Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Kenneth Fong with Credit Suisse. Please ask your question.
Kenneth Fong: Hi, thank you management for taking my question. I have two questions. First is could management comment on the latest competitive landscape? Specifically, we saw a number of your peers stressed the importance of low price. Do you have any plan or program in response? How do you position yourself to achieve quality growth in such an environment? And my second question is about sales and marketing, which we saw a acceleration in sales and marketing expenses of 56% year-over-year to around RMB18 billion in the fourth quarter. So, what investment opportunities did you see? As consumer sentiment improved, are you becoming more aggressive in terms of investment or does it just reflect a temporary seasonal hike?
Chen Lei: Hi, Kenneth. So I will first share my views. Your question on competition, the e-commerce market in China is huge. And it is for us energy. Also with the optimization in pandemic control measures, it continues to show strong resilience. And I believe it is easy for everybody to see the opportunities in this market. Therefore, I think it is natural and also a logical for e-commerce peers to choose to raise lending, which makes competition more intense as a result. Also we have noticed the recent moves in the industry. And we saw that different companies may form different strategies in face of competition. And as I have mentioned in my remarks, we believe that healthy competition is beneficial to consumers and entire industry.
But when competition intensifies, sometimes peers’ reaction could go in a different direction. And we will always keep our duty in mind, focus on our own healthy development and embrace industry competition, even when sometimes it’s in loss on sustainable practices from peers. For us, we believe that serving consumers better is the key to creating long-term value. And we will continue to provide consumers with a more fun shopping experience. Therefore, we start from our own unique value propositions. And our team and I are exploring how to provide more value to consumers. And towards this end, we will continue to focus on R&D so that we can better understand the needs and preferences of consumers, improve their shopping spirits and in this way we can increase consumer satisfaction.
And at the same time, we are fully aware that we still have a lot to improve. So, as a result, we will further step-up investments, especially in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing sectors, as well as improve supply chain efficiency, so that we can create more values for consumers and deepen our more savings, more fall proposition. So, this is my view on industry competition. As for your question on sales and marketing expenses, I will leave it to Jun to answer your question. Thank you.
Liu Jun: Hi Kenneth. This is Liu. Let me take the question on sales and marketing expenses. Well, during the fourth quarter, which show consumption recurring trends continue. And given this background, we offered various types of promotions and subsidies to support consumption, as I just mentioned in my remarks. And this offers are reflected in the financial number. And you can see that our sales and marketing expenses in Q4 increased. And absolutely, we always carefully evaluate ERI for every investment for all of our projects. We hope to allocate resources to places that can generate long-term high quality development. Where we see growth opportunities that can create value, we invest firmly. Thank you.
Chen Pang: Hi, operator, we can go to the next analyst on the line.
Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Ellie Jiang with Macquarie. Please ask your question.
