Full Transcript: Baozun Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Baozun (NASDAQ:BZUN) reported first-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company's first-quarter earnings call has been provided below. Benzinga APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ to learn more. Access the full call at https://event.choruscall.com/mediaframe/webcast.html?webcastid=iFZYf3hH Summary Baozun reported a 15% year-over-year revenue increase to $2.4 billion for Q1 2026, with non-GAAP operating income turning profitable at 8 million RMB, a significant improvement from a 67 million RMB loss a year ago. The company's e-commerce (BEC) segment showed a 10% revenue growth and brand management (BBM) segment reported a 39% increase, with GAAP reaching operating breakeven for the second consecutive quarter. Baozun's strategic focus includes enhancing business quality, refining service satisfaction, and leveraging AI for operational efficiency, with plans to open 50 new Gap stores in 2026. Management expressed confidence in the company's ability to sustain growth momentum, highlighting improved inventory turnover days and cash generation as key operational achievements. The company is cautious about new brand acquisitions, focusing on larger scale opportunities within fashion apparel that can provide immediate profitability. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good morning ladies and gentlemen and thank you for standing by for Baozun's first quarter 2026 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 would now like to turn the call over to your host for today's call, Ms. Wendy Sun, senior Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations of Baozun. Please proceed. Wendy, thank you. Operator hello everyone and thank you for joining us today. Our first quarter 2026 earnings release was distributed earlier before this call and is available on our IR website at ir.baozun.com as well as on PR 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 Chu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ms. Catherine Zhu, Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Wu, Director and Chief Strategy Officer of Baozun Group, and Mr. Ken Huang, Chief Financial Officer of Baozun Brand Management. Mr. Chu will share firstly about our business strategy and company highlights. Ms. Zhu will then discuss our financials, followed by Mr. Wu and Mr. Huang who will share more regarding our E Commerce and Brand Management segment respectively. They will all be available to answer your questions during the Q and 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 U.S. Securities Act of 1933 as amended, the US Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended, and the US Private Security Litigation Reform act of 1995. These forward looking statements are based upon management's current expectations and current market and operating conditions and relate to events that involve no 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 and certainties or factors is included in the Company's filings with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission and its announcement notice or other documents published on the website of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Ltd. All information provided in this call is as the date hereof and is based upon assumptions that the Company believes to be reasonable as of this date and 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 conference call are in RMB. You may now turn to Slide 2 for the executive highlights for the quarter. It is now pleasure to introduce my Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Vincent Shultz. Vincent, please go ahead. Vincent Chu Thank you, Wendy. Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us. the first quarter of 2026 was solid throughout. We achieved growth across every key metric revenue, profitability and working capital turnover efficiency. For the quarter, Group revenue grew 15% year over year to $2.4 billion. Non GAAP operating income turned profitable at 8 million, a significant improvement compared to a loss of 67 million a year ago. Both business lines delivered solid growth in top line and bottom line. Importantly, these are not just financial improvements. They reflect notable progress in sales quality, profitability and cash generation across both engines. BEC resumed sustainable top line growth this quarter with a 10% year over year revenue increase compared with scale. What is even more critical is actually the quality of this growth. We will continue to prioritize our revenue streams towards enhancing business quality, refining service satisfaction and ultimately improving overall profitability. With growing synergies with BBM and integration of this brand management mindset, we aim to engage more deeply with our clients, understand their businesses at a gradual level and collaborate closely to drive sustainable growth. BBM delivered acceleration this quarter with revenue up 39% year over year and a continuing improvement in profitability. GAAP reached operating breakeven for the second consecutive quarter. This is especially impressive given the relatively smaller seasonal cycle in the first quarter. We believe this performance is a testament to our methodologies in mmc, merchandising, marketing and channel. We will continue to leverage this proven approach to nurture smaller niche brands within our portfolio to expand our addressable market. The strong Q1 results bolster our confidence in the full year outlook and more importantly, ability to excel during the acceleration phase of our business transformation. Over the next three years. Our two engines are each playing distinct yet reinforcing roles. BEC is not simply resuming growth. It is becoming a higher quality and a value driven business. Meanwhile, BBM is accelerating with GAAP on a clear path toward 2026 annual operating breakeven. Both engines are performing in sync and operating synergy is beginning to emerge, opening up broader development opportunities and unlocking new growth potential for our company. Now I'll hand over the call to the team for a deeper dive in our financials and business performance. Catherine Zhu (Chief Financial Officer) Thanks Vincent and hello everyone. Now let me provide a more detailed overview of financial results for the first quarter of 2026. Please turn to slide number three. Baozun Group's total net revenues for the first quarter of 2026 increased by 15% year over year to 2.4 billion. Of this total, e commerce revenue grew by 10% to 1.9 billion, while brand management revenue grew by 39% to 538 million. Breaking down E Commerce revenue by business model, services revenue increased 7% year over year to 1.4 billion, while BEC product sales revenue increased by 21% year over year to 510 million. Please turn to slide number four from a profitability perspective, gross profits for product sales increased by 33.6% year over year to 350 million. For the quarter, our group level blended gross margin for product sales was 33.5% representing an expansion of 110 basis points year over year. Within this, gross margin for E Commerce product sales expanded to 15.9% reflecting a 98 basis point improvement from 15% a year ago. Gross margin for BBM was 50% for the quarter compared with 51.6% in the same period of last year. Now please turn to slide number five for a walkthrough of our OPEX sales and marketing expenses increased by 93 million to 893 million. This included an increase of 43 million for BEC which was mainly due to higher spending on creative content and marketing initiatives on Douyin and RedNote. Consistent with growth in digital marketing revenue, BBM sales and marketing expenses increased by 56.8 million, mainly driven by the expansion of offline stores and marketing activities in the quarter. Fulfillment costs for the quarter decreased slightly by 1% to 519 million reflecting our ongoing efforts in cost optimization, Technology and accounting expenses increased by 7% to 125 million primarily due to more revenue contribution from technology monetization. SG&A expenses decreased by 4% to 164 million reflecting our continued focus on cost control and operational efficiency. Turning to bottom line items, please refer to slide number 6. During the quarter, our non GAAP income from operations was 8 million compared to a non GAAP loss from operations of 67 million. In the same period of last year, BC's adjusted non GAAP income from operations was 30 million significant improved from loss of 46 million a year ago. BBM reported a non GAAP operating loss of 4.9 million compared with a loss of 21.1 million a year ago. Lastly, with the growing significance of our distribution business across both operating segments, we would like to share key metrics related to capital turnover, efficiency and inventory turnover days. First, enhancing our transparency and accountability for the first quarter of 2026, our working capital turnover improved to 109 days compared with 193 days a year ago. Compared to within this inventory, turnover shortened to 113 days from 185 days a year ago. This improvement was driven by both BEC and BBM segments. As of March 31, 2026, our cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and short term investments totaled 2.9 billion. Let me now pass the call over to Junhua to update you on BEC, our E Commerce business. Junhua Thanks Katherine and hello everyone. BEC delivered a solid first quarter with revenue growing 10% year over year and non GAAP operating income of 13 million, a meaningful turnaround from a non GAAP operating loss of 46 million in the same period last year. This performance reflects both a return to sustainable growth and meaningful progress on a broader priority of improving revenue quality and expanding margins. Please turn to slide number seven. Our product sales revenue grew 21% year over year with broad based growth across all key categories benefiting from both deeper and relationships that improves execution on major platforms. It is encouraging to see apparel product sales deliver high double digit growth as our efforts to expand into non standard categories began to scale. We continue to deepen our engagement with brand partners in refining go to market strategies through channel diversification and merchandising segmentation, we are pleased to have achieved not only healthy top line growth and product sales but also improvements in gross margin and inventory efficiency. Now please turn to slide number eight services revenue from the quarter grew 7% year over year led by digital marketing and IT solutions as well as online store operations. We continue to gain market share in key categories like luxury, sports and outdoor, reflecting the depth and trust of brand partnerships in these high value segments. In the recently disclosed 2025 annual rating rewards, we were recognized across major marketplaces as top tier service provider, achieving a grand slam of awards across all platforms. These recognitions including TMALL Six Star Service Provider, JD Jing Excellence Partner, Douyin Diamond Service Provider, Tencent Qianyu Certified Excellent Partner and RedNote E Commerce Operation Partner reflecting our expanding ability to activate brands across an increasingly complex multi channel landscape. Returning to growth is only part of the story. We are equally focused on the quality of that growth. We have begun conducting comprehensive profitability and productivity analysis across service layers, business models and margin continuous by revenue stream with the explicit goal of concentrating on higher value work while reducing exposure to lower ROI services. Gross margin improvement is an active priority across both our product sales and service business. Lastly, we continue to focus on strengthening our bottom line. To support this, we are rolling out the enterprise wide lean initiatives to drive operational agility and cost optimization while scaling the adoption of AI tools across functions to unlock higher productivity. The improvement in quality non GAAP operating income from a loss of 46 million to a profit of 13 million is an early and tangible signal of this progress. Multiple AI powered tools have already been deployed across daily operations and we are expected to drive meaningful and efficiency gains. We also have several initiatives aimed at restructuring and re engineering our end to end operational process, creating even greater opportunities to capitalize on fast moving AI advancements. We are encouraged by bec's first quarter results looking ahead, our focus remaining on deepening client relationships, driving service innovation and continuously improving operational excellence and margin quality within this business. Now I'll pass to Ken for an update on Baojun brand management. Ken Huang (Chief Financial Officer of Baozun Brand Management) Thank you Tsinghua and hello everyone. Please turn to slide number nine for BBM's performance in the first quarter of 2026. BBM carried its strong momentum into the first quarter with revenue growing 39% year over year. We also achieved significant improvement in the bottom line with GAAP delivering its second consecutive breakeven quarter in non GAAP operating profits. More encouragingly, the solid growth was driven by gains across key operating metrics including traffic conversion and the average transaction value. Leveraging our omnichannel cap and agile integration. GAP achieved record same store sales growth in the 20s in first quarter gross margin remained healthy at 50% with optimized commercial strategy during the Spring festival to maximize traffic and conversion during the peak window. Inventory management also improved significantly with BBM inventory Turnover reduced to 14014 days from 157 days a year ago. Now let me share our key initiatives around merchandising, marketing and the channel for GAP during the quarter. Merchandising Our ability to blend GAP's American casual aesthetic with locally appealing features is connecting strongly with our target consumers. Our online segmentation strategy also moved beyond price driven initiatives toward more fashion forward and telemedia assortment, an increasingly important driver of online growth. Underpinning both is improved internal alignment. Our merchandising design and product development teams have operated in close coordination for several quarters, translating to tighter supply chain execution, stronger vendor relationships and more consistent cost management. Marketing our Q1 campaign strategy reflected displaying the seasonal sequencing during Chinese. This new year we activated our Packing Opera collaboration, a new edition of Classical art reintegrating traditional aesthetics through modern design. This marked our second consecutive CNY anchored by a major culture IP following the Fabian City collaboration in first quarter of 2025. In mid March, we launched our spring women's campaign Flow in the GAP in collaboration with dance artist Xiexin. Through expressive movement and storytelling, the campaign explores themes of self expression and personal growth among modern women. In fact, the women's division was the standout performer during the quarter channels following the successful launch of new stores featuring enhanced video, merchandising and upgraded store image in the fourth quarter, we remodeled and upgraded two additional stores in Beijing, Flora Village and Shang Hills. In Q1, we also combined the charm of traditional Chinese aesthetics with contemporary culture in our newly launched flagship store at Taiyuan Zhonglo street, creating a unique and engaging shopping experience. The grand opening not only drove strong foot traffic, but also generated a significant social buzz. We remain on track to deliver our full year target of 50 new gift stores open about 10 new stores planned in Q2. Looking beyond the quarter, our April brand Ambassador campaign with Shenyi Moving Forward in GAP continued to outperform. This gives us strong confidence in the momentum and reaffirms the power of well executed China for China storytelling. Our partnership with GAP Inc. Continues to strengthen, including the Victoria Beckham collaboration launched recently and additional IP collaborations planned for the second half of this year. With double digit top line growth on track, a second consecutive breakeven quarter delivered, we are well positioned to achieve our full year target. That concludes our prepared remarks. Thank you Operator. We are now ready to begin the Q and A session. OPERATOR Yes, thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. Anytime your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw it, please press Star then two. This time we will pause momentarily to assemble the roster and the first question comes from Frank Tao with cmbi. Frank Tao Yes, thank you. Hi Management. Congrats on a solid set of results. Help us unpack the drivers behind the strong revenue growth of your BBM business and how should we think about the growth trajectory in the coming quarters? Thank you. Catherine Zhu (Chief Financial Officer) The major driver for BBM growth in the first quarter is from GAP and also I think from the consumption environment in Q1 because of the effect of winter sale of the Spring Festival and also the climate change, it helps drive more traffic as we expected. So the overall increase objective for us in 2026 is over 20%. So in the first quarter we achieved 9% and in the coming quarters we are confident to deliver the 20s increase continuously. Thank you. OPERATOR Thank you. And the Next question comes from Vicky Wei with Citi. Vicky Wei Thanks Management for taking my question. So my question is mostly related to consumption sentiment and the Gen 18. So will management share your observation on the cost, consumption sentiment and the 618 preparation of brands? What is your expectations for that? And lastly, would you please share some latest update about BBM performance and margin trend? Thank you. Junhua Okay, this is Junhua. So let me answer your first two questions. First one is regarding the consumer sentiment. So we had a strong Q1 that was due to we had a late CNY and we had a longer period of the Qingming Festival. So for the Q1 so we had a very strong finish on the first quarter and we foresee the consumer sentiment is growing faster. And for the 618 preparation, actually we're in the progress of the 618 right now. So tonight is the night for the second big wave of second campaign. So we are looking forward to also foreseeing a strong finish of 618 this time. Thank you. Ken Huang (Chief Financial Officer of Baozun Brand Management) And for GAP margin we for GAP's, our objective is still to keep a relatively stable gross margin during the year but try to increase the scale effect through both our online and offline channels as well as BBM headquarters. So by this scale effect the result is trying to keep improving the store level contribution margin and and also in the end the overall operating margin. Our current performance is on track and also our current expansion plan is also on track. Thank you. Vincent Chu This is Vincent. Also some more words on this on the margin trend. Actually in general the business is contributed by two parts, BEC and bbm. You can see that BBM with a higher margin is contributing more growth to the total business. So we can expect the whole business the margin trend will be improved in the coming quarters. So that is what we are expected. And also along with the synergy in between bees and bbm this give us more opportunities working with our existing brands in BEC portfolio which can give us more potentials to generate more margin. So that is also a good thing for general margin trend. Thank you. OPERATOR Thank you. And the next question is from Zhao Wei Yin of citic. Zhao Wei Yin Good evening management. Thank you for taking my questions. Congratulations on this quarter's strong performance. I have two questions. The first is regarding BEC as growth rate across different e commerce platforms converge. What new trends are emerging in brands marketing budget allocation across different channels and what impact does this have on the company's service pricing and bargaining power? And my second question is regarding bbm. In the Chairman's letter to shareholders, the company mentioned that it Will be very cautious about new brand acquisitions. Could you elaborate on the specific screening criteria such as category positioning, business scale, profitability level and or deal structure? Thank you. Okay, so this is. Let me answer your first question. So in terms of the platform allocation between different platform in terms of the marketing budget, so both platforms and the brands maintain a relatively the same CMRTR rate. So we don't have see any significant kind of shiftment or movement about the budget allocation. But in terms of the spending the most of brands are switching a little bit from the traditional performance marketing to the content driven platform like RedNote, like Seating Platform, like creating a lot of creative content facilitated by the AI and powered by Baozun. So we realized that this kind of new allocation tends to moving from a traditional performance traffic driving to transaction to setting up emotion linkage before making transactions based on the content driven. So this is the overall kind of the trend we foresee for leading brands in different categories. And for those kind of impacts does our company as a service provider which has the bargaining power is we can provide a end to end solutions for all those brands in terms of content creating and the performance marketing. And if the brands are dedicated everything to Baozhong. So we are able to help them to allocate from the oversight to see how do you allocate the overall budget from performance marketing to content driven to RedNote to Redcat and then back to the CPS et cetera. So we can leverage from the Omni Channel perspective to use their money wisely. Thank you. Vincent Chu Hi Vincent here, let me talk about the brand acquisition thought processes. Yeah, the letter is written by me, not AI so I can clearly remember this sentence. Yeah. In the past three years, I think we have already forged a model, a new model of the development of Baozun. So right now in the model we are going to next phase, which is acceleration phase. So talking about the standards, when we talk about the new brands to work with, I think the scale is quite important because we want to accelerate. We want to harvest what we have built in the past. So talking about the scale, we want the bigger scale opportunities category wise. Of course we focus on fashion apparel which we can utilize the experiences we get from the gap operation process. So that is a category. And also we want the new opportunities to bring us profit immediately because we think we a lot of opportunities, you know, emerges in the market so we can have. We are in a very good position in talking with this kind of potential opportunities because Baozun's model today is very unique and very valuable. No one today or maybe just very, very few ones who can do MMC from our industry. Because in the past, you know, talking about the E commerce service sector, we only operate the online Channel for brands. But right now, Channel we can do both online and offline. And Channel is only one factor in the MMC methodology. Right now we know how to do merchandising, how to do marketing, how to do the Channel business together. So in this position we will be very unique and valuable to all the potential brands within the BEC portfolio and outside brands. So our position is so good, so we can have good opportunities. So our standard will be very high. Yeah, that is what we say. You know, we will be very cautious. Thank you, thank you, OPERATOR thank you. And once again please press star then one if you would like to ask a question. And the next question comes from Chris Kao with Hutai Securities. Junhua Hi Management. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. The first one is regarding the AI technology. With the advancement of AI technology, are there any ongoing changes to our service systems and mechanisms for merchants during major promotion events or in our daily operations? And in the long run, how do we the impact of AI on the key competitive factors in the e commerce industry? How will the company seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges presented by this shift? And the second question is about the trend. In the recent sale we see that the growth rate of overall online retail sales so a month on month decline in April. With the growth of social retail sales data for apparel also narrowing sequentially, how will our E commerce business and brand management business respectively leverage our strength to sustain alpha growth momentum that outperforms the whole market. Thank you. Okay, so let me ask you a first question and first half of the second question. So in terms of the AI, so basically we're leveraging AI mostly focused on our bottom line efficiency. So we know that we have a lot of AI agents which can do automatically do a lot of job in terms of the saving human powers. So right now we have a dedicated team in Belgian E commerce service segment to really just leverage a lot of AI technology like large scale mode and AI agent to increasingly increasing our efficiency like digital assets management, like customer service and like a lot of kind of the automation work. We used to use a lot of tense labor. And in terms of the top line, we haven't realized that the current public service of AI can really help us to do a creative job because they are learning business models. So we leveraging those large scale mode on the top line more focused on to facilitate our operation team to make decisions like getting collecting a lot of competitors data digital analytics and informing a lot of data formats and giving us a lot of kind of these suggestions based on their learning and their data. So that's more focused on the facility our top line growing. So in the long run that we will closely work with the large platform like like TMALL and the other platform Alibaba and the other platform to leveraging their public services even if they can provide a closed loop like a Geofencing kind of services within their ecosystem. And we also will keep maintenance about our in house system upgrading our backbone systems based on our AI. So hopefully we can share you more at the end of next year. Thank you. And the second half of the second question is in terms of the fourth overall business for online business we haven't seen a big drop of our online business. So the April business are still maintaining the same within our budget. So because this is also the beginning of a pre warm stage before the 618 period. So we can realize that a lot of brands they are saving their budgeting and they are saving their assortment allocation for the 618 and the 618 kind of campaign has a longer period than last year. So we can realize that within that kind of saving until the right now, I mean the beginning of May so we really just see a big growth compared to the last year and in the beginning of the 618 Campaign. So today is also the first wave of the 618 Campaign. So we are forward to see that the strong finish will be happening this year for 618. So that's from the online perspective Ken Huang (Chief Financial Officer of Baozun Brand Management) and for BPM I think we have proved in Q1 our alpha grow momentum with a very high growth rate. And even in April we still continue to keep the green trend not only from online but also from offline through our well planned marketing activities and merchandise plan. So for BBM because we first we have gap mass target mass market with attractive price range and we also have Hunters Weather which target different market segments. So I think our strength is not to use up any brand value but try to increase the brand value in the same time of increasing the scale. So we have after three years we have already deep understanding of online offline channels our faster reaction to the market changes. We also built up strong supply chain of new wear woven and denim. We also have approved ability in MMC motor. So all of these will help us try to meet the consumers needs. And I think in the end it's better understand brands, better understand the consumers and then you gain your alpha growth momentum. Thank you. OPERATOR Thank you. And the next question comes from Thomas Hong with Jefferies. Go ahead Thomas. Your line is live. Jeffries, Junhua hello, can you hear me? Thanks management for taking my question. So I have two questions. The first one is can management share some color about the recent amount sales performance. And my second question is for different categories, can management share some outlook for different categories like luxury apparel, fmcg, consumer electronics and appliance. Thanks. Okay, so let me give you the outlook of the category segmentation. So the sports and outdoor still maintain the leadership in terms of the growth of online categories and the premium and luxury is follow up with sports outdoor. FMCG still have a very strong they maintain the similar kind of the growth rate compared to last year. And consider about the we just after the Qingming Festival so FMCG especially the cosmetics category, they already just digested too much of the campaign. So they need to just wait a little bit for several months, maybe one or two quarters until the 11 coming this year. And the consumer electronics. Yes, especially for home appliance and electronical devices. So we are strong, we have a strong growth rate for the coming for the first part of this 618 campaign. So we're looking forward to see a strong finish for consumer electronics category also. So overall the apparel fashion apparel category is still taking the lead and follow up with FMCG consumer electronics. Thank you. And for recently months sales performance. Catherine, do you want to share some kind of. Okay. Thank you for your question. Catherine Zhu (Chief Financial Officer) I think as you see that we have done quite good for the first quarter of 2026 and we are now quite optimistic several regions month's sales performance regarding our top line and also bottom line. So the management still hold very high confidence for our whole group's performance including both E commerce part and also our BVM part. So that's all for the. OPERATOR Thank you. And as there are no questions at the present time, I would like to return the floor to management for any closing comments. Vincent Chu Thank you operator. On behalf of Baozun management team, I'd like to thank you again 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. This concludes the call. OPERATOR Thank you. As mentioned, that concludes today's presentation. Thank you for attending today's event and you may now disconnect your lines. Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.