Now you’re trying to pivot and you’re looking to buy another company to try a different direction, so there’s a lot of lack of confidence in the strategic direction of this company, and instituting a dividend, as a prior person said, like some of your competitors have would instill some good confidence and probably would get the stock price up significantly and on the radar screen. You need to learn to walk before you can run, and having a dividend would instill some confidence among American investors. Thank you.
Ning Tang: Thank you. Let me elaborate a bit more regarding the point you just made. First of all, let me report that we’ve done quite a bit of work regarding communications with retail investors. For example, we rebuilt our website investor communications content, and I was part of it. I personally wrote our AI strategy and there are three pages that I’m very excited about, so if you can go please take a look at them, I’d love to have your comments. Also, we’ve taken some remarks from KOLs in the U.S. We are incorporating their suggestions in our communications, so the retail investor communication work is being done in a thoughtful way. Secondly, let me say the insurance business is our core business, and as a whole, it grew nicely last year, 2023, and we expect the insurance business will grow nicely this year and in future years.
Lastly, I’m not sure where the concept of us buying a company to do AI came from, probably due to my not doing great communication or making clear. No, we are not going to buy any company, we are going to develop our own AI capability, and also we are going to make some strategic investments and strategic partnerships in a small way, so this is how we’re going to build our AI capability, because there are just so few great AI-native guys out there. Microsoft had to invest in open AI to develop its capability, it didn’t really just do AI in-house. I think Microsoft did the right thing, and we are doing the right thing doing it in-house, at the same time doing strategic partnerships and investments. That’s really serving the–going to serve the shareholders and the company well, in my view.
But of course, as I mentioned earlier, we’re going to report our progress in a thoughtful way. Hopefully when there’s more visibility, you will feel more comfort. Thank you.
Keyao He: I’ll just add one point on retail investor communication. In fact, we have been increasing our retail investor communication for recent months. If you look at our website, we have been publishing more news regarding [indiscernible] business update to the public, so we are statistically being more active in helping or exposing the public, especially in the U.S. market. Apart from the news that we released [indiscernible], if you look at our website you can see it, and if you can search Google it, you can see the latest business update from us. Apart from that, we also built out our own social media platforms. We have an official account on LinkedIn and also X – Twitter, and welcome to follow us on that. We will publish the latest business news on that as well.
If you have any questions, please follow us and you can ask us questions on that as well. Apart from that, in the future we will release more news and enhance our communications with retail investors, but not only retail investors but institutional investors as well, and we will attend more international conferences, some of them in domestic China and some in Hong Kong, and also hopefully in the U.S. as well. There’s a lot of things happening around, so stay tuned. Thank you.
Peter Ruh: Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Boyd Haynes [ph] with ACI. Please go ahead.
Boyd Haynes: Hi, thanks for squeezing me in here. I had a question, some questions about your ecommerce segment. That appears to be the fastest growing segment within the company right now, and I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more detail about what are the things that are driving that growth and what are your expectations for the growth in 2024, and if you could also talk about its margins and how they compare with the margins in your other divisions, that would be great. Thanks.
Ning Tang: Thank you. I’ll first offer some big picture strategic thoughts, and Mei can please add to it. Basically this is our strategy to enhance, strengthen our customer relationships, and also basically cross-selling to an ever-growing and happy customer base, and also by selling them more and more things they really need, they really like, we know them better. This is the strategic rationale. Since this business had a low base, of course the growth rate has been quite stellar. I am not sure it can grow as fast going forward, but since our products are cross-sold through–to our customers, are quite well received, so–but I hope also with AI content, we will be able to please them more. Can Mei please provide further details? Hello, Mei?
Mei Zhao: Yes, for our lifestyle business line, I think we have a very good growth in the last year. I think the key driver is our customers, they just have more and more MAU, they’re going to have more attachment on our app, and I think as we have launched some of their interesting services, like some soft development because we have some programs our customers can learn from courses they’re interested, even including financial planning and AI even, and also I think in the future as our growth with customer acquisition, I think this part of the business has very healthy growth as well, especially for AI empowered [indiscernible] of the business, but service as well, I think, so we have very confidence on this new year, and that’s going to help.
Customers will just spend more time on our app, and I think that will be even better understand our customer behavior and to have a better judgment of their payment habits as well. I think that’s going to be very key to our products and services. Thank you.
Ning Tang: Yes, it’s a great–I’d like to add a channel to sell digital goods, like video content, like memberships, IT membership and so on, so with some good discount or–yes.
