On March 12, 2024, Blue Lotus Head of Research Eric Wen hosted a webinar together with the CFO of Hua Hong Semiconductor, Mr. Daniel Wang. The webinar covered a wide range of topics, including the current stage of the semiconductor demand cycle, semiconductor localization opportunities, AI demand for mature semiconductors, power semiconductors for renewables and electric vehicles, and more.
JD is very different from PDD and Alibaba, which are 3P companies. Since they just provide a platform and revenue is basically from advertising. All the merchandise is provided by merchandise partners, which makes them respond very quickly to new trends entering the market, while JD follows the Amazon model.
Blue Lotus Research Institute’s Managing Director Shawn Yang discussed the recent performance disclosure of relevant companies, including the operational performance of JD.com and Tencent August 17th. He talked about JD.com's merchant subsidies, Tencent's future game reserves, and the challenges these companies will face in the second half of the year.
Blue Lotus Research Institute's Managing Director, Mr. Shawn Yang, recently had an interview with Bloomberg regarding Alibaba on June 21st. He discussed Alibaba's new organizational changes, future IPO plans for its subsidiary business groups, and the market competition landscape and unique features of LLM products.
Amid demand by consumers for cost effective items, we expect that demand for discounted apparel will sustain into 2024. We expect that VIPS will be the continued beneficiary of this trend despite growth of Douyin and PDD
Presidents Xi and Biden will meet in tomorrow’s APEC Summit, cumulating over 9 months of official and grass roots interactions since the balloon incident. We see intention to be real but impact to be small; We look at two issues to judge if there will be real progress made to benefit China’s economy: (1) will key import tariffs be lifted; (2) will US dollar liquidity return. The answers to both are no. We notice pickup in regional tension in South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. We expect exchange of interests to be limited and tension to rise soon.
With sharp export downturns and downward earning revisions of US competitors, solar PV’s price war and overcapacity issues is fully digested; Sungrow’s C3Q23 and C1H23 results showed it has managed the industry headwinds. It also increasingly participates in China’s electricity reform; We believe solar PV invertor’s superior strategic position in renewable energy’s supply chain is intact. Further, defending against Huawei’s intrusion is not an outstanding risk.
BABA reported C3Q23 revenue, non-GAAP operating profit and GAAP net income in-line, 6% and (7%) vs. our est., and in-line, in-line and (14%); Instead of appointing capable management to oversee key subsidiaries, BABA backpedalled to call off its spin-off plans; We cut TP from US$ 127 to US$ 72, and downgrade to SELL.