Daily Brief Financials: Great Eastern Holdings, ZEEKR, Nihon Housing, Aadhar Housing Finance Ltd, Woori Financial Group , Korea Stock Exchange KOSPI 200, Information Services and more

• OCBC (OCBC SP) has made a voluntary unconditional general Offer for the 11.56% in Great Eastern Holdings (GE SP) not held. 
• The S$25.60 cash Offer for the life/non-life insurer is a 36.9% premium to last close; and a 30% discount to its S$36.59/share embedded value (as at 31st Dec 2023).
• The Offer is unconditional in all respects. This will trade tight.  A delisting Offer is next on the cards.

• ZEEKR (ZK US), a premium EV brand by Geely, raised around US$440m in its US listing, after the deal was upsized and priced at the top.
• Zeekr was formed in Mar 2021 as a JV between Geely and its founder. Its first model was launched in Apr 21 with deliveries starting in Oct 21.
• We have looked at the company’s past performance and provided our thoughts on valuations in our earlier notes. In this note, we talk about the trading dynamics.

• Nihon Housing (4781 JP) is a business which manages real estate for owners (office, apartment management, janitorial, cleaning, facilities management, security, agency, sub-leasing package systems, etc). 
• The company has operated in Tokyo for 60+yrs, and they are finally just going to take what has always been a tight register private. Foreigners own 0.05%. Index owns nothing.
• This is basically a completely done deal. It will trade tight, and illiquidly.

• Branches visited – Ajmer, Bengaluru, Mandya, Mysuru, Jaipur, Solapur, Pimpri and Pune.
• Business growth is driven by taking calls that peers are reluctant to take with regards to property and incomes.
• Lack of team and increasing competition are primary concerns that also warrant attention. 

• In our latest South Korean banks screener, we keep Woori on the buy list along with KB Financial as our Korean banks picks
• Delinquency ratios continued to worsen QoQ, yet Woori is the benchmark for NPL ratio; Woori had lagged in terms of returns, but these are holding at the pre-provision level
• KB has a low PBV ratio relative to its ROE, it delivers rising post-provision returns, with cost of risk declining and it has a healthy CET1 ratio

• This is an update to our previous insight published on April 22nd: “EQD | KOSPI 200 WEEKLY Bounce: Rally or Not?“.
• The KOSPI 200 INDEX  has performed a nearly +6% rally in the last 3 weeks, closing up 3 weeks in a row (CC=+3).
• We have something to say about this pattern that was identified 3 weeks and ago and so we wanted to post this insight to explicit our view.

Information Services Corporation’s (ISC’s) Q124 results highlight the strength of the underlying business, with topline and adjusted EBITDA growth of 15% and 34%, respectively, augmented by the sustained organic growth of the Services division and CPI fee adjustments. This progress was made less obvious at the statutory net income level by increases in interest costs and share-based compensation expenses of C$5.0m and C$5.8m, respectively. FY24 guidance has been reiterated, and we maintain our forecasts and valuation of C$40/share, implying 58% upside.