Autohome Inc. (NYSE:ATHM) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brian Gong: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Commitment share, you know, when we will start the contract renewal with dealers for leads generation, and what’s our expectation for the contract renewal this time? Do we still have room to increase our price? And along with, you know, the rising proportion of new auto sales from, new NEVs, how does management think about numbers of dealers from traditional OEMs? Will the number gradually decline in the future? Thank you.

Craig Yan Zeng: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Thank you, Brian, for raising this question. Yes, we already initiated the contracts that renew with our dealers. However, we will not use price increase as a strategy for us to gain more profit. It has never been our strategy. Of course, sometimes using such, we charge more from the dealers. That is because we have been providing more services to our dealers, including offering more digital products to them. And I think that we never take a price increase as a strategy for us to gain more and higher performance. And this year, as we know, the dealers, they generally encounter some difficulties, so, we will of course never raised the price. So, from our side, we would like to empower and enable the dealers by offering more digital products and helping them to cut cost and improve efficiency.

So in a word, in the past and present, we have never been using the price increase as a strategy for us to gain more profits. And the second thing about the number of dealers in your questions. In Q3, we see that the sales from the ICE car dealers dropped by a little bit less than 9%. Of course, the dealers are under some impact. And I see that the sales of the ICE vehicles have been declining. However, one the same — at the same time, the NEV penetration has been on the rise. And you can see that in Q3, the penetration already hit 37%. So there are some rapid development trend for NEV brands. While at the same time, some traditional dealers are also transforming themselves into the NEV dealers. Therefore, our new retail business model, we are also trying to help those NEV dealers to further expand and to tap deeper into this market, because the market in a whole is very vigorous.

And I believe that the number of dealers itself is not an issue at all. This thing is that how we can better adapt to all kinds of changes and dynamics, to reposition those dealers so as to be more adaptable. So by offering those digital products and by facilitating them with our new retail model, I believe that we can do a better job in the future.

Sterling Song: Operator?

Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the conference back to management for closing comments. End of Q&A

Quan Long: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Appreciate your support. And we look forward to updating you on our next quarter’s conference call in a few months’ time. And in the meantime, please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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