With ~5 years of announcing every buy/sell transaction on the blog, I have now for a while shifted to only post changes under “Trade History”. Sacrificing some transparency but with the aim to focus blog posts on more interesting things than every trade done. I imagine this will be my new format, where I look back on the past months and comment on what I feel is most relevant to mention. This is the batch of trades I will discuss.
Let’s start from the bottom
It’s high time to review my holdings and if anything changed in their investment thesis. This will be a monster post, for me it’s a great way to review all my holdings and make sure I stay up to date. For you, if you hold or are interested in one of these stocks you will get a quick “what’s the latest” with some sprinkles of why this is a great company (or not anymore). As a bonus there is a short elevator pitch of my two new holdings.
I stopped posting updates for every portfolio change (instead found under Trade History tab), so I have some changes to comment on: MIX Telematics left the portfolio and Lvji entered and exited without comment from my side. MIX Telematics was a case of having too high exposure to the oil industry in the US, I don’t see that coming back at all in the same way as in the past. This was something I did not understand when I invested, properly hidden oil exposure and a mistake on my side. Lvji was a tech play on travel guides for Chinese, but soon after taking a position some twitter friends alerted me of doubtful accounting. I looked at it myself and couldn’t really feel comfortable, better safe than sorry I then sold at almost the same price I bought.
Now on to comments on all my current holdings from top to bottom in the table below.
Press “read more” and enjoy!
Although I find it highly interesting with Macro analysis, I deliberately write less about such topics on this blog. I want this blog to be focused on stock picking and the struggles of portfolio management. That said, given how many investment I have with a majority of their revenue exposed to Asia/China/Hong Kong I guess it’s time to write down some thoughts on what is going on in the region. The ground is moving very quickly around the Coronavirus (2019-nCov) and the attention has grown a lot over just the last few weeks. Even so I think people living in China & HK vs rest of world have very different views on the situation. I do not pretend to have the answers of what is going but I want to share my view and what I see and hear from people who I know live on the ground. In the end of the post I will go through why I’m as of Friday sold my full holding in Union Medical Healthcare.
I would like to start of by saying, that I think we are facing an extremely serious virus spread. It’s the sneaky feature of the virus that it can spread before people feel sick, which really makes this so very dangerous. Thanks to very powerful actions taken in China and elsewhere, we might just dodge a major major global health crisis.
When the contagion started a lot of people where quick to comment, and in some cases I also drew conclusions too quickly. If you followed this virus situation closely you might recognize comments such as:
All these comments have some merit, but let’s look at the one by one.
“It’s only old or with previous health issues that passes away from this.”
It’s easy to understand why such comments came in the first few weeks of the spread. Because naturally weaker individuals would perish more quickly to the virus. A stronger individual would naturally fight the virus longer, even though in the end they might lose the fight. So it is interesting to look at is how many of the identified cases have fully recovered. The count changes hour by hour, but right now there is 37,566 confirmed cases and 2,152 recovered. That is 5.7% has so far recovered, which in itself does not say anything about how many will make it through to the other side. But at least it is clear it takes a person a long time to be rid of the disease. One of the whistleblowers of the virus, Dr Li Wenliang only became 34 years old when he recently passed away due to the virus. According to reports he started coughing on January 10th, but was only a confirmed case on January 30th. It took him almost a full month from starting to cough to actually passing away from the disease. That brings us to the next statement.
“The mortality rate is only around 2%”
I’m not the first one to point this out, but I’m more or less repeating what a lot of people have been saying. You can not take the current 813 dead and divide with the confirmed cases 37,566. Yes this division gives 2.1% but is faulty on so many levels. First of all, like was described in the case of Dr Li Wenliang, who had worked with this from the start. Although he started coughing on Jan 10th, it took another 20 days before he was a confirmed case. The procedure to be tested and confirmed for Corona is not uncomplicated and there is not endless resources to perform this test on request from the public. My best guess is that the test is restricted to really sick people that show most of the symptoms already (fever, short of breath, etc). Again, same with the death figure, this is only confirmed cases that pass away in the hospital. Most likely there will be many that tried to fight through this at home and also passed away at home, never identified as a corona case, but actually was one. So both figures are probably higher. My best guess again is that the actual confirmed case figure is much much higher than the 37,566 figure we see. The death figure is probably also higher, but not by as much. The third and maybe most important factor is that even though every single case of corona infection and death was accounted for you still can’t divide one with the other, due to the timing lag. A person that got sick today, naturally will not pass away on the first day, he will still be a confirmed case though, that might pass away in a few weeks. So how long a lag should we apply? Well again nobody knows, but from the case of Dr Li Wenliang it took him almost a month to pass away, but only a week from that he was a confirmed case. China also classifies how many of the confirmed cases are severe, where one can presume that the death rate will be much higher, that stands at some 14%. Taking all these factors together, you end up with a big range of guesstimates. My own guess is that the mortality rate most likely is above 4% and hopefully not higher than 10%, if I have to say a figure, I would guess 6%. That’s a pretty big span and also a much more scary figure than 2%.
“A normal seasonal flu in the USA kills 10x as many every year as this flu, you don’t see widespread panic from that.”
Yes it might kill more, but there are a lot of factors explaining why there is not a widespread panic from such a disease. First of all, there are vaccines against seasonal flu for the ones that do feel worried. Second, as soon as we step out of bed we are facing risks to our life. As long those risks are very small we seem to be able to brush them off as nothing to worry about. The seasonal flu according to CDC data has a mortality rate of 0.05%. Since a lot of people get the flu, the number of dead will be high during a season. Another podcast I listened to described this in another way. Everyday there are many many roads accidents around the world where people die. Very seldom these accidents even make news headlines. But every-time a plane crashes from the sky and all people on the plane die, it makes news headlines all around the world. This virus has the impact of a plane crash on peoples feelings. The problem is that the virus cases are like planes that keep crashing every day and the news media keeps pumping stories.
“More people die from road accidents in China, since people now stay at home, road accidents should be down, meaning total deaths is down. What’s the big deal?”
The big deals is how people perceive this danger and the actions they take due to this fear. In the end it actually doesn’t matter, from an economical perspective, if the mortality rate is 1% or 10%. It’s the actions the population takes in fear of the disease that matters. Social media plays a big role in this. Panic and fear especially with the help of mobile phones and social media spreads like wildfire. The actions people taken is what I would like to focus on now, because in the end that is what matters.
When I started to write on this post a few days ago I felt my fellow investors in the US and Europe had not understood what is going on in China. But just over the past few days I think investors are getting input from company management and decent news reporting on what is actually going on. I felt all worked up, how could equity markets continue up when 1.4 billion people had decided to sit at home, not work and basically tend to basic needs!?
We humans are pretty easy to scare and what influences most of all, is the behavior of the people around us. People can be calm and rational about the likelihood of catching the virus, but change mindset very quickly when put with a new group of people that act more panicked about the virus spread. It’s very quick back to basics in situations like this, Maslow’s pyramid comes to mind. Nobody is any longer thinking about which Hermes bag or new car to buy, when you are fighting at the local supermarket for the last rolls of toilet paper. Maybe it sounds like a joke, but this has been the actual situation in Singapore and Hong Kong over the last few days. People are so scared that they have started to hoard goods like toilet paper, rice, cooking oil. Let’s not even talk about facial masks and hand sanitizing soaps etc. This is a highly sought after good that even if you are rich, you might not be able to source. People in Hong Kong are scarred by the SARS days and takes this extremely seriously, almost everyone is avoiding gatherings by now. People more or less mostly stay at home and most companies apply work from home. On top of that both Hong Kong and Singapore has now effectively shut their borders for Chinese coming into the country. This is obviously very bad for local business, especially for Hong Kong who has suffered tremendously already on back of the protest movement that lasted since last summer. I believe Hong Kong will see a massive wave of lay-offs very soon and with a city with very poor social security, this is going to be extremely tough on a already frustrated population. But, what happens in Hong Kong and Singapore, is still fairly irrelevant for the world economy, what matters is what is that big population in China up to.
China is a big place, so it’s always hard to generalize what is happening. As far as I have been able to gather, the mainland Chinese are either isolated and quarantined in the worst hit areas, or they are voluntarily quarantined in the sense that they barely go out-doors. Partly because they are scared of being infected, but also because they are told by their government to take this seriously and help minimize the spread of the disease. For example you are not allowed to travel on public transportation without a mask in the major cities. So due to Chinese New Year (CNY) holidays, the whole country has been shut since Friday, Jan 24th. A longer CNY break is still fairly common in a normal year, especially for factories. The situation from a work activity perspective is not that extreme compared to a normal year. It would be the services sector (which has grown big in the past years) which has operated at a minimum activity level this past week. The really crucial period will be the next two weeks. China can’t afford to have people just sitting at home another two weeks, it would just have too big economic consequences. At the same time sending everyone back to work, risks severely worsen the virus spread. There is some serious anger in the Chinese society after Dr Li Wenliang passed away, so there are even political stability angle for the Party to consider. A highly sensitive situation indeed. The largest aspect though is the psychological part, reports come in of restaurants being empty or just closed. Home food delivery which is huge now is reporting some 50% drops in deliveries, because people are afraid of contamination just from meeting the food delivery guy. A population which is that scared, will not turn around in a few weeks and buy plane tickets, or go out shopping for a new car. It’s really back to basics in China.
So my take is that the Chinese population is taking this super seriously, on a government and individual level. Since everyone is taking this so seriously I think we will see long lasting effects on the Chinese economy, with spill over effects on other economies. I see it as wishful thinking that the virus spread would disappear anytime soon, a vaccine takes too long to develop. So we are looking at the virus being around for at least a few months and during that time the Chinese will be very careful spenders. Very few will buy a car, with all the knock on effects to suppliers and sub-suppliers that implies. Very few will invest in real estate, so property prices might turn soft, which is fueling most of the private individuals wealth. Extremely few will travel. I think much of this might stay true even for a few months after the virus seems to really dropped off in new cases. So when 1.4 billion people, more than Europe and USA’s population combined suddenly tightens the belt and stop consuming, could that trigger something else? Perhaps the world has for the past few years, during a epic never before seen bull run for both equities and bonds, built up excesses and made stupid investment decisions during a low interest rate environment? With a Private Equity bubble lurking, and easy leveraged loan money available everywhere? What happens to all this when we get an external shock that significantly slows down the economic wheels? I really don’t understand why we are 1% off all time high the S&P500 when we are staring this situation right in the eye.
The Chinese consumer is today just too big of a part of the economical wheels that are spinning. As Ray Dalio so nicely explains in videos. One persons spending – is another persons income. And when the Chinese are not spending, this is going to hurt the income of a lot of people. In a worst case scenario this could trigger the end of the bull market we have seen.
I want to end on a positive note, about something which I have not seen written about anywhere. I’m convinced China will see a small mini-boom in childbirths in about 9 months time. Remember where you read it first!
In order of trickiness to handle
The companies cash cow is live streaming in China. With the whole population sitting at home with very little to do, I think this might be one of very few significant winners on this short term. I don’t really get it why the company is not trading up stronger. I have to consider if I should add to this holding.
This is the toilet paper producer which everyone is rushing to clean out the shelf’s off. The stock price has probably somewhat stupidly moved upwards due to this. I mean people are just moving consumption in time, the paper they stock piled will mean less consumption in the future. Perhaps this can have some inventory positive effects for Vinda, and the company for sure will have another monster quarter in Q1. But long-term it doesn’t change the case much, it’s also not that overvalued right now that I would take the opportunity to sell. I rather think that long term there is still upside at these levels.
Again this toy producer is a winner when China is in trouble, with most of its factories in Vietnam they will be able to run at full steam, whereas the competitors mostly have their factories in China. The company does also have a few production lines left in China, so the company is not totally unaffected. The stock price is stuck in value trap land though, eagerly awaiting my semi-annual report and let’s see what that says!
Some 50% of customers and even more of the profit for the Nagaworld casino comes from Mainland Chinese, which is still less than Macau, where that figure is over 90%. Even non Chinese customers will probably be much more hesitant to travel to Cambodia during these times. I expect Nagacorp to take a significant short term hit from this just like any business dependent on Chinese and in this case even travel. But the stock has also taken a significant beating lately. One has to weigh the short term loss of income against the strong prospects the casino has over the long term. I have taken the bet that gamblers will be back at the Casino in full swing by summer and that the stock price already discounted a bad period up until then. I might very well be wrong and the market continues to hammer Nagacorp down, my strategy will still be then to weather through it.
This was a speculative holding, which performed fantastically until the virus fears shot down the stock. Obviously this is terrible for a producer of batteries in China. They might have trouble with their factories and there will for sure be less sales/replacements of electric scooter batteries when people are not even driving their scooters. Not really sure how to do here, I think I need a bit more time if I should close this speculative position. The case is much less clear than it was a month ago, that is for sure.
I thought a lot about this holding lately. A lot of their business is built on Mainland Chinese coming to Hong Kong for different type of treatments, for health, minimal invasive procedures, etc. Lately they expanded more towards actual doctor clinics. Since the protest got violent in October, there are barely no mainlanders coming to HK and by now, with the border shut, there will be zero, for quite some time probably. On top of that due the shortage of facial mask, private clinics are even struggling to stay open. Locals population is neither for sure focusing on these type of activities now. So just like Nagacorp, UMH will most likely see a deep dive of it’s revenue and profits. I still like the founder, but this is just too much headwind for too long of a time. I have to be a bit tactical here and even if I like the company, I most likely will be able to get in cheaper in the future. I’m actually baffled that the stock is holding up so well. I have to be humble that I have misunderstood the situation and maybe the business is less dependent on mainlanders than I have understood. But I decide to sell my full holding as of Friday’s close.
This is another one of these which has got everything going against them, since the protest started. First it was the mainlanders that stopped coming during protests, which hurts the Mannings business. Then it was the protesters who got angry with the Maxim’s family, so nobody is eating at their restaurants. Then the 7-Elevens of course in general gets hit by less tourists and people moving about in the city. Now the virus. Well the only thing that finally must be flying is the supermarket business in Hong Kong. I can’t imagine a better market than these past months. People in general stay at home much more since the protests and obviously buys their goods from the supermarkets instead of going out eating. Problem is that I think the losses will be so severe in the other areas, so a great quarter or half year for the supermarket business won’t hold up the rest. In the long run this matters less, what matters is, will Hong Kong go back to normal long term and will the (not so) new CEO turn around the rest of South East Asia? This is not a high conviction position for me anymore and I need a bit more time to decide if it should perhaps leave the portfolio entirely. l have already reduced it to a very small position and the stock price is already hammered.
The investment case of YY has changed a lot since my analysis back in Feb 2017. The company has in less than 3 years morphed from a highly cash generative “China only” company, to reinvesting cash into overseas high growth (so far loss making) businesses.
As a general point, I really like companies with a core cash generating business, which is then reinvested. If reinvested wisely the company has potential to give fantastic returns to shareholders. YY previously was a deep value and potential dividend case, which attracted a certain type of investors. One issue was that they had not started to return cash, but were rather hoarding it, making the investment case less attractive. Lately they have instead attempted to invest this cash to grow new legs to the business, so far I’m very impressed and that is the main reason why I choose to re-invest into YY.
This time I won’t do a lengthy write-up of the company. A lot has been written by other investors and my old analysis gives a good background to the company. One important component to the investment case that I want to emphasize is the founder David Li. In my view a very special guy in the China tech scene. In many ways the China tech scene is more competitive than the western one. One needs to be very bold, nimble and willing to change your business significantly to survive in this type of fast changing environment. This is one of the reasons why I have always been hesitant to invest too heavily into China tech companies. Something that looks fantastic one year, might be collapsing the next year. I need to see either a significant discount or something very exceptional in the management (preferably both) to invest in China tech companies. I think David Li is the type of character who has shown again and again that he navigated these stormy waters very well. Combining David Li’s track record with a very modest valuation – and I felt compelled to again take a position in YY. Below are two links to better understand David Li’s background and how he thinks.
Interview with David Li, founder of YY: Link to Interview
Tech Buzz China is a fantastic resource to understand China tech. The latest episode about YY’s success outside of China is a good wrap-up what happened since the GGV interview: Link to Podcast episode and another episode on gaming live streaming: link
The most logical way of valuing the company is by valuing these three parts:
This is basically the business in my previous analysis from end of 2017. Live streaming of young pretty girls entertaining the audience and revenue sharing off tips from the audience. It does also contain some other parts like a dating app, which in the past was doing very well. My impression is that the growth has stalled for the dating app, given how little its talked off now compared to two years ago. All in all though, this business continues to be a cash generating machine, spitting out more than 500 million CNY per quarter in cash. The peer in this space is US listed MOMO which is trading at a forward P/E of 15. The outlook for MOMO does indeed look a bit better than YY, for example their Tantan dating app is killing it in the market from what I gather. For a conservative valuation if we use a P/E multiple of 10 for YY and assume no growth in profitability: 500m CNY per quarter * 4 * 10 = 20 bn CNY = 2.84bn USD
The gaming segment is very interesting and the largest competitor Douyu is also listed on Nasdaq . The gaming segment has shown fantastic revenue growth, but so far very little profitability. This is most likely due to the “war on market share” that has been pretty intense. The last few quarters has seen early signs of profitability. Valuation wise this is easier, Huya is listed and YY owns 45%. The question is only how large the holding discount should be. Many sell side research firms use the holding discount as a “plug”, varying the discount to change their target prices closer to the current market price. That is of course bollocks, but in my view there should be some type of discount. It’s quite common to see holding companies trading some 10-30% below their NAV. So again to be on the conservative side I set the holding discount at 20%. Huya current Market Cap: 4.6bn USD * 45% = 2.07bn USD * 80% = 1.66 bn USD
Lastly Bigo, the fast growing short video platform, which currently is still losing money. Bigo which was partially owned by YY in the past, was fully acquired by YY for 1.45bn USD, putting the total value of Bigo at 2.13bn USD. If one wants to be skeptical (which I always try to be) one could be skeptical of the purchase price. Given that David Li was both the owner of YY and separately Bigo, he was kind of transferring money from one pocket to another. So one could question if YY overpaid for Bigo? This is the tricky part of the YY investment case, what is Bigo actually worth?
What we do know is the following development over the last quarters.
2019-Q2:
Monthly Active Users:
2019-Q3:
Monthly Active Users:
As we can see user growth is just off the charts for Likee and Imo. If it wasn’t for those insane growth figures, the HAGO and BIGO growth would have been very nice figures as well. Obviously the monetization level of Likee and Imo is very very low, given the modest revenue increase. The monitization potential is also much lower, since many of these users come from poor countries like India. But like we have seen with YY core, a large part of its users are also from rural poor parts of China and then a smaller group of rich clients is driving the revenue generation. Is all about finding the right models to monetize the user base. David Li has stated that he hates advertisement, but for users from these countries this might still be the model. In the latest quarterly report YY notes: “Other revenues increased by 98.3% to RMB408.3 million (US$57.1 million) in the third quarter of 2019 from RMB205.9 million in the corresponding period of 2018, primarily driven by the increase in advertising revenues from Huya and Bigo.”
To conclude, the revenue potential from this segment is mind boggling with such a user base, it will be very interesting to see if YY manages to retain this user base or if they move on to other apps. Stickiness of users and monitization channels will be key for the value of this segment. If we take the acquisition value of Bigo (2.13bn USD) and divide it by 150 million monthly users, the value per user is some 14 USD. The world leader in short video and YYs largest competitor Bytedance (with it’s app TikTok) is valued at some 75bn USD and has 1 billion MAU. This gives a value per user of 75 USD. Again YY’s valuation does not seem exaggerated. So I will take the acquisition value of Bigo as the approximate value of this segment.
So the total value is the three parts above + net cash which is 1.5bn USD.
Value of YY: 2.84bn + 1.66bn + 2.13bn + 1.5bn = 8.13bn USD or 101 USD per ADS.
Looking at the above calculation a very conservative approach still gives significant upside to the share price. So there must be something keeping the stock price down – and probably more than one thing. The issues I can see are:
The issues listed above are not nearly big enough for keeping me away from this company. YY is founder lead company with a very competent leader. YY has now grown into a much more diversified business which reduced the risk significantly. Not all parts of YYs business has to succeed for this investment case to play out nicely, if just one area continues on the right path the current valuation is already motivated. It’s not either a pure China play anymore. Most of the companies revenue is still from China, but majority of MAUs is from outside of China. I took a 5% position of my portfolio in YY as of Friday close.
I have had a extra close eye on YY for a while now. The reason is that it had surpassed my conservative valuation in my analysis (YY Full analysis) of 56 USD. Actually I still wanted to squeeze out some more of the juice and believed we could see the stock trading up towards 70-80 USD. Especially considering how well other tech stocks are doing. But one of the concerns that I listed was a potential government crackdown on live-streaming. This is also something mainland Chinese people have warned me about when I have discussed the YY investment case. As an investor in China I have the fullest respect for what the government says and plans to do, in-fact many of my investment has China’s long term plans as a nice tailwind for the investment case.
On the 22 June a State administration announced it had requested to suspend several video portals due to lack of licenses. The largest company affected was Weibo and two others, this was not at all related to YY. Later on information came out that the number of services that had been named was larger than the initial 3. Today before opening the market realized this crackdown is more serious than initially expected. I haven’t myself managed to get to the bottom of this, just reading news articles like these ones:
SCMP – Weibo disables video uploads longer than 15 minutes, amid regulator scrutiny
Chinese authorities put the brakes on a surge in live streaming
Quite often these things just blow over, forgotten in 3 months and everything is back to normal. But sometimes it’s the real deal and nothing will be the same again. Given that I reached my target price and YY has not traded down drastically on this, I take it as an opportunity to both further reduce my China exposure and sell my holding close to my base-case target price, and a very healthy profit.
This is a follow-up on my previous post where I initiated a position in YY.com. I have already directed you (Here is the link again) to an excellent article on the whole live-streaming phenomena in China. As I stated before, I believe in this going forward both as a phenomena and YY’s revenue model of virtual gifts. I think this works especially well in China where the people aged 15-35 spend more and more of their time in front of computers/video-games/mobile phones. A lot of people are getting seriously dysfunctional in normal social interaction and feel loneliness. The need to interact is still there and these platforms become the ultimate way to relieve that frustration. On top of that we have a lot of old people, who also feel lonely, especially in China where the one child policy has created a lot of elderly which don’t have a big group of youngsters to interact with. In the case of YY, it’s also a city tier story, the people living in Tier 3 cities are very curious of the lives of people living in Tier 1 cities. Digging in to the figures the best future prospects for revenue growth comes from online-dating and educational platforms. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s move over to the company Intro.
The founder David Li has a long history in China Internet Tech. In 2003 David worked for Sohu as the IT head editor, later he join NetEase. In 2005 David start his own business duowan.com, the homepage quickly became China’s largest game information website, with over 100 million page views per day. Mr. Lei Jun, an angel investor in YY is was the CEO of Kingsoft Corporation later he founded XIAOMI technology-a smart phone company, Lei Jun is considered among China’s 10 wealthiest. David Li and Lei Jun owns both about 17.5% of the company each. In July 2008, the company launched the YY Client, a PC-based software that allows users to create individual channels for any live social gatherings. YY Client quickly gained a vast user base and emerged as one of the most popular voice communication tools. In 2010 a mobile app Mobile YY was introduced and in 2012 a web version. YY was listed on the NASDAQ in November 2012.
It should also be mentioned that David Li and Lei Jun quite recently tried to take the company private: “YY received a non-binding “going private” proposal from its Chairman Mr. Jun Lei and its CEO Mr. David Xueling Li, proposing to acquire all of the outstanding shares of YY for US$68.50 in cash per American depository share (ADS).”
To not increase my China exposure, which is at somewhat uncomfortable high, I decided that for every China exposure holding going in, another one has to go out. This means to make space for my new holding YY.com which I’m very excited about, I have to throw out one. The Chinese holding I have not yet done a full due dilligence on is Ctrip, and for no other reason than that, it is the weakest card in my portfolio. So out goes Ctrip in in comes YY.com at the same dollar values (approx 5% weight), as of today’s close.
I have been very fascinated about the whole Vlog (Video log) scene, and how big it has grown in just a few years in western countries. I find myself watching more and more quality content on YouTube, but also spending more time on “crap”. With crap I mean following some person through their daily life or just someone doing silly things online. China has managed to take this to the next level through online streaming, where hosts interact with their audience. YY.com and their competitors have implemented a very clever system in terms of how viewers pay. I’m very sure people get hooked on it, and I’m sure we are just at an initial stage of growth. What I’m less sure of is if YY.com is the right horse to bet on, but as far as I have been able to gather, they are. As I said I’m excited about this holding and I hope to find the time to write a full report on the stock this weekend.
Until then, this is a very excellent piece on the topic and I will base a lot of my post about YY on this article: Livestreaming Trend in China