Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining the call today. Welcome to Yeahka Limited 2022 annual results announcement call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'll now pass the call to Mr. Ben Zhao, Board Secretary and General Manager of Corporate Development for the company. Thank you. Ben, please go ahead.
Hello, everyone, welcome to Yeahka's 2022 annual results conference call. Before we start, we would like to remind you that this presentation includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Information on general market conditions come from a variety of sources outside of Yeahka. Let me introduce the management team on today's call. First, Luke Liu, our Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer, will kick off with an overview of our business. I will go through our business review. John Yao, Chief Financial Officer, will conclude with a financial review before we open up the floor for questions. Derek Lai, our Director of Finance, will translate for John. I will now turn the call over to Luke.
Thank you, Ben. Good evening, good morning, everyone. 2022 was an unusual year for all of us. Nevertheless, our three business segments, payment, in-store e-commerce, and merchant solutions, all continue to grow at a healthy rate and deliver strong financial results, thanks to our broad geographic coverage. The strong synergies within our commercial digitalized ecosystem. Notably, our payment business saw increase of both GPV and fee rates, our in-store e-commerce business contributes significant revenue and gross profit. While drastically reducing its loss on monthly basis. As China shift its focus to economical growth and consumption recover in 2023, we are able to grow our business further in both operational and financial terms. Now, I will share some details on the progress we made in 2022. In the payment business, we managed to navigate through a tough microclimate.
Both our payment GPV and fee rate increased, demonstrating strong resilience and revenue once again reached a historical high. We also continue to diversify our channel strategies. We expanded our joint merchant acquiring service with 117 banks, and launched DCEP pilot programs covering a broad range of people's daily offline consumption activity. Our payment platform is becoming increasingly inclusive and robust, and we have begun to upgrade our client tile strategy to include mid to large-sized customers and vertical leaders. Last year, we maintained our leading position in the QR code payment industry and made broke tools in both GPV and the number of transactions. As promised, we successfully monetized our leading market position by gradually increasing our fee rate to make up what was lost in 2021 when we pursued a more aggressive pricing strategy for growth.
In-store e-commerce continue to be our fastest-growing segments, serving as a valuable extension of our payment business. We believe we have a great opportunity to deepen our relationships with merchants by driving traffic to them through our various partners, such as Douyin, Kuaishou, WeChat. We grew our GPV seven times over in 2022. Sticking to our front profitability mindset. In the second half of 2022, we opt-optimized our offline BD organizational structure, operations, and the technology to improve efficiency. Now we're reaching our large-scale merchant acquisition, leading market recognition, and as well as smart content creation capabilities enabled by AIGC technology. We took the first steps to forging a competitive edge in this space. We also deployed multi-layer market strategies, including self-operate sites and cooperate sites that help us to reduce our BD cost while expanding our geographic coverage.
Jointly with our partners, we have created a merchant service network and shares merchant resources, provides Yeahka's digital tools, including KOL matching, live streaming platform and cross-sell additional solutions such as payments and the SaaS offering. Despite COVID, we continue to expand our merchant solutions module in 2022. For example, by adding increased integrated delivery capabilities, we offer the standardized input intuitive offering in conjunction with our payment interface, allowing merchants to self-register at a low cost. Thus, we believe this business has great opportunity to rebound in 2023 as the merchant get back to their feet. We are keep engaging merchants to increase their stickiness and willingness to pay, and we are gradually scale down our discount fee policy. Today, our scalable ecosystem has shown its ability to create a virtuous cycle among the payment, install e-commerce, and merchant solutions segments.
The merchant base and the consumer insights we accumulated over the years directly lead to the prosperity of our merchant solutions and install e-commerce business. They, in turn, enhanced loyalty and stickiness in our payment business. Sometimes even bringing new merchants to the payment business. Because of our strategic direction, we have healthy and a sustainable business that will endure for a long time. While monetizing China's offline consumption recovery, we are simultaneously seeking to expand overseas, grow alongside our merchants, and capitalize on our domestic market know-how and our agility in diving to new markets. In 2023, we'll continue to focus on creating value for our merchants and providing a wide range of local lifestyle experience to consumers, and increase sustainable value for shareholders, employees, and the society at large. I now hand over to Ben, who will provide a detailed business review. Thank you.
Thank you, Luke. Good evening and good morning, everyone. I will now provide more color on the development of our three business lines. First, on payments, the cornerstone of our ecosystem. We operate in more than 300 cities with low geographic concentration, and this helped us manage the regional impact of coronavirus. We increased the number of active payment merchants to 8.1 million, and daily transactions to over 50 million, both record high numbers. Solid partnerships and innovation also drove our business growth. During the year, we collaborated with 115 partner banks in our joint merchant acquiring partnership to further reduce our customer acquisition costs and increase our merchant retention rate. Our base of 18,000 ISOs provided us with greater than ever merchant outreach and service capabilities.
Our cloud payment platform through API has established partnerships with over 3,000 software partners in various industry verticals such as food and beverage, gas stations and karaoke, et cetera. This scalable and highly compatible payment infrastructure can significantly lower R&D costs and increase payment connection efficiency by allowing our software partners to customize solutions such as account splitting, bill payment custody, et cetera. For us, it represents the most effective way to expand our payment customer coverages into mid to large size KA customers and vertical brand leaders who can also enjoy the full array of our in-store e-commerce and merchant solution services. In 2022, our GPV grew over 5% year-on-year to CNY 2.2 trillion.
Out of this, ad-based GPV grew 21% year-on-year, accounting for about 70% of the total GPV, up from about 61% in 2021. Our payment revenue increased over 21% to more than RMB 2.75 billion in 2022. We have successfully leveraged our leading market position to monetize, which validates our decision to prioritize scale expansion and execute a discounted market strategy in 2021. Our overall fee rate increased to 12.3 basis points in 2022 from 10.7 basis points last year.
As the fee rate increased at a faster pace in the second half of 2022, we gave more short-term incentives to our channel networks to ensure a speedy adoption of the fee increase strategy and continued growth in the number of merchants. We will gradually reduce these incentives in the long run. We actively participated in the planning and design of DCEP and partnered with commercial banks to launch pilot programs in more scenarios covering transportation, catering and accommodation, shopping and consumption, tools and sightseeing, et cetera. We actively sought out opportunities in overseas markets and obtained relevant payment licenses in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the US. I would also like to share that we have already seen benefits from China's early stage economic recovery in the first two months of this year.
The total GPV in January and February of 2023 grew 9.8% and 34.1% year-on-year respectively. Given the rapid recovery in offline consumption, we estimate that our full year GPV will be between RMB 2.7 and RMB 2.9 trillion. Let's move on to our in-store e-commerce services. This business made significant progress in 2022 and was very close to break even, thanks to our unique positioning and effective operating strategy. Our total GMV increased more than 7 x to RMB 3.3 billion, and our revenue increased 139% to over RMB 354 million in 2022.
The net loss of our in-store e-commerce business significantly narrowed to RMB 51.9 million in the second half of 2022, a decrease of 67.4% from the first half of 2022. In-store e-commerce is a RMB 1 trillion market opportunity, with more players entering the space seeing the massive opportunity, we have evolved our marketing strategy with a firm focus on profitability. Notably, we're shifting from a fully self-operated model in which we incur all the BD costs to a co-op city model, which enables partners in various verticals and regional merchants to leverage our brand name and our strong technology empowered services such as KOL matching, live streaming optimization, and ad deployment. We also made certain investments to further strengthen our relationships.
This self-operated plus the co-op strategy will enable us to expand our geographic coverage at a controllable cost, particularly in the lower tier cities where it is less efficient for us to deploy direct sales staff. As a result, we downsized our offline BD team from 1,500 to nearly 1,000 and are placing a greater emphasis on technology empowerment and operating efficiency for our BD team, aiming to maintain our leading GMV growth and reduce marginal costs. Our strong bargaining power, driven by our scale and respective brand, has enabled us to lower commissions paid to KOLs. As a result, our gross profit margin increased from 57% in the first half to 75% in the second half.
Going forward, given the evolving competitive landscape and macro environment, we'll continue to emphasize profitability and leverage our growing technology capabilities and the power of our commercial digitalized ecosystem to form stronger strategic alliances with the merchants, local partners and mainstream media platforms such as Douyin. An update on merchant solutions. Our short to medium term strategy for this business is to grow our merchant base. One of the major features of our product is that it's simple user experience, so merchants can easily use it without prior training. Our extremely low customer acquisition costs allow us to serve merchants with lower fees and more effectively encourage the adoption of digitalized solutions. Heading into 2023, we'll continue to increase the number of merchants through product innovation.
I'm also very pleased to announce that we obtained excellent results on ESG ratings, scoring an industry leading 48 on the S&P Global ESG ratings and received an A- on the Hang Seng Corporate Sustainability Index. This performance underlines our company's strong dedication to being environmental conscious, giving back to society and emphasizing sound corporate governance. I believe it lays a solid foundation for our sustainable and resilient business model. Thank you, everyone. With that, I will now pass the call over to John, our CFO, to go through our financial results. Our Director of Finance, Derek, will provide the translation.
[Foreign language]
Thank you, Ben. Let me briefly go through the highlights of our financial results for this year. Our total revenue reached RMB 3,400 million in 2022, from RMB 3,059 million in 2021, representing a year-on-year increase of 11.8%.
[Foreign language]
The increase was mainly attributable to our one-stop payment services and the rapid growth in our in-store e-commerce services.
[Foreign language]
Gross profit increased 26.6% year-on-year from RMB 810 million in 2021 to RMB 1,013 million in 2022.
[Foreign language] 其 中 支 付 毛 利 占 比 为 百 分 之 五 十 一 点 六 。 支 付 毛 利 由 二 零 二 一 年 的 人 民 币 三 点 八 亿 增 长 至 二 零 二 二 年 的 人 民 币 五 点 三 亿 ， 同 比 增 长 百 分 之 四 十 点 三 。
Of which gross profit of One-stop Payment Services accounted for 51.6% and increased to RMB 532 million in 2022 through from RMB 380 million, a year-on-year growth of 40.3%.
[Foreign language] 整 体 毛 利 率 由 26.6% 提 升 到 30.2%, 其 中 支 付 毛 利 率 从 16.7% 提 升 到 19.3%, 到 店 毛 利 率 从 35.9% 大 幅 提 升 到 67.3%.
Gross profit margin expanded from 26.6% to 30.2%, of which gross profit margin of one-stop payment services improved from 16.7% to 19.3%, and gross profit margin of in-store e-commerce services improved substantially from 35.9% to 67.3%.
[Foreign language] 我 们 继 续 在 研 发 上 加 大 投 入, 研 发 费 用 由 2021 年 的 CNY 240 million 增 长 至 2022 年 的 CNY 270 million, 同 比 增 加 12.4%, 主 要 来 自 于 对 于 系 统 升 级 以 及 产 品 研 发 的 投 入.
Our R&D expenses increased by 12.4% from RMB 240 million in 2021 to RMB 270 million in 2022. Primarily due to our increased investment in system upgrades and product development.
[Foreign language] 我 们 的 经 调 整 的 EBITDA 由 二 零 二 一 年 的 人 民 币 一 点 二 亿 元 ， 同 比 增 长 百 分 之 七 十 三 ， 二 零 二 二 年 达 到 人 民 币 二 点 三 亿 元 。
Our adjusted EBITDA increased 73% year-over-year to RMB 230 million in 2022 from RMB 123 million in 2021.
[Foreign language] 其 中 下 半 年 经 调 整 EBITDA 达 人 民 币 近 一 点 四 四 亿 元 ， 较 上 半 年 人 民 币 七 千 万 元 环 比 显 著 增 长 百 分 之 一 百 零 六 点 零 一 。
Adjusted EBITDA in the second half reached nearly RMB 144 million, compared to RMB 70 million in the first half, representing significant half- on- half growth of 106%.
[Foreign language] 经 调 整 EBITDA 的 环 比 改 善 ， 主 要 是 由 于 下 半 年 到 店 电 商 的 亏 损 大 幅 缩 减 ， 我 们 亏 损 从 上 半 年 的 人 民 币 近 一 点 六 亿 元 ， 大 幅 缩 窄 百 分 之 六 十 七 点 四 。 到 下 半 年 不 到 -- 亏 损 不 到 人 民 币 五 千 两 百 万 。
The half-on-half improvement of adjusted EBITDA was mainly due to the sharp half-on-half reduction in the net loss of in-store e-commerce from nearly RMB 160 million in the first half to less than RMB 52 million in the second half.
[Foreign language] 这 反 映 了 我 们 到 店 电 商 业 务 规 模 的 效 应, 以 及 经 营 效 率 的 提 升.
Reflects the scaling effect and our enhanced operating efficiency.
[Foreign language] 未 来 我 们 将 继 续 追 求 三 大 业 务 的 健 康 增 长 。
In the future, we will continue to pursue the healthy growth of our three major business.
Thank you everyone. That's it for our prepared remarks. We will now open the call to questions. Operator, please go ahead.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. There may be a short pause while we compile the Q&A roster. Once again, that's star one one for questions. Thank you for waiting. Our first question comes from the line of Vicky Wei from Citi. Please ask your question, Vicky.
[Foreign language] 嗯 ， 管 理 层 晚 上 好 ， 谢 谢 接 受 我 的 提 问 。 嗯 ， 我 有 两 个 小 问 题 ， 我 们 公 司 有 看 到 说 一 月 份 二 月 份 支 付 的 GPV 的 增 速 分 别 是 百 分 之 十 和 百 分 之 三 十 四 ， 可 不 可 以 麻 烦 管 理 层 大 概 分 享 一 下 我 们 公 司 具 体 看 到 的 趋 势 ， 比 如 说 从 恢 复 的 地 区 和 城 市 等 级 来 看 ， 哪 些 地 区 恢 复 的 比 较 明 显 ？ 如 果 从 不 同 的 商 家 的 类 别 来 看 ， 您 会 看 到 哪 些 行 业 的 恢 复 会 比 较 好 ？
[Foreign language] 还 有 您 现 在 看 到 的 三 月 份 的 趋 势 ， 对 比 二 月 份 大 概 是 怎 么 样 的 ？ 呃 ， 相 应 的 我 们 应 该 如 何 看 待 二 零 二 三 年 支 付 业 务 毛 利 率 的 趋 势 ？ 我 还 有 一 个 小 问 题 是 关 于 我 们 到 店 业 务 的 ， 想 请 问 管 理 层 现 在 如 何 看 待 到 店 业 务 在 抖 音 生 态 系 统 里 面 的 竞 争 格 局 ？
[Foreign language] 您 预 计 二 零 二 三 年 我 们 公 司 在 这 一 块 的 业 务 的 市 场 份 额 的 趋 势 是 怎 么 样 的 ？ 我 们 应 该 看 待 ， 如 何 看 待 二 三 年 增 长 和 利 润 之 间 的 平 衡 ？ 谢 谢 。 我 自 己 翻 译 一 下 。
For Ethan and management. Thanks for taking my questions. Yeahka shared that the year-over-year growth of GPV in January and February this year increased by 10% and 34% year-over-year. Will management share more color about the offline consumption recovery trend, for example by regions and by merchant categories? What is the latest offline consumption trend in March as compared to February? How should we think of the payment growth margin in 2023? My second question is related to the in-store business. What is management view on the competition landscape in the Douyin ecosystem and Yeahka's market share outlook? How should we think of the balance between growth and profitability? Thank you.
Thanks a lot for the questions, Vicky. Let me address the first question first. As you pointed out, our January and February numbers on the payment GPV is quite significant. We saw the Tier-1 cities, particularly around the coastal areas, has shown significant increase or recovery from the COVID. In terms of industry, I think the core sectors that we operate in or we serve, the retail and the restaurant sector are seeing pretty good growth or recovery from the COVID. In terms of March, since we are quite confident in the full year numbers, and we have already provided a full year guidance for this sector, which is RMB 2.7 trillion-RMB 2.9 trillion in GPV.
In March, we do see a similar recovery trend, very similar to, you know, what we see in February and in January. In terms of the growth margin profile. If you look at the numbers in the second half, the payment growth margins has shown slightly decrease from the first half, and that's mainly because we have increased our fee rates quite significantly in the second half of the year, from 13.5 basis point in the first half to 14.22 basis points. In order to achieve that, fee rate increase or monetization, we gave some short-term incentives to our channel network.
That's a short-term incentive, which means as our scale increases, we are able to reduce that incentives or the revenue sharing percentages to the channel networks so that our growth margin profile can be more stable in this year in 2023. Let me pause there to see if you have any follow-ups on the first one.
Thank you.
Sure. On the second, on the second question, which is, quite key question for the in-store e-commerce. In terms of the competitive landscape, it is a quite complex industry, in terms of the local lifestyle services. If you, if you break down the scale of the merchants, it's actually quite a few categories from SKA, the large chain stores to CKA to shopping district to complex. There are many different, verticals, involved as well. Even within the in-store dining sector, we have the fast food to fine dining to dessert, to food and to the beverage services. Within the comprehensive in-store services, we have the beauty, fitness, pets, photograph, movie, healthcare, et cetera. For the hotel and travel, we have things like sightseeing, transportation, travel packages, et cetera.
As I said, it is a very, very complex sector, and it is a large sector with a trillions of RMB massive market size. It is no surprise that small players with local merchant resources or expertise in some verticals, they are entering the space, seeing the massive opportunity. With the recommendation focus model, obviously, we see on the new media platforms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, et cetera. For us, our strategy to counter that is we have now two models to serve different cities. For Tier-1 cities or the large cities, we are doing a self-operated model in which we are more efficient.
We reduced the business development staff, which, who we pay salaries to from the highest it was, 3,000 people to less than 1,000 business development professional. We target approximately 50 large tier cities. For the lower tier cities, we utilize what is called a co-op model, which we can expand the geographic outreach at controllable cost. The core idea of the co-op model is we take advantage of exactly these small players who have local merchant resources, or they have some expertise in some specific industry verticals.
What we can do is, these small players, they can leverage our brand name and our technology empowered middle office to do better businesses or to do better merchant services. We provide what is called a technology-empowered middle office services or solutions to these small teams in different cities that we operate a co-op model. Things like the paywell matching services, the live streaming optimization services, ad deployment services. Jointly with the self-operating and co-op model, we jointly form a merchant service network that are really self-reinforcing, right? 'Cause these small players, they have some merchant resources that they cannot serve, and they can. For us, we can pick these up, and we can serve them ourselves.
We also have some merchant resources or some specific industry verticals that we don't have an expertise in, so we can pass it on to our core partners for them to do a better service of. Also within this merchant service network, we can also do a lot of cross-selling. For ECAR, we have the payment business, we have the SaaS business, and for our direct self-operated sites or for our co-op model sites, they can cross-sell all of our merchants, more merchant service solutions, and to jointly form a deeper relationship with the offline merchants that we serve. Together, we can work with the mainstream media such as Douyin to offer a better customer experiences.
As you can see in the, in the, in last year, we have actually completed 37 million orders out of 400,000 SKUs, and these are all pretty tremendous numbers given the COVID situation. In terms of the market share, I think given the more effective and more comprehensive marketing strategy, we do think the market share for our lifestyle, local lifestyle services is going to be greater and increasing for the year of 2023. As Luke has mentioned, for this sector, we are focusing, we are putting a firm emphasis on profitability. Essentially, if you look at the second half numbers, our net loss for this business is significantly narrowed.
As we have also announced in a separate, notice, our currently monthly net loss or the cost expenses incurred in this business is very, very close to breakeven. We are fully confident that, very soon we should be able to achieve breakeven and, sooner, the profit being more profitable, for the in-store e-commerce, business.
Thank you.
Thanks, Vicky.
All right. Thank you. Please stand by while we take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Leon Qi from Daiwa. Please ask your question, Leon.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. This is Leon Qi from Daiwa. Two questions from me today. Firstly, on a very hot topic recently on AI. I do notice that in our presentation, we mentioned that we've already developed more than 10 functions based on AIGC, the AI-generated contents under our merchant solutions business. If possible, appreciate management's share with us on some specific applications of AIGC in this segment of business and how we monetize these tools. The second question is regarding payments. I do notice our very good trends in terms of our payment take rate and GP margin last year. I'm just wondering if management could share with us some color in terms of the competitive landscape for payment business in 2023.
Thank you very much.
Sure. Luke will answer the first question on AIGC, and I'll address the second one.
Okay. We built our AI Lab almost three years ago. We follow up all the new AI technology, I mean, when it be invented and when the industry began to use it. For the AIGC technology, we, I mean, pay a lot of attention on it as well. We already do three kind of application in this area. Number one is we create short video content with AI in our in-store e-commerce business. You know, our in-store e-commerce business covers more than 30 cities in China. We have a big sales team, and they need to, I mean, go to the restaurant and to make a video.
Now they have by the new tech AIGC technology, they can use our tool, which invented by us or programmed by us. They can complete the work much easier, it can, I mean, improve their efficiency, maybe by 30%. This is the first, I mean, example that we use the new technology. The second one is we, our colleague in the operation team, they can use the AIGC technology to create the, I mean, generate the article or description of a restaurant or a packaging automatically. Previously we have more than 100 employees in this team. Now we by the AI technology, we only need 10 or 15 to finish the task.
The third way we use the AI AIGC technology is not only for the in-store e-commerce business, but for all of our business unit. We have some pilot program to finish the customer service in our call center. They use some, I mean, NLP technology and some, I mean, TTS technology to answer the customer's question and online. I mean, we have some call center robot can help our consumers or our merchants to complete their, to satisfy their request and answer their question and solve their problems.
We will keep on going in this area and try to use the new AI to run more, I mean, business. Thank you.
Thanks Luke. The AIGC is all about source data and algorithms. We do have the in-house AI Lab to integrate the variety of sources that we can accumulate within our ecosystem, such as the payment. We are focusing on the QR code payments, which is extremely high frequency. The daily peak number of transactions has reached 50 million. All of that contains a lot of customer insights. In addition to that, we also have the in-store e-commerce, which we have accumulated 37 million orders. That 37 million orders, we can get a lot of insights into the consumer preferences, in which we can generate our content with the AI algorithms more effectively. Just to add a few points.
In terms of the second question on the payment. The competitive landscape, as everyone can see that the offline consumption is recovering after the COVID. We have actually taken a very aggressive marketing approach in 2021, if you look at the fee rate trend. In fact, in 2020, our fee rate at that time was 12.5 basis points. In 2021, we reduced that proactively to 10.7 basis points. The result of that more aggressive market approach is we have increased our payment GPV from about RMB 1.5 trillion to RMB 2.1 trillion in 2021. That gave us a lot of scale and market pricing power, given our leading position on the QR code payment.
We are now capturing more than 30% of the market share on QR code according to a variety of industry sources. With that pricing power going into 2022, if you look at our fee rate trend, we have gradually increased and in fact increased it back to where we were in 2020 to 12.3 basis points. Out of which our app-based fee rate has increased to 13.9 basis points in last year, 2022. That's really us taking the opportunity with the leading market position and the pricing power to monetize at the current more consolidated industry landscape.
Going forward, I think if you look at the GPV growth or recovery, we're seeing strong GPV growth in January and February. In fact, our fee rate is continuing to increase at a gradual pace in 2023. That should ensure us with a pretty comfortable position in terms of our profitability within the payment business. Of course, in the beginning, as we increase the fee rate at the very beginning, we do need to give more incentives to the channel network partners, that will also gradually phase out in 2023.
Right. Thank you. Please stand by while we prepare to take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Yi Lu from Finalink. Please ask your question, Yi.
[Foreign language] Hey. Congratulations on a very strong fiscal result, along with a very strong GTV guidance, GPV guidance, and the with the company remaining a very strong upper trend. My question is, we see Douyin pushing their delivery services. I wanna ask the company if we will have synergy with Douyin's delivery service in the future. Thank you.
Thanks a lot for your question. A very keen observation on the delivery strategy that is being pushed very hard by Douyin this year. I think for us, we do think it's, we do take a pretty favorable approach or attitude toward Douyin's potential success in the delivery services because they've been pretty successful in developing that user habit in the in-store business. It's just a natural extension from in-store to delivery services as long as they have the infrastructure ready, which we can really be helpful on that. In fact, last year started since 2022, within our SaaS modules, we already have the integrated delivery solutions offered to merchants.
We have already integrated the delivery capabilities from Shunfeng, SF in-intracity, Shunfeng Hongchen, from YOYO Caocao, from a couple of other delivery service providers. For us, on the supply chain side, we have the merchant relationships, so that for our partnership with Douyin, we can achieve pretty good synergies on the delivery side, because we can also work with our merchant base to help promote their delivery solutions with various types of content, such as short videos or live streaming. In addition to just the supply chain or the SKUs, we can also, we already have that integrated delivery solution that can also be integrated into the Douyin's platform. We do think it's a great opportunity.
We are looking forward to working closely with Douyin on this effort.
Thank you. Please stand by while we prepare to take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please ask your question, Thomas.
Hi. Good evening. Thanks, management, for taking my questions. My first question is regarding the in-store business. I mean, just now management talked about the payment trend in January and February and also the full year outlook. I just want to get some color with regard to our in-store GMV on a monthly basis. Can you comment about how's the momentum in from January to March, if any color on that front? Also, our full year outlook. My second question is on the DCEP, the digital currency updates, and any thoughts about the future monetization models. Thank you.
Yes. Thanks for your question, Thomas. On the in-store business, as the consumption gradually picks up in January and February, so is our in-store e-commerce business. We don't actually provide a monthly updates on the GMV for the in-store business. What I can tell you is we take a very firm approach on achieving breakeven very soon and put a core emphasis on profitability. That is also why, since the end of last year, actually, we have gradually changed our operating model from all of our 300 sites being self-operated with over 1,500 sales staff to a co-op model, which we actually take advantage of the more competitive landscape in the local lifestyle service sector as we can see today.
For the full year, numbers, in fact, what we can share is with a breakeven mindset in mind, we are very close to that, and we'll provide more color on the full year numbers to the market at a later date. One thing for sure is we have a very strong relationships with the merchants and with our local partners and with the mainstream media such as Douyin. That's that basically means that with the self-operated and a co-op model, we can actually expand the geographic outreach at a more controllable cost.
Our merchant relationships coming out of the payment business can even be strengthened with the developments of the in-store e-commerce and plus the delivery services that is yet to come.
Thank you. Please stand by while we prepare to take our next question.
Sorry, just to add on Thomas' second question on the DCEP. It is still in a pilot stage. We are obviously working very closely on the front line with the commercial bank, with the major actually four commercial banks. So far, there is no clear monetization opportunities across the industry. Obviously with a massive merchant base that we have and with the technology infrastructure that we have co-developed with the commercial banks, we do think when time comes, we should be the first to monetize just as what we can see in the payment business today.
Thank you. We'll take our next question from the line of Hang Su from CICC. Please ask your question, Hang.
[Foreign language] Thanks for taking my question about in-store e-commerce business. Will you cooperate with more online platforms in 2023? If so, what's the potential impact on monetization rate? Thank you.
Yes, absolutely. We the current traffic model that we have is a couple of sources. Douyin is obviously one of the major ones. We also have our own WeChat Mini Program. We also have started our cooperation with Kuaishou, with the Xinghang, and with a couple of other the new sort of the new media platforms. Because all of these new media platforms, they take a similar approach in their customer service strategies, which is recommendation-focused, and in which we can leverage our content creation capabilities and our KOL matching and also the live streaming optimization capabilities to be very helpful for the merchant to acquire traffic within these traffic.
In terms of the take rates, as you can see in last year, our take rate was a little bit higher than 10%. For this year, obviously the take rate, it will be more stable. As we increase our partnership or expand our partnership with more traffic platforms, we do think there's an opportunity to improve that take rate. Whenever there's a new platform, that's an upcoming, they will provide more and better policies for the traffic. The gross margin profile obviously, as you can see, is also improving.
The expenses as the scale increases, we should be able to see more economies of scale on the sales and marketing and obviously on the G&A and R&D expenses. We do think the monetization for the in-store business for this year, it will gradually picks up as we expand our partnerships and as we achieve more scale with the co-op model.
Right. Thank you. Please stand by while we prepare to take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Linlin Yang from Guangfa. Please go ahead.
[Foreign language] 谢 谢 管 理 层 给 我 这 个 提 问 的 机 会 。 然 后 我 这 边 有 两 个 问 题 想 请 教 一 下 ， 一 个 是 关 于 支 付 业 务 的 ， 因 为 支 付 业 务 我 看 到 2023 年 展 望 这 个 是 达 到 RMB 2.7 trillion-RMB 2.9 trillion ， 大 概 就 是 同 比 增 长 差 不 多 20%-30% 吧 。
[Foreign language] 那 这 个 它 主 要 的 增 长 驱 动 是 说 是 这 个 商 户 数 的 提 升 ， 还 是 就 这 种 每 商 户 的 这 种 平 均 GPV 的 一 个 提 升 ， 然 后 那 未 来 比 如 说 到 2024 年 ， 以 及 未 来 这 个 增 长 怎 么 去 展 望 。
[Foreign language] 这 第 一 个 问 题 ， 然 后 第 二 个 问 题 是 关 于 到 店 电 商 这 一 块 ， 因 为 这 一 块 业 务 的 话 ， 这 个 因 为 Douyin 本 身 是 增 长 非 常 快 的 ， 然 后 我 们 也 看 到 因 为 Meituan 他 在 应 对 Douyin 的 这 种 这 个 就 是 提 升 的 过 程 中 ，
[Foreign language] 他 也 开 始 在 采 取 一 些 这 个 一 些 措 施 ， 包 括 像 比 如 说 可 能 ， 未 来 可 能 会 比 如 说 对 商 家 的 这 个 补 贴 或 者 说 是 降 佣 吧 ， 如 果 说 采 取 这 样 的 措 施 的 话 ， 那 是 否 会 影 响 到 我 们 到 店 业 务 这 一 块 的 这 个 变 现 率 ， 包 括 盈 利 的 情 况 。
Okay. I will translate myself. My first question is about the payment business. You estimate payment GPV will be between CNY 2.7 trillion and CNY 2.9 trillion in 2023. What's the driver, members of merchants or GPV per merchant? How to expect future growth? My second question is about in-store e-commerce business. Considering the competition between Douyin and Meituan, will it affect our take rates and profit? Thank you.
Thanks a lot for your question. Let me address the first one first. We have actually provided more guidances on the payment this year, given that we see strong growth in January and February. That's, that can be contributed to two different drivers. The first driver can be attributed to, as we have mentioned that in the annual report. Our joint merchant acquiring services with the banks has proven to be very successful. We are now partnering with 108 and 15 banks, up to as of today. These banks, they all have local branches, and they all have the merchants that they already serve. They are also looking for more account openings with by serving more merchants offline.
The problem is they don't have a strong on-the-ground team to help them to achieve that. The outcome is we partner with the banks so that every time we go out and we acquire a new merchant, we can help the bank to open up a bank account so that the merchant deposits can be found or can be transferred to that particular partner bank. In return, the bank's existing merchant base can be then transferred to us for our payment services. That's one very successful new channel strategy that we employed since last year and up to this year. It's going to be another very key driver by working with the banks.
Secondly, the. In terms of the SaaS partners that we work with. There are many SaaS software providers that serve the middle to large-sized merchants or the chain stores or chain restaurants, which is not our typical customer base in before. Since last year, we have actually introduced our payment or our open API payment infrastructure, and we work with these software partners, and we provide payment connectivity to these SaaS providers so that we can penetrate into the middle to large size KA customers. To your question, I think the way we achieve a high growth in the GPV is really for one, with the more comprehensive and more layers of channel strategy, and particularly with the banks, we can acquire more merchants.
Secondly, we are now penetrating into the middle to large-size customers or the offline stores by partnering with these SaaS providers with our API connectivity. That's to your first question on the payments. Second question on Douyin and Meituan competition. I think for at this moment, we don't see a lot of impact on our current business model just because these are very two different platforms that have two different business models to help the merchants acquire traffic. For Meituan is a very effective way for people to search and people to see ratings and reviews for different merchants.
For Douyin, it's really a proactive push, whenever a user or a viewer, uses Douyin, based on his or her user preferences or viewing habits. He or she can see different types of contents, based on these user preference data. It's really the merchants being pushed to these viewers or users on Douyin. It's a two very different kind of business models. For us, we really take an open platform approach, right? Our platform is really, we work with Douyin today, and we can work with some other new media platforms in the future.
I think for our quite unique positioning within this local lifestyle service sector, I think the competition between the media side, it will not affect us. In fact, in a way, it can be beneficial to us this year as more new media comes into these, this local lifestyle service market. We think the monetization rates or the take rates and also the profitability should be within our control and we view this actually quite favorably.
Thank you. Please stand by while we prepare to take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Cindy Wang from China Renaissance. Please ask your question, Cindy.
[Foreign language] Hi, I want to ask 2 questions. The first one is, I want to ask about the payment business. We see that if it is app-based, in fact, the growth rate here in 2022 is 21%. The traditional payment, in fact, in 2022, this GPV is down 20%. If we look at the overall GPV target for 2023, if it grows by 20%-30%, how do we break down the growth rate of this app-based and this traditional payment? The second question is, I want to ask about the gross margin of Douyin. The gross margin is from 57% in the first half of last year, expanded to 76% in the second half of last year.
[Foreign language] Can you roughly explain to us the growth rate of this gross margin? The main reason is how the commission on the KOL side has changed significantly. In 2023, can you roughly give us a guideline for our overall gross margin? Is it going to be maintained at the level of the second half of last year? I'll transfer my question. My first question is related to the payment. Since the app-based payment growth was quite nicely last year at 21%, but the traditional payment growth was down by 20% year-over-year.
Considering this year the GPV target at 20%-30% year-over-year, can you provide us the color of the breakdown by the app-based and the traditional payment growth rate this year? The second question is related to the in-store e-commerce gross margin. Since the gross margin was expanded nicely in the second half of this year, could you give us more color on why the gross margin can expand quite strongly in second half, and how do we expect the gross margin in 2023? Thank you.
Thank you, Cindy, for your question. On the first question on the growth rates for breakdowns. The app-based payments, which is really our core focus this year, and because a lot of the small and micro-sized merchants, they use the QR code payments. As the COVID gradually recovers or the offline consumption gradually picks up, it's no surprise that the app-based payment GF GPV growth is faster than the traditional payments, which tend to be impacted more. A lot of the, for example, the offline luxury stores are affected or a lot of the, for example, the real estate transactions offline are affected with the COVID. For us, you can see that our app-based growth is faster.
Going into 2023, I think the trend should be similar. The traditional and app-based payments, they should both see a growing trend in this year. Again, the app-based payments, they should see a faster growth than the traditional. It's just because our core focus on the QR code payments. That's for the first question. On the second question on the in-store e-commerce gross margins. There are two potential, two drivers to that gross margin increase in the second half. For one, it's really accounting policy change. For the KOL so the Douyin commissions. The Douyin commissions in the first half of the year is accounted for in the cost side for the in-store e-commerce.
In the second half of the year, because the cash flows is first coming into the. In the first half of last year, the cash flow is first going into Yeahka's account, then being transferred into KOL, into Douyin, into the merchants. Since the second half of 2022, the cash flow starts to change a little bit, which is the Douyin will first take out its portion first and then all the remaining cash flows will then be transferred to Yeahka. In our revenue recognition policy, we will then take out the Douyin commissions, which is accounted for about 2% of the GMV first. In the cost side, it will not be accountable.
That's one of the reasons why, you know, we see the gross margin to improve in the second half of the year. Another reason is because we have a greater scale, our brand name being more recognized within the KOL community. It's very similar to payments. We can then share less commissions to KOL because they are being reassured by working with Yeahka. They can sell more SKUs. Their content can be promoted on Douyin or on Kuaishou more effectively so that they can earn a higher fee, a higher CPS-based fee on their behalf. That they can charge a lower percentages on the commissions to us.
That's another reason of the gross margin improvements in the second half of the year. Going forward, I think this year we should see the gross margin to stabilize this year.
All right. Thank you.
We'll be taking our final question from the line of Bing Duan from Nomura. Please go ahead, Bing.
[Foreign language] Thank you management for taking my questions. My first question is about the payment competition landscape. As Ben mentioned, we have already achieved number one position in the QR code payment market. How do we look at the future competition landscape? Do we think the market will continue to consolidate? We also mentioned that there will be overseas development. Can management share more color about the development and our strategy? Second question is about the merchant solution business. How do we think about the overall growth targets and strategy, and especially on SaaS, how do we look at the merchant, the number of merchants or APU growth, et cetera? Thank you.
Thank you for the question. For the first question on the competitive landscape on the payments. There are two factors. For one is we see that there are quite a few licenses being revoked by the regulators in the past year because obviously it was a pretty crowded market in the last few years. The regulators want to make sure only the most compliant players remain within the market. I think with that, we are already leading the sector with a very significant market share.
We should be able to capture this more consolidated market opportunity, particularly within the QR code payment, to gradually further increase our fee rate and at the same time to further increase our market share with our very diverse channel network strategy. We have more than 18,000 of these ISOs around China. With the commercial bank partnerships and with the SaaS software, SaaS software provider partnership, I think we should be pretty comfortable there. That's also why we are also exploring the overseas opportunities which I will pass on to Luke to explain.
Okay. I think the most important thing for our OSP payment business is to creating a stable and a solid infrastructure. After we got some license from different country and area such as U.S., Singapore and Hong Kong, we continue to build a connection with commercial banks to, I mean, to get API and the interface that can, I mean, to complete the whole payment process. We do think the OSP, the payment business over in OSP is a long-term strategy. We have enough patients in this area. For the product side, we already finish the pilot.
I mean, test from cross-border payment from U.S. to China. Have the domestic merchant to receive money from the entity in U.S. and do the other currency exchange. The third, for the local acquiring business, we have an acquiring license in Singapore, and now we have an actual business now. Currently, I think more than 1,000 merchants are using our solution, acquiring solution. In summary, we do think the OTC strategy is very important for us, we are start from payment and try to expand more service to abroad. Thank you.
Right.
Great.
Sorry. To your second question on the merchant solutions on the SaaS, it's a very asset-light model. If you look at the gross margin profile, it actually has increased to 88% in the second half of 2022, up from 82% in the first half. That basically just demonstrates that we have already completed a lot of our standardized and very intuitive product launch or product development. All we need to do is to wait for the offline consumption market to recover when we can go out and convert these payment customers into using our merchant solutions.
In fact, if you look at the ARPU, previously, particularly in 2021, we've been just similar to payments, we've been gradually reducing the ARPU for our merchant solutions and gradually up to about RMB 100. Actually, in fact, going into the second half of the year, although the conversion rate is stagnant due to the coronavirus, but we are keeping the ARPU as is at around RMB 100. Going forward, the core focus is two things. For one, with our standardized and intuitive product, there are a lot that the merchant, they can get on board with pretty much very minimal sales and marketing efforts and with a minimal training.
They can basically register by themselves when they are using our payment solutions. We can do a lot of conversions there. At the same time, as the merchants, they start to develop their user habit for our merchant solutions, we can gradually increase the ARPU by making them use more modules that we offer. We are actually offering more than close to 100 different modules, both the proprietary and third party integrated. Jointly, we're offering a better digitalized solutions, particularly to the small and medium sized merchants. I think it's a business that has a lot of potential to be very profitable given its nature, but it takes time.
We have reached the end of the Q&A session. Thank you very much for all your questions. I'll now like to turn the conference back to Ben for closing remarks.
Thank you, once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Yeahka's investment relations department through the contact information on our website. Thanks for your time.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.