Jane Sun
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead
Thank you, James. Good morning, everyone. Let me start with an overview of the performance. I would like to start with a quick overview of Q4 and the full year of 2021. Though the industry experienced the COVID resurgence and weaker seasonality in Q4, Trip.com Group delivered a solid performance. In the fourth quarter, our total net revenue remained largely stable year-over-year. The China domestic market was still under a lot of pressure due to new waves of infections and rapid development of Omicron cases. Nevertheless, we're able to maintain our competitive edge by outpacing the industry performance across business lines. In Q4, domestic hotel bookings on Ctrip platform was higher than the pre-COVID 2019 level, exceeding the industry growth by 20% to 25%. Our domestic air bookings also recovered much faster than the market performance. For the full year of 2021, our total net revenue increased by 9% year-over-year, mainly driven by the recovery of our domestic business. Our core OTA brands achieved a GMV of over RMB 500 billion or USD 78 billion, up close to 30% year-over-year. Thanks to our effective cost control and efficiency improvements, we achieved a positive adjusted EBITDA margin of 6% for the full year of 2021. 2021 was an accelerating year for us. In the domestic market, we developed a new strength in short-haul travel and speeded up the construction of content platform, putting customers at the center of our business. We also upgraded our loyalty program with expanded reward offerings and to benefit more loyal customers. Meanwhile, our international brands continue to gain market share in the overseas market with higher efficiency. Here, I would like to highlight our achievements in four areas. First, short-haul travel. Two years into pandemic, short-haul travel remains popular and continue to be a key contributor to our domestic recovery during the past year. In Q4, our intraprovincial hotel bookings grew over 30% compared to pre-COVID 2019 level with local hotel bookings increased by over 50%. Such strong performance for short-haul travel extended into the early Chinese New Year holiday with local hotel reservations increasing by more than 20% year-over-year. We have further augmented our product offerings to include boutique accommodation, planting, hiking, and other high-quality and innovative travel experiences to meet customers' evolving needs. Meanwhile, we are also joined by more business partners to provide value-added services. Our hotel packages now cover more than 7,000 high-end hotels and is contributing over 40% of reservation to these participating partners. The shortened travel radius gives rise to the demand for more vacations and weekend tours, making more short distance travels and take regular and consistent weekend getaway have become travelers new habits, even when long-haul trouble see strong comeback in months when travel curves were more relaxed, demand for short travel remain high. We expect to see high recovery potential in both long-haul and short-haul travels in the effective pandemic control. Trip.com Group has been well prepared and is well-positioned to capture this opportunity to fuel further growth. Second, content platform. During the past few quarters, we have been accelerating our efforts to construct the content platform by following our three-step strategy. First, we further enriched the amount of the content contributed by both professional creators and users. The number of KOLs increased by over 25% sequentially in the fourth quarter. Regular users were also encouraged to start hearing content on our platform. Daily average user-generated content from these new creators grew by over 80% sequentially. Second, we are delighted to see highly user engagement with the number of average daily interactive users on our content channels more than doubled year-over-year in the fourth quarter. Average viewing duration has also been significantly increased. Third, our content platform is highly synergetic with our core business, supported by our strong supply chain. We were pleased to see the content conversion rate has improved steadily and has doubled its previous year level in February. Content platform also serves as a one-stop marketing hub where business partners can showcase their products and engage with users through direct interactions. So far, more than three sales partners have hosted over 10,000 live streams on the Ctrip platform. All these efforts and achievements made us very effective and, therefore, attractive marketing hub for advertising partners. In Q4, our domestic advertising revenue increased over 20% compared to pre-COVID 2019 level. Third, user benefits. In addition to product innovation and content development, we are also dedicated to strengthening our value proposition to users, especially to our global loyal customers. We upgraded our Ctrip loyalty program last year, aiming to enrich benefit offerings and expand our users' coverage. Users are able to redeem their membership points for not only travel-related products, but also rewards across a variety of options. Meanwhile, we also deepened our partnership with business partners, including hotels, airlines, airports through a connected membership program, which allows members to enjoy privileges from both sides. We are glad to see the number of total Ctrip loyalty members increased by over 20% year-over-year in 2021, with high-level members growing at double digits. Moreover, Ctrip members can also enjoy traditional benefit from accommodation reservation under our Trip Plus program in which about 230,000 hotels have signed up to offer extra discounts and value-added services. Fourth, international business. Over the previous quarters, our international brands have been accelerating the integration of technology and supply chain. Strong synergy allows us to further improve brand awareness in overseas market. In Europe markets, air ticket bookings have enjoyed sequential improvements in the fourth quarter despite the impact from Omicron development. The recovery has further speeded up after many European countries decided to relax travel restrictions. Air ticket bookings on our overseas brands increased over 200% year-over-year in the first two months of 2022 and grew faster in the European markets. In Asian markets, we are working closely with local suppliers to address the increasing customer need for staycation in 2021 domestic hotel bookings in overseas market grew over 30% compared to pre-COVID 2019 level and achieved around three-digit growth in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Korean markets. Meanwhile, our activity offerings in the overseas markets are seeing continuous improvement in 2021, with total amount increased by 3 times year-over-year and covering about 2,000 destinations. The extensive product offerings inspire more travelers to explore unique local experiences. In 2021, resolutions for global destination activities on our platform grew by 30% when compared to the pre-COVID 2019 level. We have also been continuously upgrading our back-end systems and technology capabilities to drive up efficiency across business lines in international markets and to overcome the challenges for the surge in customer requests due to pandemic using our upgraded system. The AI chatbot in our overseas call centers can now handle nearly 80% of our total requests. Providing reliable and efficient customer service has always been our mission and the driving force behind our business. In 2021, Trip.com's customer satisfactory rate was 90%. Next, I would like to talk about corporate responsibility. Horizon is among the industry hit the hardest by the COVID-19 crisis. Two years since the onset of the pandemic, the total industry performance is yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. However, over the past three years, Trip.com Group has proactively stood out and made significant efforts to support the travel ecosystem to weather the crisis and prepare for the restoration of global travel. We facilitated guaranteed cancellations and cover the losses for our customers and offered financial assistance as well as operational and marketing support to our travel industry partners. As James mentioned, we have achieved several milestones on the way to pursue industry-leading ESG practices in 2021. In March, we launched our 5-year rural revitalization plan with the target to build 10 countryside retreat for industry benchmark and to empower 100 or more by 2025. These countryside retreat will help boost the local economy by attracting tourists to these areas and creating job opportunities. In June, Trip.com Group joined the UN Global contract, representing our commitment to create a more sustainable future for the travel industry and society. In October, we were glad to receive UN award for gender inclusive workplace as a recognition of our continued efforts in improving gender equality and inclusion. Recently, we rolled out a hybrid work model provided a successful experiment with the hope to improve employee satisfaction and work efficiency. More importantly, we newly established our ESG Committee aiming to incorporate sustainability practices include our future strategic making processes. As we discussed, every cloud has a super lining, while uncertainty around the pandemic development remains. The normalization of global travel is right on track, led by our strategy of local focus and global vision. Our business in domestic China market is steadily climbing up. On international front, we will take the lead to prepare for the global travel reopening. With that, I will now turn the call over to Cindy.