David Chung, and I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations at 51Talk. Thank you for joining us today. In the next five to ten minutes, I'll be walking you through how 51Talk, as a NYSE American-listed company—our ticker code is COE—is combining localization, technology, and people in building an online education business globally. After that, we can open the floor for questions.
Let's start with the big picture. 51Talk is an AI-driven edtech platform serving young learners around the world. We're not just offering English lessons; we're providing an integrated, adaptive learning experience that combines proprietary curriculum, high-quality tutors, and advanced technology. Our goal is to make high-impact education accessible and relevant in every market we enter. What makes our platform different is our integrated approach.
We've built our solution on four pillars: a proprietary curriculum with over 500 hours of refined content, a rigorous AI-enhanced tutor recruitment process, $100 million already invested in our proprietary technology platform, and a 360-degree parent and student support model. In the next couple of slides, you'll see how each pillar reinforces the others to deliver the results for our students.
First, our curriculum is fully animated, interactive, and aligned with CEFR global standards. Second, our tutors are selected through a stringent process, with only the best making it through. Every tutor then benefits from AI tools and ongoing training, ensuring quality and consistency at scale. Third, our proprietary technology platform is robust and scalable. We have low-latency videos, gamified classrooms, and features like virtual makeup for tutors.
Our 360-degree support ensures every student has a personalized learning path and ongoing guidance from a dedicated learning partner, maximizing both engagement and satisfaction. Global presence means local adaptation. In every market, our curriculum is customized to fit local school requirements and cultural expectations. Local teams provide direct support and guidance, and our marketing is tailored to reach parents and students where they are.
This proven approach has helped us build trust and drive engagement in diverse regions from East Asia to the Middle East and beyond. AI powers every part of our operations. Our tech stack includes LLMs, proprietary infrastructure, and advanced automation, supporting everything from telemarketing to personalized student support. We've developed tools for tutor screening, lesson personalization, and adaptive feedback, all designed to improve efficiency and outcomes. Let's look at some highlights with our AI applications. In tutor recruitment, AI evaluates pronunciation and accent.
For every new hire, AI assists in screening, interviewing, and training, reducing cost and speeding up onboarding while maintaining high standards. AI also enables truly personalized learning for our students. Every student receives an individualized model and learning path, with real-time feedback through features like AI coaches, lesson memos, and situational practices. This personalization drives better engagement, faster progress, and higher satisfaction. Our sales process is also optimized by AI, which has already improved our conversion rates and reduced idle times during the sales process.
AI supports tutors during lessons, helping them deliver high-quality instruction. We also recently saw our first paying student complete an AI-powered trial class without actual human interactions. Turning to our numbers, following our China business divestment, we're now fully focused on international markets. We are audited in the U.S. and headquartered in Singapore.
Revenues are growing, margins consistently exceed 70%, and our cash position is strong. We're expanding with discipline, focusing on profitable and sustainable growth, not just headline numbers. To close, 51Talk is uniquely positioned at the intersection of global reach, local expertise, and cutting-edge applications of AI. We are committed to unlocking long-term value in the edtech sector, one student, one market at a time. Thank you for your time, and we'll now open up the floor for questions.
Okay, we see a few questions already. We'll start off with this one. This one is one that we get asked quite often. We'll begin with this one, which is basically our growth potential and profitability in the next couple of years, 2025-2026. In each quarter, when we release our quarterly results, we do give guidance for the next quarter.
Right now, for the first quarter of 2025, our gross billings expectation is between $21.5 million and $22 million. We set for continued growth year after year, focusing on our core K-12 one-on-one lessons, English learning for our K-12 students, and through basically continuing to increase student numbers for that core product. We are continuing to push hard to become market leaders in the key markets that we operate in.
Throughout the next couple of years, we see growth continue by our continued localization efforts, as mentioned in the presentation earlier, and with our efforts to continue to tailor our offerings to local needs. In terms of profit, our goal has always been sustainable growth. For each quarter, we target positive or at least break-even operating cash flow. Definitely, the target is to have positive cash flow for the full year of 2025.
Okay, just moving on to the next question. We'll take this one. This one is an interesting one. Can we become a really big company in the long term? We think in theory, definitely yes, because the edtech education market, as a sector, is very large, and it continues to grow. Right now, we're just really addressing one niche area in this particular segment, which is K-12 English learning.
In practice, we believe we've been in the business for a long time, and we believe it takes strategy and execution. From our experience, it's really down to three key areas. The first one is education is a local business. Every market has different school systems. Students behave differently. They have different learning habits. Parents have different expectations, different habits as well.
Our strength is actually our centralized operations infrastructure, which can be replicated across different markets. When we enter a new market, we send our experienced team there, build out the local teams, hire locals. We are getting a blend of a scalable product platform, but at the same time, we're localizing that product to fit the needs of the local students and parents. We do the same for marketing as well.
The marketing is localized. With that blend, we haven't seen anyone in the market that can really do that better than us. Secondly, in terms of the technology, it's definitely very important. In particular, with AI, AI will define the quality of edtech products in the coming years. There's no doubt about that. For us, our R&D hub is in Beijing.
China has always been and is a global leader in edtech. We have a strong brand name in China because of our history. To us, we have access to some of the best talents out there in edtech, in technology. That just makes us able to develop a leading product for students globally. Thirdly, we think, of course, AI will continue, is already, and will continue to do a lot of the job.
We believe that AI will not complete the full job. Maybe it can do maybe about 80% of the job. For the remaining 20%, which is the critical 20%, humans are still needed for that part, in particular for our business, which is teaching preschool, primary school-age students. We have the most experience in training and operating a large teacher force at scale.
We haven't seen anyone doing this better than us as well. In short, we believe we have everything it takes to succeed. It will depend on us if we are able to execute this strategy well. The third one is kind of a follow-up to the second question. It is something that we get asked quite often as well, so we will address it here. How will AI affect our business?
Online education is clearly one of the industries that will be most affected by AI. AI will change everything that we do. Exactly when and how, it is still anybody's guess right now. We are working hard. There are a lot of very good, smart people working hard around the world to address this problem. Some of them work for us.
In order to make sure we don't fall behind, we are already using AI to improve everything that we do with the existing product. We have AI tutors. We have AI sales agents. We create AI study reports. We use AI to customize courses. If you imagine what's possible, we are probably doing a lot of it right now already. As a second stream, we make soft launches on products that don't require a human at all.
This helps us to continue to learn how students interact with AI, how the product can be improved, and maybe in the longer term, even replace some of the existing features or products that we have right now. Ultimately, who will decide? It's really the students. For us, it's the five to six-year-old child, keeping them engaged and motivated for 30 minutes.
That's always been our job and what the parents expect from us. It's not just about knowledge transfer. It's about keeping the child engaged and being able to be confident enough to speak and open their mouth and interact in a new foreign language. That's something that we have a track record of doing really well. We believe that AI will just continue to make us do this better and better over time.
Okay, just scrolling through the questions. There's one follow-up question about R&D AI technology spending. We'll address this as well. The question is, our R&D expense, it's probably lower than some of the listed edtech peers. How do we still come up with a competitive product when we're spending less compared to our peers? Remembering, we've been a large company before 2021, before the Double Reduction Policy in China.
We have spent a lot of money, as mentioned in the presentation, more than $100 million already in our product development. Our R&D hub is in Beijing. The cost of that, compared to other parts of the world, is competitive. That is not to say that the results, the products that they develop, are on par. The quality of the products is on par and probably even better than some of the best products around the world globally. We are always an early adopter of the technologies.
While we don't, obviously, we don't engage in the fundamentals LLM developments, we do use and combine third-party LLMs and the AI technologies that's available and customize that technology, combining them with our understanding of our student needs, combining these two to make sure that technology, the application of that technology, addresses the real needs of our students. We think this allows us to continue to keep our technology spending at a relatively low level.
At the same time, we have new technologies that's available that can be that improves our students' user experiences overall. I hope that answers the question. Okay, here is another interesting one. We'll talk about this one as well. Why should someone buy, invest in a tiny nano stock with no liquidity is the question. You're right, you probably shouldn't.
We should all be cautious when looking at smaller companies and without that liquidity. If you're a mutual fund, you're probably not allowed to invest in us. We've spoken to some large institutional investors that have different mandates that maybe we're not included in that investment list. If you do invest in us, there are probably two key reasons.
The first one is we have a very good product. We have a good track record. Most of our students are happy with the product and so are the parents. The second point is that, as mentioned, we have a very good track record. We have a history. We will not stop. We will continue to cover more countries. We'll cover more subjects. We'll continue to make ourselves better one step at a time.
If you look at our business model, we do not grow by raising money. We grow by using the sales proceeds from our students that use us and pay for the products. We grow by that sales revenue. We believe that is probably the best guarantee that you can have that we have a product that is relevant, that is needed, that is well-liked by our students in this fast-changing environment.
Okay, I think it is almost time. I will just do one more question here. This question is about our China business. Do we still have a China business? If not, are there any possibilities of re-entering? This is one that we get asked quite a lot as well. Just to clarify, you probably have seen some of the Chinese edtech companies sort of picking up again.
Probably compared to when the Double Reduction Policy was first announced, compared to now a few years later, probably some of that policy has become sort of less strict or slightly changed. For us, the core business remains that we use foreign teachers to teach our students. With that, we do not expect the policy to sort of change right now to allow for that.
In terms of, so in terms for us, China is more about us using the talent there, our R&D capability that we have mentioned before, being able to use that talent and capability to really build out a product. With our history and experience, to really build out a product that we believe can teach students that students will like around the world. Right now, we are doing a lot of localization.
Really just combining all that Chinese R&D hub, building the product, teaching students in a localized way. We believe we're very unique in that sense. We don't see a lot of competitors being able to combine that and make it work. The education business market, as we see, even without China, is still large. Right now, we see we continue to create more shareholder value just by building our overseas business and building higher entry barriers in the markets that we're doing well already.
We believe we're creating more shareholder value from doing that instead of the sort of intense competition in China compared to before. Of course, the environment can change. In the future, it may make sense for us to serve Chinese students again with some of the technology products that we continue to develop.
Right now, that's not going to be, that's not our focus right now. I think that's time. Thank you. If you have further questions, which I still see a few more questions here, if anyone's got further questions, please feel free to continue to send over, and we'll address those questions offline. Thank you very much.