Daily Brief Equity Bottom-Up: Asian Dividend Gems: Golden Throat Holdings and more

• Golden Throat Holdings is a gem. It has excellent fundamentals including an eye-catching dividend yield (17.9% in 2023) and a blistering DPS growth (10x from 2020 to 2023). 
• It also benefits from a compelling long-term theme (relieving sore throats caused by worsening air quality/smog/fine dust problems along with recurrent regular cold/flu symptoms among millions of people in China). 
• Golden Throat Holdings is one of the leading throat lozenges manufacturers in China. Its net margin averaged 24% from 2019 to 2023.

• Nanya’s quarterly revenue was NT$ 9.5 billion, up 9.2% QoQ & up 47.9% YoY
• Nanya still had a net loss of NT$1.2 billion, its sixth loss making quarter in a row
• Larger peers doubling down on HBM, structural reduction in memory wafer capacity & shortages likely triggered by Taiwan earthquake are all mounting tailwinds for Nanya

• While most HK/China stocks continue to be traded at depressed valuation, we view ESR as an interesting play among most real estate stocks
• The investment highlights of ESR are: 1) as a leading fund manager with growing AUM and fee income 2) leader in new economy sector, and 3) APAC focused
• ESR’s EBIT mainly comes from 3 segments: investment, fund management and new economy development.  ESR is now trading at deep discount to NAV

VietNam Holding (VNH) posted a solid net asset value (NAV) per share total return (TR) in 2023 of 15.8% (22.4% in US dollar terms), outperforming the Vietnam All Share index (VNAS), which posted an 11.7% return, and its direct peers. The investment manager remains confident that 2024 will be strong for Vietnamese equities, underpinned by average 20% y-o-y expected earnings per share (EPS) growth. VNH recently introduced a share redemption facility (on top of regular share buybacks), which allows shareholders to redeem their shares at NAV each September. We believe that this has contributed to the recent narrowing of VNH’s share discount to NAV to 3.0% compared to its three-year average of 14.1%.