Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the H World Group Limited Q1 2021 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. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Jason Chen. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Linton. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Welcome to H World Group's 2021 first quarter earnings conference call. Joining us today is our founder and CEO, Mr. Ji Qi, our President, Mr. Jin Hui, our Chief Digital Officer, Ms. Liu Xinxin, our CFO, Ms. Chen Hui, our Deputy CFO, Mr. Li Dong, and Ms. Ye Fei. 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 U.S. 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 filings 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 on H World Group's website at ir.hworld.com. With that, now I will turn the call over to Mr. Ji Qi. Mr. Ji, please.
Good morning and good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. As you all know, at the beginning of this year, the resurgency of COVID-19 in several cities posed a challenge to the lodging industry and later led to the stay local guidelines by the government before Chinese New Year holiday. After a dismal January and February, we are very pleased to see a strong recovery in March, especially after National People's Congress meeting in Beijing. H World Group's RevPAR recovered to 95% of 2019 level in March, compared with only 56% in February. The good news continues in April and May. During Labor Day holiday, our RevPAR recorded 25% growth compared with the same period of 2019.
In terms of the macroeconomy, despite the impact of COVID-19 resurgence, we saw China's economic remain resilient with GDP in the first quarter achieving 19.3% growth compared with 2020 and 10.3% growth compared with 2019. As the vaccination process is taking place smoothly in China, we are confident that China's economy will fully recover from the pandemic and drive the growth of business travel. Meantime, we also observed more diversified demands for the travel experience, especially regarding the leisure travel and upscale hotels. We are exploring different opportunities, of which some details will be discussed by Jin Hui later. With that, I will turn the call to Jin Hui to update our recent business development. Thank you.
Thanks, Ji Qi. Moving through our business updates, I would like to take the opportunity to introduce again our new finance management team. Chen Hui, CFO of H World Group. She was the CFO of Cjia Group Limited, Huazhu's affiliate company from March 2018 to February 2020. From 2014 to early 2016, she served as Huazhu's Executive Vice President of Finance, responsible for internal financial management and as Chief Financial Officer. Her previous work experiences also includes CFO of Homeinns Group and Financial Director of trip.com. She has deep financial management expertise in the travel and hotel industries in China.
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Mr. Li Dong, Deputy CFO. He has served as Chief Accounting Officer of Huazhu since June 2020, and Chief Financial Officer of Huazhu China region since December 2020. Before joining Huazhu, he was the Financial Planning and Analysis Head of Asia-Pacific, Middle East and North Africa regions of PepsiCo, Inc.
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Ms. Ye Fei, Deputy CFO. She has served as Huazhu's Vice President of Strategic Investment and Capital Markets since March 2016, and is in charge of Huazhu's investment and portfolio management globally.
Prior to joining H World Group, she was a director of CITIC Capital's direct investment team.
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I would like to emphasize again on our quality hotel expansion strategy. It is very important for H World Group to have a super large-scale growth capability based on quality hotel expansion strategy. It is the backbone to support H World Group's long term sustainable growth.
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Last quarter, we actually announced a very detailed definition of our quality hotel. Since the third quarter last year, we started to clean up those low quality hotels in our portfolio, especially those soft brands.
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This year, we would not only continuously improve standard of quality for the hotels in operation, but also gradually improve the quality requirements and standards for pipeline and new signings, specifically for our non-standardized brands. Due to the low standardization rate, we observed some inconsistencies in terms of quality standards for both construction and new signings.
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We will further improve quality standard for our non-standardized brands by requiring them to review the construction if we found some quality issues, and actually actively reviewing our pipelines to detect and remove those unqualified hotels. I need to emphasize again that H World Group's development is certainly around the customer centric principle. We would not only chase for the hotel expansion speed by sacrificing the quality.
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I will move to our current update in terms of the recovery. Please turn to page three. As mentioned by Ji Qi earlier, our RevPAR recovered strongly after travel restriction being removed since later March. RevPAR started turn to positive growth in later April. Full months of April recovered to the same level of 2019. The trend continues in May. As of May 23rd, RevPAR grew by 7% compared to the same period of 2019. Both business and leisure traveling are recovering steadily. I still need to remind you that there are still some resurgence of COVID-19 in China, and therefore we will keep our prevention measures carefully, and hope that the situation happened for our healthy growth in the future.
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We observed that the recovery trend is different among different city tiers. Please turn to slide four. We observed that lower tier cities recovered better than higher tier cities. In March, RevPAR in Tier 3 and below cities had exceeded 2019 level, and in April, RevPAR in Tier 2 cities also exceeded 2019 level, while Tier 1 cities are slightly lagging behind. That again shows the resilient economic conditions in lower tier cities.
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Our lower tier cities penetration strategy is further progressing. Please turn to page five. At the end of March, 38% of our hotels in operation are located in the Tier 3 and below cities, and 54% of our pipelines are from lower tier cities, which could lead more contribution from the lower tier cities in the future. As of March 24th, we have penetrated into 741 cities in China.
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Please turn to slide six. Apart from the lower tier cities penetration, we are further exploring the new opportunities in the lifestyle hotel segment. Firstly, for our own brand, the Crystal Orange Hotel, its new flagship store will be soon opening Shanghai. This is the new Crystal Orange Hotel 2.0 version. We would like to provide new products to the business travelers from the lifestyle perspective with better and warm services. The products will provide customers unique, elegant, and exquisite lifestyle experiences during their journey. We are very pleased to announce that we recently completed the annexation of CitiGO Hotel. Such acquisition would further enrich our lifestyle brand portfolio. Please turn to slide seven. CitiGO's brand positioning is a lifestyle hotel with fun, targeting younger generations, creating a new concept space with functions of accommodations, caterings, leisure, shared office and social networking in the center of the city.
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Slide eight shows some basic information of CitiGO Hotel. The brand was established in 2017. As of May 1st, it has total 28 hotels in operation with over 4,800 hotel rooms covering 13 cities. From the latest operating data, in April 2021, CitiGO's RevPAR in Tier 1 city achieved RMB 384 and RMB 217 in Tier 2 cities. We believe that H World Group's strong platform capability could further enhance and accelerate CitiGO's future development, and in return, the brand could help further enrich H World Group's lifestyle brand and create more opportunity for H World Group to explore in the lifestyle segment.
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In last quarter, we announced our joint venture with Sunac. We are very pleased to update you that there will be two hotels from the JV soon open in May. One will be the first Steigenberger brand hotel in China, and another one will be the Song Hotels. Both hotels are located in Jinan.
Slide nine and slide 10 show some photos of these two hotels. We are continuously progressing in our high-end hotel segment penetration, not only from the joint venture, but also for other brands. With that, I will now turn the floor to Liu Xinxin to discuss our recent development in direct sales and technology.
Thanks, Jin Hui. Good morning and good evening, everyone. As we all know that direct sales and technology capabilities are critical elements of H World Group's three-in-one super component business strategy. We continuously put a lot of effort to grow our member base and strengthen our direct sales capabilities together with full utilization to our hotel operation. Please turn to slide 12. Our hotels remain the key channels for us to acquire the new members. By the end of March in 2021, our total members increased by 12.5% to 117.4 million compared to last year. More importantly, our central reservation contribution achieved a historical high at 57% after COVID-19, improved by 8% compared to the first quarter of 2020. We are very pleased to see our CRS contribution further enlarged, which was migrated from the offline traffic, such as the walk-in customers. Moving to slide 13.
During the first quarter, we successfully launched our H World App version 3 on March 28th. After that, we saw our MAU increased by 5% in April comparing with one month ago. Moreover, we are in a dominant leading position compared to our peers, and our monthly active users are two times higher than all other nine hotel groups' active monthly MAUs. With more membership privileges provided to our members in the new version of the app, we believe it would further improve our user experience and customer loyalty, hence to drive up much more active members and improve the repurchasing rate. Moving to slide 14. In H World's version 3, we also embedded a creative and advanced online check-in function for members. This online function is integrated with our 13-second check-in and zero-second check-out kiosks in the hotel.
Such functions would create a very convenient check-in and check-out service for customers, which helps them to save a lot of waiting time and hence improve their overall hotel stay experience. More importantly, with further usage penetration of this function, our hotel could further improve our operational efficiency as there will be less staff needed for the front desk, which used to help customers for check-in and out procedures. We could use this manpower saving to further improve our hotel service. Last but not least, technology application could also lower the threshold of staff recruitment. For example, with the self-check-in queues, computer skills will not be a must for recruiting front desk staff. Moving to slide 15. As of May 23rd, there are over 4,500 hotels had already installed self-check-in queues. Penetration of ordered check-in with 13 seconds achieved to 15%.
We are targeting this service deployment in all hotels within 2021. Moving to slide 16. Even considering the impact of the resurgence of COVID-19 and the local policy, we still achieved a very good result of our 2B business. The room nights contributed from the corporate customers reached over 3.5 million with contribution rate of 9.7% of total room nights sold. In the longer term, we believe that our corporate customers will not only contribute additional room nights to us, but also bring us the opportunities for new user acquisition. We observe that a lot of customers will use their corporate account to book our hotels are not yet our members personally. Therefore, we think there are still a lot of rooms to convert such customers to become our individual members.
On the right-hand side of this slide, our new experiment of B2B2X alliance, the fourth traffic strategy, which launched last quarter, will also achieve some initial outcomes. We have partnered with eight large traffic aggregator platforms in the first quarter, such as China Mobile, Jingdong, and Didi, and so on. We are also very pleased to see this new experiment start contributing room nights to use with roughly 3,200 orders per day in average during the first quarter. Going forward, we would seek more opportunities, more cooperation with the various package traffic platforms to further attract new members as well as more room night contribution. Now, moving to slide 17. For our Zleep digitization project in Europe, with DH, we are very pleased to see that we had completed our basic IT infrastructure and architecture and solutions.
We have also rolled out the first hotel pilot project in the Zleep , Copenhagen City, to do test running. Once the testing result is satisfied, we would gradually roll out the full implementation globally at the middle of this year. With that, now I will turn the call to Daisy to discuss our Q1 operational and financial review. Thank you.
Thank you, Xinxin. Good morning or good evening to everyone. Let's move on to our operational and financial review for the first quarter of 2021. As shown on slide 19, our hotel rooms expanded by 15% in Q1 2021 to 662,000 compared to 575,000 in Q1 2020. Including DH, Legacy Huazhu's hotel rooms expanded by 18% year-over-year to roughly 638,000 in Q1 2021. For our hotel turnover in Q1 2021, despite COVID-19's resurgent impact in China and prolonged lockdown in Europe, our total hotel turnover still grew at 66% year-over-year to RMB 8.2 billion in Q1 2021. This is mainly due to our continuous network expansion as well as the low base for China's business last year, unfortunately offset by the high base of DH last year.
Including DH, Legacy-Huazhu's hotels turnover doubled year over year to RMB 7.9 billion in Q1 2021, and recorded a 10% increase if compared to Q1 2019. Turn to page 20. Legacy-Huazhu's blended RevPAR for Q1 is RMB 138, which has recovered to 77% of 2019 level. The ADR in Q1 2021 has recovered to 95% of 2019 level to RMB 209, while occupancy in Q1 is 15 percentage point lower compared to 2019. This was mainly due to the COVID-19's resurgence and the stay-local policy in January and February. However, our RevPAR started recovering strongly since late March. Turn to page 21. Our Legacy-Huazhu business has been negatively impacted by the second and third waves of pandemic since September 2020. German government imposed a lockdown from last November, and it may extend it to early June this year.
Therefore, our Legacy-Huazhu blended RevPAR for Q1 2021 declined by more than 70% to EUR 13 compared to 2021 Q1. The ADR dropped by 23% to EUR 69, and occupancy dropped by 33 percentage points compared to 2020 Q1. On slide 22, the total net revenue grew by 16% year-over-year to RMB 2.3 billion in Q1 2021. Excluding DH, Legacy-Huazhu recorded a 69% year-over-year growth rate to RMB 2.2 billion. The revenue growth was better than our previous guidance thanks to the strong recovery in late March. Breaking down the revenue of Q1, leased and owned revenue decreased by 8% year-over-year to RMB 1.4 billion, mainly caused by the decrease of leased hotels in Europe. Excluding DH, leased and owned revenue of Legacy-Huazhu grew by 56% year-over-year to RMB 1.3 billion.
Net revenue from managed and franchised hotels grew by 93% to RMB 897 million, mainly driven by the year-over-year growth rate of Legacy-Huazhu. Due to the significant drop of leased and owned revenue of DH in Q1 2021, managed and franchised revenue contribution enlarged to 39% in Q1 2021 compared to 23% in Q1 last year at the group level. For Legacy-Huazhu, as our hotel expansion was mainly through asset-light model, the revenue contribution from managed and franchised model also expanded to 41% compared with 35% a year ago. Let's move to the cost and profitability section on slide 23. In Q1 2021, the reported operating loss was RMB 575 million, narrowed from RMB 857 million in Q1 2020, expanded from a quarter ago, mainly due to the COVID-19's resurgence and the stay-local guidance in China and also around the lockdown in Europe.
Excluding DH, Legacy-Huazhu's operating loss in Q1 was RMB 172 million, narrowed by RMB 560 million compared to the loss of RMB 731 million in Q1 2020. The hotel operating cost and other operating cost for Q1 2021 was RMB 2.5 billion, a slight increase compared with last year, in which Legacy-Huazhu recorded RMB 2 billion hotel operating cost, indicating a 21% year-over-year growth. The increase was mainly attributable to the higher rental cost of the new upscale hotels, higher personnel costs as we keep growing the hotel network rapidly, and higher depreciation and amortization costs, which were related to the upscale hotel opening and upgrading of existing hotels. As we mentioned in previous quarters, our future expansion of upscale hotels will mainly use asset-light model. Our opening cost declined by 81% year-over-year and 40% Q-on-Q to only RMB 21 million in Q1 2021.
Our SG&A in Q1 2021 increased by 9% year-over-year to CNY 406 million, mainly driven by the increase of Legacy-Huazhu, but offset by cost saving of DH. Excluding DH, SG&A for Legacy-Huazhu increased by 31% year-over-year to CNY 299 million. The increase was mainly attributable to the increase of selling and marketing expenses related to revenue recovery, and also the increase of headcount for our BD team to support penetration into lower tier cities, and also affected by less government subsidies booked in the Q1 2021 compared to Q1 2020. Turn to page 24. Our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to CNY 133 million compared to CNY 704 million a year ago. DH was the main drag for this quarter. Excluding DH, Legacy-Huazhu would have recorded a positive adjusted EBITDA of CNY 207 million compared to a loss of CNY 631 million in Q1 2020.
In Q1 2021, we recorded adjusted net loss of CNY 451 million narrowed from CNY 1.1 billion a year ago. Excluding DH, Legacy-Huazhu recorded an adjusted net loss of CNY 150 million compared with CNY 981 million loss in Q1 2020. The non-GAAP pro forma adjustment mentioned on this page excludes unrealized gains or losses from fair value change of equity related to some of our investments. For example, in Q1, we recorded CNY 238 million fair value increase of Accor shares we hold. Coming to the cash position. We kept the net debt of CNY 5.2 billion by the end of Q1. There's no risk of breaching the financial covenants of the $1 billion syndication loan. Our cash balance was CNY 5.7 billion. The unutilized bank facilities were CNY 6.5 billion.
This cash and bank facilities will allow for Huazhu to further pay down the existing bank debt in 2021 and also to be used for any unforeseen circumstances. As mentioned in previous presentations, the lockdown in Germany has greatly affect DH's business. Therefore, the average occupancy of DH in Q1 was 19%, and the rates further dropped to 15% in April and May. Having said that, daily newly diagnosed figures in Germany are decreasing steadily. As of May 22nd, about 40% of Germans had received at least one shot of vaccine. In several regions like Berlin, the travel restrictions are partially lifted, and we expect to see more travel for the vaccinated people in June. To compensate the business loss, the German government has extended the scope and duration of government subsidies, including short-time worker compensation and extra government subsidy.
As of April 2021, DH has received EUR 12.7 million short-time worker compensation, which is expected to further increase as the lockdown extends. DH had applied for government subsidy to compensate the loss both in 2020 and 2021. The prolonged lockdown will certainly impose pressure on DH's revenue, but impact will be partially offset by the government subsidy at the EBITDA level. We will only record that income upon the recipient of the formal confirmation of such cash. We also continue to negotiate for rental deduction. Compared with EUR 5.4 million waiver achieved in 2020, the year-to-date waiver of 2021 has amounted to EUR 4.2 million. We'll continue to work on rental deductions through the year. The number quoted here are related to cash savings, but the P&L impact actually varies depending on the term of the waiver.
In addition, we have also put our staff on temporary furlough, frozen our headcounts and reduced discretionary spending and also CapEx. We are also in discussion with local banks in Germany for additional coronavirus aid loans. The banks have been supportive to us. Turning to page 28 for guidance. For the second quarter of 2021, we now expect the total revenue to grow by 87%-89% compared to the second quarter of 2020. Excluding DH, we expect the revenue to grow by 90%-92%. To provide a more meaningful guidance, we expect the total revenue to grow by 27%-29% if compared to the same period of 2019. Excluding DH, the 2021 revenue is expected to grow by 20%-22%. For the full year of 2021, COVID-19's resurgence in January and February slowed down our hotel open plan in the first quarter.
Echoing Jin Hui's point previously, we put more emphasis on quality hotel expansion. We now plan to revise down our non-standardized hotel brand openings for the full year. Considering the above two factors, we lower our gross opening target of 2021 from 1,800-2,000 hotels to 1,600-1,800 hotels. However, even with the slight downward adjustment of gross opening, our revenue guidance for Legacy-DH remains unchanged at 50%-54% growth compared to 2020, or 15%-19% growth compared to 2019 due to the better than expected RevPAR recovery and the limited time impact of the hotel openings in the later part of the year. The prolonged lockdown period in Germany has caused the recovery much slower than previously expected.
Therefore, we adjust down the full year group revenue growth guidance to be in the range of 44%-48% compared to 2020, or 31%-35% growth compared to 2019 from previous guidance of 50%-54% growth compared to 2020 and 36%-40% growth compared to 2019. With that, let's open up for Q&A. Thank you.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound or hash key. Your first question comes from Billy Ng from Bank of America. Your line is open.
Hello, good morning. I have two questions. First of all, I just want to ask about the current trend, in particular in May. I think from the presentation you guys mentioned that the RevPAR already recovered to 107% of the 2019 level. I just wonder if we exclude the five days May 1st holiday period, do we still see positive growth compared to 2019 for the rest of May? Also in particular, would like to know a bit more about the trend of the leased and operated hotels recently. Then my second question is about the new opening target. We understand that the revised downward of the new opening target is a result of the company pursuing high quality openings and have a higher standard for the new joiner. I just have a question. I think this adjustment has been going for a while.
When do you expect the opening pace can re-accelerate again? Also in particular in the new opening target of the 1,600-1,800 number, how many of them are still using the soft brand model and how many will be using our main core brands? Thanks a lot and thank you and good morning, management.
Hello?
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The overall RevPAR trend in May, we saw it very satisfactory. As we mentioned in the presentation, our month to date RevPAR recovered to over a growth by 7% compared to 2019. Even though excluding the five days holidays in the beginning of May, the remaining of the days, the RevPAR still achieved a positive growth compared to 2019.
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Okay. We still have to be a little bit more cautious that there were still some of the COVID-19 resurgences happened in May, such as Anhui province and Shenyang. Normally, from our observation, every time there was a resurgence of COVID-19, it will take roughly two weeks to recover for the activity.
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Overall, for the recovery trend, we still maintain our conservatively optimistic perspectives for the overall recovery trend.
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For the second question, I just want to mention one number to you, that for our Elan brand, actually in 2019, we opened up roughly over 500 Elan during 2019. This year, we are just planning to open roughly 200 Elan, which means 300 decline. Our overall perspective and strategy is still concentrating on the quality hotel expansions.
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For our lower tier cities penetration, we actually are going to utilize more Ni Hao brands as a standardized brand to complement our HanTing brands for the lower tier cities penetration.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks, Jin Hui and Jason Chen. Thanks.
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Your next question comes from Sijie Lin from CICC. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you, management. I have two short questions. The first one is still on the hotel opening. I want to know that are we still confident with the 10,000 target at the end of 2022? The second question is on CitiGO. Why we decide to acquire CitiGO at this point, and how we finance the acquisition? Thank you.
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For the 10,000 hotels in 1,000 cities target, actually we are still progressing to achieve this target. Currently, even though with the COVID-19 impact, we are still seeing our new signings gradually being better compared to last year. We are still pretty confident that we could achieve this 10,000 hotels in 1,000 cities by the end of 2022 or later in the first quarter 2023.
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For our lower tier cities penetration, actually we're progressing pretty quickly. Now, we have signed up over 1,000 hotels in lower tier cities. In addition to that, for our upscale or high-end hotel market, over the last year, after a lot of preparation internal of the company, actually, we are also progressing pretty satisfactorily in this area.
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Also, we observed that the new consumer, the younger generation, and the lifestyle hotel segment, that the trend is booming up. That's why we are exploring into this segment by leveraging our own brands such as Crystal Orange, Manxin, and also the currently acquired CitiGO brand to further penetrate in this area as well.
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Okay. I just wanted to provide a little bit more color on the CitiGO. The entire enterprise value for this acquisition is RMB 750 million. In terms of a ramp-up EBITDA level for the full year perspective, the valuation multiple, EBITDA multiple is actually in the range of eight to nine times, which is a pretty fair and attractive valuation considering this brand's unique position and also the prospect of future growth. In terms of the cash source, if you notice that we have more than RMB 10 billion cash available, including also the unutilized bank facilities. There's no problem of financing for this acquisition.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Lina Yan from HSBC. Your line is open.
Hi, thank you. Management, I want to ask a question regarding the new 2021 full year guidance for Huazhu brand. The total revenue growth versus 2019 remain unchanged at 15%-19%, even though the hotel opening is lower than before. I want to ask, what is the current RevPAR assumptions for Huazhu brand versus 2019? Thank you.
We are positive about the RevPAR recovery of the Huazhu side. In our forecast, actually, we forecast Q2, it will be 97% of the recovery. Also in Q3 and Q4, it will be 104% and 100% recovery compared to 2019 numbers. It's a same hotel level perspective. If you talk about blended RevPAR, it's a little bit hard to compare it with 2019 on the same sale level. If you talk about blended, it will be 4%-5% increase in general.
Okay, great. May I clarify on same hotel RevPAR basis, it's 97% in Q2, 104% in Q3, and 100% in Q4, right?
Yeah, it's a general guidance. I think, certainly, we will keep updating this number.
Okay. Does this guidance for revenue growth include the contribution from CitiGO acquired in May?
It is not.
Okay. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Tian Hou from TH Capital. Your line is open.
Yeah. Good morning, management. I've got a couple questions. One is, I look at the tier cities expansion plan. The lower tier cities is going to be a majority part of the pipelines. Let's say by the end of the year or by the end of next year, what portion of the Legacy-Huazhu hotels are going to come from lower tier cities and Tier 3 and below? For the Tier 3 and below, also Tier 1, Tier 2, what are the difference between the RevPAR and the potential occupancy rates? That's the number one question. I'm going to just finish all the questions. The second one is, how many hotels Steigenberger is going to open in China this year? Also Song Hotels, how many hotels does the company expect to open under those two brands? That's the second.
Third one, which is the last one, in terms of corporate customers, I saw the corporate customer contribution increasing. What is the company's outlook in terms of corporate customer contribution in the total revenues? That's my three questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
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Okay, I will do the translation for the first question. For the lower tier cities, actually in our slide number five, we provide some of the numbers in terms of our breakdown in terms of our hotel operation and pipelines. Given that we have been putting a lot of efforts last year for the cities penetration, actually over 50% of our pipeline come from Tier 3 and below cities, which gonna help us to further enlarge our hotel from the lower tier cities by the year of this year.
Also in terms of the RevPAR differences compared to the lower tier cities and the higher tier cities. Actually, we have been observing that the lower tier cities actually have a better RevPAR recovery compared to the higher tier cities. I think after the ramp up period, definitely the lower tier cities will have slightly lower RevPAR compared to the higher tier cities. For us, our take rate will be the same for all hotels, no matter they are in higher tier cities or lower tier cities. For the second question, in terms of the JV, for the upcoming years, we have been further cooperating with the Sunac under the joint venture, and we are going to develop many Steigenberger and Song Hotels brands. Currently, we have over 30 hotels in pipeline.
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As you may know that the leisure traveling is recovering and growing pretty good in China, and we believe in the longer term is still booming. Therefore, for our high-end brands such as Steigenberger and Blossom House under the joint venture, we are very confident that their future will be good.
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For the corporate customers, actually it is a very important source for further growing our traffic, and we are still very optimistic in terms of their corporate customers growth in the future. More importantly, currently the corporate customers contribute roughly 10% of the total room night, but out of the 10%, over 60% are the room night that sold through online channel, which is very good for us. For the future development, we will still leverage our technology capability to further using the tech connection to further develop this area.
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We were not only focusing on the top 3,000 publicly listed companies in China. We are currently penetrating to even lower tier cities by leveraging our strong direct sales team to do a lot of local sales. We are planning to penetrate to every single provinces in China this year.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Melody Chan from Jefferies. Your line is open.
Hi, management. Thank you for taking my question. I have two short questions. Can management share if we have any other acquisition plan that align with our high quality hotel strategy? How is our view on the market consolidation post-COVID? Thank you.
[Non-English content]Sorry, what's your second question in terms of market consolidation? Hello?
Hi, what is our view on the market consolidation and the competitive landscape about the change of market share? Thank you.
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OK, for the first question in terms of M&A plan, we always keep our eyes open and we always have an open attitude.
We have been discussing with many potential partners. There is no clear target or deals done yet. We will be updating you as long as there is something confirmed. In terms of market consolidation and competitive landscape, actually, for the economy segment, we are doing the penetrating and we are better compared to our peers because the lower tier cities have plenty of rooms for penetrating. In terms of the midscale , leveraging on the consumption upgrade, we will leverage our various brands such as JI Hotel, Orange, and the newly acquired CitiGO and the lifestyle brands to further grow our market share in this area. In terms of the high-end and upscale segment, we are actually competing with those international hotel groups.
We would use our core competencies such as technology and operational capability to create a diversified competition and trying to grab some market share from them. Thank you.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to hand the conference back to our speakers.
Thank you everyone for taking time with us today, and we look forward to connect with you again in upcoming quarters. Thank you and bye bye.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.