VOBILE GROUP (03738): Q3 revenue up 32% year-on-year; AI short drama monitoring doubles quarter-on-quarter; AI revenue contributes at scale

On November 6, VOBILE GROUP (03738) disclosed its unaudited operating data for the three months ended September 30, 2026. The announcement shows that during the reporting period, the company's total revenue grew approximately 32% year-on-year, revenue from mainland China grew approximately 31% year-on-year, revenue from the United States and other regions grew approximately 32%, and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) grew approximately 29% year-on-year. Combined with information from the investor communication meeting held the same day, the company's platform computing power service revenue from DreamMaker and other platforms exceeded HK$140 million in the first three quarters, forming a revenue contribution for the first time this year, marking that VOBILE GROUP's AI business has achieved scale contribution and become an important incremental growth engine for the group. Quarterly revenue growth hit a new high in recent years: core base solid, subscription resilience continues to show VOBILE GROUP's Q3 performance recorded the highest single-quarter year-on-year growth rate in recent years, broadly in line with the positive expectations anchored in prior market communications. At the interim report stage, the company had projected overall growth of approximately 35% in the second half; the Q3 operating data reflects strong target execution and delivery capability. At the communication meeting, the company further stated that, considering last year's fourth-quarter revenue base, if Q4 this year maintains a revenue scale similar to Q3, single-quarter year-on-year growth is expected to reach 40%. From the perspective of growth quality and revenue structure, MRR grew approximately 29% year-on-year. MRR maintained growth of nearly 30% on the basis of a high customer retention rate, and the two corroborate each other, indicating that the company's recurring revenue has high visibility, service demand from existing major customers is still expanding, and customer value and business scale are rising in tandem. The 99% customer retention rate reflects strong stickiness in the core business, and revenue growth has strong endogenous momentum. With the rapid growth of AI content, demand for copyright identification, monitoring and management continues to increase, and the company's existing customer service scope is expected to further expand, thereby providing new demand support for subscription and copyright services. From the perspective of regional and business structure, Q3 revenue growth showed characteristics of multi-region and multi-business collaborative drivers. Mainland China revenue grew 31%, and the United States and other regions grew 32%, with a relatively balanced regional distribution; core subscription, copyright protection and value-added monetization businesses together constitute a solid growth base. Overall, the company's Q3 revenue growth momentum is ample, and the foundational role of core subscription and copyright services has become further pronounced. Deepening of AI short drama scenarios: monitoring coverage doubled quarter-on-quarter, rights confirmation and monetization positioned at key links From the perspective of short drama copyright scenarios, industry demand is replicating from single-point cooperation to multi-platform, multi-scenario applications. As AI short dramas become a market focus, related content supply is growing rapidly, and demand for copyright confirmation, monitoring and protection continues to be released. In September 2026, Hongguo Short Drama reached 430 million monthly active users, with a penetration rate of approximately 30%, up 81% year-on-year; Lpaopao reached 156 million monthly active users, with weekly active users in the first week of October approaching 90 million, up 44% from the first week of September. Hongguo launched 51,800 AI short dramas in September, approximately 8 times the same period last year. The number of short dramas covered by VOBILE GROUP's monitoring in the third quarter increased 106% quarter-on-quarter, doubling within the quarter. The company has served Hongguo for more than a year and, as its exclusive copyright service provider, has replicated the API model to major domestic and overseas short drama platforms, including overseas platforms such as ReelShort and StardustTV; overall, the company has established a leading service scale in the field of AI short drama copyright protection, and short drama copyright services have also formed a service model that can be replicated across different platforms. In response to diverse infringement behaviors in the dissemination of short dramas, such as unauthorized re-uploading, segmenting, piracy and renamed playback, Vobile continues to upgrade copyright monitoring and element-level identification capabilities, and provides services including full-network scanning, work rights confirmation, evidence organization and takedown of infringing content. For example, "Lin Xia's Against the Wind Entry" was subject to extensive unauthorized re-uploading overseas, with the relevant infringing channel having up to 2.9 million subscribers; for "Liaozhai: The Taoist of Laoshan," where self-initiated appeals remained unresolved for nearly a month, after adopting Vobile's services, the infringing content was taken down within 24 hours; for "Guixu," issues such as renamed dissemination and paid piracy were discovered, and after adopting the services, takedown of infringing works was initiated in approximately 12 hours. These cases reflect Vobile's monitoring, identification and rapid handling capabilities in addressing diverse infringement behaviors in short dramas. The core value of deepening short drama copyright scenarios lies in the improvement of demand rigidity and revenue visibility. As platforms such as Hongguo, Lpaopao, Kuaishou and Youku increase investment in micro short dramas, exclusive content protection is changing from an optional service to a standard feature of platform competition, and copyright protection spending has strong sustainability. VOBILE GROUP embeds itself into platform content management processes through the API model, and service scale grows with API call volume corresponding to short drama copyright protection demand, which is conducive to forming high customer stickiness and predictable recurring revenue. More importantly, short drama copyright services are not only about content monitoring and takedown, but also about positioning at the key links of rights confirmation, licensing and monetization in the early stage of AI content commercialization, which is expected to enhance the company's bargaining power and scenario depth in the copyright industry chain over the medium and long term. Overall, the rapid growth of AI short drama content supply, the doubling of monitoring coverage quarter-on-quarter and the replication of API services to more platforms are driving short drama copyright services to become an important incremental growth driver for the company's business. New engine gaining traction: AI assets continue to expand, platform computing power service revenue contributes at scale On the basis of a solid core business and ample revenue growth momentum, the incremental highlights of VOBILE GROUP's Q3 operating data are further concentrated in AI assets and platform computing power services. During the period, the number of active assets reached 6.33 million, up 9.8% quarter-on-quarter; among them, AI-related assets reached 1.64 million, with their share rising to 26%, significantly higher than 9.1% in the same period last year. Platform computing power services, as a new business that formed a revenue contribution for the first time this year, had revenue exceeding HK$140 million in the first three quarters, mainly from the overseas DreamMaker platform; the domestic SeeBay platform launched in mid-September and, in less than two months, registered more than 130,000 creators, with more than 90,000 works on the platform and more than 300 signed super creators. The company also noted that current platform computing power services still mainly rely on third-party channel computing power, and self-owned computing power has not yet come online. The above data indicate that AI assets and platform computing power services have begun to form scale contributions and become new drivers of the company's business growth. First, the expansion and upgrading of AI assets are opening a second growth curve for copyright services. The share of AI-related assets rose from 9.1% in the same period last year to 26%, meaning that the content assets the company can manage and monetize are accelerating their expansion from traditional film and television copyrights to AI-derived content. The rapid growth of new content forms such as AI short dramas and AI-generated songs continues to drive increased demand for copyright identification, monitoring, rights confirmation and management. In music copyright, the company's in-library fingerprint assets serving label clients such as Warner and Sony have approached 160 million; the Search retrieval service added dozens of customers in the third quarter, showing that AI-generated content is being converted into new copyright identification demand. At the same time, the upgrade of element-level rights confirmation capabilities enables the company to address new infringement scenarios extending from clip re-uploading to theft of key IP elements. The company has also cooperated with Ant Digital Technologies to jointly build a copyright large model and participated in the drafting of relevant industry standards, further improving the rights confirmation technology and standards system for AI content. From this perspective, the increase in the share of AI-related assets not only reflects asset scale expansion, but also reflects that the company's rights confirmation capabilities are extending to more AI content scenarios, providing support for related business growth. Second, platform computing power service revenue exceeded HK$140 million in the first three quarters, preliminarily verifying the company's ability to generate scaled revenue contribution from its new AI business. This business has achieved a leap from zero to scaled revenue and formed a revenue contribution mainly sourced from the overseas DreamMaker platform; SeeBay completed the cold start of creators in a short period, indicating that the rights confirmation capabilities accumulated by the company over more than 20 years have differentiated appeal for AI creators, and the rights confirmation function is expected to become an important lever for the platform's promotion in Southeast Asia and the United States. As self-owned computing power is gradually put into operation later, the revenue scale of platform computing power services will accelerate growth. At present, platform computing power services still mainly rely on third-party computing power, and the deployment progress of self-owned computing power will become key to subsequent improvements in revenue scale and profitability. Against this backdrop, the Brunei computing power project constitutes important infrastructure for the company to complete the closed loop of its AI business. In early September, the company signed a cooperation agreement with Brunei to secure data center land and power resources, planning to light up the first 1 MW of computing power by the end of 2026, and to deploy 25 MW in 2027 and 25 MW in 2028, totaling 50 MW over the two years, corresponding to two 10,000-card clusters. Brunei computing power will provide private deployment and API invocation capabilities for application layers such as DreamMaker, Vobile Max and SeeBay, driving the company to form a "computing power-model-application" closed loop and enhancing its ability to provide AI content generation and copyright compliance management services for Hollywood film and television production companies and professional creators. The first 1 MW of computing power is mainly used to validate the complete process of equipment supply, Brunei deployment, token output and practical application, and to provide a template for subsequent scaled construction and project financing. Subsequent larger-scale capital expenditure is intended to be advanced mainly through project financing by the Brunei joint venture. The company stated that it has received cooperation intentions from Brunei's sovereign fund, local banks and computing power construction investors. As the project is gradually implemented, self-owned computing power is expected to provide underlying support for platform computing power services and drive related businesses to further expand revenue scale and improve gross margins. Overall, VOBILE GROUP's Q3 operating data not only delivered on growth expectations, but also demonstrated a clear path of advancement: the core subscription and copyright service base is solid, and the new engine has completed a key leap from investment layout to revenue validation. The deepening of short drama copyright scenarios and the financing preparations for Brunei computing power, meanwhile, consolidate medium- and long-term support for the dual-wheel drive of "rights confirmation and monetization + AI computing power" from the two dimensions of scenario depth and infrastructure. As the AI content ecosystem continues to expand, platform computing power services gradually scale up and the Brunei project advances as planned, Vobile is expected to open new growth space under the dual-wheel drive, and its medium- and long-term value release is worth anticipating.