Looking back on 2023, against the backdrop of the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike exceeding expectations and continuing geographical conflicts, the world trade situation and supply chain faced major restructuring, and the global economy experienced profound adjustments. For the consumer industry in particular, the lingering haze of inflation, as well as frequent fluctuations in supply and demand, are slowing the recovery of the industry. The economic adjustment period tests the fundamental resilience of enterprises the most at this time.

The Zhitong Finance App noticed that recently, Zibuyu (02420) disclosed the 2023 results. Financial reports show that revenue of 3 billion yuan (RMB, same unit) was achieved in 2023, which is basically the same as the same period last year.

As one of the largest cross-border e-commerce B2C companies in ****buyu mainly sells clothing and footwear products through third-party e-commerce platforms such as Amazon. According to reports, Amazon is the largest online clothing retailer in North America, with a market share of up to 50%, and Amazon is also the main location for selling products without saying anything.

While consolidating the advantages of core channels, in 2023, the company also focused on developing new sales channels such as Temu and Tiktok, and has achieved outstanding milestones. Take Temu as an example. When Temu first launched a full hosting model in the US, it started to supply diversified women's clothing products to the platform. Currently, the company's revenue from the new platform continues to grow.

The performance of Zibuyu's core brands has also continued to be outstanding. According to the data, the sales revenue of the company's top ten brands increased by more than 15% year-on-year in 2023, including many brands with annual sales revenue of over 100 million. The increasingly diversified brand matrix is injecting a steady stream of new momentum into unspeakable sustainable growth.

However, in terms of inventory management, drastic adjustments were made to inventory in 2023. Centralized clean-up of some inventory with slow turnover was carried out without saying anything, and resources were concentrated on popular products. By taking multiple measures, the company's inventory turnover ratio was further improved.

Affected by active inventory optimization, the amount of inventory impairment mentioned by Zi during the reporting period was about 388 million yuan, a significant increase from 55 million yuan in the previous year. This also dragged down Ziwei's profit performance to a large extent. Financial reports show that in 2023, gross profit without saying anything was about 1,955 billion yuan, and net profit to mother was -266 million yuan. However, the so-called “trend is better to focus on quantity”. The impact of cleaning up inventory on the company is only temporary, and concentrating resources on popular products in the long term is beneficial to brand building, enhancing core competitiveness, and promoting continued sales growth.

It is worth mentioning that despite the phased pressure on Zi Fu's profits, from a cash flow perspective, the company's operating cash flow maintained a good trend of a net inflow of 76.73 million yuan. This shows that the operating conditions of Zi Fu Yu's business are still healthy, and the ability to “hematopoietic” cash has not been affected.

Furthermore, without saying a word, Zi also pays great attention to using scientific and technological means to empower his own development. Since 2023, AI has been rapidly penetrating all industries and driving a new transformation in productivity and creativity. Being in it, Zi has keenly captured the wave of innovation in this era without saying a word, and actively tried to apply cutting-edge technology to her own production and operation activities. Over the past year, Zi Wu has reshaped front-end consumer trend insight, AI-assisted product design, intelligent advertising and product management, and back-end supply chain collaborative management through digital construction, enabling refined management and intelligent operation of the entire business link, thereby significantly improving operational efficiency.

The clock was set to 2024, and after experiencing organizational changes and inventory optimization, Zi was able to go to battle lightly. From an industry perspective, the size of China's e-commerce market has accelerated in recent years, and the market growth rate has slowed significantly; in contrast, the e-commerce penetration rate in overseas markets is still low, and there is still plenty of room for future development. Take clothing as an example. According to data from industry consultant Sullivan, the GMV for China's cross-border exports of footwear to B2C e-commerce market was about 75.3 billion yuan (RMB, same unit) in 2021, and is expected to expand to 1827.6 billion yuan by 2026, with a corresponding compound annual growth rate of 19.5%.

Being on an imaginative industry circuit, it can be expected that Zi, who has withstood external stress tests, will restart after a short break. In the future, focusing on high-quality development as an anchor, Zi Bu Yu will continue to expand non-Amazon channels, offline channels, and European and Asian markets, increase brand investment, strengthen the overseas layout of the supply chain, and rely on digital construction to improve operational efficiency. With many measures taken together, the unspoken growth prospects are still worth the market's expectations.