VNET Group, Inc.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for the first quarter 2022 earnings conference call for VNet Group Inc. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. Participants from our management will include Mr. Samuel Shen, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of Retail IDC. Mr. Tim Chen, Chief Financial Officer, and Ms. Xinyuan Liu, Investor Relations Director of the company. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to the first speaker today, Ms. Xinyuan Liu. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Our earnings release was distributed earlier today. and you can find a copy on our IR website as well as on Newswire services. Please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Security Litigation Report Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. For detailed discussions of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our latest annual report and other documents filed with the SEC. VNAT does not undertake an obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable laws. Please also note that VNAT's earnings press release and this conference call include the disclosure of an audited GAAP financial matters as well as unaudited non-GAAP financial matters. VNet's earnings press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP financial matters to the unaudited GAAP matters. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. In addition, a webcast of this conference call will also be available on our IR website at ir.vnet.com. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Samuel.

All right. Thank you, Xin Yuan. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. As we continue executing our dual core growth strategy to grow our reach in retail and wholesale IDC markets, we are pleased to report another solid quarter amid a complex macro environment. From a performance standpoint, we got off to a solid start in fiscal, 2022, delivering healthy operational and financial growth in the first quarter. Total cabinets under management increased to approximately 79,000 compared with approximately 56,000 at the end of first quarter of last year. Cabinets utilized by customers increased to approximately 43,000 compared with approximately 33,500 in a comparable period last year. Our retail MRR per cabinet grew to RMB 9,236 in the first quarter, compared with RMB 9,144 in the same period of 2021. For the first quarter, our revenue grew 18.6% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA grew 21.9% year-over-year, both in line with our expectations. The phenomenal rise of the digital economy and a favorable policy landscape, as well as our proven ability to execute our strategy, have all continued to boost our business momentum across each of our business segments. First of all, more supportive policy developments are paving the way for continued progress, reinforcing the positive outlook for the IDC sector and its role in China's digital transformation and technology development. At the most recent meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission held last month, China's central government extended a national initiative to further modernize infrastructure across information technology, logistics, and other industries, aiming to deploy a considerable number of next-generation IT infrastructure facilities, which include supercomputers, cloud, AI platforms, and broadband backbone networks. As one of the service providers to support this major initiative, we are well positioned to benefit from the fast-growing demand in a more favorable and healthier regulatory environment. Additionally, as the significant National Infrastructure Advancement Initiative, Eastern Data, Western Computing was released earlier this year to boost data center computing power across the nation. We continue to see the great potential for the expansion of our core business with an even more efficient and effective approach. Before I discuss our business segments in more details, I'd like to speak about the COVID-19 resurgence in certain key locations and its impact on our operations. The lockdowns and related travel restrictions that were imposed in Shanghai, Beijing, and several cities in Hebei Province have impacted some of our customers' moving rates and our progress with respect to the construction of some of our new projects in these areas. Our data centers in the affected areas have continued to operate uninterruptedly throughout the lockdowns, and we truly appreciate each of our on-site employees' efforts to keep things running smoothly. We will continue to closely monitor pandemic developments, and together with our partners, adopt measures to mitigate risk for our operations. Now let's look at the first quarter performance and latest development of our wholesale business. As digitalization is taking place across sectors and geographies, more TMP customers, especially internet players, cloud service providers, inevitably expand their efforts to enhance their data processing and storage capacities to keep up with frontier technology trends and gain competitive edges. Our compelling value proposition, rooted in extensive industry know-how, in-depth resource capabilities, and well-seasoned operation teams continually enhance the appeal of our wholesale service offerings to leading technology players. During the first quarter, we signed four contracts generating a total of approximately 60 megawatts in capacity, including an extended pre-committed order of approximately 11 megawatts from a leading social platform operator, and three orders under multi-year contracts with two existing customers and one state-owned cloud service provider in China's southwestern region. We continue to see the increasing demand from our wholesale business, and we're quite optimistic about our future prospects in this segment. Moving on to our retail business in the first quarter, our ongoing efforts to advance our value added service offerings fueled steady growth in orders from both existing and new customers, reaffirming the effectiveness of our strategy and the increasing efficiency of our execution. New customer expansion was primarily driven by growing demand from the financial services, e-commerce, automotive, and energy sectors. Also, as we continually enhance our service capabilities and enrich our one-stop service offerings, a large number of existing customers, including internet player, cloud service provider, cross-border e-commerce player, financial service providers, and local service online marketplaces, continue to expand or upgrade their contracts to procure additional, very added services. spanning a wide spectrum of areas, from interconnectivity, bare metal services, and hybrid multi-cloud solutions, in addition to co-location services. Technological innovation is a crucial driver for the business development of our digital services. We just launched a new in-house developed interconnectivity solution that aims to provide all-in-one enterprise connection services built on our innovative SD-WAN technology and backbone network. It also includes an array of cutting-edge features catering to different platforms and hybrid access networks to enable application-aware intelligent routing and network-wide visualization. In addition, we just rolled out NeoStack, a customer-oriented, full-stack cloud-native services to empower corporate developers to build and run galvarification in public, private, and hybrid clouds, facilitating digital transformation initiatives. These new product launches also represent our powerful engineering capabilities to enrich our service portfolios, deliver additional values to customers, and diversify our revenue streams. In addition to serving corporate customers across various verticals, we continue to explore opportunities to partner with more state-owned enterprises by leveraging our aptitude for technology and healthy government relationship. Recently, we signed an exclusive partnership agreement with PeopleData, a subsidiary of People's Daily Online, an authoritative media platform in China. Under the agreement, as the exclusive partner, VNet will jointly build and operate PeopleCloud, the cloud platform of PeopleData, to uphold its role in serving local government and SOE customers' needs for cloud computing. In this regard, we will provide all-around services, including co-location, interconnectivity, cloud platform, cloud native workloads, and industry-specific cloud solutions. On the blue cloud business front, we have been actively exploring business opportunities in different vertical industries, leveraging our seasoned cloud service operation expertise, and through a decade-long exclusive partnership with Microsoft. More encouragingly, in Q1 2022, we began to offer operations and maintenance services to support a digital business system of Huanen Power, one of China's largest electric power companies. we will deliver first-class 24x7 ONM services across a wide array of core business systems, as well as secure a high-availability architecture for relevant business continuity. The initial feedback we have received from our customers has been remarkable. Our solutions and services not only enable customer systems to run trouble-free, but also optimize their efficiency and performance to better meet business needs. while effectively reducing their operating costs. As this system performance enhancement improves the overall operating efficiency, our customers' overall business management capabilities also grow stronger, which in turn, summits their competitive advantages. We expect to further expand our industry-specific solution for other sectors. Last but not least, I'd like to reiterate that in a highly dynamic market in which we operate, upholding long-term commitments and responsibilities to our industry, environment, and society is central to our ongoing success. As our industry shifts toward green data center operations and the world becomes, the world comes to embrace sustainable enterprise management, we are committed to building VNet as a positive force for the betterment of society. For more than two decades, we have been committed to advancing a wide range of ESG initiatives within the stakeholder communities we serve. Our 2021 ESG report published in April showcases these initiatives and demonstrates our commitment to integrating sustainability into every aspect of our operations Some highlights include our carbon neutrality targets by 2030, lower than industry average PUE, and the fact that we are the first data center service providers in China to disclose the third party verification of our carbon inventory results. As a prominent domestic enterprise and a global industry player, we will continue to lead by example in this aspect. Looking ahead, We will remain dedicated to utilizing our core strengths while continuing to focus on our dual core growth strategy. We expect to capture greater opportunities and fulfill more growing digital demand across wide-ranging verticals as the digital transformation progresses. Thank you, everyone. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Tim, to discuss our financial performance for the quarter and our business all look. Hi, Tim.