H World Group Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the H-World Group conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, to Mr. Jason Chen, Investor Relations Director. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to Edgeworth Group's 2022 second quarter and first half earnings conference call. Joining us today is our founder and chairman, Mr. Ji Qi, our CEO, Mr. Jin Hui, our president, Ms. Liu Xingxin, our CFO, Ms. Chen Hui, our deputy CFO, Ms. Ye Fei, and our CEO of international business, Ms. He Ji Hong. 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 findings with the SEC. Edgeworth Group does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required and applicable laws. On the call today, we will also mention adjusted financial measures during the discussion of our performance. Reconciliations 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 slides presentation is available on Edgeworth Group's website at ir.edgeworth.com. With that, now I will turn the call over to Mr. Ji Qi. Mr. Ji, please.

Good morning and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Second quarter of 2022 has been both a turbulent and promising period for our business. In China, large scale outbreak of COVID, especially in major cities like Shanghai, posed significant challenges to our hotel operations. We took all necessary measures to protect our customers and employees and the collaborative development in carrying out preventive procedures against the COVID spread. We provided support to our franchisees to help them overcome the difficulties as well. In order to maintain healthy cash flow positions in this disruptive period, The future conducted a cost reduction in a very disciplined way, including streamlining of our headquarters. On the other hand, our European business has experienced a very healthy recovery. Can I have a demand for travel either to both the EDR and occupancy? In the second quarter, rural power almost recovered to a similar level for the same period in 2018. The recovery trend continues in the third quarter. In the past several years, COVID, as well as geopolitical conflicts, has brought many disruptions and challenges to our business. Facing the uncertainties of the internal environment, we have been focusing on strengthening our core commitments and building a resilient organization which is able to ride through different economic cycles. We continue to focus on sustainable quality growth, ensuring quality, consistency, and improvement for our existing hotels and upcoming new openings are essential for our business. Therefore, we continue to remove inferior hotels, including sub-brands, from our hotel network. China, our core market, is a single large-scale market with vast potential. We refuse to increase our market penetration, especially in low-tier cities. In order to close to the local market and become more agile in our decision-making process, we established six regional headquarters. Each headquarters is equipped with a very experienced development and operational team, which will create a better understanding of the market as well as access to our customers, franchisees, and employees. We are confident that such a reconstruction The restructuring of our business management will allow us to accelerate our quality growth and provide more opportunities for our business partners in the local market. With that, I will turn the call to the Jinghui to discuss our recent business development in details, please.