2Q2021 vs 2Q2020 in numbers
*AOV = Average Order Value.
Important developments during 2Q
Second quarter was historical for us. We broke our monthly sales record and managed to do it profitably. We managed to further develop our sourcing processes and profitability management.
The second quarter kept us busy. In June we had one of the four major sales festivals called 618. This sales festival was originally invented by JD.com as a counter action to Alibaba’s 11/11 and 12/12 festivals. The main sales event of 618 was on June 18th. We exceeded our all-time monthly sales record in June: our sales were more than 100% higher than during the same period in 2020.
Despite the success, we didn’t quite achieve our ambitious sales target for June. The main reasons were our bank’s slow approval process of our Chinese daughter company’s registered capital for sourcing and Covid-19 incidents in the Guangzhou harbor. These meant we were not able to utilize all our liquidity for sourcing and some of our goods meant to be sold were stuck in the logistics, not available for consumers. But, we are still ahead of our sales target after the first half.
The implementation of the ATC Oy credit line, which was approved by AGM, has started successfully. Taking it in use has been easy. We have also succeeded in boosting our sourcing with the loantainer arrangements despite the above-mentioned slow approval process for registered capital. However, this challenge has now been solved.
The first half ended on a positive note: it was profitable because of the great second quarter.
Looking ahead to the rest of 2021
Our theme for 2021 is break-even. We are extremely happy for the profitable first half, which is supporting this goal. Our third quarter has a challenging sales target. We will put all our efforts in making it happen while taking care of profitability.
We will continue to work on developing new revenue streams and opportunities.
We also have the end of year main sales events in sight, which we mentioned in our previous quarterly report. Significant effort will be put on securing sufficient working capital to enable sourcing, marketing, new product identification, content creation and live streaming.
Interesting work continues: many great achievements are paving way to second half, but there is a huge amount of work ahead of us to achieve our 2021 targets.
