Zhongtong Finance APP learned that Cinda Securities released a research report stating that it maintained a "buy" rating on Chalk (02469), and the profit forecast for the adjusted net income from 2024 to 2026 of 0.608/0.806/1.003 billion yuan remained unchanged, highlighting its investment value. From the perspective of capital, the recent fluctuations in the company's stock price may be due to the surge in short-selling, while the company has been actively repurchasing shares, demonstrating confidence in its operations. From a fundamental perspective, although changes in the time of the written examination for civil service unit exams in the first half of the year may affect the revenue of the entire industry's civil service unit training, the company still has its own alpha and is expected to deliver excellent profit performance.

The report stated that the company began repurchasing shares in the open market on May 28th. As of July 3rd, it had repurchased 39.5 million shares, with a repurchase amount of 0.168 billion yuan. The bank observed that the volume of short selling transactions in the company has been significantly high since May 22nd. Among 29 trading days, the number of shares sold short/volume exceeded 30% for 18 trading days and was between 20% and 30% for 8 trading days. Moreover, the short-selling volume is not significantly correlated with the stock price on the same day, which may be one of the important reasons for the recent fluctuations in the company's stock price.

The bank stated that recruiting and training is a very high-quality track for current consumption, and the enthusiasm for civil service exams remains high (the CAGR of the number of applicants for national exams from 2021 to 2024 is 24%, and the CAGR of provincial exams is 8%). From the perspective of the industry, there were some special circumstances in the first half of this year: the time of the written examination for civil service unit exams was moved up from May in previous years to March 30th. According to our statistics, a total of 20 provinces/regions participated. The time of this year's civil service provincial exam and joint exam was scheduled for March 16th-17th, with a total of 24 provinces participating. The examination times for the two examinations were very close in 18 provinces/regions, which we estimate may affect the revenue of the entire industry's civil service unit training. From the company's own perspective, the promotion of OMO small classes, the empowerment of AI answer and teaching research, is expected to improve operational efficiency and bring about an increase in profit margins, thereby achieving excellent performance in earnings.