【Record】Mr. Tom Mehrmann, President and General Manager at Universal Beijing Resort, delivers a speech on the forum of New Normal of Tourism amid COVID-19

Moderator: It's my great pleasure to have a talk with you. We have about three simple segments in this section. The first one, can you tell me in one or two minutes about you and your organization and what you expect to be involved in this conference?

Tom Mehrmann, President and General Manager at Universal Beijing Resort

Tom Mehrmann: Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to introduce myself to you very briefly. I'm Tom Mehrmann, President and General Manager at Universal Beijing Resort, which is a theme park being established in Tongzhou, Beijing Municipal Administrative Center.

We have had excellent cooperation with Beijing Tourism Group and other partners to establish the project. The project has been going on for nearly 20 years, but over the past four years, its construction has stabilized and it will open in 2021.

We think the most critical thing in our industry is timing. Timing is also important in our lives and in our careers. No one can plan for or foresee the dramatic crisis we are facing now, but we know that there are always opportunities in a crisis. So we hope that we could take the opportunity to choose a very good time to open our theme park. We know that in this process, we will grasp the opportunities offered by the rebound of China's domestic tourism. So we want to be ready for everything.

For example, we have heard from President Xi Jinping's speech that we will have a digital revolution, and we will have a new normal. We're going to create a great experience for everyone who comes to the park, and we hope that this represents a new normal. I'll talk about this in detail in a keynote speech later and answer questions from you.

We are representatives of an industry and this pandemic we're seeing now is an unprecedented and dramatic change for our industry. I'll take your questions later.

Now let’s welcome Tom Mehrmann. The pandemic has had a great impact on our tourism industry, including the theme parks. As we all know, the Universal Beijing Resort will open next year. How do you think the pandemic will affect our industry? What will the impact on theme parks be like in particular? That's the first question.

Second, when the Universal Beijing Resort opens, it will be the largest theme park in the world owned by Universal Studios. It will open next year. We are all looking forward to it, especially my daughter. Then I would like to know whether you have made relevant adjustments according to the pandemic in the construction and operation, as well as the future marketing. Thank you.

Tom Mehrmann: As for your first question, the impact of the pandemic on the industry, I think this is a very big impact. Some theme parks were closed at the beginning of the pandemic, and some of them haven't opened yet. The studio of my parent company Universal Theme Parks and Resorts in Hollywood is still closed and will probably be reopened in the fourth quarter of this year or the first quarter of next year. Universal Studios in Florida is back in business, but it was closed for three months.

The tourism economy is very important to Florida, so the pandemic had a very serious impact on their economy, and they started to recover after the opening of Florida Universal Studios. Of course there is a lot of uncertainty and a lot of people will still be at home.

In China, I have been saying to some of my colleagues in the industry, I think China is probably the safest country, and I think this program is very good in China. But the overall impact on the global industry is huge. For example, the airline industry and the hotel industry have been affected. Now our industry is very resilient. We just heard about Colombia and Georgia, and destinations around the world are looking forward to the coming of tourists. We are also expecting a lot of visitors after the opening.

As for the second question, I think we are very lucky that we cooperated with the Beijing Tourism Group for our project, which is very good. It is very good to have such a good partner and cooperate with the government. Our cooperation is encouraged by not only the resumption of work and production of the project, but also a very safe recovery.

After our resumption of work and production, there were no confirmed cases at all. We have strict tests and pandemic prevention and control. In Beijing, we also test the body temperature of all our employees every day. And by doing that, we've got 20,000 employees back in the workplace across the country, and we've actually been able to save a lot of money on the budget. That's what we've been doing in this outbreak. From my point of view, a good partnership is very important, and China is very pragmatic and responsible in restarting the economy, especially in Beijing. What we can see is also very good progress, and our project is now in the new normal. We hear that all the world is talking about the new normal. There also were a lot of people talking about it in the keynote speeches this morning. They said that we need to have a reservation system, and contactless services when you're buying and entering the parks. These are all the forms different from before. It is very important to reduce the gathering of these people. Our group will do this work and embrace the new normal. Until we have a vaccine and everything returns to normal. Then there will be a good new normal for pandemic prevention and control. I think it's very important for our theme park.

I am very confident that this will be the case in China and I am very confident that the tourism industry in China will recover very soon. We will see people going back to domestic tourism first, then international tourism. It is very important in the capital of China, and it is very important for us to restore the entire tourism industry in our capital. Thank you.

Moderator: In the final round, can each of you use three key words to summarize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on us and the response of our industry?

Tom Mehrmann: The first one is flexibility. We need to be flexible. Companies need to be flexible. Companies that are flexible will be successful, because they can adapt to the situation and they can provide a good experience for tourists. In short, they can overly meet the needs of customers, which is very important.

The second word is innovation. The innovative companies are always the most successful ones, and they can successfully deal with the impact of the pandemic. They can innovate technology and have new ways to bring people back. We've just heard people say that as human beings, we need contact with people, and contact with nature, so we need a shared experience. This requires us to develop tourism in innovative ways.

The third one is digitalization. I heard from Tencent just now and Alibaba before. We have a very good partnership with both of them. That way our guests can interact with customers, use relevant data, and use digitization to take our business to a new height.