Trip.com Group Limited (NASDAQ:TCOM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jane Sun: Yes. The margins, and if you look at our margin level in, for example, 2019, the most profitable segment, for sure is the outbound travel business. And the second one is our domestic businesses. And for the international part, for example, our Skyscanner business or the other well established international brands, they also have a very healthy margins. But for the Trip.com business, is still in the investing period, and still have some losses. But our team will work very hard to drive the efficiencies of our growth strategy for the Trip.com business. In terms of the lower-tier cities or lower end of the markets, yes, during the pandemic, we have been very successful in gaining a lot of market share in the lower end of the business.

Their total revenue contribution has comparatively increased. However, for the margin profile of our domestic business, I think still the mid to high end of the business or mid to high end of the customer base, contribute most of our modules. And even after the €“ yes, especially during the pandemic, we have been working very hard to increase the efficiencies across all the business lines. I think after the pandemic, we have the confidence to continuously to maintain these efficiencies, also including the China domestic business. So, we don’t think that the margin would be impacted because of the revenue mix between the mid to low end to the high end, because not only from the mid to low end of the business we are gaining market share, we are also further strengthening our market share.

Our market share in the mid to high end of the hotel business that is very critical to our overall margin profile in the future. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you for the questions. We have another question from the line of Wei Xiong of UBS. Please go ahead.

Wei Xiong: Good morning management, congrats on a good quarter and thank you for taking my question. I want to follow-up on competition from a different angle, as well your content strategy. So, given the backdrop of very encouraging travel market recovery this year, I am just wondering if we see any changes in the competitive dynamics from short video platforms, or do we anticipate potentially more competition in the travel market from new entrants? And also related to that, could the management update on the progress of our content strategy just to defend our market position there? Thank you.

Jane Sun: Yes. It’s quite natural because I think travel industry is one of the most attractive industry in the world. That’s why, we always can see a lot of players or potential players that are trying to enter into this space. However, yes, we are very €“ as always, we are very confident in the bright future of this industry. But at the same time, we have seen the content platform pretty much focused on the location based service and pre-sell products, of which the overlap with our core business at this moment is quite limited. And of course, we as always, we will closely monitor the market situation and will keep the investors updated. But most importantly, we still think we will remain very focused on developing our core capabilities, such as our strong product innovation and the service and fulfillment capabilities, so that we will make sure that we provide always the most reliable services and frictionless customer experience to the customer, yes.

And we are very fortunate to be in this promising industry. And as always, we will make sure we do the best in the core competence in this industry, because we are the experts. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you for the questions. Next up, we have the line from Joyce Ju from Bank of America. Please go ahead.