Yunji Inc.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 22 Mar 2021

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect now. Thank you. Good morning, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, and welcome to Yunji's Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. With us today are Mr. Shanglue Xiao, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Chengqi Zhang, Vice President of Finance; and Ms. Kaye Liu, Investor Relations Director of the company. Now I would like to hand the conference over to first speaker today, Ms. Kaye Liu, IRD of Yunji. Please go ahead, ma'am.

[Kaye Liu:]

Hello, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. Before we start, please note that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that are based on our current expectations and current market operating conditions and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors of Yunji and its industry. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminologies such as will, expects, anticipate, continue or other similar expressions. For a detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our related documents filed with U.S. SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today and expressly qualified in the entirely by cautionary statements, risk factors and details of the company's filing with SEC. Yunji does not undertake any obligation to update these statements except as required on applicable law.

[Shanglue Xiao:]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Yunji fourth quarter 2020 earnings call. In the fourth quarter, we generated a total GMV of RMB11.7 billion and a total revenue of RMB1.33 billion due to our ongoing development of a differentiated supply chain and upgrade merchandising mix. As a result of augmented users business and increased activities of platform service managers, the number of transacting members on our platform increased to 13.3 million for 12 months at the end of December 31, 2020. 2020 was a year of significant changes in terms of both the internal and external environment. At the end of the year, as usual, we will review our strategy and reflect on our achievements of the year. In 2020, under an increasingly competitive e-commerce environment, we identified a strategical path for Yunji to develop differentiate aided supply chain, which can be leveraged to make more tactic, customized and specialized product offering. As technology evolved, many industries embraced this intermediation and our business model is not about arbitraging the product price differential among various e-commerce platform. Instead, we established our competitive strength through researching the optimal merchandising mix, engaging service managers to act as shopping curators and enhancing our users' shopping experiences. And our differentiated merchandise mix of the private label joint venture brands and emerging brands enjoys a longer product life cycle, can be constantly improved and may gradually developed into products and brands capable for generating tens of millions or billions of sales aligned with the improvement of our product offering. Our community also became more active as our members and users have access to more materials about products to share and discuss in general meeting. Over the course of 2020, our efforts in implementing supply chain differentiation and private-label development strategy have achieved the meaningful results. For example, one of our private labeled weight loss products joined Yunji million dollar sales product category within half a year since its launch, as it has generated over RMB6 million of the sales. We will continue to improve these products according to user feedback and market demand to further improve our user satisfaction. In February 2021, we also launched our first full city focused present label called Li Ba Tian. Li Ba Tian launched its first product, Authentic grilled sausage, jointly with a renowned Food Research Institute in China called 5K Sausage research institution. And on both sides of the 2020 Chinese New Year holiday season, we started selling 2 new batches of the authentic grilled sausage, respectively. All of them sold out prudently upon market introduction. Besides food, we are also developing and promoting additional merchandising categories, including health ovens, personal care and health supplements.

[Chengqi Zhang:]

Thank you, Shanglue. Hello, everyone. Before I go through our financial results, please note that all numbers stated in the following remarks are in the Renminbi term, and all comparisons are on a year-over-year basis, unless otherwise noted. During the fourth quarter, we continued to focus on improving our margins by launching more private label brand products and to utilize our unique membership-based community to increase sales across different social channels. As a result, we continue to steadily improve our platform's operating efficiency during this quarter. With total operating expense decreased by 44%, and the loss from operations decreased by 54%. Now let's take a closer look at our financials. Total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2020 was CNY1.3 billion compared to CNY2.4 billion in the same period of 2019. Our GMV for the fourth quarter of 2020 was CNY11.7 billion compared to CNY11 billion in the same period of 2019. Revenue from net sales of merchandise in the fourth quarter of 2020 were CNY1.2 billion compared to CNY2.1 billion in the same period of 2019. Revenue from our marketplace business in the fourth quarter of 2020 were CNY153 million compared to CNY169 million in the same period of 2019. The trend in our total revenue and the GMV were in line with our ongoing efforts to improve both our internal operating efficiency and operating efficiency of our merchants as we continue to transfer business activities to our marketplace business model, while expanding our user coverage through innovative partnership with other platforms. During the fourth quarter, the year-over-year decrease in our total revenue was mainly attributable to lower commission rates as a result of our efforts to protect platform membership value through providing subsidies to products from certain large brands in response to increased competition during the e-commerce shopping festival period. Besides, as we implemented our own coverage expansion strategy, our commission rates during the quarter was also affected by our increased promotion for the new partnership on our platform, such as live streaming events on our external live stream platform.

[Operator:]

. We have the first question from the line of Terence from First Trust Group.

[Unidentified Analyst:]

This is Terence from First Trust Group. I have a few questions. My first question is, as we can see the increase in the proportion of Yunji's Marketplace business, so what's the separate percentage of your mainstream brands, emerging brands and private labels? And how would you optimize the marketed metrics? My second question is based on the transformation toward the marketplace business, what will be the company's target for the future? My last question is, we noticed the transaction members continue to grow. So would you please share some color on your monetization plan?

[Shanglue Xiao:]

So thank you for your questions. And today, most of our products are coming from the mainstream brands, and only 10% are our private labels. And then as for the expectations, we hope that as our business grows, and we hope that we could increase the percentage of the product of the mainstream brands to 60%. And because we know that it is quite expensive for those mainstream brands to attract traffic online. So later, we hope that those mainstream brands are going to provide our exclusive products, and they have our cooperation plans and for those exclusive brands from those mainstream brands, and the price is going to be quite cost-effective for our platform. And also, we would like to bring more interest to our members of our platform. So altogether, we are working on the private labels and mainstream products. And we hope that by our efforts in the next 3 years, we could increase the percentage of the mainstream brands products to 60%. And among the 60%, 20% will be the exclusive products. And for the private label products, they are going to account for 20% of our products.

[Operator:]

. Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would like to hand the call back to our presenters for any closing remarks. Thank you.

[Kaye Liu:]

Thank you for joining us today. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thanks. Bye.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may all disconnect now. Thank you.