Leo Grepin
Analyst · Eight Capital.
Okay, good morning, Steve. Thank you for the question. So, if you look at our sales in Q2, maybe I will start with momentum. If you recall, our Q1 analyst call. We shared sales for the month of April at 80% of prior year. We ended up the quarter, basically flat to prior year. So that tells you a little bit about the momentum through the quarter, which we feel quite good about. Now, as you mentioned the trends are a little bit different market to market. So you talked about international hubs. That’s our international business in Hong Kong being quite strong in Q2 we also had strong results in, in China and in Vietnam. Whereas the markets like Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, were quite a bit weaker. I think you can link that quite directly to what’s happening in terms of COVID-19 measures in these different markets. The Southeast Asian countries had much more severe levels of COVID-19 cases and therefore much more severe social distancing measures throughout the quarter. Now, despite all of that, I talked about the momentum across the region you can assign that in part to some of the relaxation of social distancing in Southeast Asia, but also to a lot of their capabilities that we deployed to all of our markets in Q2, where we equipped our advisors with a number of new digital capabilities to allow them to interact with their clients non face-to-face. And to give you a bit of a sense of what that means, for example, if you take the Philippines in the month of June, 75% of our applications were submitted via digital remote capabilities. We have also seen quite a bit of new creative and productive activities being rolled out across the region. So, for example, one of the ways our advisors operate is that they create client seminars and would typically bring 100 clients together in a conference room and have an educational seminar. In the middle of the crisis, we moved all of that to webinars online and we are having attendance of several thousand clients joining these digital venues. So, all of that is fueling good momentum, which is offsetting some of the headwinds related to social distancing measures. So, we see that momentum across the region. And then of course, at the same time, we do see quite a bit of uncertainty into Q3 as you would have seen Vietnam and Hong Kong have had a resurgence of COVID-19 cases. And Hong Kong is going through its toughest wave of social distancing measures so far in the last 6 months. And so that’s definitely a headwind. The Philippines announced a new set of social distancing and quarantine measures earlier this week. So, that’s also going to obviously be a headwind. But we are cautiously optimistic in terms of the momentum of our business, all of these headwinds notwithstanding.