VNET Group, Inc.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for the first quarter 2024 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 will be a question and answer session. Managements from our management today include Mr. Gavin Shen, Rotating President, Mr. Chi-Yu Wang, Chief Financial Officer, Ms. Xinyuan Liu, Investor Relations Director of the company. Please note that today's conference call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to first speaker today, Ms. Xingyuan Liu. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Our earnings release was distributed earlier today, and you can find a copy on our website as well as on newswire services. Please note that today's call will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ maturely 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. VNAS does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable laws. Please also note that VNAS earnings press release and this conference call include the disclosure of unaudited GAAP and non-GAAP financial matters. VNAS earnings press release contains a reconciliation of the unaudited non-GAAP 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.vinet.com. Before we start today's presentation, let me briefly introduce Mr. Gavin Shen. Beginning in May 2024, Gavin has undertaken this role of Group's Rotating President while also serving as the General Manager of the IDC Strategic Business Group. Gavin joined VNet as our vice president in 2017, and in January 2020 became senior vice president, bringing nearly 20 years of business operations management experience in IT strategic planning, cloud computing, and data centers. I will now turn the call over to Gavin. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Xinyuan. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. Before diving into our first quarter performance, I'd like to remind you of the decoding refinement that we mentioned in our last call. To enhance information transparency and help the public better understand our business, starting from this quarter, we will report total revenues and operational metrics for our wholesale and retail business separately. Our CFO, Chi-Yi, will go over the details. Now, let's move on to our first quarter initiatives and business progress. Solid first quarter results marked a good start for this year. We continued to execute our effective dual-cost strategies while pursuing high-quantity development. Our robust Operating and financial results once again demonstrate our ability to grow our business by leveraging our core space to capture even involving demand in the area of AI. Michael Wise, supportive government policies and mayor decide to foster our favorable market environment, acquitting more treatment for us and IDC industry as a whole. Computing power is widely seen as a crucial component of China's high-quality development. Per the Government Work Report 2024, which calls for accelerating the formation of a nationwide computing power network, the Telecom Regulator has strengthened policy initiatives to further optimize computing power resource and infrastructure systems across the region. We believe those initiatives will empower us to allocate and manage other data centers more efficiently and best meet the huge market demand for high-performance computer power. Additionally, interest in greener computing solutions is on the rise. In April, we signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Wollantyper's local government and Shandong High Speed Holdings to build a green AI supercomputing data center cluster. The three parties will work together to promote the digitalization and GUI development of Woodland Hub. We are confident our GUI data center business will resonate with customers and evaluate our market competitiveness as those traits take hold. While IDC development remains our primary focus, we were keenly aware of how AI-related demand for high-performance computing is resharping the data center landscape. Our quality data centers and high-density power capabilities enable us to trail high-performance computing solutions seamlessly to meet customers' rapidly growing AI needs. By the end of the fourth quarter, over 90% of our wholesale capacity in service is high-power density. Meanwhile, we continue to see increased AI-driven demand from industries like chief design, autonomous-driven financial service, and logistics, and education. As an industry pioneer, we are exploring AI data center, AIDC, development, and actively upgrading our computing power infrastructure to capture market opportunities. AI workload require massive computing power, enforcing our transition from CPU-based to GPU-based infrastructure, apart from a few top internet enterprise and AI technology enterprise with GPU resource of their own. Most small and mid-sized enterprises will outsource this upgrade given the high cost, limited channels, and other challenges in purchasing GPU infrastructure outright. AIDCs can meet enterprises' computing power needs while minimizing their capital investment, a significant advantage in the current environment. Now let me go through some updates on the IDC fund. We continued to win new orders for both wholesale and retail business during the quarter. On the wholesale side, as we mentioned on our last call, we secured a new order from one of our extreme exciting clients for approximately 15 megawatts. scheduled to be completed within 2024. We also want an order of approximately 2.5 megawatt in our data center in the Yangtze River Delta region for a new customer, one of China's largest restaurant companies. On the retail side, we continue to attract new customers in financial service, local service, and manufacturing and deepen exciting relationships. Notably, we won a new order of a policy meting 1.5 megawatt in our data center in the greater Beijing area for an exciting customer, a leading player in local service sector. Moving to our long IDC business, we also made progress with our VPN service. Our wholly owned subsidiary, DYXlet, has successfully expanded its global network coverage with a new point of prevalence established in Dubai in the fourth quarter and in South Korea and Mexico more recently. The new POPs broaden our VPN service global network coverage over our VPN service, and the new POPs will provide enterprise customers with comprehensive and integrated network cloud security service, enabling them to capitalize on emerging markets and global expansion opportunities. Turning now to our ECG performance. In April, we issued our fourth annual ESG report detailing in compliance with 2023 AdWords and progress sustainability, including verified carbon inventory results. During 2023, we continued to execute our shared sustainability system and achieved various performance across employees. diversity and equity needs, grid power engagement, and efficient energy consumption. We also highlighted achievements such as our average annual power usage efficiency of 1.2 line, a total grid power purchase of about 56.9 million kilowatt hours during the year, and an increase in our percentage of female employees in our management position to 31%. Moving forward, we will remain dedicated to integrating ESG-based properties company-wide. Advising the coordinated development of the green economy and the digital economy, driving sustainability and creating value for our stakeholders and our associates. To conclude, our solid first quarter performance underscores our core strengths, a broad and growing array of innovative ITC services. outstanding high power density development capabilities, and our low-year and expanding customer base looking ahead. We will continue to drive our dual core business strategy and pursue high-quantity goals while advising the development of China's digital economy. Thank you, everyone. I will now turn the call over to Qiwei to discuss more about our operating and financial performance.