17 Education & Technology Group Inc.

Good evening and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by for 17 EdTech's fourth quarter 2023 and four-year earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the meeting over to your host for today's call, Ms. Lara Zhao, 17 Eds, Techs, Investor Relations Manager. Please proceed, Lara.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our earnest release was distributed earlier today and is available on our IR website. Joining us today are Mr. Michael Du, Director and Chief Financial Officer, and myself, Investor Relations Manager. Michael will walk you through our latest business performance and strategies and I will discuss our financial performance in more details. After the prepared remarks, Michael will be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this conference call contains four looking statements as defined in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These four looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relates to events that involve known and unknown risks and certainties and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control. This may cause the company's actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially. Further information regarding these and other risks and certainties and factors is included in the company's filings with the US SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise except as required under applicable law. I will now turn the call over to our director and chief financial officer to review some of our business development and strategic directions. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you, Lara. Hello, everyone. Thank you all for joining us on fourth quarter 2023 and full year earning results call. Before we begin, I would like to note that the financial information and the gap numbers in this release are presented on a continuing operation basis and in R&B unless otherwise stated. Let me now start with our latest business updates. In this quarter, the company has maintained solid development and progress in our teaching and learning SaaS businesses. We've achieved 19.7 revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2023 from the previous quarter. This was primarily driven by our growth in the teaching and learning SaaS businesses. An important progress is that we were able to win orders from additional group of clients, and expanding into our potential new customer groups, and under new transaction modes. Particularly, business with individual schools and group-operated schools has started building momentum with regular new contract screenings. Moving forward, we will accelerate the development of smart classrooms, big data precision teaching, intelligent homework solutions, and other products, including those with five aspects of education, holistically supporting personalized learning, and accommodate students' individual aptitudes in their inter-school solutions. Now let me go into more details. In the fourth quarter, our teaching and learning services continue to make consistent advances. Our key projects continue to generate revenues marked by successful delivery and client acceptance. Notably, the digital transformation projects in Shanghai Minghang District that is based on our smart pen and paper technology, has completed its surface revenue recognition. Similarly, our project in Beijing Xichen District has successfully completed its delivery as well. All such projects have seen immediate and consistent high usage with active rates above 90%. These continue to demonstrate our leading ability to deliver large-scale and systematic projects. In the fourth quarter, we secured a contract for the Teaching Software Integration and Data Analysis Services Project in Shanghai's Songjiang Project. This is a fast-paced pilot project valued at RMB around $3 million and initially covers eight schools, around 100 classes, 200 teachers, and 4,000 students within the district. Our services include integrating teaching software and providing big data analysis, By gathering learning process data from daily homework, staged assignments, and in-cloud exercises, among other sources, we combine various dimensions such as student economic performance, learning behavior, and subject literacy to create comprehensive student data profiles, enable precise, data-driven, and a semi-automatic teaching and management strategies. During this quarter, we pursued new growth strategies and expanded our customer base. By establishing strategic partnership with regional schools associated with well-known private education groups, as well as individually operated public schools, we have successfully executed and delivered projects. This new strategy, targeting private school and select public schools with adaptable structure, has continued to show strong performance. in terms of both contract value and quantity since last quarter. This model is a very good complement to our existing flagship-style projects with district education bureaus that typically aim at covering the whole district. Projects with individual or group-managed private or public schools have a much quicker decision process and a higher certainty of funding. This more diversified revenue contribution by each project also helps build up a more smooth revenue stream. This model also further helps accelerate our strategy to reach more schools and students that will create a virtuous cycle that further allows us to enhance our product and solutions. We are dedicated to provide the market with innovative leading product and solutions that set new standards in education technology. The Aerospace City Campus of the high school affiliated to China Renmin University, Kunshan Foreign Language School, Nanjing Jiangning Bingjiang Foreign Language School, Zhongshan Zhiyuan Middle School are among the long list of top leading schools that have subscribed to our teaching and learning SaaS offering. Their recognition and early adoption of our solution, I believe, to be influential are expected to further accelerate the adoption process within the area. In addition, projects with this group of clients are typically in subscription modes with semi-annual or annual renewal. In the first project we signed last September that has entered the renewal this month, we have seen a revenue retention rate of 120%, which means additional classes and students and functions are being subscribed and used. This is a great result, great initial results built upon our teaching and learning SAS offerings high active use and a very positive sign that we are building up an increasingly steady SAS revenue portfolio. Looking ahead, We expect adoption of the SaaS billing model to steadily grow as the market becomes more familiar with its benefits, and we are confident that this model will not only unlock new revenue streams for the company, but also highlight the advantage of its current nature, fostering sustainable business growth. In terms of product and service offering, we have been continually refining our core offerings and enhancing user experiences to promote regular school use. by integrating application systems and data profiles from daily teaching scenarios such as classroom, homework, and exams. Such integration aids effective teaching, enhances classroom quality, and supports teachers in delivering differentiated instructions. During this quarter, we enhanced our personalized learning products that focus on students' incorrect answers, enabling automatic error correction across all school scenarios, and effectively utilizing correction data between online and offline platforms. Furthermore, we provide high quality and a diverse resource for personalized learning and to boost students' independent learning efficiency. Meanwhile, we continue to explore the practical application of AIGC in actual teaching scenarios as well as content preparation process to further deliver better results in pilot projects. Our proprietary SmartPen, which has passed the project pilot verification, further improves teachers' efficiency and experiences in correcting daily homeworks. We plan to conduct further math distributions in 2024. Recently, the 2024 World Digital Education Conference was held in Shanghai. With digital education, application, sharing, and innovation as its theme, The conference facilitated in-depth discussion on topics such as enhancing teaching's digital literacy and competence, constructing our learning societies throughout education digitalization, artificial intelligence and digital ethics, and digital education evaluation. We participated in the conference and exhibit at the Digital Wisdom Future Education Exhibition under the theme. We provided data-backed solution and shared experience to advance global digital education clients and tackle the challenge. From December 12th to 14th, 2023, as a response and development major change, 2023 China Corporate Competitiveness Annual Conference hosted by the China Business News. Our One Teaching, One Learning K-12 Digital Teaching and Learning Science Platform was honored with the 2023 Excellent Performance Company Award, Best Technology Innovation Award. This award recognizes and honors companies that have made exemplary contributions to the socioeconomic field and has established themselves as exemplars and leaders in the responsive industries. the Beijing Municipal Education Commission selected 37 innovative application cases of big data in education. Notably, Xichen District, as served by 17 ATT&CK, was selected as a district-level case, and three other schools, including the Aerospace City Campus of the high school affiliated to Renmin University, Beijing number 43 middle schools and Beijing primary school Tongzhou branch, which are all our clients, we recognize and are standing on school-level cases. These exceptional innovative application cases serve as a great model for schools in various districts and help us to win additional clients. Looking ahead, One teaching and one learning platform will continue to facilitate the digital transformation of education, consistent meeting the needs of both teaching and students, thereby assisting schools in improving their teaching and nurturing process. The demand for our other educational service products is also highly dependent on the regulatory environment and provision of competing services. We are closely monitoring the development of the market as well as regulatory environments. Moving forward, we remain committed to explore additional educational products and services that are compliant with regulatory requirements. Now I will turn the call over to Lara to walk you through our latest financial performance. Thank you.