Leading online-to-offline Chinese real estate services provider Leju Holdings Limited has announced its fourth quarter financial results ended December 31, 2016 with total revenues decreasing by 39% year-on-year to $104.9 million.
Fourth Quarter 2016 Financial Highlights
- Total revenues decreased by 39% year-on-year to $104.9 million
- Revenues from e-commerce services decreased by 45% year-on-year to $70.9 million
- Revenues from online advertising services decreased by 24% year-on-year to $28.2 million
- Revenues from listing services decreased by 11% year-on-year to $5.8 million
“We faced an extremely challenging operating environment during the fourth quarter,” said Geoffrey He, Leju’s Chief Executive Officer. “The tightening measures put in place by various local governments at the beginning of October were strictly enforced throughout the fourth quarter and led to sharply reduced transaction volume and demand for marketing activities from developers across all major cities, which had a significant and negative impact on our revenues.”
“To adapt to the changing market, we accelerated our product innovation, expanded customer service, and enhanced our efforts to consolidate our market leadership position,” Mr. He said.
At the end of 2016 the Beijing-based company announced an expanded partnership with firms Tencent, Weibo and Focus Media. This partnership was to enable Leju to launch a series of new cross-platform marketing products for the real estate and home furnishing industries, combining real estate purchase and social network user data to improve customer targeting, user experience and marketing effectiveness.
Mr He said of the expanded partnerships:
“We improved and integrated our membership, e-commerce and marketing platforms to provide more streamlined services for homebuyers. During 2016, we also invested in raising Leju’s brand awareness and worked with multiple partners to support our efforts in mobile marketing. Despite the current policy headwinds the industry is facing, we remain confident about the long term supply and demand fundamentals of the industry and believe that Leju will be able to capitalize on our investments today to generate growth once the market normalizes.”
