 is currently Senior Vice President of Global Affairs and General Advisor for the company called Pinduo Duink. This company was founded in 2015 and is the largest agricultural platform in China. 788 million users, a tremendous amount in our view, and they pay for those services. In 2020, there were total sales for $256 billion, of which 42 billion correspond to marketing of agricultural products. Pinduo Du connects more than 12 million farmers with the 788 million users in the system. Through the platform, Andrei will talk to us about now. In ending, aside from this activity, Andrei also helps support the training of human capital through the Duoduo University. The farmer partners of Duoduo work with local governments and foster the development and work actively with a farmer cooperative. So with this, we offer the floor to Andrei for his presentation. Go ahead, Andrei, please. Thank you. Thank you for having me here. I'm sorry I'll be presenting in English today, but I'm sure you're in excellent hands of our interpreter Cynthia here. Good morning, everyone. My name is Andrei Zhu. I'm the Senior Vice President of Global Affairs at Pinduo Duo. My presentation today is about our company Pinduo Duo and how we empower farmers through technology. Even though what I'm sharing here today is in the context of the agriculture sector in China, I think most of the issues that we face here and there are pretty universal. So I hope that our experience in this part of the world can be of some value to this audience. Let me start by giving an overview of who we are. We're founded in 2015, Pinduo Duo is the largest agriculture platform in China now. In 2020, we served close to 800 million active buyers, which makes us the largest online retail platform in China by active buyer. More than one in two Chinese are using Pinduo Duo for their shopping needs now. Our gross merchandise value or GMV in 2020 was over 256 billion US dollars. About 16% of it or roughly 42 billion US dollars comes from the sales of agricultural products. We're the portal that connects over 12 million Chinese farmers to the digital economy. Our goal is to become the world's largest agriculture and the grocery platform. Many people asked us, what's the secret to our success? I think the key is that we created this mobile only platform when the entire Chinese society was switching from desktop internet to mobile internet. We developed our business model and designed our user interface with one goal only in mind, which is making shopping more natural, engaging, convenient and fun to our users on our smartphones. The first thing we did was to change this task-oriented search model to an interactive and discovery-oriented recommendation feed model. You know, under the old search model, users have to know what they wanna buy. They type in the keywords to search and then compare prices and features and then choose a product and make the purchase and done. But shopping on Pinduo Duo is more like going to a mall or a weekend market. Now, users can browse in different categories and explore products and users are likely to have an interest in. Our app is more like a personal shopper that recommends products to you based on shopping record, browsing history, merchant rating, product relevance, et cetera. You know, we're also developing this innovative shopping format called PIN, which means shop together in Chinese. With just four simple clicks, a user can finish an entire process of browsing, selecting, sharing and purchasing with the friend. This may sound very simple, but it revolutionized the entire online shopping experience for the users. Online shopping now is just like shopping and brick-and-mortar stores which can be fun social interactive. Now, one benefit of users buying together is that it helps to aggregate demand for merchants. Now, with the economies of scale, greater planning efficiency merchants can charge lower prices and consumers can get better deals. Another benefits that allows us to have a better understanding of users, not just an isolated target with a wallet, but really as a social being in his network of family and friends. Now, with that, we can continuously optimize our recommendations to improve user experience. Now, our focus on meeting user needs has really helped us to drive this virtual cycle which has accelerated our growth. Now, starting from the left, if you look at a slide, as we aggregate user demand, the higher sales volume allows merchants to lower costs and pass on more savings to our user. And this happens on more products and our users continue to have good experience, then they help to spread the word and grow our user base. Then moving on to the right, those users interact more frequently on our platform with merchants and each other. And we, as a platform, we get a better understanding of what users want and that we can further refine our recommendations and improve user experience. Now, in a long-term, that accumulated trust really keeps our users engaging with us and then attracts more users. Now, why agriculture? And we're really happy that more people are taking notice of what Pinduoduo is doing in agriculture, but this is really not something new. Our story has always been intertwined with agriculture. In fact, we started off in 2015 by selling fruits and vegetables online before we actually expanded into an all-category marketplace. We've always seen great potential in agriculture for a tech company like us because the overall market for agricultural products in China alone is over $1.2 trillion in 2019. And yet the online penetration is only about 7%. Now, compared to 25% for the overall retail sector and for sectors like apparel and electronic products, it goes up to about 40%. So that's on the commercial side. And then with our current scale, we cannot just focus on business opportunities and corporate profit. We must think about the future and sustainability of our communities. And then we think by digitizing agriculture and then making the supply chain more efficient, we can actually bring cheaper and fresher produce to consumers. We can help farmers make more money. We can reduce carbon footprint of our distribution network and logistics infrastructure. So food security, food safety, and climate change, these are some of the most fundamental issues we're facing. Now let's look at some of the challenges that the agriculture sector in China is facing. The decades of rural urban migration has led to a shrinking agriculture workforce that still has to meet the food needs of a growing population. Now to improve productivity and yields, this has led to the overuse of chemicals on arable lands that temporarily maximizes production quantity but compromises production quality. At the same time, consumers are demanding healthier and cleaner foods. Now we need to invest in technology to make the food system more secure for the generations to come. So how do we help address these challenges? At Pinduoduo, we take a systems approach by investing across the agricultural value chain. You know, we're the first platform to build an agriculture focused infrastructure in China which empowers farmers to grow better crops and sell them at better prices while helping consumers get fresher and better value products. I want to highlight our seven initiatives which span the downstream, midstream, and upstream segments of the agricultural value chain. Now starting from the downstream distribution, streamlining and optimizing the national distribution chain is really our bread and butter as an e-commerce platform. Now let me illustrate this with a real example of a garlic farmer in Henan province. Under the, if you look at the top of the slide, under the traditional distribution model, this garlic grower gains access to the market by selling to a local wholesaler. The wholesaler, not the farmer actually determines the price which is two RMB per kilogram. The wholesaler then sells the garlic through as many as four layers of distributors before the garlic finally reaches the retail outlet which then charges 16 RMB to the consumers. If you notice that's eight times markup in terms of the price. Now the garlic grower can sell the same garlic directly to consumers through the online stores on our platform. She sets her own price at four RMB per kilo based on market data and comparable products on a platform. Now after deducting the incremental labor cost, packaging and delivery cost, she could still get 2.6 RMB per kilogram. That's significant 75% saving for the consumers and 30% increase in income for the garlic grower. With fewer intermediaries, the garlic also gets to the consumer much faster and fresher. It's really a win-win situation for both the farmers and the consumers. Now the second initiative I wanna highlight is called dodo grocery. This is a next day self pickup service where users place orders on our app before 11 PM on day one from a curated list of locally sourced groceries. And then they pick up their purchases after four PM the next day at a collection points conveniently located close to them. Now we launched this service in August last year in response to the surging consumer demand for online groceries during the COVID-19 lockdowns. With dodo grocery, what we're essentially is doing three things. The first one is we're developing local infrastructures within our national platform that connects local farmers to local customers. Now farmers can advertise their leafy vegetables and delicate fruits online to a targeted group of local consumers. Now second, we shortened the fulfillment time from several days to within 24 hours. The merchandise spends very little time in warehouses and trucks and travels very shorter distance. Now the consumers have a new channel to buy fresh local produce. The third one we cut down on cost significantly. But because this is a self pickup model instead of a home delivery model, we cut the last last mile delivery cost entirely which usually takes up around 30% of the entire delivery costs. Now dodo grocery, this service is hugely popular among users and farmers in China. We started in two cities in August last year. Now it's offered in 300 cities across China and almost covering every province here. Now moving to the misdream transportation, we are building a cold chain logistics network to support our dodo grocery service. We're working with our partners to develop a network of warehouses, sorting facilities, routing planning systems to really improve our capability to deliver a wider range of perishables that require refrigeration. With a more efficient cold chain logistics network, we're hoping that we can help farmers to expand the coverage area where they can sell fresh produce, particularly during the summertime. Now, our model has always been to empower farmers with technology, but not sidelining or replacing farmers by technology. So training farmers to take full advantage of digital economy is really at the center of our strategy. We created dodo university to develop human capital in the agricultural sector. So now close to half a million farmers have attended our online courses. We also partnered with China Agricultural University to offer more than 1400 hours of offline courses. We're really proud that we have trained over 100,000 new farmers. These are young people from rural areas and they went to big cities to work, but they're open to the idea of returning home to settle down. Now we coach them to be e-commerce savvy and help them set up online stores and sell local agricultural products from their hometowns. These new farmers not only earn a good living themselves, they also vitalize, and they also vitalize their local economy by selling more local products. And what's really important is they're creating good paying jobs within their rural communities. We're encouraged by the results so far. So we're committed to training another 100,000 new farmers in the next five years. Now, one of the ways we enable farmers to connect directly with consumers is through live streaming. I want to share this video clip with you to give you a better feel of it. Let's see if it works. 由喜欢主播的,可以关注下主播 我们的一号年纪是我们的盐良甜瓜 中国最大的盐良甜瓜之地 看我们的瓜 每个瓜都在茁壮的成长 都是一腾一个瓜. As you can see, a lot of the other platforms in China use celebrities to promote products in live streaming studios. Now, we take a very different approach. We actually give the camera to farmers so they can show their fields, crops to the viewers. It may not have the same kind of professional makeup or lighting, but we found it actually had this layer of authenticity that celebrity live streaming cannot match. Now, moving upstream now to production. In April, 2019, we launched this door to a farm program. This is a tripartite partnership between Pinduoduo, local governments, and Agronomic Research Institute. This is a partnership that empower farmers to grow sustainably. The picture on the left shows one of our Duoduo farms in Yunnan province. We provided 2.3 million RMB initial funding to help the local farmers to set up the co-op. Then the agronomic experts from the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences helped to select this citrus variety that was suitable for the high altitude climate. The citrus variety actually bears fruits between January and May. Usually this is the off-peak season for citrus harvests. This improves their marketability and plug a gap in citrus availability in the market. So we also introduced this Israeli drip irrigation system so that the farmers can manage a large plot of land with less labor. As a result, the orange tree grown under this pilot used 15% less fertilizer, 30% less labor, and expected to have better yield and higher profit. Now these are real results with farmers literally enjoying the fruit of their labor from working with us. Now another project we did last year in upstream production site was our inaugural smart agricultural competition. We partnered with China Agricultural University and FAO for this event. We put four AI teams and four human grower teams against each other to see who's better at growing strawberries. Now after 14 weeks, the AI team actually produced almost twice more strawberries than I wait. You have five minutes. Sure, sure. Then the human grower teams. Now one of the AI teams has since commercialized the technology to partner traditional farmers to improve the yield. What's really important about this competition is that we demonstrated to the farmers that technologies are accessible and affordable and can really improve their production and livelihood. Now finally, I wanna end by talking about how we helped the farmers in coping with the pandemic. Now when the COVID-19 first struck, the offline distribution was paralyzed. The farmers couldn't ship their products out of their farms. There was also this fear of food supply shortage in the cities. We quickly put together dedicated to help the farmers channel where effective farmers could showcase and promote their products. We partnered over 67,000 farmers. We host over 100 live streaming sessions. Now through our platform, farmers showcased over 280,000 agricultural products and sold close to 800,000 tons. Now during this time of crisis, we see this as our responsibility and I'm really proud to be part of the platform that can respond quickly and use technology to help the farmers community. Now to conclude, we're the largest agricultural platform in China and we're serious about making agriculture the center, is the centerpiece of our growth strategy. And then to achieve that, we don't believe in sidelining farmers by technology, but rather empowering farmers with technology. So we wanna share that message with people around the world and we welcome the opportunity to work with like-minded partners to make digital agriculture our reality. Thank you very much.