Baozun Inc. (NASDAQ:BZUN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Sorry. The leveraging of Baozun resources. I mean, obviously when it comes to back office resources, Gap has its own back office, but it also fortunate to have a big company backing their operations for instance, for legal finance. That’s for your first question. So then your second question is about the time and I think from the very beginning and I restated again today that obviously in this kind of business purchases are made well in advance, particularly before we took over because we now plan to really put in place a factor supply chain, but it was not the case before, which means that most of 2023 is already purchased and that the impact we can have on products is fairly limited for 2023 and will be much more measurable at the very end of ’23 and from ’24.

That’s for the impact on products that obviously the impact on products has a direct impact on growth and gross margin. Having said this, there are still some low hanging fruit that we are working on as early as now. And as we had announced when we made the acquisition, we plan to reduce the loss very significantly this year to continue to further reduce the loss next year and to reach a breakeven point in ’25. This is the sample we have planned for and that is confirmed today. So this is to address your first lot of questions which were more about Gap. Then about the other brands, where now we are in discussion with a number of other brands, which are potentially a bit different in terms of positioning from Gap in the sense that a lot of the brands we are in discussion with are more premium without being luxury and purchase a little bit higher positioning than Gap.

However, these are brands where we see a lot of synergies. That’s also why for the time being we focus more on apparel, footwear accessory brands, because again, everything we’re doing in terms of logistics, e-commerce operation and technology, particularly with regards to supply chain, as well as leveraging the resources we have recruited for the recovery of Gap Greater China are going to be usable for other brands when we remain in this area in this segment of business. This is my answer to your question, Andre. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Sophia Tan from Credit Suisse. Please ask your question, Sophia.

Sophia Tan: Hi, management. Thanks for taking my question. I have one question on behalf of Ashley, in terms of the Gap business outlook for 2023. Can management please share some color on the financial and operational metrics that is better to look at if we’d like to track performance of Gap? And how do we think about the financial impact of both topline and bottom line for this year? Thank you.

Sandrine Zerbib: And so — okay go ahead Arthur, that’s perfect. Okay, go ahead.

Arthur Yu: So for the financial, I will make some comments and then maybe Sandrine can add some colors from the operation perspective. As we mentioned earlier, so basically turning around Gap Greater China is a medium to long term efforts. So basically, we are looking at a five-year journey to turn this around. So basically for the five years, we expect our top-line CAGR to grow more than double-digits. And we expect to breakeven from both profits and also cash flow perspective by 2025. And in 2023, as we just mentioned, a lot of the decision in terms of the products and the channel strategy has already been made. Therefore, our aim for 2023 is to stabilize from a financial perspective and also to narrow down the losses of the Gap Greater China in 2023.