When facing thousands of listed company announcements every day, which ones should you read? What are the key points to take away from the dozens or hundreds of pages of material announcements? Are the many professional terms in the announcements bullish or bearish? Check out Caixin's "Quick Read Announcement" column, where our reporters across the country will provide you with accurate, fast and professional interpretations on the night of the announcement.

Caixin report on October 24th (Reporter Luo Yichen): Refrigerant prices are rising steadily, but leading manufacturers' performance has not increased quarterly. In the third quarter of this year, zhejiang juhua (600160.SH) achieved a net income attributable to the parent of 0.423 billion yuan, a significant year-on-year increase, but a nearly 20% decline from the previous quarter. Many investors commented that this performance was below expectations.

Tonight, zhejiang juhua released its third-quarter report, reporting a company revenue of 17.906 billion yuan for the reporting period, an 11.83% year-on-year increase; net income attributable to the parent company was 1.258 billion yuan, a 68.40% year-on-year increase. Looking at the quarters, the company's performance increased quarter by quarter in the first half of the year, but the situation changed in the third quarter. The single quarterly revenue was only 5.826 billion yuan, slightly down year-on-year, net income attributable to the parent company was 0.423 billion yuan, a significant gap from Q2's 0.524 billion yuan.

Previously, brokerage institutions had been very optimistic about zhejiang juhua's full-year performance expectations, considering the hot refrigerant market, expecting the company's net income growth rate to exceed 150% this year. However, judging from the performance in the first three quarters alone, achieving the aforementioned expectations appears to be quite challenging.

Regarding the Q3 performance, the company admitted in the announcement: Structural contradictions in the product market are prominent. Specifically, in addition to the strong prices of some products such as refrigerants, the market trends of fluoropolymer materials, food packaging materials, and basic chemical products continued to follow the previous year's "strong supply and weak demand" trend, with significant price declines compared to the previous year, to some extent dragging down overall performance.

Caixin reporters noted that zhejiang juhua's product structure issue had already been reflected in the semi-annual report. In the first half of the year, the company's performance growth momentum was not as good as that of its peer zhejiang sanmei chemical industry (603379.SH). The latter's relatively simple product structure showed significantly better performance elasticity in this round of the refrigerant bull market.

In addition, zhejiang juhua stated that Q3 is the traditional off-season for fluorine refrigerants, with quarterly sales volume declining compared to the previous quarter, which also had an adverse impact on performance. Their business data shows that in Q3 this year, the export volume of refrigerants did decrease compared to Q2 by around 10%, but considering that several refrigerant varieties had publicly increased market quotes during this period, there were speculations that price hikes could offset the negative impact of the off-season. Actually, due to the diverse product structure, zhejiang juhua's quarterly profit performance over the years did not show a very clear distinction between off-season and peak season.

For the fourth quarter, zhejiang juhua stated that with the start of the new cooling season, the company's fluorinated refrigerant market maintains a good recovery trend, while prices of other main products are generally stable. Although the listed company is optimistic about the outlook, according to data from Longzhong News, since October, the refrigerant market has not shown a significant rise in temperature, with traders replenishing cautiously according to demand and the behavior of hoarding goods on a large scale currently accounts for a small proportion. Currently, prices of popular refrigerant varieties such as R32 remain strong, with further room for price increases, but the industry is also concerned that manufacturers may lower prices to speed up year-end collections, leading to a cautious approach to purchases in the future.