Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Quhuo's first- quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Well, at this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. Today's conference call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now I'd like to turn the conference over to your host for today's conference call, Annia Sun, Investor Relations Director of Quhuo. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Quhuo first- quarter 2021 earnings conference call. The conference results were released earlier today and are available on our IR website. On the call today are Leslie Yu, Chairman and CEO; Co-Founder Zhen Ba; and our CFO, Sandra Ji. Leslie will review business operations and company highlights, followed by Sandra, who will discuss financials and guidance. They will both be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session that follows. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are based on the management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions, and related to the events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance, and achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. For the information regarding this and other risks, uncertainties, and factors included in the company's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company doesn't take any obligations to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required under law. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Leslie Yu. Please go ahead. Thank you, Annia, and thank you all for joining our first- quarter 2021 earnings conference call. We are pleased to deliver strong growth momentum in Q1, with revenue increased by 116% year-over-year to RMB 846 million, driven by solid performance across all business segments. The solid results reflected a prosperous, dynamic, and healthy flexible workforce market and our leading position in the Chinese gig economy. For 2021, offering and Multi-scenario Deployment has been at the forefront of our initiatives to scale the business, and we have made good progress to offer workers a diversified range of open jobs. Thousands of job seekers can now find more suitable career opportunities on our platform and earn higher incomes. Now let me walk you through our key business performance in Q1. First, let's look at our biggest revenue contributor, the on-demand food delivery business. As life returns to normalcy with fewer restrictions and the economy recovers from COVID-19, we continue to witness the ongoing evolution of consumer behaviors in China. The on-demand food delivery service has become not only a necessity during weekdays but also a high-quality source of fresh and healthy food for family gatherings. This was especially evident for this year's Spring Festival. Demand for food delivery increased year-over-year compared with the same period in previous years, as people were encouraged to stay in place for the popular holiday. We view this unprecedented strong demand as a test for the resilience of our large delivery network, as well as a strategic opportunity to sustain our leading position and expand market share. On one hand, we stepped up our efforts to stabilize existing rider teams to ensure sufficient capacity to fulfill incoming orders, while we actively launched more recruiting programs to hire additional riders. We provided extra benefits to both existing and new riders to increase our attractiveness. As a result, we outperformed the industry and enjoyed stronger order volume growth during this Spring Festival period compared with previous years. For Q1 overall, the number of average monthly delivery orders was 35.9 million, up 113% year-over-year. On the cost side, due to seasonal volatility in labor costs and increased spending on benefits and an expanded team of riders, we reported a loss for this quarter. We view this as a short-term phenomenon and remain fully confident in our strategic direction to reinforce and grow our workforce. We believe we have a real opportunity window to take advantage of our growing reputation and expand our resources to capture demand as it grows. This will give us a competitive edge down the road as we become the employer of choice for a growing number of blue-collar and migrant workers seeking better job opportunities in cities. Going into Q2, as more migrant workers return to the labor market and ease labor shortages, we have seen the supply-demand balance return to normal level. We believe this will normalize our cost structure and improve our profitability in Q2 and the rest of 2021. Next, I would like to give you an update on our Housekeeping Solutions. In Q1, revenues from Housekeeping and Accommodation Solutions increased 51 times year-over-year. After completing our investment in Lailai, a leading on-demand workforce platform that specialize in housekeeping solutions for hotels and B&Bs in China, we were able to quickly integrate Lailai into our platform and ramp up our service capacity. Together, we currently serve a number of large-scale international hotel chains and thousands of B&Bs nationwide. We are optimistic this business has strong growth potential going forward. Our mobility businesses, which includes shared-bike and ride-hailing solutions, continued their strong recovery in the first quarter. Revenues increased by 455% year-over-year. In Q1, we added three more cities for our mobility services, and strong synergies have been created as our robust technology platform can support our multiple business ecosystems. Now I want to go over the progress of a strategic initiative called multi-scenario deployment. Our goal is to increase jobs diversity and work opportunities, and provide flexibility to help workers find better jobs for their existing and evolving skill sets in order to increase their incomes. Currently, our metrics for frontline management networks for labor management and operations has enabled us to largely utilize our labor force on the multi-scenarios. We believe this will help us scale and expand our entire network over time. As of the end of March 2021, we provided services to 1,066 business circles across 122 cities nationwide, among which there were 48 cities where we provided two or more type of services, compared with only eight cities of multi-scenario deployment a year ago. Offering multi-scenario services can significantly improve the efficiency of our operation and the entire gig economy industry. Many of the service scenarios, such as on-demand food delivery and ride-hailing, have apparent peaks and troughs in usage every day, resulting in a kind of great waste of human resources and fixed assets put in place. Our platform empowers workers to engage in different jobs at different time period, leveraging diverse vocational skills training and daily management. In this way, we can achieve better use of resources, improve efficiency, and save costs. According to our statistics as of Q1 2021, the number of registered workers on our platform reached nearly 240,000, compared with 98,000 a year ago. The cumulative number of workers who engaged in two or more types of jobs on our platform has reached 15,500, increasing by about 4,000 from the end of 2020. The rapid development of our multi-scenario services has also made the gender mix more balanced. Thanks to our rapid expansion in the housekeeping business recently, the proportion of female workers registered on our platform has been close to 10% in Q1, more than doubled from a year ago. In addition, the quick expansion of our platform and the decreasing turnover rate of workers also resulted in an increase in the average compensation of our workers. In Q1 2021, riders with an average monthly income of at least RMB 5,000 accounted for 46% of total group, compared with 33% a year ago. In summary, our strategic priority for 2021 is to rapidly scale up our platform. With the continuous diversification of services and growing workforce on our platform, we believe we will play an increasingly important role in China's gig economy and capture more market share going forward. This concludes my prepared remarks. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Sandra, who will discuss our financial results for the quarter. Thanks, Leslie. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Quhuo Group's quarter 2021 call. Please be reminded that all amounts quoted here will be in RMB, unless stated otherwise. For the first quarter of this year, our total revenues were RMB 846.5 million, representing an increase of 115.6% year-over-year, primarily due to rapid growth across all business segments. Revenues from on-demand food delivery solutions were RMB 815.4 million, representing increase of RMB 109.5 million from RMB 389.3 million in the first quarter of last year, primarily due to the increase in delivery orders fulfilled as a result of the industry growth in the aftermath of COVID-19 and our continued penetration expansion into new geographic markets. From the beginning of this year, we combined shared-bike and ride-hailing solutions together to form a new business segment named mobility service solutions. Revenues from Mobility Service Solutions were RMB 17.1 million, representing an increase of 455.7% from RMB 3.1 million in the first quarter of 2020, primarily due to our enlarged customer base and service scope in shared-bike solutions and the increase in the number of ride-hailing drivers on our platform. Revenues from Housekeeping and Accommodation Solutions were RMB 13 million, representing a significant increase from RMB 0.2 million in the first quarter of 2020. This was primarily due to our enlarged customer base for provisions of Housekeeping and Accommodation Solutions—including hotels and B&Bs— as part of the network synergy we achieved following the acquisition of Lailai and Chengtu Home, respectively. Cost of revenues were RMB 868.8 million, representing an increase of 127.7% year-over-year, primarily attributable to the strategic temporary subsidy policy for workers that we adopted to meet rapid growth in demand as a result of the changing customer behaviors and our continuing expansion. General and Administrative expenses were RMB 44.2 million, which includes share-based compensation of RMB 5.9 million, representing an increase of 60.6% from RMB 27.5 million in the first quarter of last year. The increase was primarily due to the increase in stock compensation, share-based compensation, rental, and office expenses. Including share-based compensation, General and Administrative expenses increased by 46.2% year-over-year, and as a percentage of our total revenues declined to 4.5% from 6.7% in the first quarter of 2020. Research and Development expenses were RMB 4.7 million, representing an increase of 82.3% from RMB 2.6 million in the first quarter of 2020, primarily due to the increase in compensation for research and development personnel. Operating loss was RMB 17.8 million, compared to RMB 19.1 million in the first quarter of 2020. Including share-based compensation, the adjusted operating loss was RMB 65.0 million, compared to RMB 17.8 million in the first quarter of 2020. We also recorded our loss net of CNY 20.4 million, compared to our income net of CNY 3.3 million in the first quarter of 2020, which primarily due to the decrease in fair value changes of investments in a mutual fund. The income tax benefit was CNY 7.3 million, compared to the income tax expense of CNY 2.9 million in the first quarter of 2020, primarily due to the improvement of estimated annual effective tax rate. The adjusted EBITDA loss was CNY 78.5 million, compared to adjusted EBITDA loss of CNY 10.4 million in the first quarter of 2020. The adjusted net loss was CNY 79.3 million, compared to adjusted net loss of CNY 20.3 million in the first quarter of 2020. This concludes our prepared remarks. Thank you for your attention. We are now happy to take any of your questions. Operator, please go ahead. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the pound or hash key. Please stand by while we compile the question and answer roster. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We have a question from the line of Darren Aftahi from Roth. Please go ahead. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Hello? Yes, great. Good evening. Two questions. Leslie, your comments on cost normalizing post the first quarter. With your gross margin being negative, and I understand from last time on call, you talked about how input costs were higher with the workers. In the months of April, May, and June is almost done, has your food delivery business gross margin gone back into the positive? Is there any reason to think that that won't be the case for the remainder of the year? Yeah, it has turned to the positive, and we believe that it will last for the rest of the year. Yeah. Has that trended back to the normal levels that you've seen in the past, or is cost of maintaining your ridership base going to be elevated going forward? Yeah, we consider that is going back to the normal level. We are also happy to say that the general administration expense, we are still keeping decline. Great. Your comments on multi-scenario deployment, so 48 cities. I'm curious two things on that topic. You're in 48 cities versus I think eight. Where can that go? In terms of the number of services per city, where do you think that figure can go? Do you have the appropriate infrastructure on a technology basis, whether it's analytics, artificial intelligence, to actually optimize your riders? I guess what I'm trying to get at is how efficient is your workforce base today, even though you've increased it to 48 cities with two or more types of service, versus where you think it actually can be in the future? If there's any investment you would need to make, what is that? That we are happy to say that for food delivery sector and the efficiency and what we call the productivity for each food delivery workforce is increasing and is now average is about more than 30 and even some reach to the 40. Unfortunately, the productivity and increase for food delivery is only happened in the peak time for food delivery industries. We are trying to copy this efficiency to other working scenarios such as like shared-bike maintenance and such like for the ride-hailing. In order to do that, our technology platform has contributed great efforts to help us to manage this multi-scenario deployment by hour in daily operations. The technology is helping us to enable this workforce with professional skill set by online training and together with our on-ground training. They will match the skill set with each workforce together with the time requirement and the skill requirement for each different multi-scenarios. With the support of our technology platform, we are able to better match our workforce on the platform to different working scenario and to manage them to fulfill the orders in different time zone. Yeah, thank you. Great. If I could squeeze one more in. Just with where your share price is in capital allocation strategy, I'm just curious if there's any thought about potentially doing a buyback or whether you think that capital investment is best deployed for growth? We consider that the ride service market in China is very large, and the market players are fragmental and we call maybe small. The Quhuo is already have the predominant position, and we believe can make it even better in the future. What we need is only time, and also we have the time to further prove to the capital market. Thank you. Thank you, Leslie. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Thomas Shen from Nomura. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Good evening, management. Thank you for taking my question. I have a question on our growth outlook. How do we see our on-demand food delivery revenue for the rest of the year? I understand we have a more normalized base in the second half of this year. I would like to touch upon how do we see our revenue per order for the food delivery business going forward. Thank you. Afraid I can't give accurate growth rate for the revenue growth for the rest of the year. I can say that we are quite happy with the revenue growth for the last three quarters and both in On-Demand Food Delivery and for Mobility Service Solutions and the Housekeeping Solution. As far as we can see, those three business lines will achieve the significant growth for the rest of the year. Your second question is about the revenue per order, right? Perfect. Thank you. Per order. Yeah. Actually, currently, you can calculate that revenue per order for first quarter is around RMB 7.6 per order. For the rest, we expect the price will be relatively stable around this kind of level. There won't be significant change according to our opinion. Thank you. Could I follow up on a question on the food delivery business? I understand the authority has been renewing or considering policies to boost or enhance food delivery workers' social benefits, including some kind of social insurance. What is our take on this policy and if there will be any impact on our margins going forward? Okay. I'll let Zhen Ba answer the question. Okay. You mean the social security policy, right? Yes. Thank you. Okay. We are noticed that currently there are some local government have put out a policy about riders should have their social security policy. We have to notice that by the end of May, our Premier, Mr. Li Keqiang, has in a central committee meeting, he has the point that we have noticed there are 200 million staff people working on the gig economy currently in China. It's very important to keep the jobs and maintain the stability of the job and the security of the society. He also mentioned that this is a new type of job, cannot be fit into the old system. The central government currently is discussing and developing some kind of new type of social security focused on the gig economy staffs. According to the Premier, he mentioned that the insurance company should give up some profit, and the government will compensate part of the loss for the insurance company. According to our understanding, in the near future, this kind of social insurance issue going to be solved by commercial insurance, which have already been covered currently by Quhuo. Currently, we already provide the third-party insurance and the labor injury insurance on commercial insurance basis to our riders. In the near future, we didn't see it's going to be a big impact to us because this is a policy we've already been taking, and this is cost we already have currently right now. I don't think this is going to be a big impact to us in the near future. Thank you.
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