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彩生活(1778.HK):估值落后的行业龙头

銀河國際 ·  Mar 29, 2019 00:00  · Researches

The 2018 results were in line with our expectations, and earnings per share increased 18% year over year to RMB 0.37. We believe that integrating Vientiane Beauty (Wanda Property Management) will continue to be a key driver, as Vientiane Beauty will lead the company into high-margin areas. We expect its core business to continue to grow moderately. Unlocking further room for profit growth in the short term will depend on how quickly debt is reduced. Maintaining the “Buy” rating, the target price was raised to HK$6.55, based on 12.5 times the 2019 price-earnings ratio. Despite the fact that earnings per share were diluted after the acquisition, earnings in 2018 were still strong. Lottery Life acquired Vientiane Beauty through a combination of issuing bonds and additional shares. The deal significantly boosted the company's earnings. If gross profit were used to evaluate the company's performance, it would be fair, because this would avoid problems derived from different accounting treatments; gross profit increased 76% year over year to RMB 1,282 billion during the period. Profit attributable to shareholders increased 51% year over year to RMB 485 million. Earnings per share increased only 18% year over year to RMB 0.379 due to increased issuance. Lottery Life recommends a dividend of HK$0.18 per share, which is equivalent to a 42% dividend ratio. The acquisition of Vientiane Mei boosted its core management business in 2018. As Color Life acquired Vientiane Mei, one of the largest property management companies in China, the company took over a fairly large area of management. The contract area and revenue-generating management area increased by about 27% year-on-year to 554 million/352 million square meters, respectively. Since Vientiane Beauty is a high-end property management company with a large number of high-profit businesses, the overall gross profit of the property management business recorded strong growth in 2018 (84% year-on-year increase). Value-added services continued to perform strongly through exports in 2019. At the same time, as Color Life continued to improve its Caizhiyun app and export it to the outside world, the gross profit of the “Value-added Services” segment increased 96% year-on-year to RMB 391 million. This is reflected in the increase in the number of registered and active users of the app, which increased by 155%/298% year over year to 26 million/14 million, respectively. As more and more small property management companies use the platform developed by Color Life, we expect the number of users to continue to grow strongly in 2019/20. However, we are conservative in predicting profit margins, because in order to increase the number of users, the company tends to generously promote by reimbursing management fees. Without mergers and acquisitions, the management area increased or was relatively moderate in 2019. In addition to mergers and acquisitions, the company also acquired minority shares in some small companies to export their platforms and apps as its growth engine. We expect this to continue, but we don't expect the company to make major acquisitions anytime soon. Therefore, we believe that the management's guidelines for increasing the area under management by 40 to 50 million square meters in 2019 are reasonable, but this only means that the increase in the area under management in 2019 is a high number of units. Looking at the valuation, the company still lags behind. Our latest earnings per share forecast for 19/20 was RMB 0.45/RMB 0.55, respectively, which meant a year-on-year increase of 20%/21%. We expect Lottery Life's net debt ratio to fall from 30% in '18 to 16% in '19, but financing costs will still be high in 2019, reaching RMB 243 million, accounting for 16% of its gross profit. Debt issues may continue to constitute the company due to uncertainty, but we think this concern is largely reflected in its low valuation compared to its peers. As a result, we are maintaining our 2019 target price-earnings ratio of 12.5 times. We have raised our latest price target to HK$6.55. We believe that the company is a value stock in the industry and maintains “purchases.”

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