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Earnings Call: Q4 2021

Mar 10, 2022

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by for Baozun's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the meeting over to your host for today's call, Ms. Wendy Sun, Investor Relations Director of Baozun. Please proceed, Wendy.

Wendy Sun
Investor Relations Director, Baozun

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings release was distributed early today and is available on our IR website at ir.baozun.com, as well as on global newswire services. They have also posted a PowerPoint presentation that accompanies our comments to the same IR website, where they are available for your download. On the call today from Baozun, we have Mr. Vincent Qiu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Arthur Yu, Chief Financial Officer, and Ms. Tracy Li, our Vice President of Strategic Business Development. Mr. Qiu will review the business operations and company highlights, followed by Mr. Yu, who will discuss financial details. They will all be available to answer your questions during the Q&A session that follows.

Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based upon management current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relates to 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 to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Further information regarding these and other risks, uncertainties, or factors is included in the company's filings with the U.S. SEC and in announcements on the website of Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required and applicable law.

Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this call are in RMB. It is now my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Vincent Qiu. Vincent, please go ahead.

Vincent Qiu
Chairman and CEO, Baozun

Thank you, Wendy. Good morning and evening, everyone. Thank you all for joining us. This fourth quarter, despite persistent e-commerce headwinds, I'm pleased that Baozun's business remained resilient, and our team continued to make steady progress on strategic objectives. During the quarter, China's total retail sales growth decelerated to 3% year-over-year, and the erratic COVID pandemic that caused weak consumption sentiments and constrictive government policies persist for China's e-commerce. Yet resiliently, as demonstrated on slide three, this fourth quarter, we grew GMV 14% year-over-year, driven by strong volume in electronics, FMCG, and luxury categories, as well as breakthrough in beauty and cosmetics. We also grew our omni-channel business, with JD.com more than doubling and the mini program expanding, 70% year-over-year.

We see an accelerated momentum in Douyin, as we helped our brand partners generated 187 million GMV in the fourth quarter, which is more than the cumulative amount generated in the first three quarters of the year. Overall, non-Tmall channels expanded 400 basis points year-over-year to 26% of total GMV. Anticipating a new era in e-commerce where the market focuses on consumers' lifetime value generation, we are leading the way to help brand partners accelerate their digital transformation, as displayed on slide four. Take our luxury business group as an example. With deep understanding of brand value proposition and unique insights, we pioneered new innovations to fine-tune consumer experience and promote user engagement. During the quarter, we launched personalized and interactive VIP customer service for a few brands, which can engage consumers with one-on-one interactive video communications to enhance conversion and ARPU.

We also incorporated metaverse-enabling functions in merchandising, live streaming, and interactive marketing, and participated in the first wave of non-fungible token champions on Tmall Luxury Pavilion during this year's Double 11 campaign. In total, we opened 20 new luxury stores in 2021 and expect to open another 12 in the first half of 2022. Our inventive technology, coupled with differentiated brand value proposition, drives our success. This quarter, we quickly adapted to the personal identity information regulations and enabled another smooth Double 11. For the first time, we were able to supply over 330 brands on wider omni-channel approach during the annual mega campaign, while offering sweeping real-time intelligence services to help our brand partners make better business decisions. We also launched a digital transformation program for one prominent electronics brand partners in developing its nationwide distribution network management.

While our technology and innovation empowers business operations, our progress in productization and monetization has driven a doubling of IT revenue to RMB 39 million during the quarter. In addition, this year, we strategically combined our Technology and Innovation Center with our digital marketing department to newly form the Digital Marketing Group or DMG. This Digital Marketing Group greatly enhances our capability to offer the most comprehensive solutions for private domains to lay out customer assets and integrate effective marketing in an omni-channel approach. As DMG currently accounts for approximately 10% of total GMV, we believe the integration meaningfully enhances our value proposition and will drive stronger revenue penetration going forward. Meanwhile, we continue to make upgrades to our digitized, central, and integrated operating platforms and middle office for better process re-engineering and automation, therefore enhance operating efficiency and flexibility.

Please turn to slide five. In less than a year, we have successfully scaled up our regional services centers in Nantong and Hefei to more than 1,400 employees, and we plan to build additional regional centers in Chengdu and Xi'an in 2022 to further optimize employee allocation. Our Serve Anywhere, or S-ANY, continue to ramp up as we have seen great uptake with over 400 brand stores deploying by the end of 2021. With S-ANY's powerful business intelligence capability, we also upgraded traditional customer service KPI systems to a master KPI system to incorporate more comprehensive operating metrics such as customer satisfaction and the reaction duration to help brand partners achieve higher brand recognition. We are glad that even under this comprehensive master KPI system, we are able to achieve further upgrade in its rating system by one key international sportswear brand.

Our medium-term strategic plan centers around the customer service. Please turn to slide six. Early this year, we engaged with Nielsen to conduct a comprehensive Net Promoter Score, or NPS survey, to gather feedback from our brand partners. To our knowledge, this pioneering survey is actually the first ever in China's e-commerce industry, and we are delighted of achieving a very positive NPS result of greater than 8.5 out of 10. This further validates that our value-added services, such as technology and the premium warehouse and logistics services, have become well-recognized by the industry and our brand partners as a core differentiated competitive advantage. Adding to the excellent NPS survey result, we also received numerous other recognitions from our broader stakeholders, as displayed on slide seven.

In a way, 2021 is a year full of recognition for Baozun, and we are honored to earn such high praise from brand partners, employees, industry leaders, as well as ESG communities. We aspire to keep building on top of this achievement, achievements, and are keen to foster a culture that drives innovations and the business efficiency to empower our brand partners. Now, on slide number eight, advancing forward with these ambitions, we have completely streamlined the company into four major groups, namely the E-commerce group, ECG, the Logistics and Supply Chain Group, LSG, the Technology and Innovation Center, TIC, and the Digital Marketing Group, DMG. With the company being leaner, flatter, and more focused, we are crafting mechanisms that inspire the use of incentives to encourage innovation and broaden employee ownership access.

We are also developing talent program, including management trainee and universities collaborations to further enhance sustainability. In conclusion, despite the macro uncertainties, we continue to see acceleration in omni-channel development, and we are quickly helping brand partners elevate their comprehensive and interactive user engagement to promote brand value. Built on our excellent enabling capability and a strong business development, I'm glad to see our new business pipeline expanded threefold from a year ago. Moreover, with our proven industry leadership and a sound cash position, we emphasize high quality growth and a superior unit economics while continuing to optimize resource allocation. We are poised to bring best-in-class services and innovative solutions to our brand partners. We march further on our medium-term strategic plans to drive business growth and sustainable value creation. I will now pass the call over to Arthur to go over our financials. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you, Vincent. Hello everyone. 2021 was no doubt a challenging year for the internet and e-commerce sector in China. Despite that, we ended the year with solid top line growth and a stronger business pipeline. More importantly, our business is more resilient and balanced, benefiting from diversification in category mix, breakthrough in omni-channel strategy, complementary business acquisitions, and increased investments in our people and technology. Now let me first do a quick review of financials of Q4 and full year in 2021. Please turn to slide 10. During the quarter, our total GMV increased by 14% to RMB 26 billion. FMCG and electronics led the growth, both showing double digits year-over-year increase. The sentiment for appliance improved with a slight year-over-year increase on GMV, compared with a decline in the previous quarters.

On the flip side, apparel and accessories declined by mid-teens percentage during the quarter as brand partners adopted a defensive strategy to protect their margin from the impact of Better Cotton Initiative or BCI, and weak consumption sentiment. Overall, the GMV split between categories for full year 2021 are as follows. Apparel and accessories at nearly 40%, followed by electronics at approximately 30%. The FMCG at 15%, and appliance at mid-single-digit . Non-distribution GMV increased 16% to RMB 24.6 billion, contributing from strong service fee model and performance from FMCG and electronic sectors. As we focus on high quality growth, we have proactively dropped some low margin business, which caused our distribution GMV to decline by 16% to RMB 1.4 billion. Now please turn to slide 11.

Total net revenues declined by 5% to RMB 3.2 billion, of which our acquisitions contributed a total of RMB 283 million. Product sales revenues declined by 17%, largely in line with the decline in GMV from distribution model, as we just talked about. Services revenue increased by 4% to RMB 1.9 billion, benefiting from several acquisitions made early this year. During the quarter, our cost of goods sold decreased by 19% to RMB 1 billion. Gross margin for product sales improved by 250 basis points to 15.2%, reflecting our strategy in pursuing high quality product sales. Now let's turn to operating costs and expenses on slide 12. Fulfillment expenses were RMB 959 million, an increase of 12.7% year-over-year.

This quarter, there was an incremental fulfillment cost of RMB 222 million related to our two newly acquired businesses, both LianTong and BaoBidang. Excluding the impact from acquisitions, adjusted fulfillment expenses from organic business was RMB 736 million, a decline of 13.5% year-over-year. Sales and marketing expenses were RMB 895 million, an increase of 20.8% year-over-year. The increase was mainly due to increased staff as our business scales and an expansion in the headcounts of digital marketing services, which was partially offset by the efficiency improvements. Our technology and content expenses were RMB 126 million, an increase of 14.4% year-over-year. The increase was mainly driven by more efforts in productization and commercialization that doubled IT revenue in the quarter. G&A expenses increased to RMB 157 million.

This increase was mainly due to an accelerated amortization of leasehold as we moved to new headquarters in October 2021, which was mainly a one-off accounting treatment. As we invest in talent and other strategic objectives and scale up along with our acquired businesses, we anticipate our annualized G&A expenses to stabilize to a range of RMB 380 million-RMB 400 million in 2022. On efficiency metrics of OpEx as a percentage of GMV for the fourth quarter, total OpEx as a percentage of GMV is 8.2% compared with 7.7% in the same quarter of last year.

If we were to exclude fulfillment cost from the two warehouse and logistics services we newly acquired, and the one-off GMV expenses related to our move to the new headquarters, our adjusted OpEx as a percentage of GMV would have been 7.2%, reflecting OpEx efficiency in our organic business. Now turn to slide 13. Based on the above-mentioned items, our non-GAAP income from operations was RMB 71 million during the quarter, and non-GAAP OP margin was 2.2%. As there are so many moving parts that impacted our financial performance, we have prepared waterfall diagrams depicting our analysis of how our top line and bottom line evolved year-over-year. Once again, this analysis is unaudited and should solely be used as indicative numbers to aid our discussion. First, on slide 14.

This waterfall diagram shows our net revenues walk from Q4 2020 - Q4 2021. In red, you can see that BCI and weaker consumption sentiment continued to have a major negative impact as it dragged down the business in general, especially the performance of sportswear, fashion apparel, along with our logistics and supply chain business. Furthermore, we optimized our partner portfolio in the distribution model. Product sales declined by RMB 244 million. On the other hand, our M&A efforts greatly enhanced the top line resilience, and as we achieved a breakthrough in the luxury category with high double-digit growth rate. It is worth noting that our value-added service, such as technology and digital marketing, both had a nice year-over-year growth. As e-commerce keeps rapidly evolving, we anticipate this value-added service will become growth engine for our business in future.

Now turn to slide number 15. We also provide here an indicative walk of non-GAAP operating profit and cost stream. As shown in blue, we have positive momentum in luxury and technology, as we earlier addressed. Although revenues from our distribution model decreased significantly, operating profits from distribution were largely unchanged year-over-year. This clearly demonstrates that our optimization improves resource efficiency and overall growth profit margin. We believe the focus on high quality distribution business may slow down total product sales in the near term, but in the longer term, it will improve our profit and cash flow prospects. In red, the overall macro weakness drags down the performance of sportswear, fashion apparel, along with our logistics and supply chain businesses. As for our M&A progress, in addition to a solid revenue contribution, we have also been able to quickly turn positive for operating profit this quarter.

As we further integrate, we expect additional efficiencies and synergies to drive higher operating profits. Additionally, we have continued to invest in people and infrastructure, including new headquarters, talent recruitment, and setting up our Douyin department and regional shared service center. For DMG and anticipating the booming demand in 2022, we also increased MarTech funding during the quarter. Now turn to slide 16 about our cash flow. As of December 31st, 2021, our cash and cash equivalent reached RMB 4.7 billion, an increase of RMB 2 billion from previous quarter. The increase was mainly attributable to a financing cash inflow of RMB 1.6 billion and a positive operating cash flow of RMB 520 million. The financing cash inflow was mainly from Cainiao's investment in our logistics business group, Baotong, which I will elaborate a little bit more later.

It's partially offset by our share repurchase programs. Our solid cash position and positive operating cash flow enabled us to pursue two initiatives to further enhance our shareholder value. Firstly, during the quarter, we repurchased 8.5 million of ordinary shares for approximately $40 million, which boosted our total share repurchase to $165 million for the full year 2021. We believe this share repurchase not only delivers benefit to the existing shareholders, but also demonstrate our confidence in Baozun's future business performance. Secondly, we will use the cash to target complementary acquisitions to drive additional growth for the business. Please turn to slide number 17 on merger and acquisitions. Our strategy on M&A mainly concentrates on four areas. Capability enhancement, vertical consolidation, geographic expansion, and brand building. To date, our acquisitions largely targeted capability enhancement and vertical consolidations.

The initial integration are tracking well. For example, eFashion as our boutique e-commerce service provider for fashion and lifestyle brands, MoFun as our interactive user engagement programs developer, and Bao Lian Tong , our premium warehouse management capability enabler, have all achieved higher growth and synergy than we originally planned. In the quarter, we also started to make progress in brand building by investing in several fast-growing local emerging brands. Just as a showcase on slide number 18, we are glad to share that one of the local emerging brands we invested in October 2021, a skateboard brand called NOBADAY, already has become a well-known brand after sponsoring Max Parrot to win the gold medal in the recent Winter Olympic Games.

As we move forward and learn, we expect to see more synergies and higher value propositions in merging this business into Baozun. During the quarter, we successfully closed the investment from Cainiao Network into our logistics and warehouse division, Baotong. I'm glad to say the early integration has shown some quick synergies and promising future opportunities. Please turn to slide number 19. Combining Baotong's outstanding customer-centric services with Cainiao Network's larger economies of scale and infrastructure, our integrated service offering for apparel and luxury category will be able to advance to the next level in terms of being more premium, customized, diversified, and omni-channel. We are confident this will help our brand partner achieve higher cost leverage and higher efficiency with one inventory for all channels.

As the two partners integrate deeper, we anticipate additional synergies, including value-added business insight and business development capabilities, innovative material recycling, and high-profile ESG engagement that will greatly improve brand value and stickiness. We also anticipate additional revenue streams from Cainiao Network's broader brands customer base in sportswear, luxury categories, and cross-border businesses. Lastly, a quick glance on slide number 20. We ended 2021 on a solid note with total GMV of RMB 71 billion, an increase of 28% year- over- year, while GMV generated from non-Tmall channels expanded 500 BPS to 31% of total GMV. Our annual operating cash flows adjusted for exceptional items remain constantly positive for the third consecutive year. Our balance sheet also remains solid with RMB 4.7 billion in total cash position and more than RMB 2 billion in unused line of credit.

In summary, we are quite confident in our business model and investment strategy, and we are still excited about our mission to become the leading global brand e-commerce business partner. That wraps up my financial review section and concludes our prepared remarks. Thank you. Operator, we are now ready to begin the Q&A session.

Operator

Thank you very much. Dear participants, we will now begin the question and answer session. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one. The first question comes to the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please ask your question.

Thomas Chong
Regional Head of Internet and Media, Jefferies

Thanks, management for taking my question. I have two questions. First, can management comment about the impact of the macro headwinds to our overall business and trend of different categories? Does the luxury segment get impact? Our second question is about our cooperation with Cainiao. How is our thoughts about the expansion into the Southeast Asia market? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you. I will comment on the overall weak macro headwinds, and then Tracy can comment on the luxury, and I will answer the Cainiao cooperation question, if that's okay. Yeah. Okay. In terms of the overall economy impact, we think we definitely have seen some impacts in the last two quarters, and at this moment there are still a lot of uncertainties. In this kind of situation, the brands normally adopt a very conservative strategy, as I mentioned earlier, trying to protect their profitability instead of driving the growth. At the same time, in order to maintain the stable business, they are looking to the things like the omnichannel and also the different ways to engage more customer.

For example, there are more demands in terms of data services and also the BI intelligence and also the customer relationship management. They are trying to do more of that. In addition, we have seen the customers are more focused on China for China strategy, where they think the people in China are more close to the battlefield and be able to make more sound decision on the ground. That's the overall what we have seen in terms of the macro headwinds at this moment. Tracy, do you want to comment on the luxury?

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Sure. Thank you. I think in overall fashion in the recent transaction data, our observation is, it stops decreasing, and we see slight increase across categories, and especially in some of the verticals like luxury, although especially luxury still keep a very high growth compared with last year. Even for Baozun, I think as Vincent already mentioned, we have dozen of new store will open in the first quarter of this year. We have a strong pipeline in first half of this year. I think luxury business has showed their omni-channel character from day one. I think within our new business, you can see many of them are Jingdong and also WeChat channel.

Our brands also show great interest this year in doing and also pushing that emerging channel. To serve this purpose, I think Baozun's technology and the logistics solution has shown great power to support the business, especially in the O2O and the inventory part. That's why we can end up with the strong growth among cross-channels and also strong pipeline in this year. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you, Tracy. Now about cooperation with Cainiao. Basically, as I mentioned earlier, for Baozun, our strength is on mid to high-end MCN brands, and also we are focused on non-standardized category, like the luxury, the apparel, and also the footwear. At the same time, Cainiao is more focused on small to medium-sized brands, and they are more focused on the standardized category and the standardized service. That gave us a lot of room for synergy to cross the different category for cooperation and learn from each other. That's the first one. The second one is we're working with Cainiao to define a strategy. We will focus on one core category, which is the apparel, the big apparel category, where Cainiao has a lot of potential clients. They also have some business doing the apparel category.

Going forward, all those business will be done by Baozun or done through Baozun. At the same time, that's only a starting point. What we want to do is, after we consolidate one category with the value-added service, we want to expand together with Cainiao into other category. Like for this year, we are looking into cosmetics, and also, we are looking into some other categories in the future. We can see that category by category, we will be able to utilize the very good BD capability of Cainiao to grow the business together with them. That's the second one. The third one we are looking for is a concept of one inventory. Historically speaking, Baozun's more focused on the e-commerce channel, like the official website, the e-commerce platform like Tmall and JD.com, and also the social media like WeChat.

On the other hand, Cainiao has a lot of the business operation in the offline distribution network and offline the shops that they operate. Now, we are able to combine those channels all together to provide a one-stop solution for a particular brand, where they can use Baozun to do one inventory. That greatly enhanced and improved the inventory efficiency of our brand partner and help us to win more business we hope in the future. Those are the kind of the three opportunities we can see, and we have already started to see some new opportunities come to emerge. Furthermore, we actually recently, we've been working with Cainiao on the cross-border opportunity, where both outbound and inbound, we potentially will be able to utilize Cainiao Network globally to enhance our proposition for Baotong. That's on the China part. Okay.

Thomas Chong
Regional Head of Internet and Media, Jefferies

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please ask your question.

Vicky Wei
VP of Internet Research team, Citigroup

Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my question. This is Vicky Wei on behalf of Alicia Yap. Can management comment on the latest consumption sentiment, especially on the trends you are seeing in January and February? Will there be any potential impact on new brands onboarding process given the latest geopolitical situation? Has there been any impact on raw material prices and supplies of merchandising that could affect brand SKU in the coming quarter? My second question is, can you elaborate on the non-Tmall channel, the performance and contribution from JD.com versus WeChat mini program and short video platforms? Any update on progress with iClick partnerships? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Tracy, if you want to handle the first one.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Yeah, sure.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

We'll do the second one.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Sure.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Yeah.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Thank you. In terms of the, I think, the consumer sentiments, especially in the first quarter, we see from the daily sales and also the two big promotion in last three months, I think it's quite a mixed situation right now. As I mentioned, in the E-Fashion group, the whole margin I think is quite flat, but we see some structural opportunity in vertical category like, as I mentioned, although the skin and also luxury part. For the other part like beauty and also the consumer electronics, I think it's quite flat too. There's a slight increase on beauty part. For Baozun's portfolio, we are quite balanced because each of the category actually we are quite even. In total, I think we still can manage a quite balanced portfolio here.

Also I think some of your question mentioned about the emerging channels. Yes, exactly. I think for the especially for the Jingdong part during the last two I think big promotion like Double 11, last year's Double 11, and also this year's Chinese New Year promotion I think no matter if the number of the brands we promote in the promotion or the transactions themselves we are largely I think at least double the number we compare with last year. It's quite good trends. I think right now our solutions, including the wine inventory part, as I mentioned, and also the solution in the logistics part has supported us to reach the result when we drive, I mean, the non-Tmall omnichannel growth. Yeah. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay, Tracy. On the question about the raw material price, currently we haven't seen any material impact yet. It may be not coming through yet. We will keep reporting when we see something happen. In terms of the partnership with iClick, early in the year, we made a strategic investment into iClick. At the business operations level, our integration has been really successful. Through the help and the partnership with iClick, we will be able to introduce new clients, and we were able to get more business with that partnership. As we mentioned earlier, the mini program has increased very significantly. For this year, we have doubled the size of the mini program business, both on GMV and also on the revenue perspective.

We actually noticed that at the moment the share price has been under a lot of pressure of iClick. We believe this is the overall market impact and also the market sentiment on the WeChat, on the Tencent, kind of the ecosystem. We think we will focus on the operational side, working together with iClick to improve the business cooperation going forward, and hoping the market will recover and will be able to reflect the true value of both companies.

Vicky Wei
VP of Internet Research team, Citigroup

Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Charlie Chen from China Renaissance. Please ask your question.

Charlie Chen
Head of Asian Research, China Renaissance

Thank you, management. This is Charlie Chen from China Renaissance. I have two questions here. The first one is about the onboarding of brand partners. I remember the company has focused more on domestic brands. Can you give us some update on what is the progress of onboarding important domestic brands? That's my first question. The second question is a follow-up on the logistics acquisition. After all those logistics acquisitions, do you feel that this acquisition or new capability has improved your client relationship or enable you to have a better bargaining power to charge higher take rate or charge more service income, et cetera. These are my two questions. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you. On the domestic brands, we definitely have seen an improvement in terms of the demand from the domestic brands. We have many different ways to provide service to the domestic brands. From the operation perspective, we can do the end-to-end service to the domestic brands. More importantly, our capability on the digital marketing, and also be able to make recommendations to the domestic brands in terms of how to define the e-commerce from a strategy to execution, that hugely has helped our DMG business unit to win very significant domestic brand business.

We may not do the operations for them, but we definitely have seen more business from the Digital Marketing Group, and that will help to knock the door into those brands and we'll be able to get more business from them. That's one. Also, as you can see, I mentioned we use our investment vehicle to make some investment into the smaller kind of the brand, which will be able to connect us from the equity perspective with some emerging brands. By that, for example, the brand NOBADAY , as I mentioned, we are going to become the preferred e-commerce supplier from this point onward. We are starting to help them to drive the omni-channel growth on the e-commerce.

By doing that way, we are helping the local domestic brands to grow together and benefiting both of us. That's on that one. In terms of the acquisition and the strategy for the logistics business unit, I think you are right. We try to integrate and try to build the strategic alliance with the different partners. That will help us to provide a value-added service. As you may see from the NPS survey, our logistics and also the warehouse service is ranked at the top from our clients' perspective. They greatly value the kind of the service we are being able to provide to them. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the brands, especially the MNC brands we operate, they now starting to do China for China.

In China, Baozun's unique capability to offer the premium logistics and warehouse service is really make us to stand out. In that way, we think that will help us to further strengthen that business itself, and also to contribute to Baozun's overall ability to acquire new brands and to acquire new business.

Charlie Chen
Head of Asian Research, China Renaissance

All right. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay, thank you.

Vincent Qiu
Chairman and CEO, Baozun

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Dear participants, as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Next question comes from the line of Joyce Ju from Bank of America Securities. Please ask your question.

Joyce Ju
VP and Internet Analyst, Bank of America Securities

Thanks for taking my question. My first question is about the investment strategy. Is there any update on your investment strategy, especially in current macro environment? My second question is about, as you mentioned, resource allocation and optimizing product sales. Could you elaborate a little more on the detailed plan and how will that impact the financial outlook?

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you for the question. Firstly, on the investment strategy, we start to do some of the different sides in terms of the M&A from last year. In this year, we have seen the financial contribution starts to coming through. For 2022, our strategy is we're still using M&A as one of the driver to growth our business. Given the current microenvironment, we are doing this in a much more scrutinized way, trying to improve the quality of the acquisition. Our strategy are still focused on the four area. The kind of capability enhancement, the vertical consolidation of the other similar service providers, and also the brand building, as I mentioned.

One of the new area we are looking at for this year is to looking at overseas. China growth is at this moment under a lot of pressure. At this time, the Asia Pacific and the rest of the world may present more opportunity for Baozun. We're basically looking at that for this year as well. That's on the investment strategy. In terms of the resource optimization, at this moment, given the wider macroenvironment, we are being very careful in terms of the quality of our business. Our clients is prefer the profitability than the growth. At the same time, Baozun is also focused on the quality growth, because we want our growth to be sustainable.

At this moment, given the environment, our risk appetite has changed a little bit. Therefore, for this year, we proactively had a thorough review of our business. From the product sales perspective, we actually look at our business and to identify those the product sales business which has a low margin. At this moment in time, we are we made a decision for this year to not to do those low margin business. As you have seen, in Q4, and actually starting from Q3, we're already adapting this kind of the strategy. Even though our revenue dropped to RMB 144 million, but our margin hasn't been impacted for those business.

For at least the first half of this year, we will operate the similar conservative approach in terms of the product sales business. We also look at the efficiency and the people efficiency for our non-distribution business as well. We identified a numbers of clients which are low contribution from a profit perspective. These are our service kind of service fee model business. We're looking at those business and we think if we cannot provide the value-added service like the logistics, like the DMG, like the technology, but only doing the operations and with a very low margin, we made a decision to not further continue those business. In return, we will reallocate those resource into the high margin and high value-added service, which we can add more value to the customer.

At the same time, we can try to generate more profit margin from those. That's our thought in terms of the resource optimization at this moment.

Joyce Ju
VP and Internet Analyst, Bank of America Securities

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Robin Leung from Daiwa. Please ask the question.

Robin Leung
Associate Director,, Daiwa

Hi. Thanks management for taking my question. Could management share on the 2022 revenue outlook and also the margin trend in the next few quarters? Are we still targeting 5% on GAAP operating profit margin for 2022, given that this year we have a lot of, like, one-off expenses? Excluding that, in 2022, we should see a meaningful improvement. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you. I think there's a lot of uncertainty at this moment. Every day, the world is a different world. If we assume everything unchanged as of today, then when we do our annual operating plan, we see our top line having double-digit, like, something between 10%-20% growth. Our bottom line, given for 2021, we have a number of the one-off kind of impact. We will be able to see a healthy growth in terms of the bottom line, which will be greater than 20%. As I mentioned, there's a lot of uncertainties, the macroenvironment, the U.S.-China relationship, the COVID is now starting to come back, having a significant impact at this moment.

This is, at the moment, what we have seen. What we will do is we will focus on the fundamentals to improve the quality and processes and to be able to offer more value-added service to our customers. We believe in the longer term, when the business getting back to normal, we will be emerged as a stronger business into the future.

Operator

Excuse me, Robin.

Robin Leung
Associate Director,, Daiwa

Okay.

Operator

Have you finished with your questions?

Robin Leung
Associate Director,, Daiwa

Yeah. Thank you. Very helpful. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Charlie Chen from China Renaissance. Please ask the question.

Charlie Chen
Head of Asian Research, China Renaissance

Thank you, management, for taking my questions again. I have a question regarding the regulatory side of your business. Since the second half last year, we have seen a lot of tax audits on live-streaming retail business. How do you feel the impact on your business? Aside from that, do you feel there's any other regulatory risk on your business in terms of like business acquisitions and whatever you can think about? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you, Charlie. I will try to answer, and then maybe Tracy can add more after my answer. First of all, I think you must be saying the point you are making is more on the KOL and also the tax implication and the regulatory on those KOL. Right? We actually think that's a positive kind of move from the regulatory perspective, trying to get the platform and also the business back to normal and back to a sustainable growth into the future. That impact will lead the brand focus on more on the day-to-day kind of live show, which will require not the KOL, but the normal kind of the normal like the employee to do the day-to-day kind of the live show.

That will help to stabilize the traffic acquisition and provide the opportunity for more middle-reach KOL to play more part in terms of the live stream. We still believe the live stream is a growing part of the business. For this year, we start to set up more business for the live streaming. We have our studio and also we are starting to do more cooperation with the universities, trying to build our employee base who can do the normal day-to-day live stream show.

On top of that, we are engaging with the platform, both the Douyin and also the Tmall, to see how we can do more coordination in terms of our master control for the live show, and also how to deploy the budget of the brand on the advertising and also the traffic acquisition. Those kind of things will help us to get back to normal and to improve the stickiness of Baozun and our client partner. Tracy, anything to add?

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Yeah. Yes. I think to further select on top KOL impact is the shared comments from many investors, from platforms, from brands, and also from ourselves. I think after the regulation, in the past two months operation, we definitely saw positive impact on middle layer of KOL and also the sales from live stream operated by Baozun's team. I mean, the traffic part, you see the traffic shift. I think to actually translate the traffic into the conversion, it also requires other resource allocation, like the proper merchants and the proper incentives and the discount.

I think it take months for brands and us together to come out the solid plan to improve our self-owned live stream percentage of the total year spenders. Still, I think it's a good sign.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Finally, on the regulatory impact, we believe the many regulatory kind of rules or the new introduced rules has actually help us to build a longer term perspective for the e-commerce industry in China. In Baozun, we are doing a few things. Number one is we have made a lot of the emphasis on the ESG. For this year, we have improved our ranking of ESG from BBB to AA rating, which is one of the highest in the e-commerce business in China. That demonstrate the kind of sustainability and also the regulatory awareness of Baozun.

From a technology perspective, in Q4, we very quickly adapted our system and platform to fit with the new requirement on PII. That will help us to improve the our ability to provide the service to the MCN customer who normally has a higher requirement in terms of the data security. Going forward, we believe we are well positioned to cope with the new regulatory environment currently for the e-commerce in China.

Charlie Chen
Head of Asian Research, China Renaissance

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions. I would like to turn the meeting over to management team for closing remarks.

Wendy Sun
Investor Relations Director, Baozun

Thank you, operator. In closing, on behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for your participation in today's call. If you require any further information, feel free to reach out to us. Thank you for joining us today, and this concludes the call. Thank you.

Operator

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect. Have a nice day.

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