ATRenew Inc. American Depositary Shares (every three of which representing two Class A ordinary shares) 0 Earnings Call

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever this finds you. Welcome to the 94th Emerging Growth Conference and day two of our two-day virtual investor conference. I'm Ana Berry. Just a few notes. Today, we're running until 4:30 P.M. Eastern, and when we switch to the next company, you'll see a black screen for a moment. Don't go anywhere. That's just us moving over to the next presenter. But if you do experience downtime for more than a minute or two, refresh your browser. Everything usually works properly once you do that. Our platform does work best on Google Chrome, so if you're watching from an Apple device, you have to hit the play button to start the session. Now, during each company's presentation today, you can submit questions through the webcast module, and we will attempt to address as many of these at the end of the presentation.

All of our conferences are uploaded to the Emerging Growth Conference YouTube channel. Please subscribe at youtube.com/emerginggrowthconference. One last note, after today's event, you'll be redirected to the registration page for our next conference, so stay on or come back to reserve your spot early. Let's begin. Headquartered in Shanghai, ATRenew Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RERE and is a pioneer in technology-driven recycling and trade-in solutions for consumer products in China. Since inception in 2011, ATRenew has been on a mission to give a second life to all idle goods, reducing the environmental impact of pre-owned consumer products by facilitating recycling, trade-ins, and distribution that prolong their life cycle. ATRenew's open platform integrates C2B, B2B, and B2C capabilities to empower its online and offline services.

Powered by proprietary technologies and a scalable platform ecosystem, ATRenew enhances transaction efficiency and pricing transparency for consumers and merchants alike, while advancing circular economy standards in China. ATRenew is a participant in the United Nations Global Compact and adheres to its principles-based approach to responsible business. Happy to welcome the head of investor relations, Jessie Jin. Welcome to the conference today, Jessie.

Thank you. Thank you, Ana, for the introduction, and I'm happy to present here today to share some of the highlights coming from China. Basically, I will start with a brief introduction of ATRenew, the company itself, and how we operate our businesses here domestically, as well as our basic view for the international expansion. I'm sharing the slides, and in case you can't see it, you can just adjust the slides on your portal. Basically, ATRenew is the largest secondhand consumer electronic transactions and services platform in China. For full year 2025, we supported the circulation of close to 43 million used devices in China, with a slight portion happening in overseas markets. In the first quarter of 2026, we supported the circulation of 10.8 million devices, consumer goods. Basically, we're continuously expanding our business scale.

We started off in 2011 with the emerging markets on the smartphone transactions in China. With that, we have seen opportunities to leverage the used devices from one consumer to another and to further expand the life cycle of the electronic devices. We are seeing a large new device shipments in China right now, and that is continuously shipping out. The opportunity lies in the massive electronics businesses. That forms our business foundation since 2011, since our inception. As we expanded our offline service capabilities, we have already set up over 2,000 physical stores across China. That forms the largest offline network for the industry to provide easy access to consumers across the nation. Based on that, as well as leveraging the store names, which is called . That means "I love recycling" in Chinese.

We leverage this kind of store network as well as our brand, C2B collection brand, to increase consumer awareness for the secondhand industry, for circularity, for green consumption, et cetera. In the long term, we bear the mission to give a second life to all idle goods. Based on that, we are expanding into more service categories. I can definitely elaborate on that later. The four key business offerings we have are illustrated in this slide. On the consumer side, we collect from consumers directly through our AHS Recycle, the C2B portal, the brand name.

As I mentioned, we have over 2,000 stores right now. We also collaborate with e-commerce players and collaborate with brand owners, manufacturers, including JD.com, including Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, et cetera, to work collaboratively on trade-in scenarios to support consumers when they want to upgrade their devices while trading in their used devices for the more economic solution. In 2017, we launched our PJT Marketplace, which is currently the largest secondhand customer electronics B2B marketplace in China. We are serving about 2 million registered users across China to facilitate a nationwide transaction and circulation and unify the standards of the secondhand consumer electronics industry. As we expand in scale, we launch our proprietary automation technologies in our regional operation centers.

For instance, right now in Dongguan and Changzhou, we have two fully automated inspection operations facilities that supports the circulation and quality and grading and standardization of the secondhand smartphones and tablets, et cetera. The third business column we have is Paipai Marketplace, which was acquired in 2019 from JD.com. That helps us to close the loop of the secondhand customer electronics and secondhand customer products supply chain, by collecting directly from consumers, and then circulating it, standardizing it, and then directly sell to an end individual user.

The fourth core business we have is AHS Device, which is supporting this global circulation across the U.S. devices or needs from the European markets, or that we are seeing a stronger circulation demand coming from China. We can support the circulation among Asian countries, then further expand to the Middle East markets in the future. Basically, these three business offerings, like AHS Recycle, the C2B offering we have, and B2B and B2C businesses we have, connect the dots between the recycling and the users at the recycling end, to the users at the purchasing end, and cut off the middleman that we can help to expedite and to improve the efficiency during the transactions. As we build the entire ecosystem in China, we have connected the dots by offering two core business models.

One is what we call 1P business model, which basically is us collecting or acquiring secondhand consumer electronics from users directly, from individual consumers directly. We further process it by grading the devices, then sometimes we recondition the devices, then sell directly to consumers or in bulk to some dealers. Through this 1P business model, we acquire the devices and take those devices as our own inventory. The entire business flow helps us to capture our product revenue, which you can tell from our P&L. As we also open up our operation facilities as well as our marketplace.

As we open up our production facilities and as we open up our marketplaces to the industry, we help the circulation of devices or product consumer goods that are managed by some dealers, then sell through our systems to another dealer or an end user. Charge a commission fee from each transaction as we provide quality inspection services, as we provide pre-sales, after sales, and the consignment business model. We collect a commission fee based on that, and that's something you can find in our P&L as service revenue. As we expand in scale, we've defined the quality standards in the industry and managed to connect about 2 million registered users in the industry. We can further leverage our scale of economy to realize improving cost efficiency.

This picture basically illustrates how we managed to improve the efficiency in our automation facilities to improve the quality inspection results as well as grading standardization. Here are some photos of our stores, which are small in footage area, and you can see it's a light asset model for us to operate. Our stores are basically located in shopping malls, heavy foot traffic shopping malls, and some places near Uniqlo or Foot Locker, that the vast majority of the public could come to us and enjoy our services with easy access. This is the new take that I mentioned earlier. We are expanding into new categories, leveraging our brand name as well as store service fulfillment capability. We help consumers to dispose off their high residual value products by leveraging our front-end store and fulfillment capabilities.

We partner with some of the industry players to build a supply chain so that we do not need to take in the luxury bags, watches, gold, accessories, et cetera. We are operating those categories under a 3P business model. We basically charge a commission fee from each transaction of these categories. Whenever there's a fluctuation in gold prices, we do not have to bear the fluctuation because we do not take any inventory of gold products. Here is the international branch that we have been continuously building.

Basically, we are connecting the sources of supply coming from Japan, from the U.S., coming from mainland China. Then we leverage our office and international portal built in Hong Kong to facilitate the transaction, and to give a second life to those devices to the users by distributing those devices to the Southeastern market or the Middle East market and further to the European market, et cetera. Here are some partners that you can tell are very famous brand owners across the globe. We leverage our technology built in China, and offer those technologies and hardware and software solutions to all partners across the globe so that they can easily help their users to collect and resell those products. We have high priority in ESG performance.

Basically, we need to ensure that the data and privacy are properly handled through our system, and we leverage our capabilities in the industry to further improve our performance in ESG pillars. We aim to further improve those results in the near future as well. To help you understand how we are performing in the financial way, we released our first quarter of 2026 financial results this May. Basically, our top line sustained strong growth momentum by increasing 32% year-over-year, which strongly outpaced the overall growth rate of the internet or the consumer industry. We've seen a strong growth driver coming from our 1P businesses, which are related to the net product revenues. We are also seeing that service revenue growing at a double-digit growth rate, which is satisfying. We are trying to improve our performance in each business pillar.

As for our profitability, we've seen a strong growth, like 60 to 70 basis points in terms of profit margin. That's basically realized by us improving our operational efficiency, from reducing some of the costs in operational scenarios, especially in inspection, grading, and fulfillment, as well as our prudent spending in sales and marketing. In terms of shareholder return, we have a three-year shareholder return plan, starting from 2025 to 2027. Basically, the payout ratio is about 60%. That includes share buybacks programs as well as our cash dividend plans. Last year, we've returned about $36 million to our shareholders, including the share repurchase programs and the cash dividend we deployed in April this year. This basically explains how we've been performing in terms of growth and margin expansion.

To help you understand our margin expansion trajectory, that we are seeing some improvements in the fulfillment expenses, the fee ratio related to fulfillment and sales and marketing. Basically, we are trying to leverage our automation technologies to further improve the inspection accuracy so that we can collect the devices at a fair price and sell the devices at a fair price as well. Basically, we are trying to leverage some of the new media platforms, including RedNote, including Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to promote our brand awareness so that more people come to either our online portals or our physical stores to trade in or to sell their used devices or other high resale value consumer goods to us for us to further expand our business scale. If you're looking for some of the basic strategy, our roadmap.

That's just our long-term strategy that we basically focus on those four core pillars. We leverage our core scenarios and partnerships. Scenarios including the physical stores that we have built in thousands of our shopping malls. Also we are leveraging the scenarios that co-built with JD.com, with Apple, Huawei, et cetera, to further establish the trade-in programs and to improve the user experience by leveraging our supply chain capabilities. We believe that by offering a good price at the recycling end. We believe we can further educate the Chinese consumers with a better price valuation at the recycling end, so that they could be attracted to the recycling and reuse ecosystem. We aim to embrace more in-store recycling categories. For instance, we have strong growth momentum in luxury goods recycling. We have strong growth momentum in gold recycling, et cetera.

We may leverage our stores to set up some themed recycling stores, including some like bats. For instance, badminton bats and ping pong bats, tennis bats, et cetera, so that people come to these same stores for trade-in or buy value-for-money bats. They can also check out the services we have in the existing store to trade-in their old phones, et cetera. The third pillar is that we aim to further improve cost efficiency by leveraging automation technology. Right now, we have 8 operation centers across China, including Hong Kong, and we have 2 fully automated operation center, like I said, in Dongguan and Changzhou.

Maybe in the future, at some stage, we might choose to upgrade some of the streamlined facilities in the future to further meet the demand and to realize the economy of scale of our operations side. We aim to further expand our retail businesses, which has a higher gross profit margin compared to the wholesale businesses. That requires us to leverage the established refurbishment capability that's been set up in our operation centers so that we can create more value to the end users. That's the presentation. I'm open to the queue questions. Thank you, Ana. Okay. Thank you so much, Jessie.

Yes. Talk about what has been the biggest driver of customer adoption over the past year.

I think for acquiring more users, we need to leverage the macro economy, the background of China's trade-ins subsidies, as well as our existing fulfillment network, so that people get to know us and they can enjoy a good user experience, so that they can return to us as often as possible. Whenever they have the need, they can come back to our stores or our online portals. Currently, I would say for last year and this year, we are leveraging China's trade-in subsidy program to acquire more users at the sourcing end.

Also, we are prudently putting all our efforts into shorter video clips, like collaborating with some of the bloggers or influencers on RedNote, as well as on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok, so that more people get to know us and to realize that they have easy access to over 2,000 stores, and they can make an appointment online, so one of our staff or clerk will come to his or her doorstep to offer those services. Basically, it's a combination of the external environment, the market condition, as well as the internal efforts, so that we can further realize our sustained growth, especially on the consumer side.

Talk about the competitive advantage. What is it that allows ATRenew, A-T Renew, to consistently source high-quality devices?

We believe we have some core scenarios to further leverage and to further polish our app capability on those front. We have our stores, we have our collaboration with JD.com, we have our collaboration with Apple, Huawei and Xiaomi, et cetera. All stores are quite important, as we discussed over the past question, that we need people to be aware of that. The service is easy to get access to, and there could be trust built through face-to-face interaction, and people need to know that how we are handling, or the recyclers are handling their used phones, because it contains a lot of personal information, data, et cetera. That's quite important to build trust, to offer the convenience as well. Another important thing is to offer good price valuation when we acquiring, or people who are selling their devices.

In addition to that, the collaboration with e-commerce, with brand owners like Apple, are quite crucial as well. Because the memory prices are hiking, and a lot of brand owners are increasing the new product prices. It's quite important to introduce a more economic way to upgrade devices to consumers. That's why trade-in were introduced and become more popular in China right now. Because consumers, when they are trading in their old phone for a new one, as they upgrade their device in this way, they just need to pay the gap of the prices between the new device and the old devices. It's quite convenient as well as more economic too, when they are choosing options.

Perfect. Basically to sum up, I would say it's a combination of great efforts in price, in convenience and accessibility, as well as trust.

We need to further build up our advantages or competitive edges in these areas and to collect our sources of supply as efficient as possible.

How have the gross margins evolved as transaction volumes increased?

I would say the gross profit margin has been growing at a healthy trajectory as we expected, because if you are looking at the revenue composition of us, we actually have a stronger proportion of net product revenues. That basically is about a mid-teen percentage of gross profit margin. We are working on the improvement of those gross profit margin because we are trying to sell more products directly to consumers, as retail gross profit margin is about 6% higher than wholesale. As proportion of 1P2C retail improved from 25% to 27%, one to two years ago, and then last year it was about 37%, and during the first quarter, it went up to 45%. Basically, the higher gross profit margin revenue is growing, it is expanding in proportion. We can further leverage on that front.

We can definitely also leverage our capability to optimize some of the smaller business segment, that we can leverage our pricing capability to improve the gross profit margin in those areas.

How difficult would it be for a large e-commerce platform to replicate your refurbishment and pricing infrastructure?

It could be quite challenging, or I would say the e-commerce sellers are somehow reluctant to do that because they have strong capability in algorithm, in the internet capability. They can build up online infrastructure efficiently by leveraging their existing knowhow. When it comes to the second-hand industry, it requires strong capabilities in pricing, in inspection, in facility building, and in obtaining the knowhow of an entire new industry. It is quite difficult for them to get involved or to establish by themself. However, we are quite open to work with e-commerce players to leverage what we are good at and leverage what they are good at. They are good at new device distribution or retail, and we are good at collecting devices used from consumers one by one.

We can definitely work closely on that front to support the e-commerce players through trading programs and support their new phone distribution, et cetera.

Could enterprise trade-in programs become a larger opportunity?

Sorry? Could enterprise trade-in programs become a larger opportunity?

I would say it's a good opportunity out there, and we are definitely working more closely with enterprises because, like Apple, Huawei, they are quite important in the industry, especially in the second-hand industry. We believe that Apple, Huawei has strong intention to offer a better user experience in the new product sales scenarios. There's definitely something we can work together with.

What role do carrier and trade-in partnerships play in customer acquisition?

Actually, there wouldn't be a strong brand exposure from our brand exposure. Basically, if you're checking out some trading programs from Apple, Huawei, et cetera, Xiaomi, et cetera, our brand name is somehow embedded in the legal documents or the transaction service notices. We encourage the consumers to hand in their old devices to us, to either to our stores or to make an appointment of our two doorstep services. Basically, during that offline interaction scenarios, the consumers will get to know our storefronts and our store fulfillment capabilities as well as know will be professional technician who can come to his or her home or offices so that they can get to know us better. That's how we expose our brand and raise our brand awareness to consumers.

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time and presentation today. We really appreciate speaking with you, Jessie, and we would certainly love to continue on this conversation and have you on again.

Thank you, Ana. All right, everyone.

Thank you so much for watching.