Noah Holdings (NOAH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

March 27, 2023, 05:30 p.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Hi, good morning, everyone and welcome to Noah's Fourth Quarter and Yearend Conference Call. I'm Melo Xi, Director of Investor Relations in Noah Group. The Presenter today -- joining us today are Ms. Jingbo Wang, our Co-Founder, Chairlady and CEO and Mr. Qing Pan, our CFO.

Before we start, we would like to kindly remind you that during today's call, we may make four looking statements based on our current expectation of the business. Please keep in mind that these statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause Noah's actual results to differ from these statements. We do not undertake any duty to update these statements. For discussion of some of the risks that could affect results, please see the safe harbor statement section of our 6-K filing. We also refer to certain non-GAAP measures and you'll find reconciliations in our 6-K report made available on the Financial Report section of Noah's Investor Relation website.

Also, please know that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Noah or Noah affiliated products. This call is copyrighted material of Noah and may not be duplicated without consent. Also, we will appreciate for you to change your display name to first and last name, plus your institution name.

With that, I would like to welcome our Chairlady and CEO; Ms Wang Jingbo.

Jingbo Wang

For the agenda of today’s conference call, I’d like to start by discussing the macroeconomic landscape, an update on our globalization strategy. Then report on Noah’s overall performance and development of various business segments in 2022. Mr. Pan, will then present financial information for the year and conclude with the Q&A session.

Year 2022 was an extraordinary year with an extremely complex global macroeconomic environment. The extreme market gyrations caused by the Russian and Ukraine conflict during the first quarter, Shanghai-like lockdown during the second and the rapid Fed rate hikes spanning almost the entire year has by far exceeded our expectations.

In other words, we have seen the most drastic drop in investor confidence in decades. Domestically, the Chinese lockdown index reached its highest level twice since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.

Frequent lockdowns severely restricted economic activities with the household savings rate reaching its highest levels since the beginning of the outbreak and consumer confidence hitting rock bottom.