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E-commerce company Boxed (NYSE:BOXD) reported Q4 results, its second earnings as public company, after completing a de-spac in December.
Boxed, which is an ecommerce grocery platform that sells bulk consumables, reported Q4 revenue rose 4.2% to $45M versus the year-earlier quarter, according to a statement. The company’s net loss widened to $1.64/share from 82 loss a year earlier.
Boxed forecast revenue of $220 million to $245 million for the year, reflecting a range of 24% and 38% YoY growth. The company sees total Adjusted EBITDA loss of $70 million to $80 million for 2022.
Average order value (“AOV”), an important metric for the company, rose to $131 from $118 in Q4 2020, helped partly as B2B order mix and price increase due to industry wide inflation. Gross margin increased to 20.3% vs 14.1% in the year-earlier quarter, helped by its higher margin Software & Services segment.
Boxed’s B2B business struggled during the pandemic as individuals weren’t going to work or school and the business accounted for about a quarter of the company’s entire business pre Covid, according to CEO Chieh Huang. That trend is starting to change and its BtoB business was up 50% in Q4.
“We are starting to see those green shoots of recovery” for the B2B business. Huang said in a Zoom interview with Seeking Alpha. “We’re starting to see reactivation of customers that lapsed over the last year. And I think most importantly the latest trends we are seeing on their behavior is that they are behaving similarly to pre Covid.”
Huang added that the “folks that have come back they’ve begun just to spend like they did before Covid.”
While boxed is mainly known for shipping boxes filled with toilet paper and potato chips, the company has been moving into the software-as-service or SaaS business and last January announced a deal with Aeon, a large Asian retailer which has $83B in revenue.
“We’ve got of course more regions that we are negotiating and discussing with Aeon on, which was our first and biggest lighthouse account, but we’ve also diversified and have other folks in the pipeline as well,” Huang said. “We’ve got high hopes for software & services in 2022.”
Also check out Boxed CEO’s video interview with Seeking Alpha from late June.