I'm happy to welcome David Chung, VP of Investor Relations. We have about 30 minutes today, including the Q&A. If you have any questions, please submit them at the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. With that, I will let you take over, David.
Thank you, Arshit. Good morning, everyone. My name is David Chung, and I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations at 51Talk . Thank you for joining us today. In this session, we'll be walking you through how 51Talk , as a NYSE American listed company with ticker code COE, is combining localization, technology, and people in building an online education business globally. After that, we'll open the floor for questions. We'll try to address all the questions today, but if not, you can always reach us at the 51Talk IR website. You will find our emails there. 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 invested in our proprietary technology, and a 360-degree parent and student support model. In the next couple of slides, you will see how each pillar reinforces the others to deliver results. 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 benefits from AI tools and ongoing training, ensuring quality and consistency at scale. Third, our technology platform is robust and scalable. We have low-latency video, gamified classrooms, and features like virtual makeup for tutors.
Finally, 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 Large Language Models, 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 AI application highlights. 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. Every student receives an individualized model and learning path with real-time feedback through features like AI coaches, lesson memos, and situational practice. 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 higher quality instruction. We recently saw our first paying student complete an AI-powered trial class. Turning to our numbers, following our China divestment, we are now fully focused on international markets, audited in the U.S. and headquartered in Singapore. Revenues are growing, margins consistently exceed 70%, and our cash position is strong.
We are 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. We can now open up for questions. I'll just do a quick FAQ because we tend to get these questions quite a lot. Actually, that's my first. I just saw the first question in the Q&A box as well. That's something that we want to address. I think it's kind of the elephant in the room. From our side, we see the question is about liquidity. We'll just address that.
The question is basically, are there options or are we considering how to improve the visibility and liquidity of the stock? That's something that we clearly are looking into. I myself, it's driving that process. If you fundamentally, I think as we discussed, we do have a very strong product. Most of our students are very happy, and we'll continue to expand into more markets and cover more subjects over time. We do not grow by raising money from investors. We grow by using the cash that our students pay for. It's a very self-sustaining model. We believe that's the best guarantee that we can have to make sure that the product continues to stay relevant in this fast-changing learning environment. In terms of the visibility and liquidity, obviously, we are doing more. For example, joining this [Siddharthi] conference to improve engagement and investor awareness.
We'll also be doing more campaigns on the investor side. We're engaging with more investors. We've been quite active. I think basically, we've been a lot more engaging with investors over the past, over in 2025, because of the better fundamentals. The movement in the share price has also improved our visibility. There's a lot more engagement in the first- half of this year compared to last year. We expect that to continue as we go on over time. We'll be doing more conferences and taking more specific steps, for example, more PR, more content to help investors understand us more.
Thank you, David. If you can help us understand, how are you balancing the shift from your China-focused business to your overseas expansion, particularly Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Middle East?
Sure. The China business has been spun off. In the list code COE, there's no China business anymore. All the revenues for the COE at the list code level come from outside China, so it's global business. We are now a truly global business. Right now, we are active in, as you mentioned, East Asia and Southeast Asia. If you look at our website, you can see some of the languages that we have, and that should give you a good sense of some of the markets that we are active in. Right now, we are in East Asia as well as the Middle East. We will continue to see opportunities in, for example, Eastern Europe, and over time in some of the Spanish-speaking markets as well. We do believe there's a demand for our product and services as we continue to grow into different markets.
Right now, we believe we have, compared to probably two or three years ago, much better expertise and experience in developing this global business. Before, we were mainly a China business, but now, after two to three years, we are much more experienced, and we understand how to build a local operation much better compared to two or three years ago. This gives us a lot of confidence. What this translates to is really, in terms of the timing that we need to get from zero to one in different new markets, the time that takes us to do that is a lot less. The bottleneck right now is probably on the people that we have. We continue to hire new talent, trying to train new talent and send new talent to the new markets and train more new talent. We are still a heavy operation business.
I think that's what makes us very unique and difficult to compete against because we take time to build. Once we build something, it's very hard to compete against us. A lot of the competitors we see around the different markets, usually, they're either very domestic or localized, or they operate in just one or two markets, or it's a very global product. They don't have a localized team or more localized content. I think what we do is really best of both worlds. We have a very strong operational infrastructure in the headquarters. At the same time, we have local teams. We have local people on the ground that run the operations, that run the marketing, that run the sales process. These are all supported by the central infrastructure network. I think that really gives us the competitive edge.
It takes time to build, but at the same time, it's what really differentiates us compared to just sort of a simple technology or just like a pure technology product. We are really human plus technology combined together and making that an optimal operational workflow.
Yeah, you've answered most of my next question as well. Like how, what is your strategy for differentiating 51Talk from global competitors like Duolingo? Is there anything you want to add to your previous answer, or should I go to the next question?
I think, yes. I think, again, maybe just to capture in the key part. We have local teams on the ground. As you may have seen in the presentation, the product has local content. That's very important, we find, because different markets have the customer behavior, the habits differ. We have to build our content. The market, the curriculum, the marketing have to adapt to the local preferences. It takes time to build that. Once we have done it, and we have now so much experience with all these new markets, we know exactly what to do now compared to maybe two, three years ago, where we were still sort of testing and trying out different things.
Now there's a much better standard operational protocol, if you like, that we can just follow and understand how to build the local teams, how to make the marketing better as fast as we can in terms of adapting local needs. If we do face challenges, we immediately adjust much quicker than before and try to see how we can do our marketing, make sure our sales funnel is optimized, and make sure our conversions work. We are a very ROI-focused company, so we make sure that we have cash flow positive. Our target is to be operating cash flow positive each quarter. This makes us very diligent in terms of how we invest and spend our marketing money, for example. We make sure that every dollar we spend, the unit economics basically make sense.
You can see that although we're still on the accounting basis, we're still making a net loss, you can see that we are operating cash flow positive, and that's reflected by the cash balances on the balance sheet, which continues to grow.
Right. Switching a little bit to the students that you have, can you talk us through your current active student base and how it has evolved in the last 12 months across different geographies?
The student base, right now we have about 70,000 active students on the platform. The mix is, we are K-12 focused. We are basically, it's children. Of course, with different markets, the level of English differs at the same time. We do have different age groups learning different levels at the same time. For example, in Hong Kong, our users will probably be of a younger age. In Hong Kong, it will be younger age, so we need to adapt the curriculum, the content accordingly. In some other markets, the students that we have may be of an older age. We have to adapt the local, other than the local, the age, the content and the curriculum has to be in line with an older age group as well. We do make these kinds of adjustments.
Because we are K-12 focused, we believe that the human plus AI approach, we have human, real human teachers using a lot of AI. We think that's still the best in terms of engagement with the children. We measure ourselves on, because what the children are doing is they're speaking a, they're doing English as a second language. They're speaking a foreign language. For us, one of the key metrics is we try to encourage them to basically open their mouths and speak more. That's one of the metrics that we have on ourselves. We do a lot of technology and content to work around to achieve that objective. We believe that just a pure AI product is probably not the best in terms of achieving that goal.
Right. Is your model supplemental to public education, or is it a replacement to public education? Like, students are homeschooling and using 51Talk , or are they going to school and using 51Talk as an additional?
Yes, that's a great question. Thank you, Arshit. It's more complementary. We're not test preparation. We are more speaking and listening. It's really being able to speak confidently in English as a second language for our children. You can actually see, we actually have one of the more popular events that we do. Each year, we take around four or five of our best students. We take them to the United Nations, and they will do a presentation at the UN there. That's really a showcase of how the children, using English as a second language, are able to present very confidently. That's just really, I think that's really a great showcase for us in terms of the results that our children, our students really, really achieve. For us, the core product is a speaking product. We believe it's more complementary to the traditional school instead of test preparation and kind of the subject tutoring, for example.
Right. What is the customer acquisition cost like? When you recruit students, firstly, how do you go about recruiting students, and what does it cost for you?
Sure. Sorry, just let me drop this down in case I forget. In terms of the customer acquisition, obviously, different markets. Before, we were operating in China, so it's kind of one market, and you can do a lot of the calculations on one market. Now, because of our portfolio, we have different markets, and the market mix changes between quarters. It's very hard to generalize a customer acquisition number. I think the key here is really, we do spend, if you look at our marketing spend, we invest a lot in Google Ads, in Facebook, so social media ads. Each market we see has different ROIs, different costs in different platforms.
We do a lot of study around that and make sure we're using the best platforms with the best ROIs because our marketing team's KPI is ROI, so they're incentivized to achieve the best possible ROI that they can. In certain markets, we may be using Google, Facebook, the more traditional social media. In some markets, we may be using Snapchat, we may be using TikTok, for example. That can change. I think a good indicator is if you look at our sales and marketing expenses and then just compare that with our gross billings, that should give you some indication in terms of how much we're spending. We expect that to continue to lower over time. In certain quarters, you'll see that increases because that may be because we are spending more on branding, which may give us lower ROI initially.
Over time, we believe that because usually, we spend more on branding because we believe there's a big market, and branding will help us have better conversions in the medium to long- term. For that, you may see an initial boost in the sales and marketing expenses. Over time, we do expect the better ROI to happen over the next few quarters, for example. We do make these types of branding investments as well. In terms of the overall customer acquisition, again, you'll see the, because of the market mix changes, I think overall in each market, the marketing spend as a percentage of the billings will continue to come down, to trend downwards because we get more referrals, we get more renewals over time.
Initially, in a new market, we may need to spend more in social media, we may need to spend more just to get off and running in the market. In the new market, the percentage, the ratio tends to be higher. Over time, we do expect that to trend downwards over time. At the group level, you should see the sales and marketing expenses, the ratio, trend downwards over time. That is the trend that we see for the previous domestic mainland China business as well. That is something that we did see before. In a sense, sometimes we say that it's kind of like a time machine for us. What we're doing now is probably what we've done in China about five or six years ago. Now we're just taking much shorter to achieve the same level of business because of our better experience. I think that's a good way, kind of a good way to look at it.
Right. How do you recruit teachers? What does the training process look like, and where do you recruit most of your teachers from?
The teachers are mostly from the Philippines right now. That is something that is very unique and very, I think it's, again, it's actually, I believe, a key differentiator for us because we have a very, very strong teacher operations headquarter in the Philippines. We do have our own local teams running and recruiting, training, monitoring, and managing the teachers. We've been doing that for around 10 years now. It's a very mature, very experienced team. Now they're supported by AI. Before, we have tens of, in China, at the peak, we had tens of thousands of teachers that we have to manage. Now we are at about probably at about 8,000+ teachers, and that continues to grow. The team managing the teachers is much, much smaller because of AI. AI helps us, as we discussed in the presentation, do the initial screening.
AI helps with some of the accents as well. It helps with our overall teacher management. It lowers the expenses. For some regions, we do have non-Filipino teachers as well, but that's kind of a smaller portion of the overall business. The core product is mainly Filipino teachers with AI-supported management. The teachers themselves, also during the class, as we discussed, are supported by AI. They have a lot of AI tools that they can use to have a personalized engagement with the students.
Great. Thank you so much, David. With that, we're at time. I would like to thank you for sharing your story with us. I would also like to thank everybody in the audience for listening and spending time with us today. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Arshit. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Bye.