Qeeka Home Reports Strong Growth with SaaS Revenue Up 75% YOY to RMB135 Million in Q1

Qeeka Home (01739.HK), one of the largest service platforms for the decoration companies in China, reported Q1 2021 results. Due to the steady progress of its SaaS strategy, Qeeka Home’s SaaS and its extended services business (including SaaS, marketing and supply chain services) reported revenue of RMB 135 million for Q1 2021, a significant increase of 75% compared to the same period in 2020. As of the end of Q1 the total number of active paying merchants on the platform had reached 5,090, an increase of 40% year-on-year.

With enhanced operations and rebalancing of the portfolio, Qeeka Home has demonstrated strong growth based on SaaS empowerment.

Fueled by strong growth, SaaS revenue increased by 75% year-on-year

In order to earn its position as China’s leading SaaS service platform for home improvement companies, Qeeka Home studied the industry for many years, bringing in and analyzing a massive amount of data on the sales of furniture and home furnishings, as well as the experience of tens of thousands of home improvement firms, resulting in the development of a complete SaaS-based subscription service, including marketing, supply chain and innovative value-added services. The integration of these services into the SaaS solution helps the home improvement firms enhance their competitiveness in digital marketing, supply chain management and business expansion.

Thanks to Qeeka Home’s precise understanding of industry trends and needs, the company achieved solid growth of 18.8% in 2020, with sales of SaaS subscription services jumping 39.9%. The services have become a key strategic growth driver for the company, and continue to demonstrate significant potential for further growth.

In 2021, Qeeka Home will enter the next stage of the implementation of its overall SaaS empowerment strategy. This, in turn, will enhance the digital empowerment of home improvement companies and further help them reduce costs and increase efficiency, improve competitiveness and achieve long-term growth through the addition of a number of innovative services such as accurate marketing, supply chain support and financing, and new retail. Qeeka Home’s Q1 report shows that in Q1 2021, 415 new paying merchants were added to the platform, an increase of 42% over the same period, while the total number of active paying merchants increased by 40% to 5,090 compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, revenue from SaaS and its extended services suite also increased significantly by 75% year-over-year to over $130 million.

Qeeka Home’s Q1 report further highlights the tremendous potential of SaaS for home improvement firms and sets a positive tone for the industry as a whole following the pandemic. This has allowed for more flexible and deeper adjustments following the impact of the pandemic and the across-the-board adjustments that the pandemic necessitated.

SaaS solutions for home improvement firms have great potential

For a long time, the home improvement industry had been characterized by its many pain points such as too low a barrier to entry, an industry chain with too many links, a high reliance on offline delivery, difficulty in establishing any form of standardization and steep challenges in terms of undertaking any industry transformation, despite the fact that the industry has exhibited substantial growth. One effect of the pandemic has been to stifle any attempts at transformation, causing growth stagnation, and, in a few cases, negative growth, for many of the firms.

At the same time, the number of shoppers that complete their purchases online is trending steeply upward, younger buyers are taking control of the conversation around the best ways to decorate one’s home, while one-stop home furnishing solutions gain in popularity, among other changes in the market environment, causing traditional home furnishing firms to face ever more serious business challenges. Meanwhile, the so-called Matthew effect of accumulated advantage that is sweeping the sector is accelerating the cannibalization of market share by the larger players to the detriment of smaller fry.

The pandemic’s arrival last year was a major factor in driving the demand for digital transformation across the sector. As a professional home improvement enterprise service platform, Qeeka Home, by accurately grasping the digital transformation opportunities engendered by the pandemic, quickly re-adjusted and optimized the logic supporting the service system, and developed a SaaS solution based on SaaS subscription services to empower home improvement firms, alongside a lineup of marketing services, streamlining of the supply chain and other value-added services.

Qeeka Home plays a leading role in the home improvement SaaS field. On the digital marketing side, Qeeka Home has not only generated and maintained an increased and constant flow of home improvement sales leads, but also assists installers in achieving efficient conversions by optimizing big data matching, building a high-quality home improvement content ecosystem, upgrading product guarantees, and creating live broadcast tools.

In terms of supply chain empowerment, Qeeka Home has joined hands with multiple domestic and multinational best-in-quality building materials brands to create a comprehensive home improvement supply chain system covering the core materials, the accessories and the soft furnishings, helping companies to use digital solutions to streamline their operations, greatly reducing back-end procurement costs and improving procurement efficiency.

In addition, Qeeka Home provides a series of innovative value-added services to help home improvement companies seize new opportunities while preparing for the oncoming evolution of the sector.

Qeeka Home also leverages SaaS for home improvement firms as a means to efficiently transform the industry. With years of industry experience and deep datamining, Qeeka Home’s SaaS empowerment strategy will confront the industry’s pain points and provide a systematic, standardized and practical solution for digital transformation. Previously, the uncertainty, the lack of knowledge and the difficulty faced by the installers in systematizing the digital transformation process will gradually be eliminated, paving the way for the industry to implement a digital infrastructure as part of a large-scale transformation.

Most of the domestic installers are small and scattered while lacking in overall sophistication and in their capabilities to acquire new customers through digital marketing, making it even more difficult for them to cope with the changes sweeping the industry as a result of the ageing of the country’s population. These challenges tie in perfectly with Qeeka Home’s original intention of building SaaS to provide these firms with a full range of empowerment options and to help them better access and service customers. With what is needed to transform the industry becoming even more complex, creating an even bigger challenge, the future for SaaS for home improvement firms has become even brighter. Qeeka Home’s focus on SaaS will help installers accelerate their growth, while also facilitating not only a transformation of the sector as a whole but also an across-the-board enhancement in the overall level of sophistication of the industry’s many players.

Source: Qeeka Home