Rong Luo
Analyst · Thomas Chong from Credit Suisse
Thank you, Thomas. This is a very good question and looking forward to the fiscal ’19, the coming year, actually, our principle, our strategy is very clear. In the first place, for the small class and one-on-one business, our key strategy is to maintain the healthy and stable growth. So especially for the small class, we wish you will come back to the range around 30% to 50% top line perspective. And because, past few quarters, we added a lot of classrooms, we have hired a lot of teachers, now, we put them into use gradually. So we probably can see, we can see some good news coming from margin perspective. And for the whole year, we are committed to increase the efficiencies of the small class and one-on-one business and we’re going to see some margin improvements over there, which is also quite clear in Q1. But at the same time, online, I think the coming one or two years is the very critical time for the online and we may come, it’s a huge market, considering we have around 150 million students. So our goal for online is to have more market share. Last year, our online revenue growth is more than 160%. This year, we continue to, we wish we can remain the very rapid growth and healthily. So we will continue to invest in some areas in online to make sure we can get more market share. The first place is, we will continue to invest in technology and research, including content, including new systems and new technologies. In the past few years, we have done a lot of things, for example, learning management systems that come with automations and we have launched the xueersi cloud. And but all of this compared to the traditional tutorings in the past is a huge improvement, but compared to the ideal stage, as we are still in the very beginning sections. So, in the coming years, we continue to invest in, for example, AI technologies, not only in the facial, but also in the speech, in the writing and even more how we can develop some more self-attached learning platform and products to the students, because we will have huge market over there, a lot of geographies, different level of maturity in education and different level of the results that they have. So online, the new technologies, the only way we can increase our efficiency and be more scalable in the future, if we want to manage and get more market share. And I will show one example is, as the whole group, not only for the online, but including small class, one on one, for the whole group, today, we had over 4000 people focused on content development, product development, IT personnel and our target is, coming to the five years, we increased this team number from 4000 to 10,000, so which is the pace we need to invest. Only through the investment in technology, only through the new system, new platform, that’s the only way for us to show scalable and to power more students from the much bigger geographic channel. Secondly, not only, besides the technologies, we also need to do that investment in marketing and in offline, being small, is only to do too much on marketing because the parents can see themselves and they can feel our outcomes directly, but online is a little bit different, especially when we come to the lower tiered cities, xueersi, now that, we’ve always seen in tier 1 and tier 2 cities and secondly is even today, not only for us, even for all the tutoring players in this market, we didn’t figure out a most effective, or maybe most correct way or channel to touch the all students across more than 35 premises in China. So, we need to invest in online marketing and offline marketing, but most of it will be online marketing. We need to touch and pilot different channels under a way, series control on our strategy and our team who is doing online marketing and all of this is, they’re learning so fast, they are making a lot of progress, but firstly speaking, our marketing for us is now, is kind of new tool, so we definitely, we will face some time in this, make sure the team can adapt to the worries of the steep learning curve to make sure we can leverage all the investments [Technical Difficulty] very important time, we need to penetrate, we need to give our offers to the younger students. When they get used to our offer, and they will stay with us for a much longer time. And so in general, I think in a much expected Q1, which will be okay, almost flat and for the full year, depending on the progress in the second quarter in summer promotion time, but I as a CFO, I would like to remind you guys to be more conservative in the margin studies, maybe in some cases, we will decline the margin a little bit, but this range will now be bigger than what we experienced in the fiscal year 2018. In the fiscal year 2018, we declined our op margin by around 1.5 points, so fiscal 19, we will narrow that and we want to give you a kind of conservative case to and in the first place and we will update you in the second quarter, in the second quarter earning call, when we come in to the real time of summer promotions, which is more data, but in today’s strategy, I wish I could maybe breakthrough some online, and we’re gradually and we’re prepared to decline margin a little bit to accelerate our top line in courses online.