0.4% of the total; and, those with 10,000 or fewer followers account for 96%, according to Eefung data. The top topics covered by Weibo Vloggers are food, travel, celebrity, entertainment, and humor.

Marketing: Short Videos or Vlog?

Vlog contents, compared with seconds-length short videos on platforms like TikTok, are more difficult to create. Technical hindrance is not the real obstacle to its growth; video platforms will make it easier and more convenient for vloggers. However, high-quality vlogs take both delicate planning and good storytelling skills, which is much more challenging than creating short videos. It’s far behind short videos in terms of both quantity and quality.

Vlog is rising and trending, definitely worth marketers’ attention and experiments. The nature of vlogs is “log”, which can be easily boring, while the short videos focus on just eye-catching moments. So, it can’t be any serious threat to the popular short video content for reaching the mass audience but a very good complement to overall content mix.

To get you some sense what it could potentially do for marketing, take a look at the three videos below:

Vlog for Apple iPad Pro

In addition to feeling the atmosphere of the launch conference, experiencing the magnetic features of the new iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, they also incorporate many daily elements of New York’s food and lifestyle in vlog and present the experience content of the conference from the perspective of life.

Vlog for LV Exhibition

Louis Vuitton held a large exhibition and invited some top vloggers. The look and feel of the scene were presented in different Vlog styles. Among them, LV also provides vloggers with branded products such as clothing, shoes, handbags, and ornaments, which were also recorded in the vlogs.

Hyatt Presidential Suite

A couple on Weibo, boy Sid is Chinese, girl Kat is from the United States. In this vlog, they received an invitation from Grand Hyatt Xi’an to experience the 31,000-yuan presidential suite. With the arrangement of the hotel, Kat and Sid followed the timetable and introduced the hotel’s room profile, double room spa service, and an Italian restaurant.

The most important thing about Vlogger sharing life is to resonate with free expression to attract people in the same circle. Compared with traditional TVC or celebrity endorsement ads, Vlog gives the audience a smaller sense of distance and is more realistic, in addition to its much lower production cost.

How a popular vlog celebrity in China expanded from online to offline retail

TikTok signed a 7-billion yuan agreement with Taobao including 6 billion yuan ads and 1 billion yuan commission according to leaked news online. TikTok denied the accuracy of those numbers but the news got the attention of many in the e-commerce market.

As of 25 June 2019, the number of users who activated shopping cart functions has exceeded one million, 10 times more than last December.

During China’s mid-year shopping festival 618, active TikTok shopping cart user ratio exceeded 68%. The top 30 users referred over 400 million yuan worth of products sales.

TikTok e-commerce is originally based on short videos as the main carrier. TikTok influencers’ e-commerce sales capability is correlated to the number of fans, content categories, etc. But, live streaming is more about real-time sharing with sales techniques, with a relatively lower requirement on the number of fans.

Since the beginning of commercialization, the main way to monetize TikTok is advertising while Kwai relies on live broadcasting.

Top short video apps compared: Tik Tok vs. Kwai – Part 1 Platforms

Kwai recently hired executives from Tencent and Weibo to take up important positions. After setting a target of 300 million DAU (TikTok’s current DAU) by Chinese New Year 2020 and starting a battle mode, Kwai is no longer low-key and fully exerted its strength.

When viewing videos on Kwai app, the sharing button automatically becomes a WeChat Moments share icon, prompting users to share. Tencent opens this function only to Kwai in addition to its own short video platform Weishi.

7 Lessons for marketers on top short-video platforms: Tik Tok vs. Kwai