Jenny Zhang
Analyst · CICC. Your line is now open
Good morning everyone. Now, I am pleased to outline our strategic focus for 2017. As we proceed towards the end of the year, today I would like to give you a comprehensive review on how we have executed those strategies and the achievements due to those strategies. On Page 3, our first strategic focus is to upgrade our economy hotels. We don’t view HanTing as just one of the major hotel brands. Our ambition is to position this as the hotel of choice for Chinese people. As you can see, with the efforts from multiple fronts, the same hotel RevPAR for HanTing brand has accelerated to 9.8% in Q3, a historical high. The growth was mainly driven by the growing mix of our upgraded products, which is HanTing 2.0 and 2.5, our improved operational quality and the customer satisfaction level, the successful branding and sales efforts, we also attribute this phenomenal growth to strong domestic travel demand. Page 4 shows the first HanTing Plus hotel performance in the first operational month. As you can see, we not only created HanTing 2.0 and 2.5, we continued to upgrade our products and elaborating the well-known HanTing brand for some more innovation. This brand, HanTing Plus is positioned as an entry-level midscale brand, and this first completed hotel was opened at the beginning of October in Shanghai. The picture shows some perks and to give you a flavor of this new product, in addition to the new and refreshed layout of the lobby and rooms, HanTing Plus also provides more convenience to customers including Niiice Café, Self Check-in/-out kiosks, a wider selection of pillows, 24 hour self storage and laundry and many other features. We are proud to report that this newly opened HanTing Plus hotel achieved a RevPAR of RMB358 in the first operational month. Before the renovation, it was HanTing hotel, the comparable RevPAR is up 40% year-over-year. As of now, we have 23 hotels in the pipeline for HanTing Plus. We see the franchisees are really enthusiastic about this new product introduced. We expect a lot of new HanTing Plus will be opened in the coming years. Our efforts for economy hotel upgrades also extends to our Elan and Hi Inn brands. On Page 5 and Page 6, are the features of the new Elan and the new Hi Inn products. Elan is our economy hotel brand designed for franchised and manachised hotels. This newly rolled out Elan 1.0 has a smart renovation concept designed for different property sizes and shapes. Similarly, Hi Inn 4.4 – 4.0, as shown on Page 4 is designed to optimize space utilization for the smaller properties with a small lobby and a small room. Nevertheless, we try to put in all the necessary functionality into this very condensed space. Moving on to our strategic focus of expansion in midscale segment. Page 7 demonstrates our well-covered brand portfolio in the midscale hotel segment. We structure our brands from two angles as we explained to you before, pricing and standardization levels. We divide our hotels in midscale into three different levels, entry-level midscale, midscale, and upper midscale. And from a design perspective, we separate them from highly standardized hotels, hotels with standardized styles, and hotels with standardized core elements. This portfolio avoids – this portfolio positions each brand in a unique position to meet the different customer needs as well as property features. As you can see, starting from the entry-level midscale, by leverage HanTing strong brand recognition, we launched HanTing Plus as we just introduced, and we also have the new ibis product positioned at the entry-level midscale in the market with a very European design we find it’s very well received by Chinese consumers. At the midscale segment, we have Ji Hotel, Citigo, Orange Select, ibis Styles, and Starway, which can well satisfy the different CapEx budgets and different types of properties in the Chinese market. Furthermore, we have four brands to cover upper midscale segment, which are HanTing – which are Crystal Orange, Mercure, and Novotel. Each of these brands are also catered to different customer preferences. As you can see, we have successfully repositioned Huazhu’s hotel portfolio to provide a chance of Chinese consumption upgrade. On Page 8, our mid and upscale hotels now has a significant portion of contribution to our revenue. In Q3 2017, the revenue contributions from mid and upscale hotels increased by 13 percentage points to 41% of our significantly larger Huazhu net revenues. This increase was driven by our aggressive push into the mid and upscale hotel segments and acquisition of Crystal Orange completed in Q2 this year. From the room count perspective, you can see on Page 9, we also have a growing room count for midscale hotels. During the past three years, we have increased our room inventory in mid and upscale segments from 11% in 2014 to 25% in Q3 2017. And approximately 66% of our rooms in the pipeline are mid and upscale hotels. We expect for the new hotels we are going to open next year, 60% to 65% of the room count are going to come from our midscale and upscale hotel brands. Page 10 details an update on Crystal Orange, our newly acquired brand. In Q3, Crystal Orange posted strong same-hotel RevPAR growth of 14.5%. In addition, we have completed the integration of operational and booking systems, loyalty program and back office support for this newly acquired business. We are happy to see our centralized reservation system contributes to Crystal Orange’s strong performance. Our third strategy focus is to grow our same-hotel RevPAR. In addition to hotel upgrades, we also focus on strengthening our relationship with members and our direct channels, which make a significant contribution to the same-hotel RevPAR growth. In August, we launched a marketing campaign to boost Huazhu’s loyalty program and Huazhu App. Page 11 shows some of the pictures of the various campaign angles. We displayed the Huazhu Club logo and various hotel brands on high-speed train traveling from Shanghai to Beijing. And this train will carry our logo for the next six months after the launch. And they joined the – the passengers can join Huazhu Club by scanning and downloading our App on the train. We also launched a new version of our App last quarter. In the new App, Hello, Huazhu is one of the new feature, which bridges communication between our guests and our staffs. In addition, we also optimized and customized the booking function and committed to the lowest price from Huazhu’s direct online channels. As you can see on Page 12, our fast-growing membership program contributes significantly to our sales achievements. Approximately 97 million customers join our member program up to Q3 2017 and I am happy to report that our membership program reached the 100 million mark just last week. On Page 13, with all the sales efforts as well as the quality improvements, our same-hotel RevPAR growth recorded 9.5% in Q3. This number is achieved without counting the Orange acquisition. So this is primarily our existing brand portfolio. So, with the detailed view on Page 13, you can see the growth of our same-hotel RevPAR performance trending very well in the past two years. In Q3, the 9.5% increase was driven by the 3% increase in same-hotel ADR and the 4.5 percentage point increase in occupancy. The midscale and upscale hotels maintain a high single-digit same-hotel RevPAR growth rate at 9.5% as driven by 1.2% and 3.6 percentage point increase in occupancy rate. Our economy hotels also performed very well and the RevPAR growth rate accelerated to 9.4% in Q3 driven by 4.3% increase in ADR and a 4.5 percentage point increase in occupancy rates. As I just pressed, the Crystal Orange hotel RevPAR are not included in our reported same-hotel RevPAR statistics as you have seen on the chart. Whereas they will be included when they are included in a Huazhu system for at least 18 months. As mentioned in earlier page, Crystal Orange alone posted a same-hotel RevPAR growth of 14.5%. Moving to Page 14, in Q3, our branded RevPAR growth accelerated to 17.3% driven by higher ADR, occupancy and a mix upgrades. We expect RevPAR growth trend will continue due to factors that I will further elaborate in the following pages. As you may recall, in our last earnings call, we shared with you the price comparison among hotel rooms and other consumer products in China versus U.S. We found that ADR for hotels in China are significantly underpriced. Today, let’s take another angle, in Q3, our blended ADR grew from RMB194 to RMB218, which is a year-over-year increase of RMB24. Such increase in ADR is less than the Tall cup of Starbucks coffee latte in China. So we believe such price increase is totally affordable to the Chinese consumer who is experienced their big tide of consumption upgrades. And I think this consumer buying power will continue to drive our ADR growth in the long run. Turning to Page 16, the domestic travel market remains very strong. From 2011 to 2016, disposable income per capita grew at CAGR of 7% while domestic travel expenditures grew at 14% CAGR. The strong demand for travel has been driven by consumption upgrades and lifestyle change. The increasing adoption of annual leave system and a higher frequency of short distance leisure travel are prevailing in China, especially for the young generation. We are not only facing a positive demand trend on the supply side, we also see very favorable trends. Turning to Page 17, we can see at the net addition of branded hotels started slowdown in 2016 and we expect this moderate slow trend will continue in 2017 and 2018. We think that such trend is reflective of the general trend in China lodging market. The escalating rent and the funding costs scarcity of profit properties and higher investment requirements prohibited field channel cost or post competitive challenges for many smaller and individual players from entering into the lodging market. While the demand for travel remains strong, the slowdown of supply will provide the perfect environment for ADR growth as well as occupancy growth. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Teo, who will talk you through our operational and financial results in Q3.