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Tongcheng Travel Revenue Rises to RMB17.34 Billion in 2024, Adjusted Net Profit Grows 26.7% to RMB2.79 Billion

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Rising Travel Spending Boosts Growth
AI Integration Drives Sustainable Development

HONG KONG, March 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Tongcheng Travel Holdings Limited (“Tongcheng Travel” or the “Company”, together with its subsidiaries the “Group”, stock code: 0780.HK), an innovator and leader in China’s online travel industry, today announced its audited consolidated results for the year ended 31 December 2024 (the “period under review” or “2024”).

2024 Results Highlights with Year-on-year (yoy) Change

Robust Growth in Revenue and Adjusted Net Profit

Revenue increased by 45.8% yoy to RMB17,340.7 million Adjusted EBITDA increased by 29.7% yoy to RMB4,050.2 million, adjusted EBITDA margin recorded 23.4% Adjusted net profit increased by 26.7% to RMB2,785.4 million, adjusted net margin recorded 16.1% GMV increased by 5.9% to RMB255.7 billion The Board recommended a final dividend of HKD0.18 per share

Strong User Base with Paying Users Reaching Record High

Annual monthly paying users (MPUs) increased by 4.4% to 43.1 million Annual paying users (APUs) increased by 1.5% to 238.3 million, reaching record high Accumulated number of travelers served in the 12-month period increased by 9.3% to 1,928.1 million, reflecting a robust growth in user purchase frequency

Significant Growth in Core OTA Business Enhancing User Experience and Platform User Value

Revenue of core OTA business increased by 22.1% yoy to RMB14,199.4 million Revenue from transportation ticketing services increased by 19.9% yoy to RMB 7,229.0 million, with international air ticket volume recording a growth rate of over 130% yoy Revenue from accommodation reservation services increased by 19.7% yoy to RMB4,668.2 million, with international room nights sold registering a yoy increase of over 110% Revenue from other business increased by 35.5% yoy to RMB2,302.2 million

Mr. Ma Heping, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of Tongcheng Travel, said, “In 2024, China’s travel industry exhibited robust growth and maintained an upward trajectory, driving the Group to deliver exceptional performance during the period under review. As a technology-driven leading travel platform, Tongcheng Travel continues to anchor itself in the mass travel market, further advancing the integration of intelligent travel services and providing users with greater ease in consumption decision-making, which in return strengthens the Group’s market position. Looking ahead, the Group is committed to leveraging its core strengths to advance AI technology, enhance its applications and expand application scenarios, thereby creating long-term value for stakeholders.”

Expanding Influence in the Mass Travel Market with Accumulated Number of Travelers Served Reaching New High to 1.93 Billion
Building on its core strengths in user acquisition and operational efficiency, Tongcheng Travel continued to build its vast user base and enhance user value, expanding its influence in the mass market on the mainland. The Group’s annual MPUs increased by 4.4% yoy to 43.1 million while APUs increased by 1.5% yoy to 238.3 million, marking record highs. The Group’s twelve-month accumulated number of travelers served increased by 9.3% yoy to 1.93 billion, driven by the continuous improvement in user purchase frequency.

Tongcheng Travel continued to expand its traffic sources through both online and offline channels, with a focus on improving operational efficiency. The Weixin ecosystem was the Group’s vital traffic source. The Group has effectively established a vast user base across China by leveraging its huge and stable traffic. The Group continued to refine its operations within the Weixin ecosystem to enhance user interactions. In addition, the Group has been actively diversifying its traffic sources. During the period under review, the Group increased investments in its standalone APP and launched a variety of customized marketing campaigns to attract new users. In 2024, the Group’s registered users residing in non-first tier cities in China accounted for over 87% of the total registered users. For the three months ended December 31, 2024, around 70% of our new paying users on the Weixin platform were from non-first tier cities in China.

Core OTA Businesses Experienced Robust Growth
The International Air Ticketing Business and Accommodation Business Doubled the Growth
During the period under review, the Group’s core OTA business demonstrated remarkable growth. Driven by the increase in ticketing volume and the enhancement in value-added products and services, revenue from transportation ticketing services increased by 19.9% yoy to RMB7,229.0 million. The Group’s air ticketing business continued to gain market share throughout the year, registering solid growth in volume that surpassed the overall industry growth. The Group’s international air ticketing business continued its rapid expansion, fueled by a competitive pricing approach and aggressive marketing efforts. Consequently, the international air ticket volume for the year recorded a remarkable growth rate of over 130% yoy. In addition, the train ticketing business delivered decent revenue growth, supported by ongoing efforts to improve monetization through optimizations of the intelligent Huixing travel system. The Huixing system offers practical and accessible travel solutions, which improves user experience and enhances user value on Tongcheng’s platform.

The Group’s accommodation business experienced strong growth, as it achieved record highs in both room nights sold and revenue during the period under review. The revenue from accommodation business increased by 19.7% yoy to RMB4,668.2 million. The Group persisted its efforts to increase penetration in the mass travel market in China amid the resilient demand. Tongcheng Travel is committed to delivering the best value-for-money products and services to the users. The Group strengthened its partnership with suppliers and collaborated to offer users differentiated products and services, thereby enhancing product competitiveness.

As the nation’s travel demand shifts from ‘essential’ to ‘leisure and vacation, the Group’s other business under the core OTA business also performed steadily, with revenue increasing by 35.5% year-on-year to RMB2,302.2 million.

Leading the Transformation of AI Technology in the Travel Industry
Deepening the Travel Industry Chain and International Expansion
As a technology-driven company, Tongcheng Travel continued to increase its investment in technology research and development and actively promote the deep application of AI technology in the travel industry, bringing profound changes to the sector. The Group had self-developed Chengxin (程心), a proprietary generative AI system focusing on travel, which helps users create personalized travel itineraries and compare accommodation options based on their preferences. The Group has also developed digital assistants for several tourist destinations, providing personalized recommendations and facilitating seamless interaction with tourists. During the period under review, the Group became the world’s first online travel platform to integrate DeepSeek and it officially completed the technical integration with Chengxin system. The Group strategically incorporated emerging technologies to enhance operational efficiency and elevate user experiences. It has implemented a n AI-driven customer service system to streamline workflows and reduce workloads for the staff, to enhance their productivities at work.

Tongcheng Travel is committed to fostering high-quality development within the travel industry by empowering its industry partners and enhancing user experiences. During the period under review, the Group partnered with the Eastern Airport Group to help them implement targeted marketing strategies to attract traffic. Meanwhile, it also joined hands with a number of airports in Western China region to conduct joint marketing campaigns centered around a popular game, aiming at promoting the travel routes featured within the game and boosting local travel development.

As one of the Group’s key industry chain initiatives, the hotel management business has continued its growth momentum across China. As at the end of December 2024, the number of hotels in operation under Elong Hotel Technology rose to nearly 2,300, with approximately 1,400 more hotels in the pipeline.

Furthermore, HOPEGOO, the new international online travel booking platform under Tongcheng Travel, has been in full operation, providing reservation services in six key areas including flights, hotels, train tickets, tickets, ferry tickets, and local activities, and supporting payments in 16 currencies and multiple operating languages. Meanwhile, eLong Hotel Technology, the hotel technology platform of Tongcheng Travel, has boarded brands covering countries such as Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia. These brands will provide diverse and high-quality accommodation experiences for global consumers.

Going forward, the Group will leverage its core strengths to foster enduring expansion. The Group is committed to strengthening its core OTA business by enriching the product and service offerings and delivering greater value to its users. At the same time, the Group will prioritize the expansion of the outbound business to seize emerging market opportunities and bolster its global footprint. Besides, the Group will continue to advance its hotel management and package tour businesses to strengthen its influence and competitive edge within the industry. Tongcheng Travel will emphasize corporate governance, environmental protection, and social responsibility in our operations to generate long-term value for its stakeholders.

About Tongcheng Travel Holdings Limited (HKSE Stock Code: 0780.HK)
Tongcheng Travel is a one-stop shop for users’ travel needs. With the mission “make travel easier and more joyful”, Tongcheng Travel offers a comprehensive and innovative selection of products and services covering nearly all aspects of travel, including transportation ticketing, accommodation reservation, tourist attraction ticketing, and products including package tour, self-guided tour and cruise, including a wide array of transportation and leisure travel scenarios primarily through its online platforms, which comprise its Tencent-based platforms, its proprietary mobile apps, quick apps and other channels.

As a technology-driven company, Tongcheng Travel leverages big data and AI capabilities to better understand the preferences and behaviors of users, thereby offering users customized products and services. Tongcheng Travel has a strategic focus on lower-tier cities in China and seized opportunities there supported by its diversified traffic sources, product innovation capability and flexible operation strategies. Through the in-depth understanding of user experience and advanced technological capabilities, Tongcheng Travel has been revolutionizing what consumers expect from the online travel industry, making the entire travel process more convenient, personalized and enjoyable than ever. Tongcheng Travel aims to develop and apply its advanced technology to transform from an online travel agency to an intelligent travel assistant.

For more information, please visit the Group’s website at https://www.tongchengir.com

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/tongcheng-travel-revenue-rises-to-rmb17-34-billion-in-2024–adjusted-net-profit-grows-26-7-to-rmb2-79-billion-302406909.html

SOURCE Tongcheng Travel Holdings Limited

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Skywork AI launches the world’s first music reasoning large model Mureka O1, leading the global AI music revolution

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BEIJING, March 26, 2025 /CNW/ — On March 26th,  Skywork AI officially launches the Mureka O1 and Mureka V6 models. As the world’s first music reasoning large model, Mureka O1 outperforms Suno and achieves the State of the Art (SOTA). China’s technological innovation is leading the global AI music revolution.

In April 2024,  Mureka released the first-generation music model Mureka V1 (SkyMusic). It received an overwhelmingly positive market response.

Over the past year, our technology and product teams have been working hard to push the boundaries and refine Mureka’s capabilities. So far, users from more than 100 countries and regions around the world have accessed our AI music product—Mureka.

Mureka is a combination of “Music” and “Eureka.” Eureka is an exclamation from Greek, meaning “I have found it” or “I have discovered it,” often used to express moments of sudden inspiration. Mureka hopes that it can quickly capture people’s moments of musical inspiration and create songs in their own unique style.

Mureka V6 & O1 have been fully launched and support seamless switching

Mureka V6 is the current base model of Mureka, supporting pure music generation as well as AI music creation in ten languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Russian. In Mureka V6, we have introduced our self-developed ICL (In-Context Learning) technology. This advancement brings several improvements: a more expansive soundscape, enhanced vocal texture, and improved mixing design.

The Mureka O1 model is an optimized version based on Mureka V6 and is the world’s first music model to introduce CoT (chain of thought). It incorporates thinking and self-criticism in the inference process, significantly improving music quality, music creation efficiency, and flexibility.

Both Mureka V6 and O1 models support a wide range of music styles and emotional expressions, which cover Jazz, Electronic, Pop, Country, R&B, Soul, Blues, Rock, Dance, and more. The emotional dimensions include happiness, indulgence, mystery, vitality, sadness, and various other emotional expressions.

In addition, Mureka also offers two unique music generation features:

Music Reference Function: Using the music itself as a prompt, users can directly upload audio files or YouTube links as creative references.
Vocal Function: Mureka is the world’s first AI music generation platform that allows users to choose the vocal timbre of the singer. Users can not only choose from a variety of official singer timbres but also upload their own voices for the AI to learn and replicate, accurately simulating the singer’s timbre and generating personalized exclusive works with a single click. The feature of customizing singer timbres heralds the arrival of the era where everyone can become an AI singer.

The launch of Mureka V6 and O1 represents a significant milestone in the technological advancement of the AI music industry. It also demonstrates the potential of AI in artistic creation and highlights the vast possibilities of continuously exploring new technological forms and artistic expressions.

Mureka O1 adopts the self-developed MusiCoT technology and achieves SOTA

Mureka O1 includes MusiCoT, Mureka’s latest innovative research in the field of music generation, which is technologically advanced and forward-looking. We found that there is very little algorithmic work in music, and only a few teams have made their work public. To address this,Mureka published the implementation principle of Mureka O1 in the form of a paper, and welcome the industry to make better work on this basis.

Mureka O1 incorporates the latest achievements in music generation from the Mureka team—MusiCoT. MusiCoT is a variant of the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method tailored for music generation. Unlike traditional autoregressive models that generate audio step-by-step, MusiCoT pre-generates the overall music structure before finalizing the audio tokens for decoding. This approach significantly improves the structural coherence and instrumental arrangement of the generated music.

Built on the CLAP model, MusiCoT achieves high scalability without requiring manual annotations. It not only enhances the analyzability and quality of generated music, but also paves a new path for high-fidelity music generation. With MusiCoT, we usher in an era of structured music creation using AI, offering exceptional possibilities for musicians and producers.

Given to the introduction of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technology and the upgrade of the algorithm framework, Mureka O1 not only maintains low-latency music generation but also significantly improves the lyrics accuracy, singing accuracy, and production quality. It surpassed Suno V4 in multiple metrics.

Music isn’t math. Ultimately, it’s all about what sounds good to the ear. That’s why both subjective evaluation and objective metrics are crucial. Under this philosophy, Mureka O1 excels across various aspects in our subjective assessment and ranks among the top-tier models in this category,including Mixing, Vocal Texture and Background Music Texture.

Mureka offers API service and model fine-tuning function

Mureka is the world’s first high-quality AI music generation platform with open API services. Both developers and music platforms can now seamlessly integrate Mureka’s music generation capabilities into their own products or platforms, making it easier to extend their business value with AI music capabilities.

In addition to opening up API services for the first time worldwide, Mureka synchronously opens up model fine-tuning services based on Mureka V6. Become the world’s first AI music generation platform with open model fine-tuning function.

This feature makes AI music creation more personalized, providing customized AI music solutions for musicians, producers, and even brands and game developers.In the future, the Mureka team will continue to invest in model capabilities to keep our music model in the top tier in the world, while developing more music creation functions on top of the base model, such as secondary editing of music generation, song creation, and so on.

Users around the world are welcome to log on to Mureka (www.mureka.ai) to experience the new V6&O1 model, explore the infinite possibilities of music creation with AI music creators around the world, and build an AI music developer ecosystem.

 

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kunlun-tech-launches-the-worlds-first-music-reasoning-large-model-mureka-o1-leading-the-global-ai-music-revolution-302411665.html

SOURCE Skywork AI

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Announcing the 2025 M&A Source Spring Conference & Deal Market

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INDEPENDENCE, Ohio, March 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — M&A Source® announces the 2025 Spring Conference & Deal Market, where established lower middle market advisors, investment bankers and investors throughout the U.S. will gather to build their skills, make connections and uncover deal-making opportunities. Registration is open for this highly anticipated event, taking place from May 20-21 at The Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld in Orlando, FL. M&A Source® professional development courses will be offered on May 19. M&A Source® is the leading trade association for the lower middle market deal community.

 

The M&A Source® Conferences and Deal Markets, held in the spring and fall each year, provide carefully curated opportunities for lower middle market advisors, private equity groups, family offices and search funds to establish relationships and build deal flow.

On May 20, highly acclaimed keynote speaker, David Horsager will present, Trust Matters More than Ever. A leading authority on trust, Mr Horsager will reveal the 8 Pillar Framework™ that has helped top leaders and organizations gain trust from consumers, employers, investors and the public. For business advisors, trust is essential to guide and influence clients effectively.

A wide range of M&A Source® professional education courses are scheduled on May 19. Written and presented by the industry’s top thought leaders and practitioners, options are available for a spectrum of experience levels to maximize success for lower middle market practices.

Conference-related festivities begin with a New Attendee Gathering on May 18 and a Kick-off Cocktail Party on Monday May 19.

“The M&A Source® Conferences and Deal Markets are the premier events for the advancement of the LMM deal community. True to our mission, we’re proud to provide high-level educational and networking opportunities for our members‒transaction advisors, related professionals and investors, who are dedicated to the highest standards of client care.” – Kathlene Thiel, Chair of the Board, M&A Source®

Register now for the M&A Source 2025 Spring Conference & Deal Market.

M&A Source® is the leading not for profit association for individuals and firms engaged in lower middle market business transactions. The association provides education, benefits, conferences, support programs and networking opportunities, and awards the Mergers & Acquisitions Master Intermediary® (M&AMI®) designation to qualified advisors. For additional information, contact M&A Source directly at 216-243-0030.

[Website] www.masource.org

[Social Media Handles]
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61558836868836&is_tour_dismissed
Twitter – https://x.com/dealmakerinside
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/dealmakerinsider/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/deal-maker-insider
Pinterest – https://www.pinterest.com/dealmakerinsider/

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/announcing-the-2025-ma-source-spring-conference–deal-market-302411255.html

SOURCE M&A Source

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Yingli Solar Modules Certified by Certisolis for Low Carbon Footprint

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BAODING, China, March 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Yingli Solar complies with Certisolis’ French Carbon Footprint regulation for four types of solar modules: bifacial and glass-glass (2+2 mm), ranging from 460 Wc and 630 WC to 645 Wc and 725 Wc, respectively.

Yingli Solar, founded in Baoding, Hebei province, China, near Beijing, has been a pioneer and pillar in the solar industry for 27 years. Today, Yingli Solar maintains its Tier 1 ranking and global presence, with local employees providing tailored services to customers worldwide.

France has unique carbon footprint certification requirements, which can benefit other European and global markets by enabling raw material supply tracing. 

Mr Xiong, CEO of Yingli Solar, states: “As part of our Environmental, Social, and Governance approach, we are proud to have obtained carbon footprint certification for all our solar modules. Furthermore, we are among the few top 10 solar module manufacturers with a low carbon footprint score for all modules (400 kg eq CO ₂ /kWc). This team achievement demonstrates our dedication to our long-standing French and European strategic clients.”

Hital Wang, Deputy General Manager of International Sales at Yingli Solar, has long advocated for carbon neutrality regulations to make energy production greener: “Our commitment to reducing our carbon emissions to zero throughout the entire value chain is at the core of our strategy. We believe this also supports our clients’ development, as they always consider how suppliers are leading in carbon emission neutrality. At Yingli Solar, we consistently improve our analysis of raw material sourcing to achieve a cleaner and better carbon footprint score.”

Since March 2024, Mr. Larruchon has been leading the French team: “This low carbon footprint achievement will greatly support our long-standing French and European strategic clients. The carbon footprint score influences tender rewards and makes PPA projects more valuable assets for owners. Carbon emissions in our operations are central to our present and future efforts for global carbon neutrality. Our world is under pressure from climate change, and we will not cease these efforts as long as they do not significantly impact the LCOE.”

Yingli Solar is ranked among the top 10 solar module companies and looks toward the future with a positive vision, aiming to provide clients worldwide with stability in an ever-changing industry.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/yingli-solar-modules-certified-by-certisolis-for-low-carbon-footprint-302411745.html

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