Quhuo - Earnings Call - H1 2025

Transcript

Speaker 4

Good day and welcome to the Quhuo Ltd 2025 H1 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a telephone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sarah Wang. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator. Hello everyone, welcome to Quhuo Ltd's first half year of 2025's earnings conference call. The conference results were released earlier today and are available on our website. On this call today are Leslie Yu, Chairman and CEO, and CFO Barry Bao. Leslie will review business operations and company highlights, followed by Barry, who will discuss financials and guidance. They will be available to answer your questions in the Q&A session that follows. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this call may contain forward-looking statements, which tend to depict the provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions related to the events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond the company's control, which may cause the company's actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Furthe

Speaker 3

Thank you, Sarah Wang, and thank you all for joining our 2025 first half of earnings conference call. In the first half of 2025, China's local service industry experienced significant structural shifts, with intense market competition becoming the new normal. Against this backdrop, Quhuo Ltd has adhered to a clear dual-track strategy. First, optimizing the structure of our core business to pursue quality growth, and second, accelerating the development of the second core business to strengthen the group's earnings foundation. I will now share our operating performance and the strategic progress over the first six months of 2025, along with these two dimensions. I'll also look ahead to Quhuo Ltd's future vision. For the first half of 2025, Quhuo Ltd achieved total revenue of RMB 1.13 billion. Let me begin with our core business, on-demand delivery solutions.

During the first half of 2025, particularly in the second quarter, the domestic food delivery market saw significant changes in the competitive landscape. These changes were mainly reflected in two areas. First, the delivery walls passed the path of the cost burden to service providers. To respond to rapid order fluctuation and safeguard service quality, we made targeted investments in workforce management and operations. Second, structural adjustments by major upstream customers reshaped the competitive landscape. Leveraging our long-standing service capabilities and adaptation, we took our new business share while integrating and launching this new site added short-term cost. Beginning in May this year, we observed signs of increased market share, which we believe will lay a solid foundation for scalable profitability. Although this measure placed the pressure on short-term profitability, we believe the company's overall financials remain sound.

At the same time, we proactively closed a number of underperforming sites and concentrated resources on higher return areas in order to further strengthen our overall network health. These initiatives reflect both our confidence in and commitment to the long-term value of on-demand delivery business. We believe that as the integration period ends and operating efficiency improves, the scale benefits and the profit potential of the business may become more evident in the second half of 2025. While consolidating our core business, our second core business, housekeeping and accommodation solutions, and vehicle export solutions are now contributing to meaningful profitability. In the first half of 2025, our housekeeping and accommodation segment reported strong growth, with revenue up 70.8% year over year and gross profit up 63.4% year over year, becoming an important driver in optimizing Quhuo's profit structure. This performance was primarily driven by our two business units.

First, Home to Home, they achieved 83.6% revenue growth and 319.8% gross profit growth, with gross margin rising to 65.2%. We believe this strong performance reflects our method for operating model and effective marketing. Our self-development mini program, now fully rolled out, allows users to browse and search for home related things, communicating with hosts and complete reservations and payments in one seamless process. This closed-loop system greatly improves the booking experience, making it faster, more transparent, and more reliable for both guests and hosts, while also enhancing operational efficiency. Based on this mature system, Chengdu plans to open their platform to more home stay operators in China, providing standardized management tools and marketing support, and transitioning from a property management service provider to a platform operator.

Second, Lilac's accommodation business recorded a 63.6% year-over-year increase in revenue, primarily supported by its new cooperation with Baker, a leading housing transactions and service platform in China. This cooperation extends beyond traditional cleaning, with Lilac providing a more comprehensive property service solution for the property solicited on Baker's platform, covering property preparation and maintenance, ongoing household services, and tailored offerings. In service delivery, Lilac has translated years of localized service experience and technological advantages into practice. By leveraging its proprietary digital display system, it integrates cleaning, repair, and other service orders into a unified scheduling platform, supporting efficient management and high-quality fulfillment. This cooperation already covers Chengdu, Beijing, Shanghai, Ningbo, and Henan, and is expected to expand to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and other cities. We believe it may generate a scalable and sustainable revenue growth for Lilac.

Lilac's ability to deliver standardized high-quality property services providers provides a solid foundation for new initiatives. Building on this, we also participate in the Benefit Life No. 1 Fund Trust Plan, initiated by the China Foreign Economy and Trade Trust. Phase 1 and Phase 2 of this plan total RMB 16 million and are designed to enhance the quality and rental value of interactive properties through standardized renovation and long-term asset management, ultimately generating stable returns for investors. Within this project, Lilac is responsible for upgrading property quality and providing ongoing property management services, ensuring continuous value creation and compliant operations. Meanwhile, Quhuo, in its role as a strategic partner, works alongside the Trust Fund to design the pathway from operating assets to data assets, and ultimately to financial assets, and jointly manage and share in the return.

Through this cooperation, we have put into practice the four pathways from business operations to financial value. Leverage the standardized renovation and service capabilities built by Lilac as solid operating assets. Rely on the real and valuable data assets continually accumulated through operations for risk pricing and asset management, and ultimately achieve asset financialization through trust cooperation, completing a critical upgrade to financial assets. This process not only broadens Quhuo's business boundaries but also provides new direction for the integration of industry and finance. This advance in the housekeeping and accommodation segments not only provides financial returns but also supports our business model initiatives, providing opportunities for longer-term growth for Quhuo. Our third major growth driver comes from international revenues. In the first half of 2025, used car stores achieved 17.8% gross profit growth, with gross margin improving from 4.2% to 7.0%.

We believe this reflects the continued optimization and upgrading of our business model. We currently operate with two models in parallel. The first is the traditional trust model, under which vehicles are sold upon its own with a cash cycle of about three to four months, with a gross margin typically at around 7%. The second is the technological empowerment and resources cooperation model, which we believe to carry greater potential. Here, we leverage our accumulated technology, operations, and management expertise from domestic wide-selling sector and packaging solutions for overseas partners to jointly operate vehicles and share with long-term higher margin income. This model offers significantly higher profitability and unique economy, with a payback period of roughly 24 months, which means revenue growth may be realized more gradually but on a stronger foundation. Our cooperation in Azerbaijan, with both Auto and Boat, provides an example of this model.

By employing our SaaS platform and management expertise, we are helping partners shift from one-time vehicle sales to a recurring service-based model. Till now, hundreds of vehicles have been under management, with a project level margin of 43%, well above the pure trade model. The success of this pilot has already led partners to place multiple follow-up orders, validating its replicability and long-term profit potential. Looking ahead, we plan to draw on the asset financialization experience gained in the accommodation segment to address cash cycle challenges in this model, enabling further expansion into new markets, driving our international business to evolve from linear growth based on vehicle sales to a higher quality development model of maintaining scale through sales and creating profit through operations. We believe this approach builds a global automotive ecosystem through technology empowerment and management expertise.

We will raise our earnings ceiling and establish a more durable competitive advantage. To conclude, in the first half of 2025, despite the pressures in the on-demand delivery business, we maintained resistance in our core business and made progress in our second core business. We believe these results reflect both the soundness of our strategy and the strength of our execution. Looking forward, we plan to remain focused on our dual-trick strategy of optimizing cooperation and cultivating new growth. On our core business side, we recently entered into a cooperation with JD Jingdong Takeaway to provide delivery services in some cities. We believe this not only demonstrates recognition of our operation capabilities but may also potentially add incremental volume under the new competitive landscape in on-demand delivery. On the new initiative side, our supply chain empowerment partnership with New World has been progressing steadily.

Since May this year, it has generated approximately RMB 14.4 million in revenue and is expected to contribute approximately RMB 60 million for the full year. We view this as an early milestone in our transition from a fulfillment service provider to a supply chain enabler, which may create new opportunities to capture additional value from our delivery network. We plan to continue focusing on our operational efficiency and refining our business models while seeking key market opportunities in order to deliver more sustainable long-term returns for our investors. This concludes my remarks. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, who will provide a detailed overview of our financial performance.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Leslie. Hello everyone, this is Barry Bao, the CFO of Quhuo Ltd. Welcome to Quhuo's first half of 2025 conference call. Please be reminded all the amounts here will be in RMB otherwise. Total revenue decreased by 30.2% from RMB 1,619 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, to RMB 1,131 million in the six months ended June 30, 2025, due to the following reasons. Revenue from on-demand delivery solutions was RMB 1,039 million, representing a decrease of 30.7% from RMB 1,499 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily because we optimized our business by disposing of several underperforming service stations, which led to a decrease in the revenue sales.

Revenue from mobility service solutions consisting of shared maintenance, repairing, vehicle export solutions, and flight service solutions was RMB 57.4 million, representing a decrease of 42.8% from RMB 100.5 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily due to, one, a decrease in the unit of vehicles sold in our vehicle export solutions business as a result of the introduction of a new business model and a decrease in purchase of vehicles for sales, and second, optimization of our business by shifting from our repairing solutions service in several underperforming service segments. Revenue from housekeeping and accommodation solutions and other services was RMB 34.8 million, representing a sharp increase of 70.8% from RMB 20.4 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily due to the adoption of online promotion channels in addition to traditional platform-based customer acquisition.

Cost of revenue was RMB 1,127 million, representing a decrease of 29.3%, primarily attributable to the decrease in our labor costs and the service fees paid to service station managers in line with the decrease in the revenue. As a result, our gross profit was RMB 24.8 million and RMB 4.1 million in the six months ended 2024 and 2025, respectively.

G&A expense for RMB 76.3 million, representing an increase of 7.7% from RMB 70.9 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily attributable to, one, an increase in the professional service fee from RMB 14.5 million in the first half of 2024 to RMB 25.2 million in the first half of 2025, due to the insurance cost of ADS occurring in the first half of 2025 of RMB 9.7 million, and, two, an increase of welfare and business development expense and office expense from RMB 12.8 million in the first half of 2024 to RMB 15.1 million in the first half of 2025, resulting from the expansion into new cities for its housing service and offset by a decrease of labor costs from RMB 36.6 million in the first half of 2024 to RMB 30.6 million in the first half of 2025, and the result of expense control through technological optimization.

R&D expense for RMB 3.6 million, representing a decrease of RMB 1.3 million from RMB 4.9 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily due to the decrease in the average compensation level for our R&D personnel as we restructured our R&D team. With the recorded gain of disposal of assets, of RMB 7 million and RMB 5.7 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, and 2025, respectively, primarily due to the transfer of 30% long-term assets to third parties. Our interest expense remains stable at RMB 2.2 million and RMB 2.3 million in the six months ended June 30, 2025, and 2024, respectively, primarily relating to the stability in our average short-term bank accounts.

We recorded an other income net of RMB 1 million in the six months ended June 30, 2025, compared to an other income of RMB 3.1 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily due to the disposal of investment in a mutual fund in the second half of 2024. We recorded the income tax benefit of RMB 17.9 million in the six months ended June 30, 2025, as compared to the income tax benefit of RMB 2.6 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024, primarily due to the virtue of unrecognized tax benefits recognized in the previous years and have been passed in the retroactive hearings.

As a result of the foregoing, we have net loss of RMB 53 million in the six months ended June 30, 2025, compared to an increase of 14% from RMB 46.5 million in the six months ended June 30, 2024. EBITDA loss of RMB 60.2 million as compared to EBITDA loss of RMB 34.8 million in the first half of 2024. In terms of balance sheet, as of June 30, 2025, the company has cash equivalents and restricted cash of RMB 33.1 million and short-term debt of RMB 118 million. This concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you for your attention. We are now pleased to take your questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Speaker 4

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch-tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Sally Gao, a private investor. Please go ahead.

Hi. My question is, could you explain Quhuo's specific role in the trust corporation and what impact this corporation may have on future financial performance? Thank you.

Speaker 3

Okay. This is Leslie, and thank you for the question. Our operation was a trust built on our traditional BPO for payment services, but we take a step further. We turn business revenues into data assets and then into investment for financial assets. This not only strengthens liquidity but also increases asset returns. Quhuo Ltd is one of the initiators of this project and a core operator. To be more specific, Lilac is the operational base. It makes sure that our properties are upgraded and managed at a higher standard, creating stable rental income. On top of that, Quhuo Ltd works to prove the receivables generated. Through trust structures, we monetize future cash flows in advance and unlock capital. The financial impact is quite direct.

First, it brings in higher margin income, such as asset management fees and capital gains, which is very different from traditional labor services and improves our profit mix. Second, it also improves cash flow, giving us more flexibility to expand both our current and new business. This is not just a single business success. It proves our new model of combining on-the-ground operations with financial empowerment, opening up a lighter, more profitable, and sustainable growth path for the company. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 4

This concludes our question and answer session. This concludes our conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.