Tencent Music Entertainment released its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year of 2019. Tencent Music reversed its quarterly loss of 875 million yuan from Q4 2018 to a profit of 1.04 billion yuan ($149 million). The company said that for the quarter ending December 31, it had total revenue of 7.29 billion yuan ($1.05 billion), up 35.1% on-year.
Within that quarterly revenue total, music subscription revenue increased 60.1% from the year-ago period to 1.11 billion yuan ($160 million). All online music services generated 2.14 billion yuan ($307 million) for the company, an increase of 40.7%.
For the full fiscal year, Tencent Music had a net profit of nearly 3.98 billion yuan ($571 million), up from 1.83 billion yuan in 2018. Annual revenue rose 34% to 25.43 billion yuan ($3.65 billion). Online music service revenue increased 29.2% to 7.15 billion ($1.03 billion) and music subscription revenue reached 3.56 billion ($512 million).
Executives had glowing words in the press release, but one of the more notable statements came from CEO Cussion Pang. “Our strategic transition to pay-for-streaming service has started to pay off, contributing to paying ratio expansion for online music services to 6.2% in the fourth quarter of 2019, up significantly from 4.2% for the same quarter of 2018,” he said. “As a further testament to the quality of our online music paying user growth, we recorded a 4.5% quarter-over-quarter ARPPU expansion, in addition to continuously improved user retention.”