By SHE Xiaochen
Bilibili, China’s premier online entertainment site posted annual revenue of 21.9 billion yuan (US$3.2 billion) in 2022, up 13 percent. But profit remains a distant pipe-dream and losses are mounting, this year hitting 7.5 billion yuan, 700 million more than the year before.
CHEN Rui, founder and CEO of Bilibili, said at the end of Q3 last year that the priority of the company was to reduce losses, and he would peronally be in charge of that. The net loss in Q4 narrowed 29 percent year-on-year to 1.5 billion yuan.
One of Bilibili’s chosen method of staunching bleeding was to lay off thousands of workers. The company spent 340 million yuan last year on severance pay and more than 250 million yuan of that was spent in Q4.
Despite the mass layoff, Bilibili’s daily active users (DAU) in Q4 climbed 29 percent year-on-year to 93 million. Monthly active content creators also grew 25 percent. One third of them earned something from posting videos or live streaming sessions, Bilibili said it spent 9.1 billion yuan last year on rewarding content creators.
Bilibili has tried to produce both dramas and animations to mixed reviews. The series of short animations of Yao-Chinese Folktales received widely positive feedback from fans of many animation genres. Another in-house animation The Three-Body Problem hit was not so well-received, but it too brought considerable cash flow into the company via advertising.
However, all this love from users hasn’t manifested itself as profit. Bilibili’s revenue in Q4 was only up by 6 percent compared with a year ago. Gaming was completely uninspiring in Q4 without a single new game launched. The company plans to release two new games of its own this year and six games as an agent.
While gaming business didn’t perform, Bilibili is dabbling in live streaming. Last year, income from live streaming was up 30 percent.
