H World Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Huaju Group Limited Q2 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in 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 like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Jason. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Karina. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to Huazhou Group's 2021 Second Quarter and Interim Earnings Conference Call. Joining us today is our founder and CEO, Mr. Jiqi, our president, Mr. Jinghui, our chief digital officer, Ms. Liu Xingxing, our CFO, Ms. Chen Hui, our Deputy CFO, Ms. Ye Fei, and Mr. Li Dong. 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 Security Litigation 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 uncertainties are outlined in our public filings with the SEC. Guadu Group does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required by 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 Hua Chu Group's website at ir.huatu.com. With that, now I will turn the call over to Mr. Ji Qi. Mr. Ji, please.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I would like to give you an overview of our business. In the second quarter, our China real power recovered to 102% over the same period of 2019. supported by strong leisure traveling demand in May, but offset by a relative weak river path recovery in June due to COVID-19 resurgence in Guangdong province and traffic control in Beijing. However, unfortunately, the Delta variant of COVID-19 was again detected in Nanjing since later July. With further With the fever spreading into many other provinces and cities, the Delta variant promoted the Chinese government post another round of strict traveling restrictions, which seriously affected our performance in August. Our European business saw some positive trends, with the real-power recovery into 50 to 60 percent of the 2019 level during the summer holiday. It's mainly due to the continued progress of vaccination and the restrictions. However, we remain cautious on the future recovery. Other European governments, especially the German government, are still carefully monitoring the situation regarding the Delta variant and a potential impact for it. Looking ahead, our certainties brought by the pandemic may exist for a longer than expected time, and we expect to be well prepared to overcome any business turbulence in the near term. Nevertheless, in the long term, we have high confidence in China's future economic growth, and I think the upward trend of the China lodging industry remains intact. Therefore, we will be implementing our strategies, such as further penetration of low-tier cities, building up of upper-middle-scale and up-scale segments, organize regional upgrades and talent acquisition, as well as concentrating on high-quality hotel expansion to support our sustainable growth. With that, I will turn the call to Jinghui to update our recent business developments. Thank you.