Earnings Labs

LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd. (LITB)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Thu, Jun 15, 2017

$2.11

-3.21%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the LightInTheBox First Quarter of 2017 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today Thursday 15th of June, 2017. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Mr. Christian Arnell. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Christian Arnell

Analyst

Thank you, Joe. Hello, everyone and welcome to LightInTheBox’s first quarter 2017 earnings conference call. The company’s earnings results were released earlier today and are available on the Company’s IR website as well as through PR Newswire. Today, you will hear from LightInTheBox’s Chairman and CEO, Mr. Alan Guo, who will give you an overview of the company’s strategies and recent developments, followed by Mr. Robin Lu, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, who will address financial results in more detail. Before we proceed, I would like to remind you of our Safe Harbor statement. Please note that the discussion today may contain certain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. To understand the factors that could cause results to materially differ from those in the forward-looking statements, please refer to our Form 20-F filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 30, 2017. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable laws. At this point, I would like to turn the call over to Alan. Alan, please go ahead.

Alan Guo

Analyst

Thanks, Christian, and thank you everyone for joining us today. I am pleased to report that our first quarter revenue came in at $72.7 million, which represents 8% year-over-year growth and exceeded the high end of our guidance of $72 million. This marks the second consecutive quarter of revenue growth on a year-over-year basis. Revenue growth has recently further accelerated over the past two months, which is highlighted in our strong guidance for Q2, with revenue expected to be between $76 million to $79 million. This represents approximately 16% to 20% year-over-year growth. We believe that our success in regaining revenue growth demonstrates our persistence and the effectiveness of our strategy. To improve our business through strengthening the supply chain management, better product quality, greater customer satisfaction, big data enabled new product merchandising and development of new growth opportunities including mobile and social channels as well as our logistics platform. We are committed to fulfill our mission of making good product accessible to global consumers at affordable prices. To achieve this, our number one focus during the quarter has been to continuously improve our supply chain; we’ve further improved our new vendor acquisition practices by incorporating an even stronger focus on product quality. We also deployed an improved vendor evaluation and incentive system which segment suppliers according to product defect rates, on time fulfillment rates and out of stock ratios. This improved evaluation system allows us to retain and nurture good suppliers and disqualify underperforming ones. Leveraging our proprietary automated data analytics systems, we have built sophisticated statistical models that analyze the important data and trends among our supplier networks. As a result we achieved a significant year-over-year drop in overall post sales return and refund. And in particular a significant drop in post-sales returns and refunds due to product…

Robin Lu

Analyst

Thank you, Alan. As I review our financial results, let me remind you about a few things. All numbers quoted are in U.S. dollars; all percentage changes we refer to year-over-year unless otherwise noted. So to start, net revenues increased 8% to $72.7 million for the first quarter of 2017. Net revenues from product sales were $64.8 million compared with $61.9 million in the same quarter of 2016. Net revenues from service and others were $7.9 million, compared with $5.4 million in the same quarter of 2016. As a percentage of net revenues, service and others accounted for 10.9% in the quarter 2017. Total orders of product sales were 1.6 million and total number of product sales customers in the quarter were 1.2 million. Product sales in the apparel category were $21.2 million compared with $21.9 million in the same quarter of 2016. As a percentage of product sales, apparel revenues accounted for 32.8% compared with 35.4% in the same quarter of 2016. Product sales from other general merchandise were $43.6 million for the first quarter of 2017. Looking at our business geographically, product sales from Europe were $33.5 million for the first quarter of 2017 compared with $36.5 million in the same quarter of 2016, representing 51.7% of the total product sales for the first quarter of 2017. Product sales from North America were $17.4 million compared with $19.6 million in the same quarter of 2016, representing 26.8% of total product sales for the first quarter of 2017, while product sales from other countries were $13.9 million, representing 21.5% of total product sales for the same quarter. Total cost of revenues was $48.5 million, an increase from $42.5 million in the same period last year. Cost of product sales were $41 million compared with $37.6 million during the same…

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] There is no further question at this time, I’d like to hand the conference back to our presenters, please continue.

Christian Arnell

Analyst

Well, thank you everyone for joining us today and if you have any questions or comments -- it looks that we do have one question actually. Operator, can we take it please.

Operator

Operator

We have our question coming from the line of Yang Sin Chen [ph] of Guotai Junan Securities. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay, hello gentlemen. This is Yang Sin Chen [ph] from Guotai Junan Securities and I got one question that is we look back at the quarter of Q4 in 2016 and Q1 in 2017, we can see the growth and do you expect the revenue to regain double-digit growth in quarter two in 2017. Can you give us more background?

Alan Guo

Analyst

Sure, thanks for the question. I think Q1 was the second consecutive quarter of growth. The drivers of growth came from a couple of different angles, the first is we have some fast growing categories such as sports and hobbies, as well as wigs and hair extensions. Secondly, geographically we are gaining growth in some emerging markets including India, Brazil. We also gained growth in our new initiatives, including logistic platforms as well as the new inbound business. We also gained some quite momentums from the mobile platform, both mobile web and mobile app installation and the daily active users, as well as our social networks followings and our social adds. So all those things actually contribute to continued growth and all these trends the recent development we saw actually carried on in Q2 that’s why we saw accelerated growth in Q2 and which led us to provide a stronger guidance in terms of revenue growth. Thank you.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay, thank you for answering. Thank you.

Alan Guo

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There is no question at this time. Sorry we have our next question coming from the line of Rick Shea of Vardon Capital. Just go ahead.

Rick Shea

Analyst

Hi, good evening. Alan, I was just wondering if you could maybe explain, what has to happen for the company to go net income positive? And do you think that's more likely to happen in the product division or the services?

Alan Guo

Analyst

Hey Rick, how are you? I think while we are -- there are a couple of things, a, is while we are regaining growth we certainly care very much about our bottom-line. We pay a lot of attention to it, we don't want to have the widened gap while we are accelerating the growth, that's number one. So we take it very seriously. And secondly, we believe there is a natural re-leveraging of our fixed cost once we regain faster growth in our top-line. So I think our improved bottom-line will come along with the regaining growth that's secondly. And thirdly, when we’re expanding into new product categories, we are very careful about which categories we choose. For example, the categories we mentioned like the sports and hobbies and the wigs and hair extensions all have very healthy margins. So that's the third one. And the fourth one is we work very hard to increase the customer satisfaction and which we hope will leads to higher lifetime value, which means we will have more revenue generated from non-paid traffic acquisition channels such as the CRM [ph] through email and also the daily app users, which will come organically. I think those will actually contribute -- if those increased significantly that will also significantly improve our bottom-line. So we definitely feel the product business will continue to be a main driver of our gross margin. And we believe the growth of our top-line will also improve -- will also help us improve the bottom line if we provide the right leverage and focus.

Rick Shea

Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Alan Guo

Analyst

Thank you, Rick.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There is no question at this time. I'd like to hand the conference back to our presenters. Please continue.

Alan Guo

Analyst

Alright. Well thank you very much for joining us everyone today. Please let us know if you have any comments or questions contact myself. And if not, please let us know. Have a good evening and good night. Thank you for joining. Bye-bye.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.