Earnings Call Excerpt
Here’s the entire text of the Q&A from eLong’s (ticker: LONG) Q3 2005 conference call. The prepared remarks are here. We recognize that this transcript may contain inaccuracies - if you find any, please post a comment below and we’ll incorporate your corrections. And please note: this conference call transcript is a Seeking Alpha product, so feel free to link to it but reproduction is not permitted without the explicit permission of Seeking Alpha.
Q&A
Operator
Question by William Bao Bean, Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong.
Q - William Bao Bean
Hi guys; could you talk a little about your guidance, I guess you’re looking for losses slightly up. In the past Q4 has always been slightly up. Do you see any changes this 4Q versus previous 4Qs?
A - Justin Tang
Derek, do you want to answer that?
A - Derek Palaschuk
Sure; William one of the aspects that we factor into our guidance is the lower revenues from Ray Time. Ray Time’s revenue is now less than RMB1 million per month, so we’ve factored that into the guidance. Our October hotels and their business, the growth rates were consistent with what we’ve seen in the past.
Q - William Bao Bean
Okay great; and if you could just talk a little bit about the success of your marketing program, how things are going there, especially on the online side, your ability to convert traffic to revenue?
A - Justin Tang
William you said the marketing program?
Q - William Bao Bean
Marketing, yeah; customer acquisitions.
A - Justin Tang
As you can tell from our second quarter results, we added 81,000 new customers which is a record quarter in terms of new customer acquisitions. At the same time our sales and marketing expenses in the third quarter stayed relatively flat from the second quarter, so I think in general our online as well as offline customer acquisition has been pretty effective. Another good indication is we’ve been able to successfully cross our air ticket product into our hotel customer base. That’s one of the key reasons our air ticket has been able to grow has been able to grow 50% quarter-over-quarter, so I think that we will continue to expand our marketing program.
Q - William Bao Bean
Okay and saying that most people don’t really know about Avian Flu so far in China, but do you see an impact there? Have you seen any impact at all?
- The prepared remarks from this call are here.
- All China Stock Blog articles on eLong.
- A list of full conference call transcripts available on the Seeking Alpha Network.
- The complete list of China stocks (and links to articles about them) covered by The China Stock Blog.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
