Yeahka CEO Addresses Employees on Its Future Development Plan, Establishing Strategic and Implementation Certainty

Yeahka Limited (Yeahka or the Company) (09923.HK) founder and CEO, Luke Liu, sent an open letter to all employees via email, looking back on the 10-year history of the company and announcing its future development plan on January 3.

In the email titled “Toward a More Promising Future”, Luke looked back on Yeahka’s transformation over the past 10 years since its inception, sharing how the Company grew from payment focused business to a comprehensive 2B business solution provider with extended product offerings including SaaS, Fintech, and other; subsequently evolved to an ecosystem with recently added In-store E-commerce business that covers both 2B and 2C markets; finally successfully transformed into a “payment-based digital commerce ecosystem”. Till now, Yeahka serves nearly 7 million active merchants, with its service covering over 800 million consumers and generates nearly 100 million daily payment transactions within its ecosystem.

To prepare for the increasing complexity and uncertainty of macro environment, Luke outlined Yeahka’s future development blueprint in his letter, which is “upholding value creation principle, establishing strategic certainty and implementation certainty”. He said that the Company’s positioning and overall big picture strategy is getting clear and the Company’s next steps will be the refinement of sub-strategy in the future. He also added that the strategy execution will be realized by strengthening corporate management, optimizing organizational mechanism, cultivating talents and leveraging scientific management methodologies.

In relation to the Company’s recent focus on the In-store E-commerce business, Luke reiterated his confidence in Yeahka’s entry into the local lifestyle market. According to Yeahka’s 2021 interim report, the Company has served more than 10,000 merchants with its in-store e-commerce services, with over 1.42 million paying consumers and a GMV exceeding RMB71 million. In order to further strengthen its capabilities in local lifestyle services, the Company invested RMB100 million for 60% equity of Dingding Cultural Tourism (Chengdu) Co., Ltd., expanding the scope of the Company’s in-store e-commerce business.

Full text of the 10th Anniversary Letter from Luke Liu, the founder and CEO of Yeahka

Title: Yeahka’s 10th Anniversary Letter – Toward a More Promising Future

Happy New Year, colleagues of Yeahka!

In today’s world where uncertainty has become a challenge, we need to keep reflecting ourself both in work and life. Thinking about the many moving pieces of the Company’s businesses and what is happening with life, I want to take the opportunity to review the path we have all travelled together at this meaningful point in time, and to discuss how we should develop as a company going forward.

On this day 10 years ago, I moved to 1802 Chang Hong Building, filled with anticipation for starting the offline payment business.

In the following five years, my colleagues and I explored possibilities of various products in the offline payment space. However, the product/market fit was less than optimal, so we could only rely on the venture capital investments and hang on to our firm belief, that immerse opportunities lie in the offline payment space, to survive with strong will.

In 2015, we set company strategy to be a “cloud platform for offline merchants”, and chose the development direction of the Company to move “beyond payment”. So we started the Smart Shopkeeper SaaS and fintech businesses. Looking back, these were very forward looking positioning and planning, way ahead of its time.

In 2017, we foresaw that mobile payment would change people’s lives, and started to invest into QR code payment early on. We strongly believed that if we dedicate ourselves to each and every single payment transaction, we could accumulate massive merchant and user base, traffic, channels, bring more value to merchants, and develop our comprehensive technology services.

In 2020, we officially positioned Yeahka as a payment-based technology company, successfully listed the Company on HKEX, and became a high-profile IPO stock in the Hong Kong capital market. Ever since our listing 18 months ago, we have been thinking: where is Yeahka’s next peak summit?

Currently, although we have experienced the global pandemic for the last two years, and are facing the greatest changes in the century, we still firmly believe that the nearly 7 million active merchants and over 800 million consumers we serve, the nearly 100 million daily payment transactions we support, the flow of capital and information among different entities, and rich portfolio of value-added services will create the foundation for a payment-based digital commerce ecosystem, same as the exchange of matter and energy to create a natural ecosystem.

Recently, we entered into the trillion dollar “local lifestyle” market in a big way, leap frogging from payment pureplay to providing enhancement of 2B business efficiency and financial performance, and subsequently to elevating the broader 2C consumer experience. Our chosen path has derived from mature and long-term business thinking, our drive comes from our innovative and assertive company value and genes, as well as our mission to consistently create value for merchants and consumers.

10 years is enough for a toddler to become a teenager, but for a startup company, 10 years is only long enough for us to go from survival to just starting growth. Perhaps Yeahka does not yet have a revolutionary product to change the world, but we have the resilience, the long-term and forward-looking ways of thinking, and the capabilities to grasp industry opportunities, which are most-needed for an entrepreneurial company like Yeahka. The qualities we possess make us confident about our future, and keep us as curious and excited as we were 10 years ago.

How do we deal with the complexity and uncertainty in the environment and still maintain our leading position? I believe the goal will be achieved primarily by upholding value creation principle, establishing strategic certainty and implementation certainty.

On strategic certainty front, through 10 years of continuous exploration, we have developed a proprietary “clover” model to analyze and measure the user value of our business, to assess our competitive advantage and economic moat, and to accumulate long-term company value. After 10 years of shaping and reshaping, the Company’s positioning and overall big-picture strategy has become crystal clear, and the Company’s next steps will be the refinement of sub-strategy in the future.

On implementation certainty front, we need to focus on management. Firstly, the robustness of the Company’s organizational capability and the vitality of the corporate culture is the source of management power. It takes people with similar values to run a business. We ought to optimize our organizational mechanism to train and nurture talents. Also, we need to achieve goals by adopting scientific methodologies, identifying the core essence and key process points of issues, dissecting tasks from top down, and simplifying complicated matters. We will become very efficient on problem solving by adopting the above-mentioned practices.

In the past 10 years, we have gone through ups and downs, tears and joys through our journey of entrepreneurship. But for every enterprise to achieve its goals, this is a necessary experience. The experience is just like the youth we have all experienced. It is filled with contradiction and uncertainty, and there is absolutely no need to be overly joyful or depressed, as I believe the journey itself is actually the most wonderful part.

As long as we stand by our beliefs of creating value for users and society, we will be able to smile honestly and advance down the right path.

Let us march forward towards the promising future.

Luke
Jan 2022

About YEAHKA LIMITED (Stock Code: 9923.HK)
Yeahka is a leading payment-based technology platform dedicated to creating value for merchants and consumers. According to Oliver Wyman, Yeahka is the second largest non-bank independent QR code payment service provider in China in terms of transaction count in 2019, with a market share of 14.0%. Yeahka’s vision is to build a commercial digitalized ecosystem to enable seamless, convenient and reliable payment transactions among merchants and consumers , and to further provide a rich portfolio of diversified technology-enabled business services, including SaaS digital solutions, which help customers improve their operating efficiency; precision marketing services, which allow customers to effectively reach their target markets; fintech services, which satisfy customers’ diversified financing needs; and in-store e-commerce services, which helps merchants to increase sales and consumers to enjoy local lifestyle discount benefits.