Chen Lei
Analyst · Haitong International. Please ask your question
Thank you, Chung. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our results announcement for the third quarter of 2021. Our total revenue for this quarter, excluding revenue from merchandise sales, was RMB 21.4 billion. This represents a year-on-year increase of 55%. Our annual active buyers reached 867.3 million for the 12 months ending on September 30. Over the quarter, average MAU increased to 741.5 million. Pinduoduo turned 6, last month. We are grateful for opportunities to serve our users, farmers, merchants and everyone who has interacted with us in the past 6 years, and we hope to continue serving them. It has been over a year since I took over as a CEO and half year as Chairman of the Board. Over this period, we have been busy watching our transition, which I'm happy to report has been gradual and on track. There are two major things to this transition has been happening behind the scenes. The first is grooming younger talent and leaders. The second is shifting to more focused investments in R&D from a previous focus on sales and marketing for the first five years. And now let me elaborate. First, on grooming younger talent and leaders. Since the beginning of last year, we have witnessed many of our younger team members stepping up to take more responsibility. This young men and women demonstrated their core value of commitment to our users. When COVID-19 was struck and disrupted our daily lives, many among our young team immediately took actions to source essential supplies and deliver to users in need. When heavy rains got stuck Henan in July, they explain interaction to source out our stocks and coordinate the logistics so that our users will not run out of daily necessities. This unforeseeable event has accelerated their maturity and sent our several goods to our users and suppliers. We are encouraged to see more with potential to become future leaders of our business. They make practical business decisions actually strongly, exceeding our expectations. I'm proud to be able to work alongside with this young team. Despite the age, many of them has been with the company for a number of years and have matured on the job and shaping the future of this company. Young talent a great creative, vigor and constantly innovate. I more than taking a critical role in the next 6 to 12 months as we continue to create opportunities for them to step up. And second, shifting to more focused and investment in research and development. We are already serving 867 million users. To leverage our strength of having a management with years of engineering training, we'll be increasing our research development investments. This is a significant shift in strategy from our first 5 years when we were focusing much more on sales and marketing. Agriculture has been the main thing and the backbone of our business since the very beginning where we saw an opportunity to create value by bringing agriculture into a digital economy. Trained as engineers, my team and I have devoted ourselves to find technology solutions to implement across agriculture supply chain. We have only scratched the surface after 6 years. There is still much more for us to do in agriculture, especially with technology. Therefore, we plan to deepen our investment in tech-enabled agriculture solutions to address critical needs in these sectors. This includes, first, bringing more agricultural products and agriculture committee into a digital economy; and second, further improving efficiency in agriculture supply chains to meet user demand and reduce waste. Over the past 6 years, Pinduduo has provided consumers across China with wider variety of agricultural products at better prices while helping farmers to increase their income. When we started 6 years ago, we were among the first to serve agriculture produce online. And now we are connecting 16 million farmers to 867.3 million consumers nationwide. During China's Golden Week in October, agricultural related orders our platform served 279% over the same period of last year. We hope Pinduduo will be the go-to platform for quality agricultural products for farmers and consumers. We look forward to leveraging our platform to have more farmers in order to improve their livelihood and benefit their communities. To this end, we will continue to focus up before in digital inclusion in agriculture industry. We will expand our core offering on total economy at scale farmers on e-commerce and store operations. It helps them to control price, quantity in a way they on definitely in their own hand as they can sell directly to consumers. In order to expedite agriculture digitization, we plan to maintain our zero commission policy on agricultural products. At the same time, we will continue to improve consumer awareness and appreciation of agricultural produce, geographical indications and agricultural brands through technology innovations, such as live streaming, media marketing, et cetera. The most awareness consumers have, the more educated farmers are, the more value can be created to agriculture communities in China. We are also designing tech-enabled services to increase supply chain efficiency to agriculture sector. One of them is to manage local supply with local demand. At the same time, it helps reduce unnecessarily transit to provide faster options for consumers. To further cut down transportation time and reduce food not a waste, we are developing proprietary technology solutions like low planning, averaging design, analytics and culture optimization. This solution helps to lay the foundation for an infrastructure that is more sensible for agriculture produce and more environmentally sustainable. High force in applying agriculture technology go beyond matching supply and demand and extend into identifying upstream technology solutions to improve productivity, nutritional profiles and environmental sustainability. By strength in agri type applications, we also hope to make agriculture attractive to a tech service young generation. A good example of our efforts in this area is our Smart Agriculture Competition. It has demonstrated that precision farming techniques can make real improvements to farm output. Something through our competition last year have started to commercialize their technology of strawberry cultivation, exception in all start-ups and bring tangible productivity gains to farmers. This year, we have joined forward with China Agricultural University and Zhejiang University with technical gained from UN Food and agriculture organization and Zhejiang University and Research. In line with our priorities, we're expanding the challenge to accept not just yield, but the nutritional value, environmental sustainability and commercial viability. Contestants have adopted a multi-disciplinary approach, applying nutrition science, precision farming and other relevant technology to cultivate tomato. The finance team counsel cross-discipline background. Revenue from agricultural to consumer sizes. Currently, they're remotely planting tomatoes in our smart greenhouse base in Hunan. We're encouraged to see that 80% of the team members are in their 20s, bringing entirety and new ideas to a traditional agriculture sector. At the same time, we are partnering with world-class agriculture institutes to offer these young agri tech talents, tailored courses and training on topics such as greenhouse horticulture, product management and modeling. Agriculture is an industry with great potential for young people, who’s been the future in technology and who aspire to make impact for society. As an agri-focused platform, we want to leverage our platform and technology to provide more opportunities for young talents to join agriculture sector, working with them to apply technology to improve every link of agriculture supply chain. Investing technology to improve agriculture sectors is important as a challenging task. It implies our long-term commitment, and we will be patient and systematic. We hope that through our efforts, we can help build a smarter and more sustainable future for agriculture. Last quarter, we announced the launch of our 10 billion agriculture initiative, which seeks to address critical needs in the agricultural sector and rural areas. This initiative will not be driven by profit or commercial goals, but drive the facility, the advancement of agritech, promote digital inclusion and provide agritech talent with greater motivation and sense of achievement. Profit from the second quarter and any potential profit in the future quarters will go into this initiative until the final goal of 10 billion is met. The profit for the third quarter will also go into this initiative. After receiving Board involvement, we held an EGM at end of September and the initiative was approved by our shareholders. Pinduduo is closely connected to the community that we operate in. This point is crucial to our development and we intend to support them to the best of our ability. Therefore, we are committed to take on more responsibility to society. In July, we plunged into action of the [indiscernible]. We donated RMB 100 million to flood relief and launched a portal to support emergency relief distribution. The total grocery network in physical stock of food and emergency supplies and worked with suppliers to secure and dispute necessities to our nearly 20,000 partners there. In October, we also contributed to the relief effort in response to the heavy rain there, donating RMB 50 million to Shaanxi charity foundation to carry out emergency disaster relief and post disaster risk construction work. Looking forward, we plan to do more to contribute to society. We will continue to proactively leverage our platform and resources to serve our users; farmers, merchants and their communities better. Thank you. And now let me pass it onto Tony.