Yeahka Announces 2023 Annual Results

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Brilliant growth momentum in one-stop payment services, GPV increased by 29.2% YoY,

Adjusted EBITDA significantly improved by 160.6% YoY

HONG KONG, March 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Yeahka Limited ("Yeahka" or the "Company," Stock Code: 9923.HK), a leading payment-based technology platform in China, is pleased to announce its annual results for the twelve months ended December 31, 2023 (the "year" or the "2023").

Financial Highlights

• Total revenue reached RMB3,950.6 million, representing a year-on-year (YoY) increase of 15.6%;
• Adjusted EBITDA amounted to RMB556.0 million, an increase of 160.6% YoY;
• Gross profit margin of in-store e-commerce services improved to 80.3% in 2023 from 67.3% in 2022, while its net loss narrowed significantly by 79.4% YoY.

Operational Highlights

One-stop payment services growth fueled by growing merchant base and expanding channel network:

• Total gross payment volume ("GPV") of payment services increased by 29.2% YoY to reach RMB2.88 trillion, of which 71.2% was app-based payment services;
• Number of active payment service merchants reached 9.2 million, an increase of 13.3% YoY;
• Fee rate^[1] increased to 13.3 basis points (bps) in 2023 from 12.3 bps in 2022, an increase of 1 bps YoY;
• The peak daily count of app-based payment transactions reached nearly 60 million;
• Number of independent sales agents in nationwide channel network reached nearly 19,000, number of joint merchant acquiring partner banks exceeded 150, and number of application programming interface (API) partners in cloud payment platform reached nearly 5,000.

Merchant solutions effectively strengthened commercialization, capitalized on cross-segment synergies and recovered offline consumption:

• Number of active merchant solutions merchants for the twelve months ended December 31, 2023, exceeded 1.6 million, an increase of 30.8% YoY.

In-store e-commerce services sustained growth momentum:

• Total gross merchandise value ("GMV") exceeded RMB4.3 billion, an increase of 30.3% YoY.

Mr. Luke Liu, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, said, "Yeahka achieved a strong performance during the year, fueled by our strategic positioning of serving small and medium-sized offline merchants, and our independent and scalable ecosystem. Our domestic business grew steadily while our overseas initiatives began to yield tangible results. The growth in our one-stop payment services GPV, as well as the number of active merchants, outpaced the industry, representing a stellar performance that further solidified our industry-leading position. Beyond that, we actively expanded into overseas markets, serving over 5,000 local merchants in Hong Kong SAR and Singapore. Simultaneously, in-store e-commerce services sustained growth momentum and substantially narrowed losses as we built merchants' comprehensive digital marketing capabilities and refined our standardized midstream operational capabilities. Merchant solutions also achieved improved monetization, powered by our innovative models and merchant servicing capabilities. Moreover, we consistently pursued technological innovation. Throughout 2023, we adopted private clouds in our companywide technological infrastructure, significantly reducing costs comparing with traditional physical hosts in data centers, and are made available to our payment partners. And lastly, leveraging massive data and cutting-edge open-source models, we self-developed generative AI technology products and applied them to all business lines. For example, the code adoption rate of our self-develped co-pilot has reached to 10%, significantly improving our R&D and operational efficiency."

Mr. Ben Zhao, Board Secretary and General Manager of Corporate Development, added, "For one-stop payment services, we achieved a remarkable 29.2% year-on-year growth in GPV in 2023. Our revenue from one-stop payment services increased by 26.5% year-on-year, aided by our efforts to develop new growth catalysts, including our joint merchant acquiring services with over 150 commercial banks. In-store e-commerce services also experienced robust growth, with a 30.3% year-on-year increase in GMV while improving operational efficiency. Prompted by offline merchants' increasing willingness to pay and our product innovation, such as the launch of the metaverse game "Yverse," revenues from merchant solutions services recorded a year-on-year increase of 17.2% in 2023. In terms of technological innovation, leveraging cutting-edge open-source libraries, our AI Lab has fine-tuned the foundational model and GNNs based on our extensive payment-related data and developed several proprietary applications. For example, our specialized generative AI technology for in-store e-commerce that automates the creation of promotional materials, significantly reduced content production cost by 90%, increased content generation efficiency by 70%. These effective operating strategies led to a year-on-year increase of 160.6% in our adjusted EBITDA."

Outlook

Mr. Luke Liu concluded, "Moving forward, we will continue to cultivate the domestic market, strengthen compliance management, and enhance each business's commercialization capabilities. Concurrently, we will further progress the use of generative AI technologies to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and explore new business models. We remain committed to accelerating our expansion into overseas markets and localizing our products and services, to further enrich our overseas product matrix and build our new global strategic footprint."

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About YEAHKA LIMITED (Stock Code: 9923.HK)

Yeahka is a leading payment-based technology platform dedicated to creating value for merchants and consumers. Our goal is to build an independent and scalable commercial digitalized ecosystem to enable seamless, convenient, and reliable payment services to merchants and consumers, and to further expand into serving merchants and consumers with our diversified product portfolio, which now includes (i) in-store e-commerce services, providing consumers with local lifestyle services of great value, and (ii) merchant solutions, enabling merchants to better manage and drive business growth.

For more information, please visit https://www.yeahka.com/ 

SOURCE Yeahka