ZKH Group (NYSE:ZKH) reported second-quarter financial results on Friday. The transcript from the company's second-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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The full earnings call is available at https://app.webinar.net/z510NneQLxE

Summary

ZKH Group achieved a tenfold increase in overseas GMV year-over-year, advancing its international business by supporting Chinese manufacturers globally and deepening localized operations.

The company reported significant GMV growth in specialized MRO categories, with electrical automation customers growing 160% year-over-year and semiconductor GMV increasing over 100-fold.

Private label SKUs grew by more than 700, lifting private label GMV growth by over 25%, contributing to a 10% share of total GMV and improving gross margins.

ZKH Group optimized its fulfillment network, reducing fulfillment expenses to 3.7% of net revenues, and enhanced AI capabilities with the launch of the Domino big data engine.

Financially, the company achieved operating profitability for the first time, with GMV increasing by 18.9% year-over-year to RMB 2.9 billion and net revenues growing 12.8% to RMB 2.4 billion.

The company expects continued GMV and revenue growth in the second half of the year, with plans to strengthen core competencies and maintain high-teens GMV growth.

ZKH Group's international business is expected to turn profitable in the second half of the year, with continued focus on disciplined expense management and ROI.

The company authorized a $50 million share repurchase program, with plans to increase buybacks and potentially start dividends once profits scale further.

Full Transcript

Zhuoming Zhao, Chairman and CEO

While we continued to deepen our domestic business, our overseas expansion accelerated further from the first quarter with first half GMV increasing more than tenfold year over year. During the quarter, we continued to advance our international business on two fronts, supporting Chinese manufacturers as they expand globally and deepening localized operations in key overseas markets. On the first front, we provide Chinese manufacturers expanding overseas with one-stop MRO solutions spanning coordinated product sourcing in China and abroad, compliance support and local fulfillment.

On the second front, we continued to build out our localized operations starting with MRO use cases in warehousing and supply chains where our business model has been validated. Our North Sky private label products also gained traction through online channels, primarily Amazon, with categories such as material handling, forklifts and industrial fans, delivering encouraging sales and earning strong customer recognition. We also established a dual sourcing system for key product categories with sources in China and overseas, further strengthening the resilience of our international supply chain.

As these initiatives take hold, our overseas business is moving beyond early market exploration into a new stage in which capability building and business expansion are advancing in parallel with an increasingly clear path forward. The progress we achieved across our businesses was underpinned by the continued strengthening of our core capabilities. During the quarter, we remained focused on three areas central to our long-term competitiveness: products, fulfillment and AI.

Starting with products, we continue to deepen our presence in specialized, high-barrier MRO categories and strengthen collaborations with leading manufacturers. These efforts enhance the depth of our services in specialized categories and further differentiate our offerings. During the quarter, GMV from electrical automation customers grew 160% year over year, driven by our strategy of focusing on key product categories and high-potential industries to address customers’ end-to-end needs across control, safety, sensing and connectivity.

For intelligent production lines, we deepened our offerings in sensors, PLCs, industrial safety, industrial IoT and robotics, forming a comprehensive automation product portfolio. At the industry level, we positioned ourselves early in three sectors with high automation intensity: new energy, semiconductors and communications and electronics. This enabled us to capture growing demand arising from capacity expansion and intelligent product line upgrades.

Growth among semiconductor customers was particularly strong, with GMV up more than 100-fold year over year. We also expanded our collaboration with Intel in edge control, jointly advancing visual inspection and industrial control product solutions as we cultivate our next growth curve beyond control, safety and sensing. Meanwhile, our private label business is an important driver of both competitive differentiation and profitability. During the quarter, we added more than 700 private label SKUs, driving private label GMV growth up more than 25% year over year and lifting private label products’ share of total GMV to approximately 10%.

In addition to contributing incremental revenue, this also improved our overall gross margin. As we broaden the portfolio, we are also building out end-to-end capabilities from product development through testing and validation. Our in-house testing system now covers multiple core product lines with rigorous validation across performance, safety, compliance and reliability. These capabilities further improve product development efficiencies and quality consistency, providing strong support for scaling our private label business.

Turning to fulfillment, we continue to optimize our multi-tiered warehousing and distribution network while enhancing supply capabilities and customer experience in specialized MRO categories. During the quarter, we completed the build-out of a dedicated hazardous materials warehouse in Cangzhou, Hebei Province, further strengthening our compliance, storage and supply assurance capabilities for hazardous chemicals. As of quarter end, our nationwide fulfillment network comprised more than 30 distribution centers, 109 transit warehouses, more than 200 company-operated delivery vehicles and more than 6,000 EVM smart vending machines deployed at customer production sites. This integrated network strengthens our end-to-end fulfillment capabilities from regional inventory deployment and last-mile delivery to on-site, on-demand product access. As we expanded our network coverage, we also improved warehouse operations and transportation scheduling, further improving operating leverage. In the quarter, fulfillment expenses as a percentage of net revenues declined to 3.7% from 4.2% a year ago. We also made solid progress on the AI and digitalization front, guided by our goal of building industry-leading full-stack AI capabilities for industrial supplies.

We continue to strengthen our technology stack and expand AI adoption across customer-facing and internal use cases. These efforts are accelerating the conversion of our extensive industry data and technological expertise into tangible customer value and operating results. A key milestone this quarter was the June launch of Domino, our industrial supplies big data engine. Powered by more than a billion product parameters, Domino features automated data labeling, self-learning and end-to-end traceability.

This provides customers with a high-quality data foundation for MRO data governance, model training and intelligent applications. Through this platform, we are further unlocking the value of MRO data and enabling it to evolve from an internal resource to industry infrastructure that can be offered externally. Building on this foundation, we continued to expand the use cases for our Ling Loan MRO industry-specific foundation model and its suite of AI agents, integrating AI more deeply into customers’ business processes.

Today, solutions such as AI Materials Manager, Lin Long, Huizou, Linglong, Huiyuan and AI Marketplace are already deployed across manufacturing, chemicals, ports and automotive, covering key workflows such as materials data governance, product search and selection, enterprise knowledge management and collaboration, and warehouse item recognition. Notably, AI Materials Manager has served more than 8,600 customers and has been implemented in more than 15 cases involving state-owned enterprises, including centrally administered SOEs.

To date, it has processed more than 24 million rows of materials data, helping customers streamline materials management and reduce inventory costs. Internally, we continue to scale AI adoption across our organization and business processes to improve operating efficiency. During the quarter, internal AI applications saved more than 12,000 employee hours, and AI-assisted coding accounted for over 70% of our coding activity. We also continue to encourage business teams to participate in AI innovation and the co-development of new use cases.

More than 200 employees across 22 departments are now actively involved, bringing AI capabilities into a growing range of new business processes. Beyond strengthening our own capabilities, we are also actively contributing to the broader industry ecosystem. In June, we co-hosted the inaugural China Industrial Supply Summit, or CISS, with several national trade associations and industry organizations. As China’s first MRO industry summit focused on collaboration and value creation, the event brought together more than 2,000 attendees from over 1,000 companies, including many industry leaders, senior executives and experts from across the value chain. The event set industry records for both attendance and the seniority of its guests. Its success further enhanced ZKH Group’s influence within the industry and provided an important platform for deeper engagement with key stakeholders. Going forward, we will continue to leverage our platform strengths to promote knowledge sharing and coordination across the value chain, creating greater long-term value for the industry as a whole. Looking ahead to the second half, we will remain focused on strengthening our core competencies, including enhancing product supply capabilities, improving fulfillment efficiency and building greater organizational strengths. These are the cornerstones of our long-term competitiveness and will lay a solid foundation for sustained growth in business scale and further improvements in profitability. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO, Jerry Wong, to walk you through our financial results. Thank you.

Jerry Wong (Chief Financial Officer)

Okay, thank you, Eric. And thank you everyone for joining our earnings conference call today. Now let me walk you through our financial performance for the second quarter of 2026. Building on a strong start to the year, we delivered continued improvement across key financial metrics in the second quarter. GMV growth accelerated to its fastest pace in the past few quarters, while our gross profit margin expanded even further as operating leverage became increasingly evident.

Our profitability also improved significantly. Notably, we achieved operating profitability for the first time, marking an important financial milestone for the company. Together, these results demonstrate our ability to maintain growth momentum while improving operational quality, supported by the increasing benefits of scale and disciplined execution of our strategic priorities. Let's now take a closer look at the second quarter financial performance, starting with GMV and revenue.

The growth recovery that began in the second half of last year gained further momentum in the second quarter, with GMV and revenue posting accelerated year-over-year growth. GMV increased 18.9% year over year to RMB 2.9 billion, while net revenues grew 12.8% to RMB 2.4 billion, representing the fastest growth for both metrics in recent quarters. This strong performance was primarily driven by robust growth among SME customers and key accounts across our core industries, along with a continued recovery in business with central SOEs.

As GMV growth accelerated, gross profit grew even faster, increasing 20.3% year over year from RMB 357 million to RMB 430 million. As a result, gross profit as a percentage of GMV edged up to 14.9%, compared with 14.8% in the same period last year and 14.4% in the first quarter of 2026. This improvement reflected the continued optimization of our customer and product mix, as well as the increasing GMV contribution from private label offerings, driven by improved operating leverage and operating efficiency.

Total operating expenses decreased 0.8% year over year to RMB 425 million in the quarter. Operating expenses as a percentage of net revenues improved notably, declining from 19.8% in the same period last year to 17.4%. Breaking it down, fulfillment expenses were RMB 90 million, representing 3.7% of net revenues, down from 4.2% in the same period last year. Sales and marketing expenses were RMB 151 million, representing 6.2% of net revenues, down from 6.9% in the same period last year.

R&D expenses were RMB 35 million, representing 1.4% of net revenues, down from 1.9% in the same period last year. General and administrative expenses were RMB 150 million, representing 6.1% of net revenues, down from 6.8% in the same period last year. Looking ahead, we expect GMV and revenue growth to accelerate further in the second half of the year. Combined with our continued focus on operating efficiency, this should drive further improvements in our operating expense ratios and strengthen our operating leverage.

On the international front, as we noted previously, overseas expansion remains an important long-term strategic priority for the company. In the first half of this year, international GMV exceeded RMB 95 million, marking a significant step up in scale. As we continue to grow this business, we remain disciplined in managing expenses and focused on return on investment. Going forward, we expect our international business to turn profitable in the second half of this year.

Our faster GMV growth, improving operating efficiency, and greater operating leverage drove a significant year-over-year improvement in profitability. In the second quarter, our operating profit, non-GAAP EBITDA, and non-GAAP adjusted net profit all turned positive. In particular, non-GAAP EBITDA reached RMB 42 million, compared with negative RMB 39 million in the same period last year, while non-GAAP adjusted net profit reached RMB 39 million, compared with negative RMB 37 million a year ago.

Turning to our balance sheet, we continued to maintain a solid liquidity position. As of June 30, 2026, cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, and short-term investments totaled RMB 1.7 billion, providing ample financial flexibility to support our day-to-day operations and strategic priorities. Operating cash flow followed a seasonal pattern that is similar to last year, with net outflows in the first half and net inflows in the second half as customer collections accelerate.

For the first half of 2026, net cash used in operating activities decreased to RMB 156 million from RMB 208 million in the first half of 2025, reflecting continued improvement in our working capital management. To conclude, the second quarter of 2026 marked an important financial milestone for the company, as we achieved positive operating profit for the first time and delivered a significant improvement in non-GAAP adjusted net profit. Based on current trends, we expect to maintain high-teens GMV growth in the second half of the year while continuing to improve profitability.

This should put us in a solid position to achieve our full-year business and profitability targets and lay a solid foundation for even stronger performance in 2027. Okay, this concludes our prepared remarks. Thank you. We can now open for Q&A.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. For the benefit of all participants on today's call, if you wish to ask your question to management in Chinese, please immediately repeat your question in English.

The first question comes from Jing Luan with CICC. Please go ahead.

Jing Luan, Analyst at CICC

Good evening, management. We noticed that the company's GMV growth accelerated to around 18% this quarter year over year. Could management walk us through the key drivers behind this acceleration and which subsectors, customer segments, or product lines are seeing stronger momentum? And what's your outlook for GMV growth in the second half and full year?

Jerry Wong (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks for that. Thank you very much for that question. So indeed, we achieved acceleration in terms of our GMV growth in the second quarter of 2026, and it's faster than any past quarters. And this goes to show how we are gaining share in this highly fragmented MRO market in China. We can approach this question from three perspectives, namely industries, customers, and private labels. Firstly, let's talk about industries. We have been continually investing in high-growth industries.

The following are some of the industries that have been growing over 30% in Q2 this year from a GMV perspective: steel and nonferrous metals, primarily nonferrous metals, growing at over 103%; utilities grew 57%; fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals grew 37%; food and agricultural products, 37%; communication and electronics, 35%. And we have also been consistently gaining customers from emerging and strategic industries such as semiconductors, robotics, and optical communications.

Secondly, in terms of our customer mix, I would like to talk about how we perform on the SME customers front. And just to clarify the definition of what we mean by an SME customer, we're talking about a customer with a revenue of over RMB 1 billion. So it's not technically a small customer or small company, right? But relatively speaking, it's small compared to some of the large guys or central and local SOEs. A big highlight of Q2 is that the GMV for these SMEs grew over 30%, and the GMV growth for this segment is outperforming the company's overall GMV growth.

Like discussed earlier, we believe this type of customer can reflect the improvement of the product and service capabilities of ZKH Group more than any other types of customers, because these customers are getting increasingly demanding in terms of their requirements for services. As a result, traditional and conventional trading companies are being eliminated. Secondly, the business—our business—is evolving from sales-driven to supply-driven or supply-chain-driven.

I'll explain what I mean by this: before, we were basically selling whatever the customers wanted and demanded, right? But now, with the capabilities of our product improving, we are more in a position to sell what we recommend and what's available on our part. And that's definitely a huge increase in terms of efficiency and productivity. At the same time, the gross margins on the part of the SMEs are higher than large customers. So the growth of SMEs outstripping the overall company is definitely conducive to the improvement of our overall gross margins.

And these SMEs are usually located in the outskirts of cities, which means delivery and fulfillment for them is easier. GMV-wise, these SME customers are accounting for about 30% of total GMV, while large customers—and by large customers I mean key accounts or leading companies of various sectors and those SOEs—account for 60% GMV-wise, and we expect SME GMV share to continue to rise in the future. Thirdly, my last point is on private labels. For Q2, private labels achieved a growth of over 25%, outstripping overall growth, and its GMV share has reached 10%, marching towards our long-term goal of 30% for it. And the gross margins for private labels are higher than non–private labels—it's usually 10% higher. So this trend of private labels as a share of overall GMV increasing will also be conducive to the overall gross margins improving. Looking out to the second half of this year and the entire year's GMV, if you look at the order trend in July and August this year, we expect GMV growth for Q3 is going to be higher than Q2's 18.9%, so it's going to continue to accelerate.

And Q4, especially the month of December, is a peak month or peak quarter for orders throughout the year. And we are confident that we are able to sustain this growth and be able to achieve our overall growth of 15% to 20% for GMV this year. And that was my answer to your question. Thank you.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

Thank you. The next question comes from Zhuoming Zhao with Huatai Securities. Please go ahead.

Zhuoming Zhao, Analyst at Huatai Securities

Question: Against the backdrop of the ongoing AI wave, have you observed any incremental changes in purchasing behavior and habits of different customer groups? How will ZKH Group capture the opportunities? Have AI applications launched previously, such as the AI Materials Manager, made further progress recently? In addition, what is the latest progress on establishing the AI subsidiary as alluded to earlier?

UNKNOWN, CTO

So this is the CTO of the company and I'll take this question. So indeed, we have observed some incremental changes in customer purchasing behavior as AI applications gradually mature. So we observed three trends that are quite notable. First, customers are changing how they express their needs and access procurement services. In the past, MRO products procurement relied primarily on keyword searches, catalog filters or manual requests for quotations.

Increasingly, customers are becoming accustomed to describing their requirements directly in a natural language. Some provide AI systems with equipment models, use cases and technical specifications and expect the systems to clarify their needs, select suitable product models or recommend the right products to them. The second trend we observe is that the demand for high quality data is increasing. For AI to participate meaningfully in procurement decisions, data such as product parameters, specifications, product alternatives, brands and materials, these things must be sufficiently accurate.

We therefore believe that high quality, structured and specialized data will become even more important in the era of AI. Third, SMEs are becoming more receptive to self service and smart procurement. In the past, many procurement services required repeated communication between our sales representatives and the customers procurement people. In the future, AI may be able to handle a significant portion of the standardized work, reducing service costs while improving the customer service experience.

So as regards to AI Materials Manager, which we launched previously, it continues to evolve. It has now served more than 8,600 customers representing a year over year growth of 93% in terms of customer count and has begun generating revenue. We're also continuing to build a competitive moat around our full stack AI capabilities for MRO products and in September or rather October this year we plan to work with Intel, a leading global chip maker, to launch our Lingon Huai Yen which is an industry leading edge model and solution for industrial vision.

We also intend to establish deeper collaboration with leading domestic chip makers integrating AI Material Manager and the Linglong model with their technologies at both the model and agent layers. Regarding the AI subsidiary you were asking about, we are proceeding with this establishment according to plan. The primary reason for setting up an independent company is to give the business a more independent and flexible organizational structure, talent model and greater flexibility for future capital activities.

At the same time, the subsidiary will maintain deep synergy with ZKH Group in industrial data, customer use cases and supply chain resources. Our goal is to develop it into a smart infrastructure company serving the industrial sector. And that was my answer to your question. Thank you.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

Thank you. The next question comes from Leo Chang with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Leo Chang, Analyst at Deutsche Bank

Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the strong result. I have two questions. First one is regarding our international business. Could management update us on the company's internationalization progress including GMV contribution, summer expansion and your outlook for future international markets? The second question is could management provide an update on the shareholder return plan such as share repurchase program or other related initiatives.

Thank you.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

And that concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for closing remarks.

Jerry Wong (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you once again for joining us today. You can find the webcast of today's call on ir.zks.com. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. Our contact information can be found in today's press release. Thank you and have a great day.

OPERATOR (Moderator)

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.