111, Inc. (NASDAQ:YI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Junling Liu: Yes. Thank you, Steve. With regards to the question of operational focus, I think I briefly mentioned in my script, essentially, we did a lot of soul searching in 2022 and the organization had some realignment on the strategic focuses operationally. And those are really value creation. We’ve got to evaluate the businesses on the merit of how much value it can create to our upstream and downstream customers. And the second focus will be being customer-centric. And as in the past, we were more or less more focused on internal metrics rather than metrics that drive the organization towards creating value for customers. And also the third focus is really to strengthen our supply base. So in 2022, we kind of managed to restructure the business.

We gave up some of the businesses with really low value. And we have really realigned all the, let’s say, weekly business review metrics towards customers instead of our internal metrics like revenue and margin. And obviously, we worked really hard towards the suppliers. Although we have built some good relationships, they are not strategic enough, and we are making excellent progress with our digital technical products. So all the suppliers we have been talking to are delighted. And all of those focuses will really create the following benefits, we believe, one being the sustained revenue and margin growth and the improved operational efficiency. We should expect our OpEx continue to improve. And also all those results will really impact the bottom line, which is profitability.

Luke Chen: Yes. On the cash flow, we are very pleased to see that we have achieved two competitive quarters for positive operating cash flow. And we are very confident that we will be able to keep this good trend as we are very much close to profitability and we have been operating with very high efficiency. For example, our accounts payable days is around 45 days and our inventory days is about 30 days. While we further build up our business scale, we will be able to negotiate better trading terms with suppliers. In terms of cash position, our cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash and short-term of investment as of December year-end amounted to RMB923 million. And we believe that we have sufficient cash reserve to support our business expansion. And Steve, I hope we have answered your questions.

Stephen Lee: Yes. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question today comes from Tom Craig at Cornerstone Investment. Please go ahead.

Tom Craig: Hello. This is Tom from Cornerstone. Congratulations on your performance last quarter. I have two questions. The first one is, what are the main factors driving the sustained improvement of the B2B gross margin? Is this improvement sustainable? The second one is, the company’s pricing expense ratio has been consistently decreasing. What is the main reason for this trend? Can they continue to decrease in the future? Thank you.

Harvey Wang: Okay. Tom, this is Harvey, I will take your first question regarding the margin of our B2B business. So, first of all, we are a technology company. So, I would like to thank my technology colleagues for their assistance, help us to drive our efficiency, including our dynamic inventory management system, which help us to get the best cost in each of our warehouse. So, we can do dynamic transit within €“ among all these warehouses to better serve our customer and also get the best profit. And also the other very good system called PIS, that is our Price Intelligence System. And it help us to optimize our price real time and get a good balance on our profit as well as our customer experience on price. So, all these tools really help us to get a much better profit.