Mango Excellent Media Reports Second Consecutive Year of Declining Performance, Net Profit Nearly Halved

Deep News04-30 17:32

Mango Excellent Media Co.,Ltd. recently released its financial results for the full year 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. For the full year 2025, the company reported revenue of 13.813 billion yuan, a decrease of 1.89% year-over-year. Net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was 1.227 billion yuan, down 10.06% compared to the previous year. In the first quarter of 2026, revenue was 3.084 billion yuan, representing a 6.35% increase year-over-year. However, net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company plummeted by 47.37% to 199 million yuan.

Since its restructuring and listing in 2018, Mango Excellent Media had been consistently profitable in the long-form video industry for several years, leveraging its unique model of "state-owned background coupled with market-oriented operations," and was hailed as the "only profitable player in the long-form video sector." However, over the past two years, this light has been dimming. Wind data shows that both revenue and net profit for Mango Excellent Media have declined for two consecutive years. The year 2025 already showed clear signs of weakness. Entering 2026, while there are indications of recovery on the revenue side, profits have experienced a cliff-like drop of nearly 50%.

The revenue structure shows divergence: membership revenue growth is under pressure, while content e-commerce revenue declined by 13.68%. In 2025, Mango TV's internet video business generated revenue of 10.126 billion yuan, a slight decrease of 0.52% year-over-year. The new media interactive entertainment content production and operation business reported revenue of 1.399 billion yuan, an increase of 10.85%. Content e-commerce business revenue was 2.240 billion yuan, down 13.86% compared to the previous year. The internet video business remains the dominant contributor, accounting for 73.31% of the full-year revenue, but growth of this core engine has nearly stalled.

The membership business, considered the ballast for Mango Excellent Media, faced structural pressures in 2025. By the end of the year, the number of valid Mango TV members reached 75.6 million, and mobile MAU reached 268 million, a 4.88% increase year-over-year. However, despite the growth in member numbers, full-year membership revenue was only 4.646 billion yuan, indicating that "growth is under pressure, mainly affected by some programs failing to meet membership monetization expectations." According to a Huatai Securities research report, membership revenue decreased by approximately 9.8% year-over-year. This suggests that Mango TV is caught in an awkward situation of "increasing users without increasing revenue"—even as user numbers hit a record high, the efficiency of converting them into revenue is declining. The traditional model of relying on hit content to drive paid conversions has seemingly hit a ceiling.

The advertising business was the only segment to report positive growth in 2025. Full-year advertising revenue reached 3.831 billion yuan, an 11% increase year-over-year, with the company stating it "maintained the highest number of variety show clients among long-form video platforms, with per-client contribution leading the industry." However, the quality of this recovery warrants scrutiny. In the first half of 2025, advertising revenue was still negative year-over-year, only turning positive quarter-over-quarter in Q2. The full-year growth was largely driven by the concentrated release of variety show advertising effects in the second half of the year. As advertising premiums for established variety show IPs approach saturation, the sustainability of relying solely on top-tier variety shows to support the advertising business remains a question—optimistic in the short term but uncertain in the long run.

Content e-commerce was the segment with the deepest decline among the three main business lines, with revenue falling sharply by 13.86% year-over-year. This decrease was primarily due to the strategic scaling back of the traditional TV shopping business "Happy Go." Although Xiaomang E-commerce achieved annual profitability for the first time in 2025 with a GMV of 18.6 billion yuan, the wind-down of the traditional e-commerce business continues to impact the overall revenue structure. While actively "cutting off an arm" to optimize the business structure is a choice for improving quality and efficiency, it also signifies a lack of new growth drivers. Content e-commerce is unlikely to fill the gap left by the slowing growth of the internet video business in the short term, leaving Mango Excellent Media facing an awkward transition period with no clear new growth narrative.

High content investment costs with low conversion rates are eroding profits, and the gross margin has declined for five consecutive years. In Q1, profits came under further pressure, with net profit down 47.37% year-over-year. If the revenue side is merely experiencing "weak growth," the profit side is undergoing a continuous and accelerating decline. For the full year 2025, net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company fell by 10.06% year-over-year, while net profit after extraordinary items attributable to shareholders of the parent company dropped significantly by 29.93%, far exceeding the decline in revenue, with the rate of decline widening quarter by quarter. The situation became even more severe in the first quarter of 2026: while revenue grew by 6.35% year-over-year, net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company plunged by 47.37%, and net profit after extraordinary items fell by 38.53%. The core issue behind the profit collapse lies in the continuous rise in content costs and R&D investment, which the revenue side has failed to absorb simultaneously.

For the full year 2025, the company's total costs did not decrease alongside the drop in revenue. While revenue declined by 1.89% year-over-year, operating costs increased by 6.32%. Within this, new media platform operating costs rose by 12.9% year-over-year, and new media interactive entertainment content production costs increased by 17.56% year-over-year. This also put pressure on the company's gross margin. The full-year gross margin decreased by 5.9 percentage points year-over-year to 23.1%. The rigid increase in costs stems from the "strategic investments" Mango Excellent Media is making to consolidate its content moat.

The critical question, however, is how long the core narrative of "content is king" can be sustained when the return on investment for high-quality content has shifted from being highly leveraged to one of "high cost and low conversion." Compared to competitors like iQiyi and Tencent Video, Mango's exclusive content advantage still exists, but the growth rate of users' willingness to pay is far from keeping pace with the inflation rate of content production costs. At a time when the long-form video industry is collectively focusing on cost reduction and efficiency improvement, Mango Excellent Media finds itself trapped in a cost dilemma: stagnation leads to decline, but advancement brings even greater difficulties.

Whether it's the membership business's "volume growth without price growth," the advertising business's "recovery yet to be fully verified," or the content e-commerce segment's "strategic retreat for survival," they all point to the same underlying issue: Mango Excellent Media's growth narrative is facing structural challenges.

The market is not short of short-term factors to explain this earnings report—quarterly fluctuations due to content scheduling, the gestation period for strategic investments, or the temporary pains of business restructuring. Analyst reports generally maintain a "Buy" rating, anticipating that net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company will recover to over 1.8 billion yuan between 2026 and 2027. However, as "increasing users without increasing revenue" and "rising revenue alongside halved profits" become the norm, whether these optimistic expectations can be realized ultimately depends on Mango Excellent Media's ability to genuinely resolve the ever-widening gap between content investment and commercial returns.

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