ZKH Group - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to ZKH Group Ltd's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Jin Li, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Jin Li (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Operator. Thank you, everyone, and welcome to our call today. Joining us today are Mr. Eric Chen, our Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Max Lai, our Chief Financial Officer. Before turning the call over to Eric, I'd like to briefly review our safe harbor provisions. Please note that the comments made during today's call represent management's views as of today and may include forward-looking statements. Please refer to our latest safe harbor statement in the earnings release on our IR website. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for comparison purposes only. Please refer to the earnings release for definitions of these measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results. With that, I will now turn the call over to Eric. Eric, please go ahead.

Eric Chen (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

[Foreign language]

Hello everyone, thank you for joining our first quarter 2025 earnings conference call for ZKH. In the first quarter, our platforms continue to gain momentum, with the total number of customers exceeding 60,000, representing a 30.3% year-over-year increase. Sales to industry key accounts and regional SME customers both achieved double-digit growth. However, sales to state-owned enterprise, or SOE, and central SOE customers declined significantly year-over-year in the first quarter, mainly due to the high comparison base last year and a result of our business optimization initiatives since the second half of 2024. Consequently, our first quarter revenue reached RMB 1.94 billion, representing a 4% increase year-over-year.

[Foreign language]

Regarding margins, our operating loss was approximately RMB 80 million, and our net loss was around RMB 66 million, representing meaningful improvements of 37.7% and 26.6% year-over-year, respectively. Despite the negative seasonal impact from the Chinese New Year in January and February, we were able to achieve single-month profitability in March. We would like to emphasize that this achievement was reached despite investment in our U.S. operations and in the absence of government subsidies in the first quarter of this year, unlike the same period last year. This demonstrates that the profitability of our domestic business continues to strengthen at the operational level.

[Foreign language]

Additionally, our cash flow remains resilient and shows continued improvement. Net cash outflow from operating activities was RMB 97 million in the first quarter, compared to an outflow of RMB 220 million in the same period last year. This continued improvement underscores our strong financial resilience.

[Foreign language]

Now, let's shift our focus to our domestic and global business performance in the first quarter, along with our platform developments and advancements in the use of AI technologies. In the first quarter, we delivered solid, high-quality growth both domestically and globally.

[Foreign language]

Starting with our domestic business, our dual-platform strategy aims to meet diverse customer demands. The ZKH platform serves mid to large-sized enterprise customers, while the GBB platform caters to micro and small businesses through an e-commerce model. The ZKH platform experienced strong growth in both sales and customer numbers from our industry key accounts. GMV from these key accounts increased by 19.7% year-over-year, with over 20% growth in sectors such as new energy vehicles, electricals, telecommunications and electronics, and pharmaceuticals. This success is the result of our targeted efforts to curate and manage industry-specific and customer-specific product pools, leveraging AI to gain deeper insights into customer needs and provide tailored product selection and recommendations, which also help to increase our wallet share.

As enterprise procurement continues to shift online, and as we expand our coverage to more KA customers, sub-factories, and enhance our cross-selling capabilities across production lines, we remain confident that our sales to industry key accounts will maintain strong growth momentum.

[Foreign language]

For regional SME customers, our region-based service and grid-based staffing strategies yielded positive outcomes. In the first quarter, both sales and customer numbers from regional SME customers on the ZKH platform recorded double-digit growth. Notably, sales in several regions, including Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Fujian provinces, as well as Beijing, each posted more than 20% year-over-year growth. This strong performance was attributable to our enhanced local services for regional customers, as well as accelerated factory coverage, market reach, and customer acquisition.

[Foreign language]

For SOE and central SOE customers, our sales declined significantly year-over-year in the first quarter, mainly due to the high comparison base in the same period last year and the result of our business optimization initiatives since the second half of last year. As we mentioned during our last earnings call, we have completed these business adjustments, and the impact has gradually tapered off. Our SOE and central SOE business have entered a stabilization phase in the first quarter. We remain confident that building on our supply chain advantages and proving value we deliver to customers, our SOE and central SOE business will regain growth momentum in the second half of this year.

[Foreign language]

Regarding gross margin, driven by our optimized procurement costs and rapid GMV growth from our high-margin private label products, both the gross margin of our product sales model, or 1P, and the take rate of our marketplace model, or 3P, on the ZKH platform improved significantly. This marked the fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement in both gross margin and take rate, highlighting our team's strong execution in cost reduction and efficiency enhancement. In the first quarter, the GMV of our private label products exceeded RMB 190 million, an increase of approximately 40% year-over-year.

[Foreign language]

Now, let's turn to the GBB platform. Our strategic partnership with Tmall has been fruitful. Since our partnership began in the fourth quarter of last year, GBB has operated eight stores on Tmall as of the end of March. We expect that the total number of stores will reach 24 by the end of this year. In the first quarter, this business segment on Tmall achieved a quarter-over-quarter sales growth of over 260%. Customer growth on GBB platform also accelerated, with over 24,000 customers, up 73% year-over-year, benefiting from our strengthened Tmall partnership. As we expanded our store footprint on Tmall to reach more SME and micro businesses and focused on high-margin MRO categories, our gross margins for GBB platform improved significantly in the first quarter.

With more stores lined up to launch and start operations on Tmall this year, we expect maintaining strong growth momentum in our Tmall business across sales, customer base, and gross margin, thereby driving the overall growth of the GBB platform.

[Foreign language]

Overall, the Chinese MRO market is vast and highly fragmented, with online penetration still at a relatively modest level. We believe China's MRO market offers extensive potential to propel both scale and profitability growth. As for our global expansion, the United States has been our first destination. Our U.S. subsidiary North Sky and our U.S. standalone website officially launched in December last year. We have implemented a localization strategy in the U.S. market, leveraging our supply chain strengths, offering selected high-value-for-money products, and utilizing innovative technologies to establish a strong presence. By the end of March, the North Sky platform had launched over 500 SKUs across categories such as personal protective equipment, or PPE, hand tools, power tools, packaging, and HVAC systems. Notably, our power tools, hand tools, and PPE categories have steadily risen in Google search rankings. In the first quarter, both revenue and customer numbers doubled month over month.

[Foreign language]

In the second half of the year, we plan to launch a mobile app version of our U.S. standalone website, while scaling our SKU portfolio beyond 1,500 items to further enhance product coverage and customer experience. Our goal is to provide the world's best MRO offerings across global markets. We have actively initiated global supplier recruitment efforts and thus far have secured an array of high-quality suppliers in Southeast Asia, allowing us to flexibly choose sourcing locations based on business needs. As we continue to expand our SKU portfolio, strengthen supply chain capabilities, enhance user experience, and foster user mindshare, we believe we're well positioned to accelerate our U.S. business growth in the second half of the year.

[Foreign language]

Moving on to AI technology development and applications, we possess a specialized database of industrial supplies covering 17 million SKUs and over a billion industrial product parameters. Leveraging our deep industry expertise and our self-developed large language model for industrial supplies, our goal is to build an end-to-end matrix of AI tools tailored to the industrial supplies vertical, with integrated capabilities for delivering tangible outcomes. Over the past two years, we have successfully developed and deployed more than 10 AI-powered applications to improve our internal operational efficiency and enhance customer service capabilities. To illustrate advancements in our operational efficiency, take the order processing scenario as an example. Previously, customer service teams manually entered each order into our system. To optimize this, we have developed the AI Smart Workbench, which seamlessly combines natural language processing with our ERP platform.

This innovation enables order creation via simple conversational commands, greatly boosting both efficiency and accuracy. With the implementation of this AI Smart Workbench, our customer service team has achieved a 60.4% quarter-over-quarter increase in the average number of orders processed per team member in the first quarter.

[Foreign language]

On the customer service capabilities front, one notable example is the material standardization and management scenario. Using AI technologies, our AI material management agent can rapidly structure and standardize complex and diverse material descriptions from customers and suppliers. It then generates standardized catalog parameters, enabling one-to-one item coding. What previously required several days of work by multiple team members can now be completed in just a few hours, drastically reducing material sorting and management costs while also improving accuracy. Another example of our enhanced customer service capabilities is the product selection and recommendation scenario. Our AI product recommendation agent deeply analyzes MRO use cases to glean precise insights into customer procurement needs and enables automated management of customer-specific product pools. This has significantly improved the efficiency and accuracy of product selection and recommendation.

Since its launch in September 2024, our AI product recommendation agent has analyzed procurement needs and managed product pools for over 200 customers, driving over RMB 34 million in revenue growth. This year, we plan to scale up our AI product recommendation agent to cover 14,000 customers, targeting even greater business growth.

[Foreign language]

Looking ahead, despite external challenges and uncertainties, we believe ZKH has entered a new phase of long-term sustainable growth, underpinned by two years of organizational strengthening and core competency solidification. We are now well positioned to drive forward with a dual focus on both domestic and international markets, powered by AI and product innovation, and anchored in our industry-leading expertise in the MRO sector. Now, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Max Lai, to present our financial results. Thank you, everyone.

Max Lai (CFO)

Thank you, Eric, and thanks everyone for making time to join our earnings call today. I'm pleased to share our financial performance for the last quarter, which reflects our service start to the year, characterized by resilient revenue growth, improving profitability, and significant enhancement in our operating cash flow. In the past quarter, our total GMV reached RMB 2.17 billion. While this marked a modest decline, it is largely due to a high comparison base from last year, which included SOE and central SOE customers' low-margin business with extended credit terms that we have since optimized. When excluding these factors, our underlying GMV maintains robust double-digit year-over-year growth. Notably, we are seeing strong growth in sectors such as new energy vehicles, electronics, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. Total net revenues rose 4% year-over-year to RMB 1.9 billion, primarily driven by high single-digit year-over-year increase in product sales revenue.

As anticipated, marketplace revenue declined due to the prior year's high comparison base, as mentioned above. This solid top-line performance underscores the enduring strength of our product offerings, enhanced supply chain capabilities, and growing customer engagement. Looking ahead, we expect the impact of last year's phase to continue to diminish in the next quarters, positioning us for sustained top-line growth. Simultaneously, we are committed to improving operational efficiency, driving elevated business quality and profitability through targeted strategic initiatives, including organizational refinement and AI-driven product innovation. Regarding margins, our gross profit margin slightly decreased to 17.2% from 18% in the prior year period, primarily due to lower revenue contributions from our marketplace model. However, on a GMV basis, our gross profit margin continues to trend upward.

Gross profit margin from our product sales model improved, with increases of 58 basis points to 16.6% on ZKH platform and 67.5 basis points to 6.2% on GBB platform. Marketplace take rate increased by 235.9 basis points year-over-year to 14%. These gains reflect the effectiveness of strategic business optimization, improved procurement efficiency, and a greater contribution from high-margin private label products. Turning to cost efficiency, our operating expenses decreased by 10.9% year-over-year to RMB 412.9 million, reflecting reduction across all major expense categories. Notably, this improvement was achieved despite incurring approximately RMB 10 million in U.S.-related expenses, which were absent in the last year. This demonstrates our continued commitment to cost discipline and operational efficiency for our domestic operations, driven by streamlined organizational structure and enhanced workforce productivity. As percentage of total revenue, operating expenses decreased to 21.3%, down from 24.9% year-over-year.

Excluding share-based compensation, this ratio improved to 20.5% from 22.4% in the prior year period. Breaking it down further, fulfillment expenses were RMB 93.3 million, a 4.2% year-over-year decrease, primarily due to reduced employee benefits and warehouse rental costs. Sales and marketing expenses declined by 16.6% to RMB 136.8 million, primarily attributable to lower employee benefits and travel-related spending. R&D expenses remained stable at RMB 39.6 million, down slightly by 0.6% year-over-year, as savings in employee benefits were offset by increased spending on technology and information services. General and administrative expenses were RMB 143.2 million, down 11.8% year-over-year, mainly reflecting lower share-based compensation, partially offset by higher employee benefits. It is worth noting that our G&A expenses also include employee benefits for product line personnel, as well as other product line-related costs, which supports the development and enhancement of our product competitiveness.

As a result, our profitability metric shows significant improvement. Loss from operations narrows to RMB 18.8 million from RMB 129.6 million, with margin improving to 4.2% from 7%. This reflects a substantial enhancement in our operating level profitability. We also deferred meaningful improvement in operating cash flow, with outflow reduced to RMB 97.1 million compared to RMB 224.3 million in the prior year period. This reduction is testament to our narrowed losses and effective working capital management, bolstered by improved capital utilization and operational execution. In summary, the above-mentioned results validate the strength of our strategy and effectiveness of execution. We are progressing towards our 2025 goals with discipline and strategic focus, supported by enhancements in business quality and steady margin improvement.

We believe that as we expand our product portfolio, deepen supply chain integration, and implement AI technologies across our operations, we are well positioned to enhance our market penetration and accelerate global expansion, delivering long-term value for our customers, merchants, partners, and shareholders. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Operator (participant)

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. 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. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, if you wish to ask your question to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your question in English. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Leo Chiang with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Leo Chiang (Analyst)

[Foreign language] I will translate myself. So I have two questions. My first question is, could management share what are the impacts from tariffs on your domestic and the U.S. business respectively, and the measures taken by the company? My second question is that, is there a timeline for entering new markets beyond the U.S., such as European? Thank you.

Eric Chen (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

[Foreign language]

Thank you very much for that question. I think the U.S. tariffs, when it comes to our overseas business, is not really a negative piece of news. In some sense, it's actually a tailwind for us to expand our U.S. business. We believe all of the changes in the market and in the prices offer new opportunities for us. Specifically, there are two things. Firstly, the U.S. does not produce MROs themselves. They primarily need to import from geographies like China and Southeast Asia. In order to tackle potential changes, we had already prepared a lot of suppliers or built up this reserve of suppliers way back when from ex-China markets, especially Southeast Asia. Now, because of that preparation, we are able to source accordingly based on business needs. That is very important for us.

This also goes to show that in the MRO business, as an intermediary or as a channel or marketplace, when there are uncertainties in the market, we can actually act to become more proactive and take more initiative and have more flexibility.

[Foreign language]

The U.S. is our first step in our foray into overseas markets, and we currently have 500 SKUs available there. More will be coming soon. With these SKUs being available, we can use this as a base to sell into other geographies like Europe and Canada. Starting second half of this year, we will start our business in Europe, and we are already in the preparatory phase for that. When it comes to the European market, there are two aspects. One is online, the other is offline. For online, we will be able to cover the entire Europe by selling via e-commerce. With offline, we will be focusing on two countries, Germany and Hungary. Basically, some Chinese companies already have a presence in those countries, and we will first serve those Chinese customers of ours there in those countries.

Germany already has a very advanced MRO business. In terms of other geographies, Southeast Asia, we started our business in Southeast Asia. Our company in Thailand has finished registration and started operations. As was said before in other earnings calls, Southeast Asia, in the short term, we will be serving Chinese companies that have set up a footprint there first.

[Foreign language]

That was actually my answer to your question. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Mr. Chiang, is there a follow-up to your question?

No, that was the answer to the question, said Mr. Cheng.

Thank you. The next question comes from Xiaodan Zhang with CICC. Please go ahead.

Xiaodan Zhang (Analyst)

[Foreign language] So thanks for taking my questions, and could you please share some updates on this year's product strategy, including the key product categories to be developed, as well as your private label brands? Thank you.

Eric Chen (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

[Foreign language]

We currently have 32 product lines spanning across five categories, and they are spare parts, chemicals, processing, manufacturing, general consumables, and administrative materials. In 2025, we'll be focusing on existing lines while adding more categories and SKUs. As an MRO company, we will be focusing on industrial-grade MRO products, including spare parts, chemicals, processing, and manufacturing pieces. We will also particularly strengthen the development of our private labels this year. When it comes to private labels for us, it's not just about product selection. In a lot of cases, we'll be proactively engaged in the R&D and design side of things to enhance our absolute competitiveness in China. Also, at the same time, these private labels will serve as a strong support for our overseas business development. Also this year, particularly, we'll be focusing on chemicals and processing and manufacturing.

Chemicals are traditionally our forte, and we will further enhance its development. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Xiaodan, is there a follow-up to your question? Did that answer your question?

Xiaodan Zhang (Analyst)

No further questions. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you.

Xiaodan Zhang (Analyst)

Yes, thank you.

Operator (participant)

The next question comes from Ella Ji with China Renaissance. Please go ahead.

Ella Ji (Analyst)

[Foreign language] My question is if management can share with us some updates regarding the company's business and financial outlook for the upcoming quarters. Thank you.

Eric Chen (Founder, Chairman, and CEO)

[Foreign language]

For Q1, we achieved our planned targets. We actually slightly outperformed our targets. Like was mentioned earlier, our adjustment and optimization when it comes to the business with SOEs and central SOEs is pretty much finished. We foresee for the next three quarters, things will start to gradually accelerate. For Q2 through Q4, especially for Q3 and Q4, we hope to achieve double-digit growth for GMV. Profitability-wise, we believe Q2 will see single-quarter break-even. Q3 and Q4 will see positive profitability. For the entire year 2025, GMV will be positive year over year. The domestic business will see positive profitability. As for the entire group, so domestic plus overseas business, things will break even for the entire year 2025. That was my answer. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

That concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional or closing comments.

Jin Li (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you once again for joining us today. You can find the webcast of today's call on ir.zkh.com. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Our contact information can be found in today's press release. Thank you and have a great day.

Operator (participant)

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.