Sunlands Technology Group ADR

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to Sunland's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After prepared remarks by the management team, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I'd now like to turn the call over to your host today, Yuha Yi, Sunland's IR representative. Please go ahead.

Hello everyone and thank you for joining Sunline's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. The company's financial and operating results were issued in our press release via newswire services earlier today and are posted online. You can download earnings press release and sign up for our distribution list by visiting our IR website. On the call, our CEO, Tom Bo Liu, will provide an update on our operational performance as well as our strategic initiatives. Our CFO, Celina Lu Lu, will give you an overview of our financial performance and also provide our guidance for the second quarter of 2021. Following their prepared remarks, we will move into the Q&A session. Before I hand it over to the management, I'd like to remind you of Sunland's safe harbor statement in relation to today's call. Except for the historical information and contained hearing, certain of the matters discussed in this conference call are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current trends, estimates, and projections, and therefore you should not place your reliance on them. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. For more information about potential risks and uncertainties, please refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Tongbo Liu.

Thank you, Yu Hua. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Sunland's first quarter 2021 conference call. We are pleased to announce that Sunland Technology Group had a very strong opening quarter for 2021, starting with net revenues that rose to 694.3 million RMB, a 22.9% year-over-year increase. The increase in net revenues was mainly driven by the year-over-year growth in gross billings since the second half of 2020. Girls' balance in the first quarter rose to 5,930.7 million RMB, representing year-over-year growth of 14.9%. In terms of new enrollments, we achieved a 107.6% increase year-over-year, which surged to over 145,000 students. The solid performance was driven by our continued efforts in diversifying product offerings rising brand awareness, and improving student satisfaction. Sunland continues to focus on expanding and refining its master's degree-oriented programs. Because of this strategy, girls' buildings in master's degree-oriented programs attended a growth rate of 73.6% year-over-year and contributed approximately 34% to total girls' buildings. compared with 22% in the same quarter last year. The enrollment also grew at a significant rate of 72.8% year-on-year. Our master's degree programs cater especially to students with full-time jobs who are more financially stable but have relatively limited time and demand more customized assistance for learning. with full-time jobs tend to be more dependable and more eager to attend online test prep courses like those offered by Sunland. We believe this fact, coupled with Sunland's continued investment in brand awareness and course offerings, will continue to provide thrust for our wider market share. We also continue to focus on market opportunities for our professional certification and are making significant progress in growing this segment as well. Since the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, people are getting more comfortable attending online classes to improve work-related and hobby-related skills. Moreover, the employment market is becoming more competitive for employees, and they are feeling the growth sense of urgency to attend professional certification courses. with the purpose of maintaining their level of employability. In addition, the Chinese government also established multiple policies to support the professional certification education, such as subsidies, training vouchers, and so on. According to the State Council of China, more than 27 million subsidized vocational training opportunities were provided in 2020. We believe these factors will continue to play out in the future, bowed well for our professional certification business. While it is encouraging to see such strong growth momentum in both master's degree-oriented and professional certification programs, we remain confident of our ST programs and will continue to fine-tune and expand our product offerings. According to the 7th National Population Census of China, Only 218 million Chinese held an associate degree or above, representing a percentage of 15.5% compared to the total population of 1.41 billion in China. We believe STE is still a sizable market and the company will continue to generate revenue from this industry. High-level teaching quality is our priority, and we are devoted to recruiting first-class teachers with competitive composition packages. By the end of the first quarter, more than 17% of our teachers held degrees from top-tier universities in both China and around the world. Furthermore, we are committed to building an extensive teacher rating and a training system, deploying our database of case studies and the templates in teaching. and establishing dimensional teaching channels to ensure top-notch teaching standards. Driven by our efforts in pursuing high-level teaching quality, we are enthusiastic that our students' level of satisfaction has reached a record high according to our internal survey. Aside from our efforts in upgrading teaching quality, we continue to expand and improve our academic research team. refine our research and development framework for new courses with the assistance of AI technologies. In order to widen our course offerings and accelerate the pace with introduced new courses, we believe our academic research team continue to grow. Our research personnel will have better opportunity to become more specialized in his or her own academic discipline. which will further enhance the synergies between our existing and new cost offerings, and subsequently improve the overall academic research efficiency. We are confident this snowball effect in academic research will pave the way for solidifying our competitive position and strengthening our economic mode in post-secondary education industry. Looking ahead, We are endeavoring to proliferate our master's degree-oriented and professional skills programs to capture the benefits of economic skill while solidifying our market-leading position in STE programs. We are devoted to delivering the best learning experience to our students so they can have the best career prospects while also creating values for all stakeholders. With that, I will turn the call to our CFO, Selena, to run through our financials.