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Transcript Summary

Tongcheng Travel delivered a robust performance for the 2025 fiscal year, reporting an 11.9% increase in total revenue to RMB 19.4 billion and a record 253 million annual paying users. The company's fourth-quarter revenue grew 14.2% year-over-year, supported by strong momentum in the accommodation reservation business and the successful integration of Wanda Hotels and Resorts. This strategic acquisition has bolstered Tongcheng's presence in the high-end hospitality market and is positioned as a primary growth driver for 2026. Management also emphasized the deep integration of AI through its DeepTrip planner and automated customer service, which now handles 80% of inquiries, improving operational efficiency. Despite regional challenges in outbound travel to Japan, the company remains optimistic about the global market, targeting a 10-15% revenue contribution from international segments in the medium term. Financial prudence was evident in the proposed HKD 0.25 per share dividend, a 38.9% year-over-year increase. With a focus on high-quality growth, technological innovation, and a strengthening brand portfolio, Tongcheng aims to capitalize on evolving consumer preferences for experiential travel and supportive government holiday policies in the coming year.

Full Earnings Call Transcript — Q4 • 2026-03-24

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Tongcheng Travel 2025 Fourth Quarter and Annual Results Announcement Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Ms. Kylie Yeung, Investor Relations Director of the company. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Kylie Yeung: Thank you. Good morning, and good evening, everyone. Welcome to Tongcheng Travel's 2025 Fourth Quarter and Annual Results Conference Call. I'm Kylie Yeung, Investor Relations Director of the company. Joining us today on the conference call are our Executive Director and CEO, Mr. Hope Ma; our CFO, Mr. Julian Fan; our Chief Capital Officer and President of Wander Hotels and Resorts, Ms. Joyce Li. For today's call, our management team will provide a review of the company's performance in the fourth quarter and full year 2025. Hope will brief us on the company's strategies. Joyce will discuss our business and operational highlights, and then Julian will address the details of financial performance accordingly. We'll take your questions during the Q&A section that follows. As always, our presentation contains forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market operating conditions and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ from those in the forward-looking statements. This presentation also contains some unaudited non-IFRS financial measures. They should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. For a detailed discussion of non-IFRS measures, please refer to our disclosure documents in the IR section of our website. Now let me introduce our CEO, Hope. Hope will be presenting in Mandarin, and our colleague will provide the English translation afterwards. Hope, please go ahead.
Heping Ma: [Interpreted] In 2025, China's travel industry and the company entered a new phase of high-quality development. Over the past year, we witnessed resilient travel demand with increasingly diversified trends as immersive and experiential consumption continues to gain popularity. Amid this backdrop, we deeply dive into user needs and comprehensively optimize our travel products and user experiences. As a result, both our user base and ARPU demonstrated robust growth in 2025 with APU reaching a record high. The robust business growth reflected the ongoing enhancement of our service quality and the expanding influence of our brand. The year 2025 was a year of challenges and opportunities for us. In response to consumers' diversified and personalized needs, we continuously enriched our product offerings, facing growing expectations for premium services. We consistently improved our service quality. Amidst AI-driven technological revolution, we proactively embraced new frontier technologies with an open attitude. All these showcased our strong organizational agility and exceptional execution capabilities, further reaffirming our commitment to our user-centric mission of make travel easier and more joyful. The Chinese government sees travel as a vital pillar of national economic development. The latest 15th 5-year plan has explicitly stated the commitment to expanding the supplies of high-quality travel products and to enhancing travel service standards with the goal of establishing China as a premier travel destination from the pilot implementation of autumn and winter vacations in certain regions to the longest spring festival holiday on record. These expanding holiday arrangements underscore significant governmental support for the travel industry. In terms of demand, travel has become an essential part of people's pursuit of a better life with seasonal themes such as spring flower viewing, summer retreats, all foliage tours and winter snow activities continuously gaining popularity. In the coming year, we will remain focused on domestic market and deep dive into user needs, aiming to further solidify our leading position in the mass market. Simultaneously, we will make intensified efforts to capture growth opportunities in the outbound travel market to propel our global expansion strategy. On the operational front, we will continue to implement technological innovation and product upgrades centered on user experience while enriching membership privileges and deepening user engagement. In 2021, we tapped into the hotel management business. After several years of rapid expansion, it has now gained meaningful scale. The integration of Wanda Hotels and Resorts in 2025 marked a pivotal milestone in the development of our hotel management business. This strategic move strengthened our brand portfolio and ecosystem while substantially elevating our competitiveness and market influence. By consistently executing our strategy and leveraging our strong Internet DNA, we are well positioned to accelerate the segment expansion in 2026, laying a robust foundation for our long-term sustainable growth. Amidst the rapid advancement of AI technology, we are devoted to expanding the application of AI in our business process, further optimizing operational efficiency and enhancing user experience. Building on our user-centric value proposition, market acumen and superior execution capabilities, we are confident that we will continue broadening our competitive moat in the travel industry. Moving forward, we will continue to export our technologies and expertise to empower our partners and support the broader industry ecosystem while strengthening our commitment to corporate social responsibility to foster sustainable industry growth and create greater value for all stakeholders. Next, I will hand over the call to Joyce. She will share with you our business and operational highlights of the fourth quarter and the full year of 2025. Joyce, please go ahead.
Joyce Li: Thank you, Hope. 2025 was a pivotal year of growth and achievement for our company. Beyond the steady expansion of our domestic business, our outbound travel and hotel management businesses made remarkable progress, contributing meaningfully to the overall growth momentum of the company. During the past year, we acutely grasped users' evolving preferences and precisely captured emerging demand. This enabled us to once again deliver solid growth across all business segments, highlighting our excellence in strategic execution, operational efficiency and organizational agility. Throughout the year, our accommodation business sustained robust growth momentum and achieved a record high in room nights sold. In early 2025, we identified a notable shift in users' preference towards high-quality hotels. In response to the changes, we strategically reallocated operational resources to meet this evolving demand, resulting in an approximately 5 percentage point year-over-year increase in the proportion of high-quality hotels sold on our platform. In the meantime, we prioritized enhancing user experience. We not only offer the best value for money products and services, but also provided faster and more responsive support to user requests to further strengthen our presence in the mass market. As for our international business, we continue to enhance our product capabilities by deepening partnerships with third-party providers as well as expanding our product and service offering. In addition, we leveraged our domestic user base to drive cross-sell initiatives and execute the precision marketing campaigns targeting high potential users. All these efforts collectively led to nearly 30% growth in our international room nights sold in 2025. In terms of our transportation business, it continuously demonstrated strong resilience throughout the year. Over the past year, we placed a strong emphasis on improving both user experience and engagement. At the core of the efforts is our Algorithm-driven Huixing system, which leverages advanced algorithm capabilities to provide users with viable and accessible travel solutions by utilizing a comprehensive range of transportation options. The intelligent system significantly enhances the overall travel experience for users. In the fourth quarter, we launched skiing-themed marketing campaigns and rolled out various benefits to skiing enthusiasts so as to reinforce our positioning as an experience-driven platform and further engage our user base. On the international front, we focused on improving operational efficiency by implementing a more disciplined subsidy policy and expanding our VAS offerings. As a result, we achieved a balanced growth in both volume and revenue throughout the year with volume growth of nearly 25% for 2025. As mentioned at the beginning of the speech, 2025 marked a milestone year for our hotel management business with significant progress achieved. This year, we successfully completed the acquisition of Wanda Hotels and Resorts, a company that possesses a renowned portfolio of upper upscale and luxury hotel brands with strong market presence in China. In addition to its hotel management expertise, the company is the only hotel management firm in China with proven specialization in operating scale resorts. This unique capability can help us strengthen supply chain resources in the travel industry, thereby enhancing our influence and competitiveness. Furthermore, Wanda Hotels and Resorts operates its own in-house design institute which is recognized as one of the leading hospitality design teams in China and has received numerous prestigious international awards. The team possesses strong capabilities in designing and managing large-scale hotels as well as convention and exhibition centers. Its design solutions serve not only its own properties, but also high-end hospitality projects across the industry. Following the acquisition, the Wanda Hotels and Resorts team underwent a seamless integration process, resulting in a significant boost to its vitality and optimized organizational capacity and refined strategic direction. This strategic integration has improved our brand portfolio, strengthened our market presence and accelerated the sustainable growth of our hotel management business. Regarding our eLong hotel technology platform, we remain focused on expanding our geographical footprint while prioritizing quality growth throughout the year. The platform also offers technology-enabled hotel management solutions featuring a proprietary property management system, a smart marketing solution, [indiscernible] and service robots for automated in-room delivery. By the end of December, our total number of hotels in operation exceeded 3,000 with more than 1,800 in the pipeline. Looking ahead, we are committed to further expanding our asset-light hotel management business through network expansion and ecosystem enablement. This strategic approach will position us to achieve leadership in China's hotel industry and establish a second growth engine for the company. Traffic operation has been the foundation of our success, leveraging the Weixin Mini program, we have effectively reached a broad user base across China, in particular, those in lower-tier cities. Over the past year, the Weixin ecosystem continued to serve as a critical traffic channel, where we focused on enhancing operational efficiency. At the same time, our stand-alone app, a key driver of new user acquisition, demonstrated strong growth momentum over the past 4 quarters. To attract younger demographics, we rolled out a series of innovative products and engaging marketing campaigns to enhance user mind share and solidify our positioning as an experience-oriented travel platform. As such, the average DAUs of our stand-alone app posted more than 30% growth year-over-year in 2025. Additionally, social media has played an increasingly vital role in engaging users, particularly those younger audiences. During the year, we stepped up our efforts in social media platforms to connect with younger travelers and broadened our user reach through effective and targeted user engagement. We have accumulated the most extensive user base in China's OTA industry. For the 12 months ended December 2025, our annual paying users climbed to 253 million, representing a year-over-year growth of 6%. In addition, the accumulated number of passengers served on our platform over the past 12 months continued to expand and reached 2,034 million with an annual purchase frequency exceeding 8x per user. Moreover, our annual ARPU for the year further rose to RMB 76.8, reflecting a year-over-year growth of 5.5%. Besides our MPU also maintained a growth trajectory throughout the year and increased by 6% year-over-year to 46 million for 2025. As an innovation-driven company, we fully embrace new technologies such as Gen AI to transform our business. In December, we rolled out collaboration with Yuanbao, enabling users to access to our travel booking services via the Weixin Mini program by searching travel itineraries on Yuanbao app. In mid-March last year, we introduced our AI-powered travel planner, DeepTrip, which integrates the supply chain capabilities and market insights of our platform with the resuming capabilities of DeepSeek. Over the past few quarters, we have continuously refined its functionality, incorporating social features to enhance its shareability among users. In the fourth quarter, we embedded a map tool to give users a clearer visual representation of their travel destinations. By the end of December, approximately 6.8 million users in total have utilized DeepTrip. Additionally, we extended its application to some business scenarios by integrating DeepTrip into air ticketing service. We aim to address users' prebooking inquiries as well as helping them find competitive ticket prices, which not only improved operational efficiency, but also enhanced overall user experience. In customer service, AI now covers around 80% of user inquiries, demonstrating its important role in streamlining operations and enhancing user experience. Over the past year, we have consistently advanced the integration of AI in every phase of the customer service process, which not only reduced the workload of customer service staff, but also improved overall operational efficiency. Furthermore, we have made continuous advancements in AI capabilities to enhance its precision in identifying user requests and delivering timeless, contextually relevant and human-like responses. By leveraging AI-driven solutions, we aim to further optimize customer interaction, reduce response time and maintain seamless user support as we continue to grow. In pursuit of global excellence in ESG practices, we have achieved milestones in improving our ESG performance over the past few years. Notably, in 2025, our MSCI ESG rating was elevated to the top AAA level, surpassing 95% of global industry players. In addition, we were included in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook China for the third consecutive year, and we were also honored with the Industry Mover Award for our remarkable progress in driving sustainable development within our sector. All these achievements have not only demonstrated our leadership in ESG performance among global peers, but also reflected our resilience and excellence in corporate sustainability in the face of market uncertainties, evolving policy landscape and dynamic social development, we remain dedicated to further strengthening our ESG practices and contributing to a more sustainable future. I'll stop here and give the call to our CFO, Julian. He will share with you the detailed financials in the fourth quarter and for the year of 2025. Julian, it's your turn.
Lei Fan: Thank you, Joyce. Good evening, everyone. Over the past quarter, China's travel industry showcased remarkable resilience driven by rising demand for immersive and experiential travel experiences across both traditional holiday hotspots and newly emerging destinations. Leveraging our profound understanding of evolving traveler preferences, we delivered another quarter of robust performance, capping off a highly productive year. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we achieved healthy growth in both top and bottom line. We reported net revenue of RMB 4.8 billion, representing a 14.2% year-over-year increase from the same period of 2024. We executed targeted marketing campaigns to strategically prepare for the 2026 Chinese New Year, while upholding rigorous cost discipline to ensure financial prudence. During the fourth quarter, our adjusted net profit rose to RMB 779.8 million, reflecting an 18.1% year-over-year growth. The increase was principally fueled by the enhanced economies of scale and the optimized operations of our OTA business. Our core OTA business revenue registered a 17.5% year-over-year increase to RMB 4.1 billion during the fourth quarter of 2025. Our accommodation reservation business achieved RMB 1.3 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025, representing a 15.4% increase from the same period in 2024. The revenue increase was primarily driven by growth in hotel room nights sold, coupled with a modest rise in ADR. In our domestic accommodation business, we proactively explored diverse accommodation scenarios to capture emerging growth opportunities, including themed offerings tailored to specific demand such as winter vacation and exam season space. For our outbound accommodation business, we strengthened cooperation with third-party partners to expand product offerings as well as our destination footprint catering to growing user demand. In the fourth quarter, our ADR once again achieved year-over-year growth, benefiting from growing consumer demand for high-quality hotels and our proactive adjustment to user subsidy strategies, supported by precise and disciplined marketing strategies. Our net take rate remained stable year-over-year. Our transportation ticketing revenue for the fourth quarter reached RMB 1.8 billion, marking a 6.5% year-over-year increase compared with the same period of 2024. During the past quarter, we heightened our focus on improving user experience. We actively expanded travel supply chain and enriched VAS offerings to deliver a broader range of mobility options and ensure seamless travel experience for users. As for our international air ticketing business, it achieved balanced growth in both volume and revenue, which aligns with our long-term strategy. In the fourth quarter, our international air ticketing revenue increased to more than 7% of our total transportation ticketing revenue. Our other business segment maintained stellar growth momentum with revenue reaching RMB 916.7 million in the fourth quarter, representing a growth of 53% year-over-year. This growth was mainly propelled by outstanding performance of our hotel management business and the consolidation of Wanda Hotels and Resorts. Our tourism business achieved a revenue of RMB 777.5 million, which was largely flat year-over-year. mainly due to our proactive reduction in prepurchased business as well as softer demand for Southeast Asia and Japan. In terms of profitability, our gross profit increased by 18.5% year-over-year to RMB 3.2 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025. The operating profit margin of our core OTA business remained flat year-over-year for the fourth quarter of 2025, while the operating profit margin of our tourism business has been affected by the one-off goodwill impairment. Our adjusted EBITDA increased by 28.6% and reached RMB 1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Adjusted net profit grew by 18.1% to RMB 779.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. Adjusted basic EPS for the fourth quarter of 2025 was RMB 0.33 with a 17.9% year-over-year increase compared to the same period in 2024. Service development and administrative expenses in the fourth quarter of 2025 increased by 6.8% from the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation charges, service development and administrative expenses in total accounted for 18.1% of revenue in the fourth quarter compared with 18.6% of revenue in the same period of 2024. Selling and marketing expenses in the fourth quarter of 2025 increased by 22.7% from the same period of 2024, excluding share-based compensation charges. Selling and marketing expenses accounted for 32.4% of revenue in the fourth quarter compared with 30.2% of revenue in the same period of 2024. Now let's move to our results for financial year 2025. Our net revenue in 2025 achieved RMB 19.4 billion, representing an 11.9% year-over-year increase. The core OTA revenue achieved RMB 16.5 billion, representing a 16% year-over-year increase. Our accommodation reservation revenue was RMB 5.5 billion in 2025, representing a 16.8% year-over-year increase. Our transportation ticketing revenue reached RMB 7.9 billion, representing a 9.6% year-over-year increase. Other business revenue for 2025 achieved RMB 3.1 billion, representing a 34.4% year-over-year increase. Our tourism revenue for 2025 reached RMB 2.9 billion, representing a 6.9% year-over-year decrease. In terms of profitability, our gross profit in 2025 increased by 15.7% year-over-year to RMB 12.9 billion. Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 improved by 26.9% year-over-year to RMB 5.1 billion. Meanwhile, adjusted net profit for 2025 increased by 22.2% year-over-year to RMB 3.4 billion. Adjusted basic EPS for 2025 was RMB 1.45 with a 20.8% year-over-year increase. As of December 31, 2025, the balance of cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investments was RMB 12.3 billion. We highly appreciate our shareholders' consistent support and are committed to delivering sustainable capital returns. Our Board of Directors has proposed a final cash dividend of HKD 0.25 per share, marking a 38.9% increase from last year. This reflects our commitment to enhance capital returns to shareholders. Over the past year, China's travel industry has demonstrated increasingly prominent trends towards diversification and personalization as consumers place growing emphasis on emotional value and unique experience-driven travel opportunities. Notably, the 2026 Spring Festival represented the longest holiday period on record. During the 9-day holiday, consumers divided their holidays into multiple shorter trips such as homecoming visits and vacation travel. Incremental demand from multiple trips during the festival has driven robust growth in our business volume. In addition, the pilot implementation of spring and autumn vacations initially launched in Zhejiang and Sichuan has been expanded to include more regions such as Jiangsu and Anhui. We believe this initiative will help stimulate travel consumption and provide additional momentum to the growth of the tourism industry. Such supportive government policy, combined with sustained strength in user demand, fuels our optimism about the upward trajectory of China's travel industry in the coming year. Moving forward, we will remain focused on our core OTA business, providing users with diverse domestic and international travel products while sparing no effort to enhance user experience. As we continue to improve operational efficiency in domestic OTA operations, we will actively expand our outbound business to bolster our global brand presence. Additionally, our hotel management business will enter a new phase of high-quality growth, building a solid foundation for the company's long-term sustainable development. Concurrently, we will continue to adopt technological innovations as well as deepening the integration of AI technology with our supply chain capabilities, striving to better meet user needs. Last but not least, we will strengthen our corporate social responsibility to support the healthy development of the travel industry and to create greater value for our stakeholders. With that, operator, we are ready to take questions now. Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from the line of [ Xi Wei Liu ] from Citi.
Unknown Analyst: Xi Wei From Citi. Congratulations to the company on a solid operating performance. I have 2 questions. The first about outbound travel. There have been many flight cancellations between China and Japan recently. How has this impacted your outbound business? Could you share the regional breakdown of your outbound markets? And what are your 2026 targets for outbound revenue growth and profitability? The second about large model and AI strategy. The company has actually rolled out some partnerships with large models so far. In the long run, as AI model portals become more important, how will the company position itself?
Joyce Li: Thank you, Xi Wei for the question. The first one is in terms of outbound travel. We did observe a decline in Japan-bound travel volume given the current circumstance. However, the overall impact on our business has been limited as outbound travel accounts for only around 5% to 6% of our total transportation and accommodation revenue. And at the same time, outbound travel demand remains resilient, and we have been seeing users shift to alternative destinations rather than cancel their travel plans. During the Chinese New Year holiday, shop to middle-haul destinations within a 5-hour flight regions such as South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macau remain among the most popular choices, while demand for Thailand also shown signs of gradual recovery. In addition, demand for long-haul travel increased year-over-year with European destinations such as Italy and Spain seeing particular strong growth. We have been actively adjusting our product offerings and marketing focus to capture this demand shift. Overall, given the relatively small contribution of our outbound travel to our core OTA business and the substitution effect across destinations, we do not expect a material impact on our overall performance. And looking ahead to 2026, our priority remains to further improve the quality of growth by enhancing pricing discipline, optimizing marketing efficiency and strengthening cross-selling from air tickets to accommodation and other travel products. At the same time, we will continue to deepen partnerships with global suppliers to improve service capabilities and user experience. Overall, we expect the international business to continue expanding in scale and become an increasingly meaningful contributor to our revenue. Over the next 2 to 3 years, growing business volume and expanding the user base will remain the key priorities while maintaining a strong focus on improving growth quality and profitability. We expect the revenue contribution from the outbound segment to increase to around 10% to 15% with increasing operating leverage over time. And in terms of the AI cooperation, our AI strategy focused on enhancing both user experience and operational efficiency as we continue to evolve from a traditional OTA toward a more intelligent travel platform. We see AI as a core capability that helps us better understand user needs, improving decision-making and optimize service delivery across the entire travel journey. At the same time, AI-driven efficiency improvements are significantly enhancing staff productivity and optimize our cost structure, which we believe will be an important driver of margin improvement over time. On the user side, we have integrated our proprietary travel-specific AI with advanced large language models to develop DeepTrip, which supports itinerary planning, travel inspiration and personalized product recommendations. By combining AI capabilities with our real-time supply and transaction ecosystem, DeepTrip provides a practical and actionable solution and enables a seamless end-to-end booking experience. We will continue to iterate its functionalities to better support users across different travel scenarios. And as a positioning of us, I think that we have been started exploring the partnership with large AI platforms and large model ecosystems. For example, we enabled traffic [ redirection ] from Yuanbao to our mini programs and apps. So our strategy is to actively participate in the emerging AI ecosystem by positioning our platform as a trusted travel service partner with deep market insights and a strong understanding of user behaviors. Leveraging our long-term accumulation of transaction data and operational experience, we are able to provide users with more accurate recommendations and practical bookable travel solutions on our AI platforms. Users who enter through AI platforms complete their bookings within our mini programs or apps and the related user and transaction data remain within our ecosystem. This allows us to maintain direct user relationships, accumulate valuable behavior insights and continuously optimize our product services and personalized recommendations. It also enables us to strengthen user engagement and lifetime value, which remains a key competitive advantage for our OTA platform. Going forward, we will continue to monitor development of the AI ecosystem and expand partnerships where it makes strategic sense, while maintaining our focus on strengthening our product service offerings, operational capabilities and user experience.
Operator: We will now take our next question from Wei Xiong of UBS.
Wei Xiong: First, I want to get your thoughts on regulations because recently, an OTA peer has been under antitrust investigation. So how should we think about the implications to the OTA sector? Do you foresee any impact on OTA's business model or lead to any change in the competitive landscape?
Lei Fan: Thank you, Wei Xiong, -- please go on.
Wei Xiong: Yes. Sure. So second question is on the hotel management business, which is set to become our second growth engine. So I wonder, could management elaborate your strategic focus and planning for this year? And what are the key operational goals and financial metrics that we look to achieve in 2026 and in the medium term as well?
Lei Fan: Okay. Thank you for the question, Xiong, Wei. In terms of the investigations, as you mentioned, we closely monitor regulatory developments recently. At this stage, we have not observed any material changes that would impact our day-to-day operations. Tongcheng has always operated with a strong focus on compliance and fair cooperation with our partners. We believe a well-regulated market environment is beneficial to the long-term healthy development for the company and also for the industry. We will continue to adapt our business practices as required to ensure full compliance in the company. Overall, we remain focused on executing our strategy and delivering sustainable growth and profitability improvement. In terms of the hotel management plan, I think Joyce will have her words.
Joyce Li: Thank you, Xiong, Wei. Actually, following the completion of the Wanda Hotels and Resorts acquisition, the integration has progressed smoothly and is better than our expectations. We have achieved rapid organizational alignment, revitalized organization and teams and further refined the strategic direction of the business. Overall, the post-acquisition integration has been very successful. On the synergy front, we are beginning to see encouraging early results. The addition of the Wanda's upscale and luxury brands has enhanced our overall brand portfolio and strengthened our positioning in the middle to high-end segment of our hotel management business. At the same time, the integration has enabled better resource sharing across business development, operations and membership, which is gradually improving operational efficiency. It also further reinforced Tongcheng's presence within the accommodation supply chain. From the other perspective, Tongcheng also empowers Wanda Hotels and Resorts through our technology capabilities. By providing standardized system tools and digital solutions, we help improve internal operational efficiency while reducing research and development efforts and lowering system maintenance and third-party service costs. From a financial perspective, the acquisition has already delivered a positive contribution at the operational level as Wanda Hotels and Resorts is an established hotel management company with a solid operating track record. The consolidation has enhanced our revenue scale, optimized the business mix and strengthened the earnings visibility of the segment. As we move forward, our development strategy will remain disciplined with a focus on balancing scale expansion with operational efficiency and healthy returns, ensuring sustainable and high-quality growth of the business segment. With continued expansion of scale and improving operational efficiency, together with the contribution from Wanda Hotels and Resorts, we expect the hotel management segment to maintain strong revenue growth with a further improvement in profitability from 2026 onwards. Thank you.
Operator: We will now take our next question from the line of Brian Gong of Citi.
Brian Gong: Two questions here. First is, how do you -- how is the travel consumption trend for the industry in the first quarter considering recovery on hotel ADR. Do we still expect teens level on room nights growth this year? Second question is that recently, [indiscernible] has been under government's investigation. Do you think this will impact their cooperation with us and their stakeholding on us? [indiscernible] is adjusting their hotel business to comply with government's requirement. How will this impact the industry and us?
Lei Fan: Okay. Thank you for the questions, Brian. In terms of the first quarter's performance and also the industry outlook, actually, during the Chinese New Year holiday, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, the China travel market continued to demonstrate very solid demand. According to the Ministry of Transport, national passengers throughput during the 9-day Chinese New Year holiday reached a throughput record 8.2% year-over-year growth during the holiday with decent growth for both long-haul and short-haul travel. Our passenger throughput of railway and airline increased by around 10% and 7% year-over-year, respectively. Meanwhile, according to the industry statistics, overall hotel ADR increased during the Chinese New Year holiday among all segments. With demand for family reunions concentrated in the pre-holiday period, we observed a pickup in passenger throughput during the latter part of the Chinese New Year holiday this year. In response, we promptly adjusted our operational resources, strengthened supply coordinations with our partners and enhance the targeted marketing efforts to capture the rebound in travel demand and improve conversion efficiency in the latter part of Chinese New Year holiday. So as a result, we continue to outperform the industry in the first quarter and also during the 9-day Chinese New Year holiday with especially strong momentum in our accommodation business. Average daily room nights sold increased by 30%. Specifically, room night growth for 3-star and above hotels significantly outpaced that of lower-tier properties. This reflects our ability to respond effectively to changing user preferences as more travelers place greater emphasis on higher quality accommodation experiences. As a result, our hotel ADR in quarter 1 maintained a positive trend during the period and once again exceeded the industry average. For transportation business, we continue to focus on improving monetization, while average daily air ticket volume was broadly in line with the overall market. And also for the room nights growth in the full year of 2026, actually, I cannot provide a very clear numbers here because of the short booking window. But as we mentioned, looking into 2026, we continue to view the long-term fundamentals of China's travel market positively. Consumer preferences are increasingly shifting towards experiential-oriented spending with growing interest in event-driven and themed travel such as concerts, exhibitions and outdoor activities. At the same time, travel is becoming more integrated into everyday lifestyle, supporting more frequent and diversified travel demand. In addition, supportive policy measures aimed at expanding domestic consumptions and promoting high-quality tourism development provide a favorable backdrop for the whole industry. And also for the second question about the investigation, actually, we don't monitor any change on the cooperation with Trip and also, we don't monitor any change of the shareholder structures or potential change of the shareholder structures. So currently, as I mentioned in previous question, we're just focusing on our own execution and long-term competitiveness improvement. So actually, our strategy remains very consistent, focusing on enhancing our user value, improve the ARPU, strengthening our product and service capabilities and deepening cooperation with our suppliers through a mutual beneficial approach. And also, at the same time, we will continue to take a disciplined and prudent approach while monitoring the industry regulatory development. Thank you for the question.
Operator: We will now take our next question from Yang Liu of Morgan Stanley.
Yang Liu: I have 2 questions. The first one is also related with AI. Could management elaborate more about the DeepTrip's contribution to the business, especially on the business -- overall business volume and also cross-selling side? And my second question is regarding the marketing intensity this year, given the geopolitical risk in both China and Japan and also Middle East this year, will management adjust the outbound business marketing intensity? Yes, that is my second question.
Joyce Li: Thank you. The first question is concerning our DeepTrip. As I mentioned, DeepTrip is our AI-driven travel planner that use the reasoning power of DeepSeek and our platform supply chain advantages to create personalized travel itineraries. Since launch, DeepTrip has served about 7 million users with orders placed through the platform steadily increasing over the past few months. Over the past quarters, we continue to enhance DeepTrip with the goal of strengthening user awareness and building long-term trust. We have been continuously upgrading its user-facing capabilities to support more comprehensive travel planning. Key enhancements include the integration of trend transfer data to enable seamless multimodal itineraries. The addition of social sharing features to improve engagement as introduction of a map tool in the fourth quarter to provide a more intuitive visualization of travel plans. In addition, DeepTrip has been embedded into our air-ticketing service to help users address pre-booking inquiries and identify more competitive fare options, delivering a more seamless booking experience. Beyond user-facing applications, we have also extended DeepTrip into different business scenarios to improve operational efficiency. We integrated customer service agent capabilities into DeepTrip to respond to customer inquiries directly within DeepTrip and guide users to human support when needed. For corporate clients, we piloted a travel booking suggesting tool customized according to travel profiles, business travel policies and past bookings. In the future, DeepTrip will continue to serve as a platform for understanding and addressing users' comprehensive travel needs across diverse scenarios. We will further leveraging our AI capabilities across various business segments to provide valuable solutions to users, thereby strengthening our competitive advantages. Additionally, we have begun the cooperation with [indiscernible] to acquire more traffic. We're also actively exploring potential collaborations with our AI agent platform to further broaden our reach and engagement opportunities. We remain committed to leading AI innovation, continuously increasing the investments in this area and delivering cutting-edge user-focused features to elevate our user travel experience. And in terms of the current circumstance in terms of outbound business, we have seen considerable growth potential in the outbound tourism market. As the travel habits evolve, more travelers are eager to explore the international destinations. The number of outbound tourists is still significantly lower than the domestic travelers, revealing a substantial opportunities for expansion in this area. At present, we believe that there are only a limited number of Chinese OTA players have the capabilities and resources to actively drive outbound business. This situation place us in a favorable positioning facing relatively low competitive pressure and allowing us to fully capitalize on the growth potential of the market. Again, our strategy and confidence are anchored in the long-term growth prospects of China's outbound industry and our competitive advantages. While we remain agile in our short-term tactics in response to the market conditions, I think our business momentum remains unaffected. Thank you.
Operator: In the interest of time, we will take our last question from Thomas Chong of Jefferies.
Thomas Chong: Congratulations on a solid set of results. My first question is about our future growth driver and the take rate trend for accommodation and transportation. And my second question is relating to margin. How should we think about the 2026 margin trend as well as the margin driver in the future?
Lei Fan: Thanks for the question, Thomas. For growth, actually, the company's focus remains on achieving a high-quality growth in 2026 by balancing scale expansion with operating efficiency improvement, while continuously enhancing our user value and ARPU. So in the first quarter and also the second quarter, we will prioritize healthy and sustainable growth across our core OTA segments, supported by improved operational efficiency and more refined resource allocation. At the same time, we will continue to strengthen our competitiveness positioning and capture growth opportunity to future expand our market presence. Within the core OTA business, we anticipate that the accommodation business will grow faster than transportation business through the whole year. For accommodation business, we believe that the growth will be driven by volume expansion and ADR improvement, as we mentioned a lot of times. Our volume is expected to continue outpacing the market growth, while our ADR will benefit from the ongoing upgrade in hotel star mix driven by shifts in user preference. So we think it's enough to support a very nicely growth for accommodation business by these 2 reasons. So this year, in terms of the take rate of the accommodation, we expect that the take rate may be stable year-over-year at 2025. For transportation business, volume growth will be in line with the market and still one of the reasons of the revenue growth for transportation. While our take rate improvement driven by cross-sell and VAS will continue to contribute to the revenue growth of the transportation segment. Also, we expect the hyper growth for other revenue, mainly due to Wanda consolidation since the middle of October last year and the hyper growth of our original hotel management and PMS business and also our Black Whale business, the membership business. In terms of the profitability, as we promised, the margin improvement is one of the very important strategic priorities for the company. For the reasons, one, for our core OTA business, the improvement in operational efficiency will continue to be an important driver of profitability over time. In particular, we are leveraging AI technologies to enhance both customer service automation and R&D efficiency, which help improve staff profitability and overall operating efficiencies. For the development of our hotel management business, including eLong Hotel Technology platform and Wanda Hotels and Resorts, we will continue to support its high-quality expansion with a near-term focus on scaling the business, while the return profile is expected to improve progressively as the business matures. For our international business, we will maintain a very prudent approach as we continue to build the foundation for future growth and cultivate the company's next growth engine over the coming years. Last, in terms of the marketing investments, our marketing dollars may fluctuate slightly depending on market opportunity. For example, in quarter 4 last year and quarter 1 this year, we identified strong early booking demand for the 9-day Chinese New Year holiday period and therefore, increased our marketing investments to capture early demand and gain market share. At the same time, we will continue to strengthen ROI management across different marketing channels. So overall, we will continue to balance growth opportunities with disciplined cost management while focusing on improving operational efficiency across the business and improve our margins. Thank you.
Operator: That's the end of the question-and-answer session. Thank you very much for all your questions. I'd now like to turn the conference back to Ms. Kylie Yeung, for closing comments.
Kylie Yeung: Thank you. We are closing the call now. If you wish to check out our presentation and other financial information, please visit the IR section of our company website. Thank you, and see you next quarter.
Operator: Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.