occurrences

The company announced its 2024 quarterly report. In Q1 2024, revenue was 34.21 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 0.4%; net profit to mother was 1.08 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 25.8%; and core profit to mother was 1.08 billion yuan, a decrease of 12.85% year-on-year.

Domestic sales of gas traded on the platform maintained relatively rapid growth

As international natural gas prices gradually returned to a normal range, domestic LNG imports reached 1.78 million tons in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 20.4% over the previous year.

The company actively grasps the opportunity for upstream prices to fall and expand the scale of the platform's trading momentum. In terms of gas sales, in the first quarter of 2024, the company's platform traded gas sales volume of 1,213 billion square meters, an increase of 33.6% over the previous year.

China's domestic gas volume increased 95.5% year over year to 833 million square meters, and international gas volume decreased 21.2% year over year to 380 million square meters. In terms of customer types, about 43% of domestic gas customers traded on the company's platform are urban gas customers, and about 45% are energy groups and large industrial users, meeting the different needs of customers through flexible and diverse strategies.

Retail gas sales have recovered steadily

In terms of gas sales, in the first quarter of 2024, the country's apparent natural gas consumption was 109 billion square meters, an increase of 11.8% over the previous year. The company's retail gas volume in the first quarter of 2024 was 7.237 billion square meters, up 2.7% year on year. Among them, industrial and commercial energy increased 2.9% year on year to 5.224 billion square meters; people's livelihood increased 2.5% year on year to 1,947 billion square meters.

In terms of price differences, the favorable price policy continues to advance: Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu and other regions have issued natural gas price linkage mechanism documents or price adjustment notices. The retail gas sales spread is expected to continue to improve.

The focus of development is on the domestic market. Clear dividend guidelines highlight the narrowing of the difference between the basic core profit and core profit of the investment value company from 330 million yuan in the first quarter of 2023 to 08 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2024, indicating that the overseas non-basic business scale of the Hong Kong stock company Xinao Energy is gradually shrinking, and the 2024 will focus on expanding domestic business.

In terms of dividends, the company will pay special dividends on some of the net proceeds from the sale of Xinneng Mining and compounding the annual increase in cash dividends per share. The company's cash dividends (including tax) are expected to reach 1.03 yuan and 1.14 yuan per share from 2024 to 2025, respectively. As of the close of April 30, 2024, the dividend rates corresponding to dividends per share for '24 and '25 were 5.7% and 6.3%, respectively.

Profit forecasting and valuation

The company is expected to achieve net profit of 66.8/76.4/8.48 billion yuan in 2024-2026, corresponding PE of 8.6/7.6/6.8x respectively, maintaining a “buy” rating.

Risk warning: Risks such as fluctuations in international gas prices exceeding expectations, falling short of expectations in domestic favorable price policies, falling short of expectations in downstream demand recovery, and insufficient downstream customer expansion of the platform trading gas business