Shun Jiang
Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Hanli. I'll take those two questions. First question on the sales channel trends and recovery and outlook. So as discussed during the earnings call just now, sales recovery in general has been quite healthy. You would have seen we've reported nearly 40% year-over-year growth, mainly on the back of new product launches, as well as a pickup in overall consumer activity and industry-wide sales channel recovery. So, in terms of channel breakdown, we have not seen major structural changes in terms of overall online channel traffic trends, which you may have seen in quite robust earnings results by the major e-commerce retailers in the last couple of weeks. Our core online channels remain a key sales channel for us for this year, as well as the year ahead, so still very positive trends, as well as feedback from the online channels. So the offline channel performance is also definitely stabilized since the difficult times in the first-half of this year. And we have once again, reinitiated our efforts towards growing our offline points of sales. So also, as discussed just now, we have historically focused more on standalone franchise Viomi experience stores for our offline presence. As we continue to increase our brand presence and recognition, we have initiated plans to greatly increase our overall points of sales in the offline channels, particularly through cooperation with many of the O2O outlets of the major e-commerce retailers, such as JD and Tmall. And we're also continuing to discussions in relation to additional partnerships with retail leaders, such as Hunan Friendship, as well as Gome and Suning. So in terms of our standalone stores, we'll continue to optimize our franchise structure, as well as look to opportunistically opens additional stores. But I think the most of the offline point of sales growth will be additional partnerships with these O2O retailers, as well as other retail leaders. We could potentially more than double our offline points of sales over the next year or so. The second question is a very good one. How's the outlook for 2021 and kind of the margin trends, both on a gross as well as operating and net basis? Maybe I'll just break that down into a few parts. Firstly, on kind of our top line growth outlook. So generally, we remain very positive on 2021’s outlook from a topline perspective, right, from several perspectives. One is obviously the so-called low base effect. So, obviously, as everyone knows, the first-half of 2020, especially the first quarter was materially impacted by the effects of COVID-19. Assuming the situation in China remain stable, which there are obviously still uncertainties around, we do expect to experience a rebound effect on the year-on-year basis as a result of this low base effect. Secondly, new product launches. So as discussed, since the middle of this year, we have made a significant push towards two new product categories that we believe will form very important growth pillars in 2021, them being Viomi branded water purifiers and various small appliances products, particularly sweeper robots. So leveraging upon our existing know-how, which we already have quite a large presence within these two categories through our relationship with Xiaomi, together with new investments in R&D as well as our own new personnel hires, we do believe that there is significant potential to significantly increase our presence in these very attractive and growing markets, particularly given consumer trends towards this cleanliness theme. So, a little bit more detail for water purifiers, we initially introduced a series of large flux, next-generation water purifier products in the middle of this year. That subsequently, we recently launched our high-end water purifiers sub-brand, Tianjin, and its first series of double reverse osmosis water pure product called Super in September. So, revenues from these Viomi-branded products nearly doubled in the third quarter and more than doubled in the fourth quarter of this year on a year-over-year basis. So it's a very good reception to these initial launches. Similarly, we've expedited the development of our own Viomi-branded sweeper robot business. Several of the several new products include the automatic dust collecting and disposal sweeper robot called, Alpha, as well as other laser navigated individual navigated sweeper robots. So, sales of our Viomi-branded sweeper robots, again, have increased multiple-fold on a year-over-year basis, as well as quarter-on-quarter basis. So these products have been extremely well-received, in line with general industry trends. So, I think importantly, these products also entail very healthy gross margins above our overall blended gross margin, which should drive our overall margin uplift going forward as their contribution to overall revenue increases over time, right? And the third point, and I'll just finish on this one is our overall kind of products and portfolio optimization and premiumization theme, right? So since the middle of this year, we've very much been devoting efforts towards the comprehensive upgrade of our core product lines. This will encompass reducing our exposure or eliminating many of the earlier more volume-based lower-margin lower ASP, SKUs within our product portfolio and focusing our efforts towards more innovative and differentiated product development within our 5G IoT framework. So, as discussed just now, we've been devoting a lot of efforts toward continue to enhance the experience as well as content and entertainment partnerships and applications 21Face large screen refrigerator, as well as we recently launched kind of two next-generation models of washing machines. And you should expect more of these kind of new innovative more premium focused kitchen as well as other white goods products as we progress through 2021. So to this end, we guided total revenues for 2020 close to RMB6 billion, which is around 25% year-over-year growth. So although, it's still very early stage talking about 2021, taking into these considerations, I think you can think about 2021 year-over-year growth on at least similar levels, if not greater. But of course, this while we’ll give more granular guidance as we proceed to have more clarity on next year's performance. And I think on a gross margin basis, we've guided that we do expect to experience a noticeable degree of gross margin expansion as we expect to experience more positive shifts in our product mix as compared to historically, and as we proceed to execute a product premiumization and streamlining strategy. So I think we increased our gross margins by around 280 basis points in the third quarter to the second quarter. I think this is a trend that we very much committed to continuing, and gross margins of close to around 20%, which would be our initial target for 2021. I think net margins is a little bit more uncertainty around given that we will obviously continue to invest in not only sales and marketing and sales personnel, but of course, also R&D. But I think you should expect a certain degree of net margin uplift, as compared to this year as well, given the kind of the impact of COVID-19 on industry this year.