Chen Lei
Analyst · Jefferies. Your line is open
Thank you, Chen and thank you everyone. Thank you for joining us on our earnings call for the fourth quarter and the fiscal year of 2021. Let me first recap our results in Q4 and full year 2021. Our total revenue in the fourth quarter, excluding revenue from merchandise sales, was RMB27.1 billion. This represents a year-on-year increase of 28%. Our annual active buyers reached RMB868.7 million for the 12 months ending on December 31, with RMB733.4 million average quarterly MAU. Our GMV in 2021 was RMB2,441 billion, representing 46% year-on-year growth. Total revenue for 2021, excluding revenue from merchandise sales, was RMB86.7 billion, representing 61% growth year-on-year. 2021 was a year of transition for Pinduoduo. Over the course of the year, during which I took over role of Chairman, we shifted our priority from sales and marketing towards research and development. I am glad to see that this shift is well on track. It will lay the solid foundation for us over the long run. We are grateful for our users’ continued trust and support. To keep up with the evolving and increasingly multi-dimensional preferences, we currently ask ourselves how we can serve them better. As a team with engineering background, our focus has always been to use technology to benefit all. We were fortunate to be early in identifying opportunities to contribute to and increase value in agriculture. Agriculture is a sector that touches everyone’s daily life, yet has low levels of digitalization. Since Pinduoduo’s establishment in 2015, we have been facilitating agricultural modernization and digital inclusion and efficient, resilient, sustainable and vibrant agricultural sector benefits all stakeholders in the value chain and we remain focused on our goal. In 2021, we deepened our agricultural digital inclusion efforts in various ways and they include: one, helping farmers to expand their access to the market; two, advancing the use of smart agriculture and three, encouraging and enable more young and tech-savvy talent into agricultural sector. And now let me elaborate. In a downstream, we continue to bring farmers into a digital economy by expanding their market access. We are working hard to build a platform that effectively matches consumer demand in agricultural production across the country. This enables farmers to ship their fresh and perishable agri-food products directly to consumers, bypassing layers of distribution to deliver in the shorter timeframe. The result is higher income for farmers, lower price for consumers and the fresh produce consumers’ cuisine. Our platform has opened up a market of nearly 870 million users to farmers and agri producers in China directly. We have also provided them with various tools to promote their unique agricultural produce. One commitment that we have is our zero commission policy of agricultural products. We waived sales commissioning and proactively gained more exposure for agricultural products. We plan to continue this zero commission policy of agricultural products. We aim to create a virtual cycle like what we have done for SMEs in the past, in which farmers spend more while consumers get leisure and more affordable produce. To amplify its effectiveness, we launched numerous promotional events. In 2021, we worked with various regions to create a series of agri-focused shopping festivals that introduce consumers across China to different regional strategy. We also collaborated with key partners, such as CCTV to launch live streaming events to promote China’s agricultural heritage. This event not only enhanced user awareness as appreciation of local specialties enable farmers to directly talk to consumers, understand consumers’ preference data which have been in brand building and production upgrades for quality agricultural produce. For instance, we initiated an Orange Festival to promote high-quality orange specialties from 7 major orange-produced areas across the country bringing regional orange varieties to consumers nationwide, benefiting from rising order volume on our platform local orange and agri merchants in Hunan Province which means a large increase in sales. This increase in sales not only improve farmers’ living standards, but also gave them confidence to invest into the future, many of the reinvesting with our partners into developing better products, including in sorting machines and packaging design. Moving upstream, we are advancing adoption of agricultural technology to help growers improve their productivity. A few practical and affordable technologies came out of them in all Smart Agriculture Competition last year, including automated crop monitoring, program dynamic adjustment for changing climate conditions and irrigation. We have several teams to commercialize these technology solutions. Today, these solutions have been applied in major strawberry growing regions across China, such as Liaoning, Anhui and Yunnan provinces. They have helped transitional growers more than double their management capacity. Such progress is inspiring and variable for the entire industry. We regularly organized knowledge-sharing session to encourage the adoption of technology in this sector. Earlier this month, we jointly hosted a sharing section with FAO China or harnessing [ph] smart agriculture to boost food production and security. Representatives from FAO, China Agricultural University, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Pinduoduo and the finalists of the smart agriculture competition presented their insights at a webinar. We are honored to work closely with world class partners in agri-food sector, such as China Agricultural University, Zhejiang University, UN FAO, Singapore and Wageningen University. And we look forward to collaborating with more likeminded organizations and individuals in the future. Another important pro of Pinduoduo’s agricultural strategy focuses on encouraging and enabling more young and tech-savvy talent into the agriculture sector. We are glad to see more and more young agricultural entrepreneurs choosing to start their businesses with Pinduoduo. As at end October 2021, over 126,000 young farming professionals, born after 1995, has joined the Pinduoduo platform, up from 85,700 in 2020 and 29,700 in 2019. Most of these young entrepreneurs are well educated. They are digital natives who grew up with mobile technology. Therefore, they are used to buying things online and use innovations like live streaming. At the same time, many of them are motivated by the desire to contribute to the rural communities. To ask you then, we have offered dedicated training programs or necessary know-how to operate their e-commerce businesses. We will devote more resources to support them as we believe we will play a key role in facilitating agricultural modernization and rural vitalization. Looking back on our efforts in agriculture, we are happy with the positive impact that we have generated. But we have only scratched the surface in the field of technology advancement and digital inclusion in agriculture. Therefore, we are stepping up our investment in this sector as a long-term commitment. The focus of our long-term vision may always translate into near-term results, but we will be patient as we do our part to contribute to agricultural modernization. As mentioned last year, I am personally overseeing our RMB10 billion agricultural initiatives, which aims to facilitate advancement of agri-tech, promote digital improvement and provide agri-tech talent with greater motivation and sense of achievement. Profits from this quarter will continue to be allocated to this initiative. Lastly, as a platform that serves over 868 million consumers, we are also showing more social responsibility. In July, we rapidly responded to help with [indiscernible] making donations and launching a portal to support emergency relief distribution. In October, we did a same to carryout emergency disaster relief and post-disaster construction work in [indiscernible]. In December, we contributed towards relief efforts in Xian and work with the local government to maintain necessary provisions as a result of COVID-19 outbreak. To support the rural communities, we launched Duoduo Reading Month. Today, we have donated carefully selected farming books [ph] to rural communities around the country with an organized reading program. We hope that this effort will broaden the horizon of the youth and contribute to a better future to the community. As we step into another year, we remain laser focused on our goals and we will continue to do our best to serve all our stakeholders. And I would like to thank you all in advance for your continued support. And now, let me pass the time to Jim. Jim has been with us since 2017 and has been recently promoted to VP of Finance as part of our plan to grow more young generation leaders. And Jing, please?