Net profit returned to mother gradually recovered in 2023, and the long-term development trend is improving
In 2023, the company's revenue was 7.855 billion yuan (YoY: 9.24%); net profit attributable to mother was 388 million yuan (YOY: 144.09%). Looking at a single quarter, 4Q23's revenue was 1.922 billion yuan (YoY:
11.81%); Net profit attributable to mother was $34 million (YOY: 102.61%). The company continues to consolidate data center resource reserves in the core region, and is expected to benefit from the development of new applications such as AIGC, and the long-term development trend is improving. Considering the slowdown in customer listings, we expect the company's EBITDA for 24-26 to be 16.96/19.32/2180 billion yuan (previous value: 19.87/2.80 billion yuan). Considering the company's forward-looking layout and development potential in the field of intelligent computing, give it a 24-year EV/EBITDA of 13.0x (comparable company average:
11.69x), corresponding to the target price of 12.10 yuan, maintaining the “gain” rating.
IDC's revenue remained steady. Planning the overseas data center business layout In 2023, the company's IDC and its value-added service business achieved revenue of 2,221 billion yuan, an increase of 6.28% over the previous year. The company continued to advance data center construction and resource delivery progress in various regions, and the overall operation of IDC's business remained steady. In terms of project reserves, the company's Fangshan data center has been delivered to customers one after another in accordance with the established plan. The shelf rate of production cabinets has steadily increased, the Hebei Yanjiao project has gradually been put into operation, and the Tianjin Baodi Data Center has completed all civil construction in January 2024. By the end of 2023, the company has put into production 52,000 cabinets, and all data center projects nationwide will have an operating scale of more than 110,000 cabinets after delivery. In addition, the company plans to jointly invest in the construction of an intelligent computing/cloud computing base project in Florida, Malaysia. The overall project load is 45MW, which will help further improve the company's business layout.
The cloud computing business maintained steady growth, expanding the high-performance computing power service business. In 2023, the company's cloud computing and related services achieved revenue of 5.544 billion yuan, an increase of 10.56% over the previous year. Among them, the subsidiary Wushuang Technology actively adjusted its customer structure and revenue rebounded steadily; the subsidiary Guang Huan Cloud actively empowered the digital transformation of customers based on Amazon Cloud service products and hybrid cloud resources. Furthermore, in line with the development trend of the AIGC era, the company made full use of existing network resources, data center resources and cloud computing resources to deploy computing power services. In August 2023, the company officially launched high-performance computing power services to industry customers using its own data center resources in the Yizhuang region. In March 2024, the company deployed computing power resources for inference scenarios that customers can use. Up to now, the company's computing power center has about 600P computing power.
Maintain an “increase in holdings” rating
We believe that as the company continues to expand IDC's resource reserves and expand its intelligent computing business, its long-term performance foundation is expected to be further consolidated. Considering the slowdown in customer listings, it is estimated that the 24-26 EBITDA will be 16.96/19.32/2180 billion yuan (previous value: 19.87/2.80 billion yuan). The average EV/EBITDA value of comparable companies in 2024 was 11.69x. Considering the company's forward-looking layout and development potential in the field of intelligent computing, it was given a 24-year EV/EBITDA 13.0x, corresponding to a target price of 12.10 yuan, maintaining an “gain” rating.
Risk warning: Customer listing progress falls short of expectations; project construction and delivery progress falls short of expectations.