Emma Xu: So, my question is about your U.S. market. As management just mentioned that U.S. market contributed to around 30% of new clients in third quarter. So, this will be a very important new market for your company. Could you tell us what’s your plan for this market in the medium to longer term? And could you tell us what’s your client characteristics in this market? For example, the average client assets, the client acquisition costs for U.S. clients as well as payback period?
Arthur Chen: Okay. Our founder, Leaf, will answer this question. Thank you.
Leaf Li:
Daniel Yuan: We continue to iterate on client incentives and across various channels in the U.S. and our continued marketing and our co-operations with KOL helped improve our brand awareness in the U.S. market. And despite the acceleration of client acquisition, average assets per paying client has decreased as market downturn offset strong net asset inflows of our clients. And looking into the fourth quarter and as result of the upcoming holiday season, we expect the sentiment to affect some U.S. clients’ willingness to open accounts and transfer funds, causing client acquisition to slow down in the U.S. In the meantime, we will continue to focus on improving the client quality and the efficiency of client acquisition. And in terms of client acquisition costs, right now, the CAC in the U.S. is lower than the overall group’s client acquisition cost.
However, the payback period will be much longer. I think we are still patient on our monetization in the U.S. as we plan to rollout a number of new product features in the coming quarters that we think can meaningfully improve monetization. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. We’ll now take our next question. Please stand by. This is from the line of Peter Zhang from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Let me do the translation. This is Peter Zhang from JP Morgan. Congratulations on the strong results. My first question is about the market share in Hong Kong. We noticed that the Futu’s trading volume in Hong Kong declined by 28% quarter-over-quarter while Hong Kong — the total trading volume in Hong Kong market declined by 18%. So, we wish to understand what’s the reason behind. My second question is on the IT spending. Management gave guidance of 20% headcount increase in 2022. I wish to check what’s the progress on this initiative and what will be the R&D expense trend going forward?
Arthur Chen: Thank you. I will take both of the questions. I think number one, the comparison is our trading volumes change patterns versus the overall markets. The reason behind in my humble view is that the overall markets including retail investors and also institutional investors, when the market becomes extremely volatile and extremely challenging, normally institution investors trade more tactically and responsibly versus retail investors. Given certain revamps, few retail investors may continue to hold their positions, unlike institution investors will become more nimble and react to the market volatility. This is the question number one. For question number two, I think year-to-date, we are on track in terms of the next new headcount increase in this year and in particular in terms of delta, the overall headcount increase has already peaked in terms of speed versus the past two years.
So, down the line, I think, we are — we are still through the internal reevaluations about next year’s budget, in terms of headcount, but I do think the increase of the headcount, especially in the R&D side next year will be quite stable or the speed maybe smaller — even smaller than this year. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. And this concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to hand back to Daniel for closing remarks.
Daniel Yuan: That concludes our call today. And on behalf of the Futu management team, I would like to thank you for joining us tonight. And if you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or any of our Investor Relations representatives. Thank you and goodbye.
Operator: Thank you. This does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for participating. And you may now disconnect.
