Daily Brief China: Oriental Watch, Alibaba (ADR), PDD Holdings, MIXUE Group, S.F. Holding, Tencent, IVF Hospital Management Group Limited, AAC Technologies Holdings, Adani Green Energy and more

• Oriental Watch (398 HK)  went ex-dividend on the 4th of January and has settled at an appetizing valuation of 6.8x PE with 60% of the market cap in cash.
• The market post-golden week and into the new year has been tepid.
• We expect the company to continue paying out 100% of its profits as dividends, based on which the dividend yield is close to 14% at the current share price.

• In this note, we will take a look at broker performance for HK IPOs and placements in 2023. 
• The following dataset includes all HK IPOs and placements above US$100m, which amounted to a total of 27 deals.
• The deals you see in this note are based on our historical IPO and placement tracker. Feel free to drop us a message for additional information.

• PDD diversified into ‘local life’ businesses in December 2023, but stopped these businesses within two weeks.
• We believe PDD’s low price advantage does not work in Meituan-like ‘local life’ and the top performer Meituan is hard to fight.
• We believe the stock price has an upside of 88% for year end 2024.

• MIXUE Group (1860056D CH) is looking to raise about US$1bn in its upcoming Hong Kong IPO. The bookrunners on the deal are Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and UBS.
• MIXUE Group (MIXUE) is a freshly-made drinks company providing affordable products to consumers, including freshly-made fruit drinks, tea, ice cream and coffee, typically priced at around one USD per item.
• The firm is the largest domestically freshly-made drinks company in terms of number of stores as of Sept 23, and number of cups sold during 9M23, according to CIC.

• Kerry Logistics Network will pay a special dividend in the form of KEX shares
• This will trigger a general offer by SF Holding for all KEX shares at THB 5.50
• Why is SF Holding doing this, & how could its int’l express business change?

• 2023 marked our eighth year covering Equity Capital Markets in Asia Pacific. In 2023, IPOs didn’t pick up much from the low base of 2022  while placements showed upward momentum.
• We ended 2023 with an accuracy rate of 73.7% across 57 IPOs that we covered and 79.3% across 115 placements.
• For those not familiar with our coverage, we aim to cover all IPOs and placements with a minimum deal size of US$100m across Asia-Pacific, including China ADRs.

• IVF Hospital’s profitability and growth momentum look good at this stage, but the Company is still in early stage of development, with obvious gap with leading players in the industry.
• IVF penetration rate in China is not high and the rate of improvement is slow. With public hospitals accounting for over 90% market share, IVF Hospital’s growth space is limited.
• Licensing is a big barrier for development, slowing down the pace of nationwide expansion. The “good story” should be based on internationalization, which is actually the weakness of IVF Hospital.

In our inaugural Asian Monthly for 2024, we discuss the regional credit outlook for the year, with a focus on China, India, Indonesia as well as our favoured bonds. We also provide a review of 2023, including new Asian USD corporate bond issuances and defaults last year.

Lucror Analytics Morning Views comprise our fundamental credit analysis, opinions and trade recommendations on high yield issuers in the region, based on key company-specific developments in the past 24 hours. Our Morning Views include a section with a brief market commentary, key market indicators and a macroeconomic and corporate event calendar.

• Adani Green Energy
• Adani Ports & Special Economic Zone
• ENN Natural Gas
• Greentown China
• Innergex Renewable Energy
• SK Hynix
• Tata Motors ADR