Author | Gu Yue Longtian Source | Xinliu Finance
After experiencing its first single-quarter loss in the first quarter, Qudian needs a longer breathing period.
Faced with the steady development momentum of its old rival Lexin and the strategic transformation of "new consumption", Qudian’s luxury e-commerce platform has helped sales revenue reach nearly 300 million. Unexpectedly, the new strategic layout of Qudian has not increased. An amazing "open platform" failed to release a blockbuster effect.
However, the continued contraction of financial business is bringing unprecedented challenges and pressures to Qudian.
Qudian's business scale has shrunk to less than 20 billion, and asset quality has not improved in the second quarter
On the evening of September 7, the second quarter financial report of Qudian announced that, on the whole, Qudian’s loan business scale and profitability continued the trend of the previous quarter, both shrinking.
In terms of scale, the outstanding balance of Qudian's loan business was 9.7 billion yuan, a decrease of more than 36% from the previous quarter. The decrease was 32% in the previous quarter, and the reduction was further increased;
The open platform balance was 9.8 billion yuan, a decrease of over 25% from the previous quarter, which was 15% in the first quarter.
In terms of new additions, the transaction volume of Qudian’s loan business in the second quarter was 4.2 billion yuan, a decrease of 200 million yuan from the previous quarter; the open platform transaction volume fell sharply to 700 million yuan, a decrease from the 2.6 billion yuan in the first quarter. It reaches 73%.
In this regard, Qudian said that during this period of instability in the market, the platform has strict loan approvals, focusing on reducing the risk exposure of the credit market, so the loan transaction volume is relatively stable; because some institutional funds have tightened credit It is estimated that the transaction volume of the open platform has dropped significantly.
In fact, during the current period, the book-weighted period of the Qudian loan business was only 4.7 months, which was almost halved compared to the previous quarter’s 8.4 months. The open platform’s book-weighted period was also reduced from 11.2 months in the previous quarter. Reduced to 10.6 months.
Although the D1 delinquency rate of Qudian once rose to 20% in the first quarter due to the epidemic and other negative environmental factors, in the second quarter, the D1 delinquency rate still fluctuated around 20%, and the asset quality showed no obvious signs of restoration.
Entering the second quarter, Qudian also further increased the M1+ provision coverage multiple, from 1.7 times in the first quarter to 1.8 times, and the corresponding reserve was also raised from 1.97 billion yuan to 2.05 billion yuan.
Net profit fell 84% year-on-year, and sales revenue increased to nearly 300 million
In terms of overall revenue, Qudian recorded a total revenue of 1.167 billion yuan in the second quarter, down 47.4% year-on-year; net profit was 179 million yuan, down 84.3% year-on-year.
The financial report shows that Qudian's revenue is mainly divided into four categories: financing revenue, sales revenue, loan convenience, and open platform.
In the first quarter of 2020, Qudian recorded a single-quarter loss for the first time, with a net income of negative 908 million yuan. However, in the second quarter, Qudian achieved a weak profit with a net income of 30 million yuan, but the overall income capacity was still declining.
During the period, Qudian’s financing income decreased by about 40 million yuan compared with the previous quarter, and its loan income decreased by nearly 170 million yuan. In addition, the cost of revenue and sales and marketing expenses have increased substantially, with the former increasing nearly four times, and the latter almost Achieve a three-fold increase.
However, with the help of the "Wanlimu" luxury e-commerce platform, Qudian's sales revenue in the second quarter increased from 17 million yuan in the first quarter to nearly 300 million yuan.
It should be noted that the long-term contribution of Wanlimu to Qudian remains to be seen. From the market feedback, the controversy on the Wanlimu e-commerce platform is still unabated.
In addition, Qudian also invested $100 million in Secoo in the second quarter, becoming its largest shareholder, holding 28.9% of its shares. Obviously, luxury e-commerce has become the strategic direction of Qudian. In this regard, Qudian said in its financial report, "I look forward to creating synergy in the luxury consumer business."
However, the scale of the luxury goods market may decrease in 2020. According to data from Bain & Co., the scale of the luxury goods market will shrink by 15%-35% this year, and the global luxury goods market sales in the first quarter also show this expectation.
Objectively speaking, it is quite difficult for Qudian to successfully develop the luxury e-commerce market.
The growth rate of users dropped further, and the re-borrow rate remained high
In the financial business, interesting shops that have experienced both high and low moments are still lingering.
As of June 30, 2020, the total number of registered users of Qudian reached 80.8 million, which was an increase of 0.75% from the previous quarter’s 80.2 million, an increase of 0.75% from the previous quarter. This figure was 0.93% in the first quarter, and the user growth rate has further declined.
In terms of the number of outstanding borrowers, the number of outstanding borrowers during the reporting period was 5 million, a decrease of 12.5% compared with the 5.7 million on March 31, 2020, and the number of outstanding borrowers at the end of 2019 was 6.12 million.
It is worth mentioning that the re-borrow rate of Qudian has remained high for a long time. In 2017, 2018 and 2019, repeat borrowers accounted for approximately 81.9%, 88.0% and 77.6% of the total number of active borrowers in Qudian, respectively. On average, active borrowers withdrew about 5.3 times of credit from Qudian in 2019.
On the one hand, high repeat borrowers reflect the loyalty of platform users and the high satisfaction of Qudian credit products; on the other hand, the repayment ability of relatively fixed borrowers is likely to not follow the improvement, more than three years The life cycle of consumer finance customers may adversely affect asset quality.
In other words, when the water function of the pond disappears, the living water will gradually become stagnant water.
The above data means that the scale of effective users of Qudian has continued to shrink in the past six months. The core reason behind Qudian is that Qudian has to rebalance the relationship between its risk control guidelines and asset quality.
This also directly affects the performance of Qudian’s loan-sharing business. Since Qudian’s user growth has almost stagnated, and asset quality has continued to deteriorate in the first half of this year, this directly affects its open platform business performance. The amount of cooperative lending funds of licensed financial institutions has shrunk significantly, and the transaction volume in the second quarter was only 700 million yuan.
After the introduction of the upper limit on the interest rate of judicial protection of private lending, licensed financial institutions are more likely to carry out loan assistance business in the future in the profit sharing model. Then the flow performance and asset quality of third-party financial technology will become the key to unlocking the profit sharing business.
From the current point of view, the future pressure on the loan assistance business of Qudian cannot be underestimated.