Boqii Holding Limited, China's leading pet-focused platform with its own separate sales, e-commerce and social platforms on top of several offline pet stores, is growing on all fronts, reporting total revenues of RMB321.8 million (US$49.6 million) for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2022. It is a solid 35% year-over-year growth from the RMB238.4 million (US$36.8 million) revenues in the same quarter of fiscal year 2021.
Established in Shanghai 13 years ago, Boqii boasts of 1.6 million active buyers to date that placed RMB792.1 million (US$122.2 million) worth of confirmed orders or Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) for pet products for Q1 2022. That translates to an almost 43% improvement from Q1 2021.
Active buyers also increased their average spending on Boqii by 11.7% over 2021, reported Hao Liang, Boqii's founder, chairman and chief executive officer.
Recent steps to bring long-term value
To bring long-term value to both its users and shareholders, Boqii took a number of steps recently:
- July 2021: Boqii made a strategic investment into Better Choice Company, an animal health and wellness firm, as part of its “relentless efforts in sourcing high quality global brands for our customers,” said Liang. “We are set to grow together with our brand partners and empower them with our eco-system in China,” he added.
- May 2021: Boqii announced the opening of its first offline store at Jing'an IMIX Park, one of the busiest shopping malls in Shanghai. The brick-and-mortar store offers everything a pet owner might need to give comprehensive care to his or her pet.
- September 2020: Boqii became the first in the Chinese pet industry to list for an initial public offering (IPO) in the U.S. It initially offered 7 million American depositary shares (ADSs) (each representing 0.75 of the company's Class A ordinary share) for UA$10–$12 each. Before its U.S. public listing, Boqii had Goldman Sachs and CMB International as investors.
- June 2020: Boqii's reach spanned 15,000 physical pet stores and pet hospitals over 250 cities in China, ultimately expanding its brand partners' reach, too, in a cost-effective and coordinated manner and bringing a comprehensive catalog to pet parents across China.
More about Boqii
- Boqii has its own pet food brands: Yoken launched in 2015 and Mocare introduced in 2018. As of June 2020, Boqii offers customers access to 2,130 SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) sold under its private brands, accounting for 11.9% of its total SKUs. At the same time, the company had built partnerships with over 570 brands while the number of available SKUs has climbed to over 17,000.
- Despite being the leading online destination for pet products and supplies in China, Boqii has continued to invest in traditional stores since 2015. It tapped PetDog, China's largest pet store franchise and the largest training center for pet service professionals as partner stores and equipped them with a proprietary software as a service (SaaS) solution for supply chain management and in-store operations.
- To have a complete pet-focused platform covering the entire pet industry chain, Boqii likewise tapped several pet food manufacturers like Qingdao Shuangan Bio-technology Co., Ltd., private labels, R&D and pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as animal breeders.
- Boqii Community is now the largest pet-focused interactive content platform for Chinese pet lovers with 3.5 million monthly active users from a base of 23 million registered users. The platform has on board 860 key opinion leaders that made an average of 334 million user interactions per month from April to June 2020, according to Frost & Sullivan.
