H World Group Limited (HTHT) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

H World Group Limited (NASDAQ:HTHT) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 29, 2023 9:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Jason Chen - Director, Investor Relations

He Jihong - Chief Financial Officer

Jin Hui - Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Ronald Leung - Bank of America

Sijie Lin - CICC

Lydia Ling - Citi

Lina Yan - HSBC

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the H World First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.

I'd now like to hand the conference over to the IR Director, Mr. Jason Chen. Please go ahead sir.

Jason Chen

Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to H World Group 2023 first quarter earnings conference call. Joining us today is our Founder and Chairman, Mr. Qi Ji, our CEO, Mr. Jin Hui; our CFO, Ms. He Jihong; and our President, Ms. Liu Xinxin. Following their prepared remarks, management will be available to answer your questions.

Before we continue, please note that the discussion today will include forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provision of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. As such, our results may be materially different from the views expressed today. A number of potential risks and uncertainties are outlined in our public findings with the SEC. H World Group does not undertake any obligations to update any forward-looking statements except as required by applicable laws.

On the call today, we will also mention adjusted financial measures during the discussion of our performance. Reconciliation of those measures to comparable GAAP information can be found in our earnings release that was distributed yesterday. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. The webcast of this conference call, as well as supplementary slide presentation is available @ ir.hworld.com.

With that, now I will hand over the call to our CFO, He Jihong for opening speech. Ms. He, please.

He Jihong

Good morning and good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining our first quarter 2023 earnings call today. With the reopening in China, we have experienced a very positive growth in the first quarter 2023. Our franchisees are rebuilding their confidence and accelerated investment in new [hotels] (ph). After COVID, we observed people in China are willing to spend more experience related activities like travel similar to what happened in the rest of the world.