Below is the transcript of a CNBC interview with Jane Sun, CEO, CTrip and CNBC’s Geoff Cutmore. The interview took place at CNBC’s inaugural tech conference, East Tech West, in Nansha, Guangzhou.
Below is the transcript of a CNBC interview with Jane Sun, CEO, CTrip and CNBC’s Geoff Cutmore. The interview took place at CNBC’s inaugural tech conference, East Tech West, in Nansha, Guangzhou.
GC: Thanks, last but not least, as they always say, thank you so much, Mandy, for that, and Jane, terrific to have the opportunity-,
JS: Thank you.
GC: To talk with you again. We’ve had some really interesting conversations up here, both with people at the very early stage of the road that your company has travelled, and some a little bit further down the road. What’s becoming clear, it seems, is that the investing environment has become a little bit more difficult-,
JS: Mm.
GC: At the VC, private equity level. I wonder if you could just offer us some reflections on some of the challenges, as you see it, for perhaps other companies in your space, at the moment, trying to get a foothold? I mean, maybe that’s a good news story, for CTrip, in a way-,
JS: Yes, yes.
GC: But just explain how you see the travel and leisure sector.
JS: Yes. For travelers, I think the segment we are targeted at is relatively resilient, so we are targeting at people who are making $10,000 USD per person, and that segment, relatively, is more resilient than the people making less money. So, what we have seen is safety is very important for these travelers. Secondly, the direct flight routes is very important. Whenever the airlines open a direct flight, we can see the increase to these countries or cities. Thirdly, the people who want to go to Europe, or Australia and New Zealand, or Asia, I think they all want to feel-, to be welcomed, and that feeling is also very important. So, whenever I travel around the world, when I see these cities, meeting with the state governors, I always try to make sure, if they have the will to receive more tourists, they have these three things in mind. And we also designed a program called Welcome China program, so Chinese customers, on the first couple of days, they are very daring to try different food, but after a couple of days, they will miss their food, they like to have hot teas, you know, little things will be very important. The road signs, if they have a little Chinese on it, so they feel, ‘Oh!’ very comfortable, that’s all very comf- very, very well.
GC: So, all of those things are about tailoring the specific-,
JS: Yeah.
GC: Experience to the Chinese traveler-,
JS: Exactly.
GC: But just circling back to my first question, there is a sense that the Chinese economy is slowing, at the moment, and the middle class traveler, who is just emerging, in many senses, has less disposable income-,
JS: Mm.
GC: To spend on your experiences. Are you seeing any of that, in all the data you collect, and what does that mean, in terms of maybe profitability and margin for you?
JS: Yes. So, for us, I think, if we look at our Diamond users, no impact at all. If we look at the new, upcoming, young people, instead of travelling for example, abroad, now they are travelling domestic. And for certain countries, if the currency trades against RMB negatively, then these regions will be impacted. But if the Chinese dollar is holding against certain currencies at a steady level, it’s not impacted.
GC: One of the reasons it’s so good to have you here is you are a big user of data-,
JS: Yes.
GC: And you’ve invested heavily in systems that allow you to mine, and use that data to react very quickly to trends.
JS: Mm.
GC: Can you give us a sense of just how quickly you’re able to change the pricing of what you’re offering, a hotel package, perhaps, or a flight plus a hotel, based on the feedback you’re receiving? How quickly does that process happen?
JS: Oh, that’s instant. So, we connect with all the hotels, every day we host about-, we have about 300 million registered users. Based on where the customers are, we try to reach out to the suppliers, and find the best rate for our customers. And we also innovate a lot of new products. So, for example, China right now has two thirds of the high-speed railway, and the speed is 50% faster than the rest of the world, yet the price is one half of the price we have in Europe. So that gives a huge potential. So, CTrip innovated this product called High-speed Railway Package, so along the way, when you travel, for example, we went to the Hollywood of China, where all these movies were filmed, it used to take 4.5 hours, now we can get there by 1.5 hours. So we, you know, were able to negotiate a very good deal with the hotels, and bundle it together, we negotiated very good deals with the attraction tickets, bundle it together.
