Baozun Inc. (HKG:9991)
Hong Kong flag Hong Kong · Delayed Price · Currency is HKD
7.32
+0.17 (2.38%)
Apr 28, 2026, 4:08 PM HKT
← View all transcripts

Earnings Call: Q3 2021

Nov 30, 2021

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for Baozun's third quarter 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 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. Thank you, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our third quarter 2021 earnings release was distributed earlier today and is available on our IR website at ir.baozun.com, as well as on global newswire services. We have also posted a PowerPoint presentation that accompanies our comments to the same IR website, where they are available for download. This presentation is also available on our webcast, where we will move on the slides in synchronization with our remarks. On the call today from Baozun, we have Mr. Vincent Qiu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Arthur Yu, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ms. Tracy Li, our Vice President of Strategic Business Development. Mr. Qiu will review the business operations and the company highlights, followed by Mr. Yu, who will discuss financials and guidance.

They will all be available to answer your questions during the Q&A section 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 US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relates to events that involve known or unknown risk, 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 filing with the SEC and the announcement on the website of Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under 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. Today, we are hosting our earnings call for the first time from our new headquarters, where most of the Baozun family has finally come together under one roof. Ever since I founded Baozun back in 2007, our business expanded so rapidly so that we ended up being spread across multiple offices for many years until now. We call our new home Baozun New One, symbolizing the start of a new journey, and we believe being physically together will greatly enhance our people's sense of belonging, collaboration, and productivity. As many of you already know, China's e-commerce has recently experienced a variety of headwinds, including weak macro environment and consumer sentiment drops, as well as new policies and the requirements issued by the government.

Despite all these short-term challenges, we were able to grow our revenues and deliver a non-GAAP operating profit of RMB 2 million after one-off adjustment. I'm confident with the great resilience and the sustainability of our business. We believe, given e-commerce is rooted in daily life, as headwinds slowly pass, consumer sentiment will eventually improve and various regulatory changes to the e-commerce environment will bring upon the next phase of long-term sustainable growth. Changes and temporary challenges bring opportunities, especially for those who can identify them to be the first mover to adapt and innovate. Let me share with you some of the opportunities we are seeing. Now, please turn to slide three. We continue to see the trend of consumption upgrade, especially in the luxury and the premium sector.

We believe the nature of such growth is structural, with consumption upgrade driven by rising disposable income and demand for quality lifestyle of the younger generation. The increased online penetration of luxury has also made luxury goods more accessible, and we have laid out a healthy pipeline from global luxury brand partners for next year. During the quarter, we onboarded seven luxury brands, and we are forecasting GMV from luxury to keep double-digit growth momentum in next few quarters. In addition, with increasing demand for premium warehouse and logistics services, we commissioned one more brand new luxury dedicated warehouse to better support our brands. For sportswear, despite the lingering impact from the Better Cotton Initiative, we have witnessed a modest recovery trend. Long-term wise, as the government aims to further promote sports and physical exercises in the 14th five-year plan, we believe sportswear category will likely see better growth.

Many leading international sportswear brands who view China as one of the most critical and strategic target markets, in the summer, are even accelerating its localization efforts as a brand of China. In addition, we have identified what we believe to be structural growth opportunity for some sub verticals, such as outdoor sportswear and adventure sports, which will likely to be the incremental drivers. Moving on to our omni-channel progress. First, an increasing number of brand partners are accelerating the deployment of omni-channel strategy. In this quarter alone, we added 54 stores for non-Tmall channels. Of these newly opened stores, over one-third are JD.com stores. We are glad to see our GMV generated on JD.com nearly tripled from a year ago, accounting for roughly 10% of our total GMV.

In addition, we continue to make progress in Tencent mini programs for pro-private domain as well as O2O initiatives. More importantly, the recurring revenue stream of store operations and marketing from our mini program ecosystems continue to grow their stake. Of the emerging channels, we have made quite some breakthrough for Douyin. We are happy to be the first to be at the forefront of action helping our brand partners to explore and expand into such the emerging channel with over 24 brand partners are piloting there. Our unique insight in brand value, preparation, and merchandising in this regard has been instrumental in delivering strong sales on some of our trial programs.

In the first nine months of 2021, we helped over 100 brands to generate over RMB 100 million in GMV with extremely successful cases for one fast fashion brand and one FMCG brand. The trend has been encouraging month-over-month, as in October alone, our brand partners generated over RMB 70 million GMV. It is worth noting that in some of our end-to-end services, we have managed to hit a take rate of over 20%, indicating attractive economics potential for us on Douyin. Although some emerging channels are still in early phase exploring optimum monetization models, we're happy to see our initial channel investments already start to bear fruits. Just a rough reference, in the third quarter, our revenue contribution from non-Tmall platforms, along with the associated backend services, has continued to increase to more than 20%. Now please turn to slide four.

On the technology front, we further upgraded our core e-commerce infrastructure to be more omni-channel oriented. Following the government's new policies regarding data privacy, we also upgraded our system for personal identity information protection to ensure brand partners are compliant with the latest laws and regulations. Such upgrades applied to our order management system, warehouse and logistics management system, and CRM ensure smooth order fulfillment and stronger user engagement. To drive business operating efficiency and flexibility, we keep making further upgrades to enable our digitalized, centralized and integrated operating platforms and the middle office. ROSS now has a multilevel authorization system helping our brand partners manage distributor networks. We launched Service Anywhere or S-ANY, an intelligent customer service management system to unify workflow dispatching, training, and resource management.

We believe S-ANY is both unique and disruptive within the e-commerce industry, and we have seen great uptake by over 300 brand stores deploying since its launch in just one month timeframe. Lastly, our remote service centers in Nantong and Hefei are ramping up shop smoothly with over 1,000 employees moved over. These regional service centers and S-ANY are highly complementary, allowing us to attain better service quality, gaining greater operational efficiency while lowering operating costs. We anticipate such initiative to save over RMB 20 million in operating costs in 2022. In addition, we received a 30% equity interest investment from Cainiao Network into Baotong, our warehousing and logistics arm.

At the beginning of the year, when we formulated our medium-term plan, we set objectives that Baotong needs to be a disruptive game-changer, and that's needed to expand business scope to be wider and deeper, while also innovating its supply chain practices. We considered several leading players in the industry to be our strategic partners, each with its own advantages and characteristics. Ultimately, we concluded that Baozun and Sanyou are the most complementary in terms of capabilities and assets. The combination elevates the partnership's competitive advantage in the sports, outdoor, luxury, and cosmetics industry. We believe such strategic alliance will lead to substantial cost optimization and greater synergistic business opportunities. In summary, we witnessed a number of short-term headwinds, and we anticipate further changes as the industry adapts and evolves.

As part of our corporate vision, we have always believed that technology empowers success, and are committed to delivering quality through developing our people. One quick example is our advanced preparations for the year's Double Eleven festival, where we facilitated more than 40 brand partners to rank number one in order value in their specific product categories during the mega campaign. Throughout the year, we have made considerable investment in enhancing our platform, enriching our technological capabilities, as well as establishing a special force full of talents. We believe Baozun has the most comprehensive, reliable and powerful set of infrastructure empowering our business partners. We are more confident in our competitive landscape, and as a leader of brand e-commerce partner, we are well-placed to navigate through these changes, adapt to the new environment and capitalize on our opportunities.

At the same time, we continue to promote sustainable Baozun ecosystem for the longer term, and I'm happy to point out that this September, MSCI, in recognition of our comprehensive ESG initiatives, upgraded Baozun's ESG rating to A, as demonstrated on slide number five. We are very proud of our team's resilience through the quarter and are confident in the future. I will now pass the call over to Arthur to go through our financials. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you, Vincent. Hello, everyone. Before diving into the numbers for this quarter, I would like to talk about three key topics. Number one, our M&A strategy. Number two, the near and long-term impact of our recent acquisitions. Number three, our prudent and conservative accounting approach. Now please turn to slide number six. Firstly, I'm confident that our M&A plan is making solid progress. We target complementary business and enhance our vertical competitiveness, expand economies of scale, and help make our business portfolio more resilient and balanced. We believe the current tough market environment offers an excellent window of opportunity for us to seek and consummate a variety of strategic long-term focused acquisition at a favorable valuation. The initial revenue contribution from our acquisition early this year helped drive top line growth and balance against the market headwinds.

We will look to do more of these buyout acquisitions as opportunities arise. Secondly, while we continue to make notable progress in our M&A strategy and integrating new acquisitions, let me provide you with the anticipated near- and long-term impacts to our business and financials. One near-term impact is that while the initial revenue contribution benefited our top line this quarter, the associated costs contributed to a small quarterly operating loss of RMB 7 million on a non-GAAP basis. As acquisitions typically need several quarters to be integrated, we anticipate an improving bottom line contribution in the future. On the positive side, we expect greater synergies and ROIs once acquisitions are fully integrated, which will contribute to our financial resilience as well. Thirdly and finally, we strive for a prudent and conservative accounting approach in our financial reporting.

Every reporting period, we thoroughly evaluate our assets and liabilities, and this quarter, we conservatively made a decision to reduce the outstanding accounts receivable of one distributor where a write-down of RMB 86 million. Although we have initiated legal proceedings to collect the overdue amount and believe we have a reasonable chance to prevail, we decided it is more prudent at this time to write down 65% of the total amount owed to us. We believe this is a one-off adjustment, and it is an isolated incident in our 14 years of history. Overall, our accounts receivable are healthy, and we have taken measures to strengthen risk management and quality control in the future. While this write-down had a negative impact this quarter, it preserves the integrity of our financial reporting. Now, let me share with you some observations on the consumption trend during the quarter.

Please turn to slide seven. First, to share some of the macro statistics in light of the weakening of consumption momentum in China. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, retail sales growth decelerated noticeably to 5.1% year-on-year in the third quarter, compared with 13.9% a quarter ago. While e-commerce continues to gain share of retail, the growth rate of online physical goods for the third quarter also fell to 8.7% from 13.3% in the second quarter, and 25.8% the first quarter of 2021. Respectively, in the previous two quarters, discretionary categories, including apparel and appliance, struggled, while FMCG and electronics flourished. Such macro consumption trends was consistent with our financial performance as depicted on slide eight.

During the quarter, our total GMV increased by 48% to RMB 16.1 billion. However, there was a cap among performance by sectors. Electronics did extremely well with triple digits year-on-year increase, as there was an incremental 3C brand that launched several new SKUs during this third quarter. In fact, if we're excluding that, our GMV growth would have been 2% in line with our observation of weaker consumption. In addition to electronics, FMCG and luxury both delivered high double-digit growth rate. On the flip side, apparel and accessories declined by the mid-teens % during the quarter with persistent impact from the BCI, adding further to the weakened consumption sentiment. Sportswear continued to show a year-over-year decline. However, the contraction rate has narrowed, and we now see a modest month-by-month recovery trend. Appliance also declined by mid-single-digit .

Overall, the GMV split between categories for the first nine months are as follow. Apparels and accessories at 40%, followed by electronics at 30%, FMCG at 16%, and appliance at mid-single digit. We also saw a division between our distribution and non-distribution model this quarter. Specifically, our distribution GMV declined 13% to RMB 786 million, while non-distribution GMV increased 54% to RMB 15.3 billion. Please turn to slide nine. Total net revenues increased 4% to RMB 1.9 billion, of which our acquisitions contributed a total revenue of RMB 212 million. Product sales revenues declined 13%, mainly due to the decline of key brands in the appliance category.

Our planned business model transition of a new brand partner, as well as our tighter control on brand and channel selection criteria for the distribution model. In light of the macro uncertainty, our strategy for our distribution model is to pursue high quality growth with a clear focus on profitability and working capital efficiency. Now, turning to service revenue. It increased by 17% to RMB 1.2 billion, benefiting from several acquisitions made early this year. Service revenue of our organic business declined by 4% to about RMB 1 billion, as BCI continued to impact sales of many sportswear brands. If we refer to the total outbound orders of our logistics service, it declined by more than 25% year-on-year for the quarter. As the proportion of our consignment model reduced, our blended take rate also declined accordingly.

During the quarter, the take rate for the non-distribution model was 7.8%, down from 10.3% a year ago. Looking at the take rate of the consignment model itself on a like-for-like basis, it is flat year-on-year at 12.2%. During the third quarter, our overall gross profit totaled RMB 1.3 billion, an increase of 12.7% year-over-year, and our gross profit margin expanded by 540 basis points to 68.6% from 63.2% a year ago. Now let's turn to operating expenses on slide 10. Fulfillment expenses were RMB 634 million, an increase of 51% year-over-year. This quarter, there was an incremental fulfillment cost of RMB 205 million related to our two newly acquired warehouse and supply chain businesses, Baotong and Baobida.

Sales and marketing expenses were RMB 536 million, an increase of 6.9% year-over-year. The increase was mainly due to increased staff as our business scales and our expansion in headcount in digital marketing services, which was partially offset by efficiency improvements. Technology and content expenses were RMB 140 million, an increase of 12.2% year-over-year. The increase was mainly due to higher staff costs for incremental IT development, offset by efficiency improvements. G&A expenses increased to RMB 191 million. This increase was mainly due to some of our investment in talent and sustainability, as well as a write-down of RMB 86 million in accounts receivables from one specific client that I talked about earlier. As a percentage of GMV, we continue to optimize OpEx to drive greater operational efficiency, as displayed on slide 11.

For the third quarter, total OpEx as a percentage of GMV improved by 80 basis points to 9.1%, driven by efficiency gains in marketing and technology ratios. More specifically, our sales and marketing improved by 130 basis points to 3.3% from 4.6% a year ago, driven by a combination of more effective digital marketing services and lower marketing and promotion expenses in absolute dollar. We also improved by 20 basis points from higher efficiency in technology ratio. This quarter, the total fulfillment ratio was unchanged year-over-year at 3.9%. Lastly, our G&A, due to the one-off extraordinary write-down, as well as more strategic investment in talent, increased to 1.2% from 0.5% a year ago. Now turn to slide number 12.

Reflecting the above mentioned items, our non-GAAP loss from operations was RMB 84 million during the quarter, and non-GAAP OP margin was -4.4%. On slide 13, let me walk you through our analysis on non-GAAP operating profits. The slide shows the breakdown of our various operating profits and cost stream and how they evolved year-over-year. I would like to note that this is an indicative number which aims for you to better understand our financial performance. In red, you can see the BCI continued to have a major negative impact as it drags down the performance of sportswear, fashion apparel, along with our organic logistics business. We are encouraged to see that while revenue from our distribution model decreased, operating profit from distribution was largely unchanged year-over-year, benefiting from our high-quality growth strategy.

Additionally, some of our strategic investments combined for a negative variance of RMB 42 million, including the temporary higher cost of concurrently occupying two headquarters during our move to build a new one, as well increasing talent recruitment and investment in our Douyin and regional service centers. In blue, we saw positive gains in digital marketing, luxury, and technology. As mentioned earlier, we also had the extraordinary write-down of RMB 86 million, excluding which our adjusted non-GAAP operating profit, which is calculated based on the non-GAAP operating profit, adding back the write-down of RMB 86 million, was a positive at RMB 2 million. Turning to slide 14, non-GAAP net loss attributable to ordinary shareholders totaled RMB 88 million, and basic and diluted non-GAAP loss per ADS were both 1.21 for the quarter. Lastly, turning to slide 15. Operating cash flow for the quarter was negative RMB 400 million.

Was negative RMB 740 million. European cash flow was impacted by our need to procure additional inventory during the third quarter in preparation for the Double Eleven peak season in November. During the quarter, we also deployed RMB 178 million for M&A activities. Total financing cash outflow was RMB 739 million, mainly due to our execution of share repurchase program. This May, our board of directors authorized a share repurchase program allowing us to repurchase up to $125 million worth of our shares. As of September 30, 2021, we completed the full purchase totaled 18.6 million ordinary shares with an average cost of $6.7 per ordinary share. Each ADS represents three plus eight ordinary shares. As of September 30, 2021, our cash and cash equivalents totaled RMB 2.8 billion.

Importantly, as discussed earlier, our warehouse and logistics entity, Baotong, received the investment payment from Cainiao Network in late October. Therefore, we believe we have sufficient cash for normal operations and to pursue additional strategic opportunities. As we are confident with our comfortable cash position, I'm pleased to announce that the board of directors has approved an additional share repurchase of up to $50 million for the next 12 months. That wraps up my financial review for the third quarter and concludes our prepared remarks. Thanks to everyone. Operator, we are now ready to begin the Q&A session.

Operator

Certainly. Participants who wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound or hash key. It's star followed by one to ask your question. Your first question comes from the line of Alicia Yap from Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Alicia Yap
Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst, Citigroup

Hi. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my questions. Actually, I think you explained you know very well the discrepancy between the GMV growth, especially on the non-distribution GMV versus the service revenue growth this quarter. But I think my follow-up question on that is, when can we expect these discretionary category, like the apparel or the sportswear, to recover to a more normalized level which could help our service revenue to grow more in line with the non-distribution GMV growth? Secondly, also on the Singles' Day performance, I think you announced about 16.3% year-over-year growth during the Singles' Day performance.

Should we expect this, more or less, the 4Q GMV growth, to be, or any colors, on the service revenue for 4Q, as well as the margin direction, for 4Q as well? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay, thank you, Alicia. I will take your question. On the first one, you were talking about the sports coming back to the normal growth. Back in quarter two, when we communicate to the market, we thought the BCI could be one-off impact. In Q3 and Q4, it will get back to normal. Our current assessment is that it takes longer than our expectation to get back to normal. Even though the decline trend has come back to narrow down from Q3 and also we are going to further narrow down in Q4, we expect this trend to continue into the next year, at least the quarter one and quarter two.

Our current view is maybe from quarter three onwards, we could see some positive kind of trends on the sports and apparel. I would like to add. Despite we have some headwinds on the sports and apparel, we do have some positive gains from the luxury and also FMCG. In this quarter, we have seen a good growth on the GMV on the luxury, and we recently have won quite a number of luxury brands. We anticipate the strength of luxury will continue in the next few quarters. Our omni-channel strategy has helped us to grow FMCG and some other category, which also can help us to balance the impact from the sport. That's on the first question.

On the second question, regarding to the Singles' Day performance. We still, as I mentioned, overall, we still see some headwinds in the quarter four. From a GMV perspective, we think quarter four will be a low-teens kind of growth in the GMV. We saw the sports and apparel will slowly recover. Overall, it will slowly recover. Within the sports, there are some highlights or some kind of the spotlight we would like to highlight, which is some subvertical, such as the outdoor or the winter sports, because we will hold the Winter Olympics next year. We've seen that from some of the brands we do. We see some good growth. Also, as I mentioned, the luxury will continue its very strong trend into the quarter four.

That's the overall what we have seen.

Alicia Yap
Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst, Citigroup

Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Thomas Chong from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thomas Chong
Managing Director and Head of China Internet, Jefferies

Hi. Good evening. Thanks management for taking my question. I think management has mentioned in the prepared remarks about the non-Tmall GMV trend. Can you comment about how we should think about the mix between Tmall and non-Tmall over the next couple of years? My second question is more about the cooperation with Cainiao. Can you share with us more about the strategies going forward and the synergies that we should expect? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

I will take the question on the Tmall and non-Tmall and probably comment a little bit on Cainiao. In terms of the Tmall, as I mentioned earlier, for this quarter, we have seen the Tmall has seen some weakness. If we take out that one specific electronic brand, for the first time, the non-Tmall has surpassed 50% of overall GMV. That's a trend we have seen very clearly, i.e., people are starting to explore more opportunities in terms of the non-Tmall channel. Our expectation is this is a trend will continue at least going into the early part of next year. We believe this represents a lot of opportunity for Baozun.

We have, from the last two years, continued to make investments into the omni-channel technology. We laid out the team, to do more business on the mini program and also on on Douyin and on Jingdong. As Vincent mentioned earlier, in this quarter, we made some solid progress in Douyin, now operating about 20 kind of the stores on Douyin, which we are quite satisfied with. Going forward, I think this trend will continue, and I think Baozun, we have prepared pretty well for this trend. In regarding to Cainiao, our cooperation with Cainiao will bring two synergies. The first synergy is we have comparable, I mean, we have a very matched kind of capability. From a Cainiao perspective, they are doing a lot of business based on a volume basis.

They do quite the standard logistics and warehouse products. For Baozun, we are focused on the premium, and we are focused on customized kind of solution for the large brands. When we combine together, we will be able to depend on each other to further strengthen our capability. We could introduce the business to each other from Cainiao to Baozun. We think from a sports, luxury and cosmetics, which is what Baozun is really strong on, we will get some synergy from the Cainiao network. That's on the capability. On top of the capability, we also can gain some resource efficiency. As we know, Cainiao operates a national network of a much bigger kind of scale in terms of logistics and warehouse.

By utilizing that, I think it can further reduce our cost base and improve our capital efficiency when we make investments into the new warehouse. That could also help Baozun to grow into a much bigger and much efficient business. Based on those two, we think that could be a pretty good in terms of going forward.

Vincent Qiu
Chairman and CEO, Baozun

Yeah. Some more, you know, words to say about the Cainiao cooperation is that we view the, you know, cooperation with Cainiao as a big business development opportunity for us as well. 'Cause by working with Cainiao closely, I think we can have much more BD opportunities for the categories, including sports, luxury, apparel, cosmetics, these kind of categories.

In this case, we work with clients closely, deliver a better and comprehensive solutions to the industry. Potentially we can work with so much more, you know, the potential brands, you know, in their captioned different categories.

Thomas Chong
Managing Director and Head of China Internet, Jefferies

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Charlie Chen from China Renaissance. Please go ahead.

Charlie Chen
Head of Asian Research, China Renaissance

Thank you. Thank you, management for taking my questions. I have two questions, one related to GMV and the other related to take rate. The first one is regarding the GMV from the distribution business. We can see there is a slight decline of the GMV year-on-year for this quarter. We understand the company is doing some strategic optimization. How should we think about the negative impact going forward for the GMV from a distribution business? My second question is related to the take rate. I can see for the non-distribution business, GMV growth actually significantly outpaced revenue growth. We understand that we are still on the investment stage for non-Tmall channels as an omni-channel efforts. How do you think about this?

What do you think would be a reasonable estimate we can see meaningful improvement of take rate as a result of the long-term investment seeing some returns? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you. On the GMV, as you mentioned, we do have seen some decline of the distribution model. There are three main drivers behind this fact. The first one is, we have initiated some of the business model change along with the brand partner for distribution. We convert the distribution model into the service fee model, which, for the brands and also for Baozun, it's actually a good thing because it improved our capital efficiency, so we don't need to use our own cash to hold the inventory. So that's the first factor. The second factor is, since about 18 months ago, we initiated a high quality growth strategy. In this quarter specifically, we stopped some low return kind of low profit of the distribution business.

We don't want to do that type of business, especially during the weak market performance. We're concerned quite a lot about kind of the quality of that type of revenue. Thirdly, as we all know, one small home appliance brand made a significant contribution to our overall distribution revenue. For this quarter, that one brand shows a low single-digit year-on-year decline, which also is contributing to this fact. That's the reason behind the decline of the distribution model. Going forward, we will focus on quality.

If we see good business or good category which provide us with a good profitable return, which is a distribution model, then we definitely would like to do it because the positive side of the distribution model is it shows a higher client stickiness with the brand partner. If we have a chance to do it, we will use that model to do the profitable business. That's our strategy going forward.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

This is Tracy. I would like to add another point is that when we talk about the emerging channel like Douyin and the TikTok operation, what we observed in the past few months is for this channel, the take rate and also the revenue portion is positively flat or even higher than the Tmall channel. Because right now, in the early stage of the channel development part, a brand is heavily rely on partner like Baozun to further dig out the consumer value and also to improve the ROI compared with Tmall channel. At that part, which means besides the operation part, we can combine the digital marketing and also, I mean, the technology into the total take rate, which means our revenue income part.

That is the, I think, one of the positive way we can see the trend.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Yeah.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

going forward. Yeah.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Also I would like to add, for some of our business model, take rate is not the only measure. We actually look at the profit, the operating profit contributing to the bottom line. For example, as I mentioned in the past, for the mini program in this quarter, we actually doubled our revenue year-over-year. For the mini program, we are making the profits for this quarter. We focus on not the take rate, but the profitability of this kind of the business.

Charlie Chen
Head of Asian Research, China Renaissance

Thank you very much.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Ashley Xu from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Ashley Xu
VP of China Internet Research, Credit Suisse

Thanks, management, for taking my questions. Firstly, I want to get management's preliminary review on our next year's outlook, given the currently challenging macro environment. My second question is related to our operation on JD.com. I understand there has been quite some positive progress there. I want to check on the key categories or brand types we are cooperating on this platform. At the same time, what types of model are we deploying there? Thank you.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

For the Jingdong part, I think Jingdong's e-commerce operation logics are more similar to Tmall, like partially adapted to Jingdong's top e-commerce environment build-up, which is the main focus for this year and next year for Jingdong. I think Baozun's operating experience can effectively improve the service capability of the non-standard category like fashion, luxury, beauty, home and others, which all of this, as mentioned, is our big main focus, fashion, luxury, beauty and home, this kind of non-standard category. I think our value on this, not just about the marketing consumer acquisition, but also the after-sales consumer customer service and also how to assist the platform in operating their tailor-made solution for the, I mean, pop-up flagship stores.

This is the direction for, I mean, for the next year, regarding the collaboration with Jingdong. You can see from the Double Eleven, actually, we have doubled the brands participating at Jingdong's Double Eleven this year, and also it's resulting in the 100% YY growth compared with last year's in terms of the transaction itself. The momentum is promising. Even in this, I mean, right now, actually, we're being positively prepared for the Double Twelve, for Jingdong platform too. I think the momentum is, it keeps the same pattern. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. In terms of the outlook for next year, we are currently in the process of doing our annual operating plan. At this moment, we only have a direction in terms of both the GMV. We continue to see, given our portfolio of brands, a healthy growth year over year, maybe towards a high 18% to even the 20%-ish mark. In terms of the revenue and profits, I think there are still a lot of the moving space. If, like I mentioned, we can see a recovery in terms of the overall economy and also the BCI impact stopped from Q3 and Q4 next year, then from a revenue perspective, we could see a kind of a double-digit growth on the revenue.

In terms of the profit, while we keep making the profit improvement, we think our profitability will in line with our revenue growth to the same percentage. Having said that, we will also look into other M&A opportunity for inorganic growth, and also we will look into other opportunities to make investments into the future, for example, on some technology and to further enhance our omni-channel. There are still some moving parts at this moment. Once we completed our annual operating plan in the next few weeks, we will be able to give the market a little bit more guidance.

Ashley Xu
VP of China Internet Research, Credit Suisse

Sure. Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Joyce Ju from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Joyce Ju
VP and Senior Equity Analyst, Bank of America

Thanks, management, for taking the questions. My question was related to, first is our future M&A strategy, in terms of like, you know, for the rest of the year or next year, if we have seen other areas we probably want to invest in the future. Second thing, just want to understand the connectivity impact between Alibaba and, you know, Tencent and how this affected our, you know, operations for brands. Thanks.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. I will do the M&A strategy first, and then maybe Tracy can comment on the connection between Tmall and Tencent. On the M&A, overall, we see the current market environment provide some really attractive valuation on some of the targets. Given our cash position, we are actively looking for using the inorganic growth to create value for our shareholder and to ensure our future growth. The opportunity we are looking are for in the four areas. The number one is we still think the kind of TP industry or the service provider industry needs to further consolidation. In this quarter, in Q3, we actually completed our acquisition of eFashion, which is another e-commerce service provider. We have seen some early signs the integration could lead to some great synergy.

We will continue on that, i.e., the e-commerce service provider consolidation. That's number one. The second thing is we will look into the capability enhancement. In this quarter, we completed the kind of two logistics deals, and also we completed one deal on the digital marketing. That helps us to build our capability to provide a better solution to our brand partner to enhance our kind of the stickiness with the customer and also to win more business. That's the second one. The third one is, we want to use the investments to improve our cooperation and the business with our brand. For example, in early this year, we made investment into the Fosun Fashion Group.

With the five brands in Fosun Fashion Group, they all have seen some positive year-on-year improvement. Our cooperation with the brand partner, we have been making some really good progress. We will continue that. Finally, we will be looking for some overseas expansion opportunity through both organic and inorganic. That overall is our planned strategy for the M&A in the next year or so. I also would like to add. After we start to do more structured M&A, we have internally built a strong team of experienced people. We believe we will be able to capture this opportunity in the following year.

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Regarding the WeChat and the Taobao that with Lu, we do see there's a lot of improvement on the consumer journey, especially about the share links and also in the payment level regarding the friends pay. Actually I think there has not been essential changes in the user behavior, which means that right now it's hard for us to validate the positive impact on traffic and the conversion itself. In the longer run, we do believe it because we know Taobao has many potential plans in the, I mean, data-level interaction that will be carried out in next year. I think potentially it will bring a massive new wave of the traffic for e-commerce, especially the social app user base is much bigger considering this point. Yeah. Thank you.

Joyce Ju
VP and Senior Equity Analyst, Bank of America

Got it. Many thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Can we move to the next question? Management, can we move to the next question?

Wendy Sun
Investor Relations Director, Baozun

Yes, go ahead. Last one, please.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Robin Leung from Daiwa. Please go ahead.

Robin Leung
Associate Director, Daiwa

Hi, management. Thanks for taking my question. This is Robin asking on behalf of John Choi. Could management share the number of new brand partners that Baozun added in this quarter in addition to those 54 new stores in the non-Tmall channels? Will these new brands be able to offset some of the weakness in the first half of 2022? Thank you.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay. Thank you for the question. I think, we currently, I mean, from the last quarter we communicated to the market, we will stop to giving guidance or giving the numbers on the numbers of brands. That's partly because after we have done several acquisitions, we found there are several different brands being operated by, the acquired company, which is very different from our, usual standard. Therefore, we will not give that. But what we are, currently have seen is there are, some good brands, we have been able to gain from this quarter, and we have seen, some of the major brands. In total, we have gained 29 brands net addition, in this quarter. That's the overall number we have gained in this quarter.

We also have seen on top of the new brands, we have added another 122 stores, which, many of them are coming from, our existing, kind of brand partner. Which shows our existing brand partner are opening more stores. A lot of them are in the omni-channel. For example, our existing Tmall brand partner opening JD.com, opening mini-program stores. That's contributed to the 122 additional stores. Going forward with, as we mentioned earlier, the omni-channel strategy will further expand. We think we will continue to see more stores being added in the coming years. Tracy, you want to add something?

Tracy Li
VP of Strategic Business Development, Baozun

Yes. Actually, I think in numbers-wise, we definitely higher, much higher than last year, I mean the numbers. But the pattern is different because this year most of our new clients is concentrating on the luxury and this kind of category, which means we need longer time to prepare for the open up. Which means we put efforts in the Q2 and even Q3, but we harvest in, I mean, maybe Q1 next year or Q2 next year. You can see, Winston just published some number in the Q1 next year, we're gonna open over 20 stores in luxury. So that is actually the effort we invest this year.

Also on the other part is, I think for the emerging channel like TikTok and the Jingdong, this more like extend our current brands into the new channels. We call it the existing client new channels. On this part we have a very steady growth this year because actually I think the infrastructure investment, including technology and the logistics, have helped us more fluently to help our clients to open their, I mean, omni-channel strategy. All of this will also be contributed in the Q4 and also next in the Q1 next year. Yeah. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. As there are no further questions at this point of time, I would like to hand the call back to management for any closing remarks. Thank you.

Wendy Sun
Investor Relations Director, Baozun

Thank you, operator. In closing, on behalf of the Baozun management team, we would like to thank you for your participation in today's call. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you again for joining us today. This concludes the call.

Arthur Yu
CFO, Baozun

Okay.

Operator

Thank you.

Powered by