Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by for Waterdrop Inc.'s Q1 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the management's prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the meeting over to your host for today's call, Ms. Xiaojiao Cui. Please proceed, Ms. Xiaojiao Cui.
Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining Waterdrop Q1 2022 earnings conference call. Please note that the discussion today will contain forward-looking statements made under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, those outlined in our public filings with the SEC. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law. Also, this call includes discussion of certain non-GAAP measures. Please refer to our earnings release for a reconciliation between non-GAAP and GAAP. Joining us today on the call are Mr. Shen Peng, our founder, chairman, and CEO; Mr.
Yang Guang, Co-founder, Director, and General Manager of Insurance Marketplace; Mr. Hu Yao, Co-founder, Director, and General Manager of Medical Crowdfunding and Healthcare; and Mr. Kevin Xu, our CFO. We will be available for a Q&A session after the remarks. Now I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Shen Peng. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our Q1 2022 earnings conference call. Since the beginning of this year, the capital markets have further plunged amid a volatile geopolitical environment and the COVID resurgence. Since last year, both the global capital markets and domestic insurance industry have transformed in profound ways. We adjusted our pace and promoted a strategic re-alignment in order to pursue a healthier development. We have seen new opportunities emerging at the same time.
Looking at our operating results and business trends over the past two quarters, we are tipped to have a good overall performance for the full year. Apart from consistently establishing our competitive strength, we have also improved our operational efficiency and profitability, thereby securing a healthier and more sustainable development for the company. The company is reaching the six years milestone since its inception. Nonetheless, I believe we are currently standing at a new beginning. We are pleased to report that after turning profitable on a non-GAAP basis in Q4 2021, we made further breakthrough that we now for the first time delivered a GAAP net profit of CNY 105 million in Q1 2022. While against the backdrop of industry downturn situation, we resumed the positive growth and our net operating profit achieved an increase of 7.4% quarter-over-quarter.
We will maintain this positive momentum and have confidence in meeting the goal we set at the beginning of the year, which is to accomplish a healthy and sustainable profit for the entire Waterdrop Group for the year of 2022. The moat we built around our product designs, innovation capabilities, and the synergies within various business segments have enabled us to maintain vitality and resilience to counter challenges and navigate the tough times. In particular, the resurgence of the pandemic and the ever-growing demand for healthcare protection solutions have brought more opportunities for insurance and healthcare services providers, especially the online insurance platforms like us. Under this dynamic environment, we will be committed to creating values to customers, solidifying our business, and delivering better results.
下面我讲一下我们合规与经营方面的总结。本季度我们坚决地进行了战略转型，立足新起点，坚定不移地执行新的经营战略。过去，水滴公司是在合理掌控ROI的基础上，追求用户数量和收入规模的快速增长。这样的发展模式在中美两国的高科技行业都有成功案例。基于上述发展模式，水滴公司在2016年至2021年快速成长，累计了近四亿的用户规模，其中保险用户已经超过了1.1亿，为我们打下了转型坚实的基础。我们在业务、人员和组织等多个方面进行了主动的调整，团队展现了优秀的协同能力和应变能力，不仅在短时间内完成了产品运营策略调整，而且用户质量大幅度改善，保险产品的供给更加丰富。与此同时，水滴公司始终将公司管制视为企业坚守的重要使命，不断地完善公司内部的制度建设和合规自查，在全公司范围内进行合规内容的宣导倡导，提升全公司的合规意识，营造合规文化氛围，确保全方面的合规与稳定经营。今后将继续积极主动地坚定地推动行业健康发展。在ESG方面，水滴始终秉承着商业向善的精神内核，不断地提升ESG治理水平，主动承担企业社会责任，积极实现可持续发展目标，并影响带动更多利益相关方共同承担可持续发展的责任。在年初，我们获得了中华慈善总会的认可，成为其会员单位。近日，我们加入了联合国全球契约组织UNGC，正式签署成为会员企业，与全球161个国家的16,000多个企业携手一起，共同创造一个可持续发展的未来。并且在本月初，我应邀参加了2022年联合国全球契约领导人峰会，代表中国保险科技公司与知名企业家代表共同探讨和分享中国本土企业、跨国公司和多利益相关方在落实2030年可持续发展议程方面的行动和经验。面对疫情的反复无常，国内疫情防控方面面临巨大的考验，公司一直努力积极响应多地疫情防控，水滴公益充分发挥了公益平台的优势，调动各项资源支援上海等多地抗疫。联合爱心伙伴为困境人群、独居老人、一线工作者累计捐赠超100多万元的物资。包括我本人在内的重要管理层在线报名成为抗疫战士助力抗疫。自新冠疫情以来公司联合多家慈善机构和公益组织筹款已累计筹集抗疫救助款超过了6,500万元。当收到社会各界团体及组织发来的感谢信时，我们除了欣喜，也期待可以以其作为榜样来带动更多社会团体的力量。
The volatile pandemic situation has posed a huge challenges to the containment efforts in China. We have been proactively helping alleviate the impact on our community. Leveraging its position as a leading charity platform, our Waterdrop Charity has reallocated various resources and provided support to Shanghai and other areas on their pandemic containment. We also collaborated with charity organizations to provide donations of over CNY 1 million in supplies to the people with financial difficulties, the elderly living alone, and the frontline workers. Our senior management, including myself, also took the lead in volunteering to help fight the pandemic. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, we have partnered with several charities and nonprofit organizations to raise anti-pandemic funds of more than CNY 65 million.
When we received the appreciation letter from a wide range of groups and organizations, we were not only encouraged, but also hopeful that we could set an example and inspire more and more to support from the society.
持续坚守用互联网科技去推广让群众有保可医、保障亿万家庭的公司使命。继续发挥企业优势和数字化服务能力，为推进和落实可持续发展各项目标的实现而努力。此外，公司持续推动联合国可持续发展目标，包括目标一无贫困。公司参与多次医疗保障，降低困难大病患者因病致贫返贫的风险。目标三良好健康，推动健康与福祉，以社会保障为目标，探索城市居民保障模式新标杆。目标九产业创新，以科技创新为驱动，促进保险行业的发展。
We remain committed to our mission of leveraging internet technologies to make insurance protection more inclusive and accessible to the public, and bring insurance and healthcare service to billions. We also proactively leverage our competitive strengths and digital service capabilities to promote, implement, and achieve our sustainable development goals. We also continue to promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. For example, for Goal 1, No Poverty. We joined China's multi-level medical insurance system to help reduce risk for those with critical diseases to fall into or slip back into poverty due to illness. For Goal 3, Good Health and Well-being. We actively explored a new benchmark for the government-backed health protection model in serving the purpose of inclusive insurance. For Goal 9, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure. We focused on promoting the development of the insurtech industry by leveraging technological innovation.
在回顾及资本市场方面，公司现金流保持充足，并且我和同事们对未来充满信心。截至2022年3月末，公司持有的现金及现金等价物和短期投资合计约29.2亿元。我们继续坚定地执行了股票回购计划，同时关注保险、医疗健康等领域的创新机会。截至今年3月末，我们共计回购约309万股ADS，现在并继续审慎地执行。我们计划回购到水滴的ADS将继续用于内部激励。
We have maintained a strong cash position, and the team and I have united confidence about our future. As of March 2022, our cash and cash equivalents and short term investment balance totaled approximately CNY 2.92 billion. We continue to implement our share repurchase plan while exploring innovative investment opportunities in the insurance and healthcare sectors at the same time. As of the end of March, we repurchased cumulatively CNY 3.09 million ADS in total and will continue to prudently buy back shares. We plan to use these repurchased ADS for our employee incentive plan in the future.
在新的环境下，水滴作为中国保险科技与互联网医疗领域的第一梯队创业者，希望追求更高质量的发展，坚持持续为用户和股东创造价值。创新业务方面，我们将围绕用户价值，适度投入，保持科技创新活力。我们坚信中国医疗保障市场长期向好的趋势，坚信水滴公司的未来会更好。期待更多科技人才、投资者等伙伴们与水滴一起穿越周期，纵情向前。
In this changing environment, as a top-tier player and a pioneer in China's insurtech and online healthcare market. We strive to pursue higher quality development and insist on creating value for our customers and shareholders. In terms of business innovation, we will enhance user value in an enduring and proper manner and maintain our enthusiasm for technological innovations. We are confident in the long-term prospects of China's health care insurance market and also our own business. Moving ahead, we are well-positioned to grow stronger in future economic cycles and join hands with more tech talents, investors, and partners. I'll pass to Yang Guang to discuss the development of the Waterdrop insurance business for Q1.
Thanks, Shen Peng. China's insurance industry has experienced a period of profound adjustment in Q1 due to various factors, notably the COVID resurgence and the equity market shakeup. Publicly traded insurers suffer from a setback on both their assets and liabilities. In Q1, listed China insurance companies recorded an average of 3.2% decline in new business premiums and an average of 36% decline in net profit year-over-year. NBV also reduced by more than 13%, while demand for individual insurance remained sluggish. The growth from our insurance agents was also weak. The traditional insurance business that carries out on-site is human. Thereby, it was especially slow for the sales of protection products, primarily health insurance to recover.
This should be partially due to the high base for comparison last year that was triggered by a speculative sales of critical illness health insurance. Meanwhile, there is a clear industry trend that insurers adopting the less efficient traditional sales model are facing more challenges, while those capable of pioneering diversified and innovative channels are enjoying a faster recovery. The business performance of top-tier players has showed some signals of stabilization following the recent adjustment period. Against this industry backdrop in Q1 2022, we continue to firmly execute the strategy we set out in the Q3 last year, which is to reform our business model and optimize our business operations. This has helped us achieve significant improvements in our operational efficiency and in other business metrics.
In Q1, we recorded an adjusted net profit of CNY 127 million, increasing by 2,054% quarter-over-quarter. For the first time, we achieved a GAAP profit of CNY 105 million in this quarter on top of a non-GAAP profit in the previous quarter. Let me now walk through our insurance business updates in three aspects. Firstly, regarding the ongoing progress with our business model transformation. In Q1, we optimized and upgraded our operating system to a cross-platform, multi-product supply, and multi-service models. By revamping the transaction process and enhancing the accuracy of matching customer needs with the proper insurance products, our operating performance has improved in Q1.
While keeping the one-year LTV of our business at a relatively high level, our one-year ROI increased by 55% in Q1 compared with Q4 last year. Our long-term insurance business has followed the regulators and switched to an integrated sales model of internet plus telemarketing. We thereby prompted the add-on products that are eligible under this model and started to provide differentiated services to customers sourced from different channels. We also optimized our algorithm models by the user groups profile. As a result, in Q1, the average premiums per lead for the long-term insurance increased by 4%. The average productivity of long-term insurance of our in-house consultants reached 2 times the industry average, boosting the net income of our long-term insurance business by 16% in Q1 quarter-over-quarter.
We consistently extend our user lifetime management by utilizing different scenarios on cross-marketing platforms such as WeChat official accounts, WeChat mini programs, enterprise WeChat accounts, and Waterdrop apps. Thereby, we have made some new breakthroughs in user acquisitions on these platforms. For instance, the number of enterprise WeChat contact users increased to 6.5 million, and the number of active app users increased by 10% quarter-over-quarter. Short-term insurance premiums originated from those private traffic were approximately CNY 30 million in Q1, up by 60% quarter-over-quarter. Meanwhile, leveraging our innovative operating scenarios, we have effectively reactivated many dormant users, which helped improve our user engagement rate, repurchase rate, as well as policy renewal rate. In Q1, our user repurchase rate for short-term products stood at 73%, up by 16 percentage points.
The short-term insurance renewal rate reached 19.8%, up by 18 percentage points compared to Q4 respectively. Our proactive exploration of different customer acquisition models has also started to bear fruits in Q1. We have consistently polished up our output capability of insurance content, leveraging all forms of marketing tools, including graphic ads, videos, and live streaming. We have successfully acquired many high quality new insurance customers on various social media platforms and provided services to them through our financial planners. During this pilot phase in Q1, this model has generated CNY millions of premiums. Going forward, we will continue to expand our insurance content generation and financial planning team, aiming at achieving more sizable expansion of business. In addition, leveraging our highly efficient long-term insurance users conversion capability, we collaborated with many external traffic partners to convert leads into long-term insurance sales.
This approach has effectively expanded our sources of leads for long-term insurance products. Secondly, with respect to promoting product diversification and business innovation. In Q1, in terms of short-term insurance product offerings, we now have seven cost-effective versions of leading medical insurance products, including one type for patients with chronic disease and another specialized for patients with kidney disease to meet the diversified protection needs of users. We also upgraded one type of our leading medical insurance product to include targeted therapies in the coverage. In terms of critical illness products, we have launched a series of multi-level CI protection plans for users of different age groups and price sensitivities. For example, we jointly developed Waterdrop CI policy new version, a product tailored for the protection needs of the younger generation with our insurer partners.
We have lowered the threshold for purchasing this product by focusing on quality recovery, thereby allowing more users to have access to a more appropriate and affordable CI policy. Meanwhile, with the rising popularity of ads and snow sports brought about by the Winter Olympics, we have introduced a sports accident insurance policy that covers liability for accidents in skiing and other high-risk sports. In Q1, the premium contribution of our cost-effective innovative insurance products increased significantly, and the sales conversion rate of users of these products has improved by more than 30%. Going forward, we strive to develop more cost-effective products for other categories. Regarding products for customers with illness, we launched a customized product against breast cancer recurrence and also an inclusive health insurance product, Pu Huibao, for people with illness. Those products have achieved strong initial sales.
Looking ahead, we will continue expanding our user acquisition channels and developing new products, satisfying the protection needs of people with illness. We have also made great progress in our O2O brokerage business. In Q1, we have recruited more workforce and built a sales team of over 400 people, including directors and a sales person. Our product offering has been enriched to about 200. This sales team generated a total premium income of over CNY 10 million in Q1, up by 150% quarter-over-quarter. We have empowered the team with our huge online customer database and technology cost base, therefore helping them with customer acquisition and the sales performance improvement. Following the introduction of our O2O brokerage service, the LTV contribution of our existing online users converted to offline services has also increased by 50%.
Going forward, we will refine our customer segmentation and user conversion tools, which should gradually enhance the capability of our brokerage team to unlock the value of our existing customers. In addition, we are exploring a different offline brokerage service model in different regions and cities, aiming at increasing the geographic footprint and user outreach of this business. Thirdly, to talk about strengthening our robot platform capabilities and exploring new models to empower the industry. In Q1, we continued to ramp up the insurance robot platform and achieve key breakthroughs for our intelligent chatbot capabilities. We made significant progress in upgrading our sales robots for short-term insurance products, especially in the areas of user intention recognition and human voice simulation with improved accuracy in detecting user intention.
This allows the robot to identify potential customers more effectively and transfer the inquiry to our insurance consultants, who can then take over the baton and provide more in-depth service to inquirer. Meanwhile, we launched our proprietary outbound calling robot plus customer service business model in January. This coupled with our service capability in online marketing and telemarketing, has helped generate an increase in total insurance premiums over 60% in March from January. Recently, we have unveiled our first digital staff, Bangbang, a human-like virtual employee that was developed based on our business scenarios and powered by AI technology. So far, Bangbang has already been well acquainted with more than 100 of Waterdrop insurance products, including product introduction, insurance coverage, renewable process, claim settlement, et cetera.
Based on its semantic understanding feature, Bangbang can recommend solutions to our online insurance consultants in real time so that they can provide feedback to our customers with higher accuracy and a greater response rate more easily. Bangbang can also help our online insurance consultants with tedious and repetitive tasks such as data processing analysis, online user management, and customer services, thereby reducing the response time, improving the response quality, and broadening the scope of our services. Our analysis shows that Bangbang processed 86% of the user sessions, yielding a high intention recognition accuracy rate of 97%, which helps free up 37% of the customer service manpower. Our next goal is to enable Bangbang to independently complete tasks for more complex and interactive scenarios, and play an important role in the process of sales inquiry, underwriting review, risk control, and claim settlement.
Currently, we are well equipped with robotic process automation and session initiation protocol capabilities, which serves as a solid foundation for us to export our technology to the industry. Several companies have confirmed their intention to advance cooperation with us, for which two companies are now at the stage of technical integration, and our cooperations are expected to go live as early as in Q2. Our technology export products are expected to bring in CNY 10,000,000 million of premium this year. Moreover, we are exploring operating agency products to empower insurance companies on their digital customer management capabilities by providing them with a comprehensive one-stop user operation solution that covers online customer acquisition, existing user management, and user conversion in private domain, as well as offline agent empowerment, thereby promoting the overall digital operation capability of the insurance industry in China.
In conclusion, we started Q1 of 2022 with remarkable progress in terms of operation, innovation, and technological capabilities. We are highly confident in the long term fundamentals of China's insurance industry. We will firmly proceed with our strategy while actively designing new business innovations. In this transition period of the insurance industry, we strive to complete our business transformation and achieve an overall improvement in our operational capabilities at the soonest possible time. Above is the brief on insurance business. Let me hand over to Mr. Hu Yao for the update of our medical crowdfunding business, healthcare business, and technology.
For a start, let me give you an update on our medical crowdfunding business. Despite the COVID-19 has kept resurging, our Waterdrop medical crowdfunding business maintained steady growth, and we are persistent in serving patients during these challenging times. As of the end of Q1, the cumulative number of donors reached 403 million, helping 2.5 million patients with a cumulative fund raise of CNY 50.9 billion.
Next, let me talk about the progress of our patient recruitment business. In Q1, our E-find platform newly enrolled over 50 clinical trial programs by partnering with leading innovative pharmaceutical manufacturers in China and worldwide, including CSPC and Innovent. Leveraging our excellent project delivery capabilities and our abilities to accelerate the process of CRO clinical trials.
Not only have we received a steady flow of new orders from existing pharma partners, but also attracted leading domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, Fosun Pharma, BeiGene, Junshi, Shanghai Pharma, Biocab, and Colon to establish long-term business relationships with us. In Q1, we successfully recruited more than 500 patients in clinical trials, maintaining solid growth compared with the previous quarter. Let me give you two examples. Firstly, in our strategic partnerships with China Tieting and CSPC, we completed more than 20 clinical trials projects, which greatly accelerated their R&D progress. In addition, we have also established extensive collaboration with many top biotech companies and are highly recognized by them. Another example is the project with Henlius.
Within the time span of less than half a year, we have successfully enrolled more than 50 candidates who are in need of financial assistance and have the willingness to participate in Henlius' key clinical trials, which dramatically promoted its R&D efficiency and trial progress. As we continue to deepen our efforts in the patient recruitment segment, we have accumulated increasingly premium resources with our partners, which also promotes the high quality and sustainable development of other business segments. In the meantime, we will continue to maximize our competitive advantage in the crowdfunding business and patient recruitment business to explore more CRO services and develop more high value services for the R&D of new drugs. Next on technology innovation.
As we continue to increase our investment in technology, we optimize the pre- and post-processing algorithms for our speech-to-text software and reduce the surrounding noise disturbance, thereby improving the accuracy of our ASR technology and the intention recognition capabilities. Meanwhile, by analyzing massive industry data, our R&D team conducted incremental pre-training on our models to make them adaptive to our specific scenarios, thus improving the model's performance. Our customer service chatbots can solve more than 80% of questions raised by users, and their intention recognition capability achieves an accuracy rate of over 90%. For transferring customer requests from chatbot mode to manual mode on a real-time basis, we have built a first-of-its-kind phone call loss control model based on our manual plus machine coupling system, which enables us to improve sales force productivity and users' waiting experience.
In terms of promoting the industry development, we also have increased our effort in exporting our AI capability to our traditional insurance partners and other online insurance platforms, helping them enhance their customer service capabilities and the utilization of sales leads. In patient recruitment for clinical trials, we extracted patients' data such as their medication history, surgical history, and the pathological analysis from unstructured patient documents through an event extraction algorithm. Such data will serve as a supplement to manual data collection and provide a reference for medical staff to decide whether a given patient is currently in the window period. So far, the algorithm has extracted the brief medical history of patients with liver and gastric cancer, which improves the efficiency of the operation flow for
In Hebao claims settlement scene, Hebao Assistant is a tool for customers with illnesses to provide Hebao pre-screening. It can help customers select from a large amount of insurance products on the Waterdrop platform to select products that meet the conditions of Hebao, and at the same time provide customers with the most optimal insurance coverage. In order to adapt to the progress of the signed products and provide more and better services, we use algorithms to automatically extract a large amount of non-standardized disease questionnaires, standardize and normalize these data points to produce a structured map that fits well to the operational logic of our underwriting review pipeline. This has significantly improved the efficiency of product allocation and accuracy of product recommendation.
We adopted an underwriting assistant tool to conduct underwriting pre-review and for our customer groups with illness. It helps screen those insurance products for which eligibility criteria a customer could meet, and then select the one which provides the most affordable underwriting term. To facilitate the sales process and also a better user experience, we applied AI, the AI algorithm to automatically extract the data from a huge number of non-standardized disease questionnaires, and then standardize and normalize these data points to produce a structured map which fits well to the operational logic of our underwriting review timeline. It has significantly improved the efficiency of product allocation and accuracy of product recommendation.
In the claims settlement, the accuracy of extracting various data, such as name, ID card, and bank card number from claims application forms, has been improved to above 95% by the algorithm. The algorithm allowed us to effectively extract relevant structured data from bank cards and electronic invoices. This concludes my part, and then let me turn over the call to Kevin Xu, our CFO, to discuss our Q1 financial performance.
Thank you. Thank you, Hu Yao. Hello, everyone. I will now walk you through our key financial results for the Q1 of 2022. Before I go into details on the financial performance, please be reminded that all the numbers quoted here will be CNY , and please refer to our earnings release for detailed information or comparative financial performance on both the year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter basis, respectively. Despite the challenging external environment from industry slowdown and the macro headwinds, our net operating revenue firmed up on a quarter-over-quarter basis, which benefited from our strategic goal of business reform to focus on quality revenue. Our net operating revenue decreased by 26.6% year-over-year to CNY 649 million, from CNY 883 million year-over-year, mainly due to the decrease in FYP, but offset by the improvements of our take rate.
After the strategic re-alignment in Q3 and Q4 last year, there have been positive indicators for the growth recovery of operating revenue, which demonstrated a quarter-over-quarter increase of 7.4% in Q1 . This take rate stabilized at around 34% level, which was primarily driven by the quality enhancement in our insurance business. Operating costs and expenses for Q1 decreased by 60.4% year-over-year to CNY 532 million. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, operating costs and expenses further decreased by 21.5%, demonstrating our cost control measures have had a significant effect, laying a solid foundation for our high quality growth down the road.
In Q1 , we remain highly disciplined on cost control, including spending reductions, improving the effectiveness and ROI of traffic acquisition, optimizing our organizational structure, reducing redundant headcount, and improving operating efficiency. To break it down, the operating costs were CNY 155 million, a decrease of 48.5% year-over-year, mainly due to the decrease of CNY 39 million in professional and outsourced customer service fees, a decrease of CNY 35 million in personnel costs, and a decrease of CNY 37 million in relation to the cessation of the Waterdrop Mutual Aid business compared to the last year. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, operating costs decreased by 21.4%.
Sales and marketing expenses decreased by 75.6% year-over-year from CNY 837 million to CNY 204 million for the Q1 of 2022. The decrease was primarily due to the decrease of our marketing expenses to a third party traffic channels by CNY 620 million, partially offset by an increase in payroll and the related expenses for employees involved in the sales and marketing functions. Again, we delivered satisfactory results controlling our expenses as we promised starting in the Q3 of last year. Quarter-over-quarter basis, sales and marketing expenses still decreased by 15.2%.
G&A expenses decreased by 15.9% in Q1 to CNY 102 million year-over-year, and by 13.4% quarter-over-quarter, mainly due to the decrease of impairments of CNY 27 million provided for the receivables and the prepayments and the CNY 60 million in personnel costs and the shared share-based compensation expenses compared to the last quarter. R&D expenses decreased by 16.6% to CNY 21 million year-over-year, and it decreased by 22.1% quarter-over-quarter, resulting from the optimization of our organizational structure. In this quarter, we continued to have realized a non-GAAP profit of CNY 127 million on the basis of Q4 , 2021.
For the first time, made a U.S GAAP net profit of CNY 105 million compared with the net loss in the same quarter of last year. Thus far, we have reinforced our last year's financial guideline of achieving a non-GAAP profit. Going forward, we will continue our efforts in restructuring our business, enhancing revenue quality and profitability, as well as constantly instilling a rigid cost discipline. As of March 31st, 2022, our cash and cash equivalents and short-term investment balance increased CNY 2,924 million, increasing CNY 137 million or 4.9% from the end of last quarter, despite that we have implemented share repurchase under a complex framework. For detailed financial data, please refer to our press release on our IR website. This concludes my part. Thank you.
Now let's turn to Q&A session. Hi, operator. We can now begin.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please limit to two questions at this time so others can get their questions in as well. In addition, for those who speak Chinese, would you please ask your questions in Chinese first, followed by the English translation by yourself. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Michael Li with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thank you management for giving me this opportunity to ask questions. My name is Michael Li, and I'm from BofA Securities. I have two questions. The first question is about the impact of COVID on our business in Q1 and also Q2 . We noticed that Shanghai and some other cities in China were under lockdown from March until April and May. We believe that a lot of offline insurance companies have been negatively impacted and what is the impact on our business model and whether we could actually benefit from this kind of lockdown. The second question is about the SEC's list.
We noticed that Waterdrop and other more than 100 Chinese ADRs are now on the list of SEC issuers identified under the HFCAA. That means if we cannot meet the requirement of PCAOB or SEC in the next three years, we'll be forced to delist from the U.S. market. May I know if you have any comments on this and if any measures we could take? Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you, Michael, for the question. This is Yang Guang speaking. I'm going to answer your first question.
I think the pandemic resurgence caused a temporary impact and held back the operations of our offline business, such as our medical crowdfunding business. As many patients reduced the frequency to visit the hospital. However, after going through the pandemic two years ago in 2020, our medical crowdfunding business has shown strong resilience, and it is already in the dominant leading position through the industry ups and downs. The pandemic will not have a significant negative impact on our market position or business capability. Also, the COVID-19 resurgence to some extent has given our users a better understanding about the advantage of our omni-channel business model. Particularly it helped improve the user acceptance of our online business and cultivate user habits gradually.
The result is, it accelerated the development of our users' awareness and made the traditional insurance companies more inclined to rely on online channels. It will benefit the development of our omni-channel model in the long run. In addition, it also provide precious opportunity for our O2O business to expand the sales force and prepare ourselves for future business growth. While the pandemic slowed down our offline operations, we seized the window of opportunity to recruit outstanding professionals. For example, by doing that, we established three new branches in Q1, and a number of new local branches are also on the way. Our sales team attracted over 100 new staff and expanded the team to over 400. A lot of them are veterans of the industry.
The categories of products sold by this team has reached about 200, and this factor directly helped increase the average productivity per lead efficiency to reach 2 times the industry average. This team generated a total premium income of over RMB 10 million in Q1, up by 150% quarter-over-quarter. That's all for the first question, and I'm gonna leave the second question to Kevin Xu of finance.
Thank you. Michael, thanks for your question. Regarding the second question, on April 28, 2022, Waterdrop filed annual report, Form 20-F for fiscal year 2021 with SEC. On May 5th, it was identified by the SEC under the HFCAA. About 80 other Chinese ADRs were identified as well in the same batch. In fact, as you may know, almost all Chinese companies listed in the United States were included in the batch after filing their annual report with SEC. Being identified as well, being delisted.
According to applicable rules, only if a company has been identified by SEC for three consecutive years due to the PCAOB's inability to inspect the registered public accounting firms or audit papers related to the company, the company's share or American depository shares would be prohibited from being traded on U.S. stock exchange. We believe this is a normal administrative matter and a common issue encountered by almost all the Chinese companies listed in the States. It doesn't materially affect the company's business operation. We notice that CSRC has issued multiple statements this year signaling that progress has been made in negotiations with SEC. At the same time, we will continue to comply with applicable laws in China and the States and maintain our listing status on the OTC. We never think of voluntarily delisting from this exchange.
As of date, our business and operations are running as usual, and we are actively exploring feasible options to protect our shareholders' interest in our best efforts. Hope this answer your question, Michael Li, and thank you.
Thanks, Yang. Thanks, Kevin.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question will come from Qingqing Mao with CICC. Please go ahead.
Thanks, operator. This is Qingqing from CICC. Congrats on the results first. I have only one question. Can you elaborate more on the financial guidance and how the company balance revenue growth with profitability objectives? That's all for me.
Thank you for your question. It's a good question. Actually, it's difficult to do a financial outlook for the full year at this point due to the external factors, including COVID-19 and the macroeconomic uncertainty. Considering various factors including industry trends, the development space of our company and our business strategy adjustment, we will seek a balance between business growth, efficiency improvement, and cost management. We regard Q4 last year and the Q1 this year as a new starting point for our growth, which will serve as the solid foundation for a healthier, more solid, and a more resilient growth path against the various external factors.
We expect that our business will stabilize and then recover from this new starting point quarter by quarter. In the meanwhile, we will actively explore and innovate, pursue further professional health care business, and develop additional growth momentum in our new business initiatives. In terms of profitability, last quarter, we announced our goal to achieve non-GAAP operating profit for our established business for full year of 2022, and we continue to deliver on this promise. In this release, we further provided the guidance on overall profitability for our group on non-GAAP basis for the year. On the premise that we keep investing in our established business and new initiatives.
We have been seeing positive results in cost control since Q3 last year, as we strictly manage our expenditure and have squeezed out the part of revenue, which is less contribution. Our revenue decreased year over year in Q1 . Nevertheless, we are having signs of stabilization in this trend, and we revealed the positive growth in revenue quarter over quarter. On the industry landscape, the insurance industry is undergoing profound regulatory change and the cyclical fluctuations. Against this backdrop, the old growth model focusing on the scale expansion can no longer adapt to the current user demands and market conditions. The result of regulatory policies has intensified the industry adjustment. The competitive environment of insurance industry is evolving in a direction that is more favorable for Waterdrop.
For example, a number of peers have exited from market, and our external customer acquisition environment actually has improved. In terms of business operations, as we drive our business transformation towards higher quality development, we have seen significant improvements in our retention rates and the various operating metrics, as well as ongoing increase in the renewal rate and the repurchase rate. All of these improvements will provide a strong force for our further sustainable growth. Looking ahead, we believe that as we continue to transform and upgrade our business model and invest more in the management and the services of our existing users, when the next booming phase comes, we will emerge stronger with healthier and a more solid business fundamentals and achieve higher quality growth.
As a top player in the industry, and with our large user base, combined with the robust operations and the wide competitive moat, we believe that we will benefit more during the transition period. We'll hold the other questions. Thank you.
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