Hello, everyone. My name is Pat McCann with NOBLE Capital Markets. Today I have David Chung on the line. He is with 51Talk . Before he gets going with the presentation, I just want to make sure everyone is aware that you can submit questions for the Q&A period at the end of the presentation. You can just submit those at the bottom of your screen. With that, I will hand the floor over to David. David, go ahead.
Thank you, Pat. 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 the next 5- 10 minutes, I'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. 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, 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 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 videos, 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 technology 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 high 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're 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'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're committed to unlocking long-term value in the edtech sector, one student, one market at a time. Thank you for your time. We can open the floor for questions.
Thanks, David. I do have a few questions. First of all, could you talk a little bit about the key markets that you're operating in and what your plans are to open in still more new markets in the next few years?
Thank you, Pat. Expanding to new markets is obviously a key part of our growth. We are already in Southeast Asia, like Malaysia and Thailand. We're testing new markets as well there in Vietnam and Indonesia, for example. We're also very active in the Arabic markets and looking at Spanish-speaking regions as possible opportunities in the future. In selecting a market, we generally look for a relatively large middle-class children population base, low cost of acquisitions to justify our unit economics and operating cash flow. Our focus is on making our marketing and services fit each location. We build local offices with experienced leaders and train new staff with our proven methods. We also adapt our products to match local languages, customs, and styles. All these take time, but once we're set in the market, it's hard for local competitors to match our mix of central strength and on-the-ground teams.
Could you also talk about any new products and services that might be coming in the next year?
Sure. Our core product is our one-to-one K-12 English classes , but we're also very active in looking at how our current students, what the current students' needs are, and add complementary products to that core product. For some regions, this could mean other subjects or exam preparations, for example. What we find is different markets have different unique needs. In the markets that we operate, we offer very specific programs or services. For each initiative that we do, each new one, we check them again. We check the market size, whether we're competitive in terms of being able to do it well, how we compare with the competition that currently exists, and why we are the best. We have the best team and resources to take on this initiative.
Could you also, go ahead, David.
Sorry. I guess what we find is that education is a very local business. Every market has a different school system, different in terms of how students study after school, where and when they study. The learning habits and behaviors are different. I think one of the keys for 51Talk is that we're very good in sending people to new markets and building up local teams to adapt products and marketing that fit with the local students and parents. Right now, we haven't seen anyone in the market such as our competition doing this better than us.
You mentioned the competition there, and I was wondering if you could talk about how 51Talk compares to your competitors.
Sure. In terms of competition, what we usually see, it's really sort of two spectrums. On the one hand, we have local competition, which are established local players. They may be offline centers comparing us with them. As we discussed in the presentation, we have a centralized system. We are more than a matching platform for tutoring students. We have our own trained, recruited tutors on the platform. We have our own proprietary curriculum that's been established for many years. We have a centralized infrastructure compared with the local businesses. We think that gives us a very big edge over the local competition, which has kind of more limited resources. On the other spectrum, you have software or pure AI products that don't have the local teams that we have. Remember, we have local offices.
We change our—we adjust our curriculum, our product, our marketing to adapt to the local markets. Compared to a pure AI or software product, they don't have that localized structure that we have. I think compared to these spectrums, compared to the two extreme spectrums of competitors, we think we do have an edge kind of staying in the middle comparing to them both.
Given what you just said, David, are you suggesting that you don't see AI fully replacing human tutors in teaching, or what should we expect on that front going forward?
Sure. That's a question that we tend to get asked quite often, especially with the developments in AI right now. We do see online education being one of the industries that will be most affected by AI. AI will change a lot of the things that we do, and in fact, it has already. There are a lot of people working on how to apply AI into education, and some of them, they work for us. We try to make sure we don't fall behind. We use AI to improve everything that we do surrounding our product. For example, we have AI tutors, we have AI sales agents, we use AI to create customized and personalized reports to parents and students. If you imagine what's possible, we are probably doing a lot of it already.
As a second stream, we have soft launches of products that are pure AI, so no human tutors at all. It's kind of what we're doing, but with a pure AI avatar instead of the human tutor. Right now, that pure AI product is only limited to certain modules that we think AI is probably better than a human tutor, what a human tutor can do. What this does is it helps us to learn and improve how AI can engage with children, and in the longer term, maybe even replace ourselves. The ones that will really decide, we believe, is still the students. For us, from our experience, it's not easy to keep a five-year-old child motivated to learn for 30 minutes. It's not just about knowledge transfer. It's about engaging with the child, keeping them engaged, and open the mouth and speak in a foreign language.
That's what the parents were paying us, and that's what they are expecting from the product. We believe that's something that we're very good at, and AI will continue to make us better.
The next question, David, is as the company is making losses on the P&L, could you talk about the strengthening cash position and maybe go through those dynamics in terms of making losses but growing the cash balance at the same time?
Sure. Simply put, in our business model, we spend money to get students now, but the lessons happen later. We get a lump sum cash upfront, but the accounting recognition of the income and hence the profit come in the future when the students actually take up the classes. Therefore, when we grow in terms of the top line, you will see that what we call billings, which is the cash that we receive from the parents, is usually higher than our revenues when we're growing. Our cash grows because we collect payments upfront. To see the true value, what we can do is we use the billings, which is the cash we receive upfront, minus the operating costs for that given period. For example, in the quarterly earnings release, you can take billings minus the operating expenses for that quarter.
That gives an indicator of the cash profitability for that period. What you usually see is that for any given quarter, we try to be at least break-even to positive cash flow, meaning that when we grow, we increase our cash so we're not burning cash to grow. It's sustainable growth. That's very important from the management perspective. Additionally, one more point is you will see our shareholders' equity being negative. Again, that translates over time to positive once the retained earnings get recognized.
Great. You may have pretty much answered this question just now, but would there be any need to raise capital for additional growth? Perhaps if you were to make a large enough play that maybe you would still need to go out and get more capital. Are there any plans there? What are your thoughts about capital needs?
Sure. This is a question that we also tend to get quite often as well. As Pat mentioned, this builds on from the question before. We believe in growing with the cash we receive from the parents, the students paying for the product, not by growing with cash we receive from investors. We let the users, the students, the parents decide on our future. If you look at our filings, the SEC filings, you'll see that our Founder and CEO has continued to buy shares in the open market. It's an indication that he still believes there's value in the business and in the stock.
Could you also talk about the growth in active students? I believe you reported a solid growth number there in Q2. Could you talk about what is driving that? If you look at various factors like new market entries or higher marketing spend to grow the number of active users in an existing market, what are the factors driving the increased active student count?
Sure. In certain markets, we're continuing to see further penetration into some of our larger active markets. For example, the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. We've just done a really big branding campaign in Saudi Arabia recently. If I can just give some color on the business there, we started the Saudi business around early 2023. That's when we started really investing into the Saudi business. Now we're really seeing that investment. We're getting the returns from that investment about almost three years ago now. In each of the markets, some markets can be faster, some a bit slower. As we continue to grow into new markets, that's sort of the timeframe you can, or we can sort of expect is, you know, between one to two years, we will start to see markets picking up and then driving that growth for us in terms of the top line.
I just want to squeeze in one final question as we run through most of the questions here. If you look at the regulatory landscape beyond China, are there other potential regulatory risks in other markets that investors should be aware of? What does the regulatory landscape look like at this point?
Right now, we are ex-Mainland China. We have all the revenues ex-China. When you invest into COE, the list code, all the revenues are coming from, for example, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, like we discussed. We believe we have a very diversified portfolio in terms of markets. We're not compared to before, where it was basically a China business. Of course, we are always in touch with the government relations department. We're always in touch with the local authorities about changes in the education landscape. I think one thing to note is we are actually in, we're not actually tutoring per se. We're actually in kind of like extracurricular activities because we teach English as a second language. We don't help with homework. In that respect, we are kind of slightly different from the traditional tutoring homework space.
Gotcha. We do have another question from the audience. The audience participant is asking what direction you see the stock going in. Maybe I'll add to that question a little bit. Maybe you could talk about what the catalysts are, the key catalysts for the stock.
Sure. From what I can see, I guess, and these are factual, one thing to look at is we're currently trading on the American NYSE American right now. If you look at the main board, we understand there's a requirement, market cap requirement of $200 million. If we have $200 million for 90 consecutive trading days, then we can apply to go back to the main board. That's kind of one of the milestones that we're really looking at for next year, hopefully, if things continue to be where they are at or if we continue to do better. In terms of the catalysts, I think one of the other things to look at is we expect about $37 million- $38 million in gross billings guidance for the third quarter of 2025. This coming quarter, we continue to be quite confident in terms of our growth potential.
We believe that fundamentally the business is quite solid and will continue to grow.
Great. I really appreciate it, David, and thank you all for joining us today.
Thank you, Pat. Thank you.