H World Group Limited

Hello, everyone. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Y2 Group's Q3 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all plans are in the 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 further assistance, please press 0. I would now like to hand the call over to your first speaker today, Mr. Jason Chen from the company. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to Baidu Group's 2021 Third Quarter Earnings Conference. Joining us today is our founder and chairman, Mr. Jiqi, our CEO, Mr. Jinghui, our president, Ms. Liu Xingxing, our CFO, Ms. Cheng Hui, and our Deputy CFO, Ms. Ye Fei. 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 Securities 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. Huazhou Group does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required under 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 Qi. Mr. Ji, please.

Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This is an old saying in Chinese, which means a heavy shower rarely lasts for a day. I was optimistic at the beginning last year. And though the pandemic is just a heavy shower, not a light one. However, I didn't expect that it's more like the yellow plant seasons in Shanghai, told us back and forth. The persistent COVID-19 variation and recurrence from last year had brought serious impacts and uncertainties to the lodging industry. and also seriously affected consumers' traveling activities. It also had brought varying degrees of disruption to our hotel construction and opening progress from time to time. Undeniably, the longer-than-expected existence of COVID-19 had weakened franchisees' confidence and a willingness to invest in the lodging market. In the past few years, concerning the increasing influence of external online traffic, we have been consistently implementing a large-scale expansion in order to be more independent. However, recently we had witnessed the complexity and the challenges of global macroeconomy and international politics, worsened by COVID-19. At the same time, Chinese government has been continuously promoting the supply-side structural reform and optimization from quantity to quality, can change with such backdrop We reviewed our strategy and decided to adjust our growth from previously mega-scale growth to lean. Going forward, it means in addition to the absolute size of our hotel network, we will continuously provide better product and refined service to improve customers' experience. Our hotel products represent a truly craftsman spirit. It can be more durable, environmentally friendly, and bring sustainable benefits to our franchisees. Meantime, we will further utilize our core competencies, such as loyalty programs, technology, and supply chain capabilities to support our franchisees to overcome their recent difficulties. manage hotels more easily and achieve better profitability in the long run. The link growth strategy will be carried out by our new management team, CEO Mr. Junhui and President Ms. Liu Xingxing. Both of them have been with Huazhou for a long time and made tremendous contribution to the company. I would like to thank them for their strong commitment and the current challenging environment to take the new roles. And I believe that there will be a strong leadership team for Huazhou for the new chapter of growth. With that, I will turn the call to Jinghui to update our recent business development.