H World Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Huazu Group Limited T1 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Jason Chen. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Lynden. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to Huazhou Group's 2021 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today is our founder and CEO, Mr. Jiqi, our president, Mr. Jinghui, our chief digital officer, Ms. Liu Xingxin, our CFO, Ms. Cheng Hui, our Deputy CFO, Mr. Li Dong, and Ms. Yifei. Following their prepared remarks, management will be available to answer your questions. Before we continue, please note that the discussion today will include forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of the United States Private Decree Replication Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, our results may be materially different from the views expressed today. A number of potential risks and urgencies are outlined in our public filings with the SEC. Huazhou Group does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required applicable laws. On the call today, we will also mention adjusted financial measures during the discussion of our performance. Reconciliation of those measures to comparable gap information can be found in our earnings release that was distributed yesterday. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. The webcast of this conference call as well as supplementary slide presentation is available on Huazhou Group's website at ir.huazhou.com. With that, now I will turn the call over to Mr. Ji, please.

Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As you all know, at the beginning of this year, the resurgence of COVID-19 in several cities posed a challenge to the lodging industry and later led to the state local guidance by the government before Chinese New Year holiday. After this small January and February, we are very pleased to see a strong recovery in March especially after the National People's Congress meeting in Beijing. Huazhou's real power recovered to 95% of 2019 level in March, compared with only 56% in February, and the good news continues in April and May. During Labor Day holiday, our real power recorded 25% growth compared with the same period of 2019. In terms of the macroeconomy, despite the impact of COVID-19 resurgence, we saw China's economic remain resilient with GDP in the first quarter, achieving 19.3% growth compared with 2020, and 10.3% growth compared with 2019. As the vaccination process is taking place smoothly in China, we are confident that China's economy will further recover from the pandemic and drive the growth of business travel. Meantime, we also observed more diversified demand for the travel experience especially regarding the leisure travel and upscale hotels. We are exploring different opportunities, of which some details will be discussed by Jinghui later. With that, I will turn the call to Jinghui to update our recent business development. Thank you.