Incident: The company announced its 2023 performance forecast. It is expected to achieve net profit of 2.08-265 million yuan for the whole year, an increase of 2.4%-30.5% over the previous year; achieve net profit without deduction of 15.3-210 million yuan, year-on-year (-9.8%) - (+23.75%).
Industrial data services are improving steadily. The company implemented the development strategy of rapid expansion of industrial data services. In 2023, industrial data services achieved revenue of about 801 million yuan, an increase of about 16% over the same period last year. The company has strengthened data service quality management, covering all management and operation aspects of commodity information data service platforms, and service quality and capabilities have improved markedly. The company continuously optimizes the EBC platform, provides enterprises with tailor-made digital transformation solutions, and provides users with high-quality data capabilities. In December 2023, the company released the “Steel Master” model, the first vertical model for the commodity industry, and developed the commodity industry's first vertical large-scale model application “Xiaogang” intelligent assistant based on this model. It has functions such as price data query, industry encyclopedia, information collation, report interpretation, analysis and prediction, etc., to help users obtain data information more efficiently.
The transaction settlement volume of steel and silver e-commerce platforms is growing rapidly. In 2023, the settlement volume of the company's steel and silver e-commerce platform was about 63.6 million tons, an increase of about 20% over the previous year. The company continues to improve system risk control capabilities, optimize product structures, give full play to the platform's core enterprise links and service capabilities, use next-generation information technology such as big data and cloud computing to empower the upstream and downstream industries, accelerate industrial data connectivity and digital upgrading, and help build a transparent, efficient and collaborative supply chain system.
It is expected that it will continue to benefit from the data asset listing policy. In August 2023, the Ministry of Finance issued the “Interim Provisions on Accounting Processing Related to Enterprise Data Resources”, which stipulate the presentation and disclosure of enterprise data assets on accounting statements, and will be implemented on January 1, 2024. As one of the leading service providers in the field of commodity data services, the company has been deeply involved in commodity data fields such as steel, petrochemicals, agriculture, and non-ferrous metals for many years. At the same time, it also has a 100-billion-level e-commerce platform for steel and silver, and has accumulated a large amount of data resources in daily operations. We believe that with the implementation of the 2024 data asset listing policy, the data resources owned by the company will be added to the table one after another after a thorough evaluation, which is expected to directly increase the company's assets and profits.
According to the 23-year performance forecast, the company's revenue for 23 was slightly raised, the operating income for 24-25 was lowered, the gross profit margin of various businesses was adjusted, and the cost forecast was lowered. We forecast earnings per share for 23-25 of $0.70/0.87/1.01 (previously $0.73/0.97/1.25). Referring to a comparable company's price-earnings ratio of 39 times in 24 years, the corresponding target price is 33.93 yuan, maintaining an increase in holdings rating.
Risk warning
Policy implementation falls short of expectations; increased risk of market competition; risk of fluctuations in the steel industry; risk of credit management; risk at the valuation level