Research Reports

SFUN will report 2Q16 results before the U.S. markets open on August 25, 2016 with an 8am EST conference call. We do not expect SFUN to deliver a turnaround 2Q16, but we do expect the company to reach breakeven in 4Q16 after two years of restructuring. The real estate market in China is developed unevenly as prices and volumes in major cities continue to increase while prices and volumes continue to go down in lower tier cities. Fortunately, SFUN’s business activities are concentrated around 30 top cities with the most active real estate activities. As we expect these markets to continue to do well, we maintain our Buy rating on the stock and price target of $9.00.……

VIPS will report 2Q16 results on Monday, August 15 after the market close with a conference call the next day at 8am EST. Based on our data, VIPS is likely to report its revenue better than consensus expectations, but margin may not improve as there are more promotions. However, 3Q16 guidance may be in-line with the Street as our data show that the sold-out SKU days and sold-out rates in July did not outperform compared with 2Q16.……

BABA will report F1Q17 results on Thursday, August 11 before the markets open with a conference call at 7:30am EST. We believe the company is likely to report F1Q results better than the Street consensus based on accelerating Tmall GMV growth, the consolidation of Youku’s advertising revenue and ad revenues from inventories on the Taobao and Tmall platforms. We maintain our Buy rating and raise our price target to $97.00.……

JD will report 2Q16 results on Wednesday, August 10th before the market open with a 7:30am EST conference call. We are expecting both 2Q16 revenue and 3Q16 top line guidance to be slightly below consensus expectation. In addition, we believe the company’s margin may be under pressure from the newly acquired Yihaodian, an online company in China formerly owned by Walmart. Both growth and margin issues may last for a while. As such, we downgrade the stock from BUY to HOLD and wait for signs of improvement.……

SINA will report 2Q16 results on Monday, August 8 after the market closes followed by a 9:10pm EST earnings call. We are expecting 2Q results to be at least in line with consensus driven by solid results from its core business Weibo. We believe Sina is significantly undervalued. SINA owns 54.5% of WB, which is valued at $7B. In addition, SINA has $1.4B net cash. Just adding the value of these two, SINA should be valued at $74.50 per share, a 36% upside from its current level. Also, since SINA is working to transition its portal business to verticals, we believe new risks can be low. Therefore, we maintain our Buy rating on the stock.……

Weibo will report 2Q16 results on Monday, August 8 after the market closes followed by a 9pm EST conference call. We are expecting Weibo to report 2Q revenue better than consensus driven by the growth of fans, KOLs as well as traffic.For 3Q16, we expect WB to continue its growth momentum of around 31% Y/Y in RMB terms but in absolute USD terms, the guidance may be lower than current unadjusted consensus at $163.7M due to significant currency depreciation.However, we do not believe the currency issue is new to the market.Fundamentally, we believe Weibo is well positioned to capture the rapid growth in social media enabled fans economy. Therefore, we maintain our BUY rating on the stock and raise our PT to $38.00 from $21.00.……

XRS reported strong FY1Q17 revenue results that beat consensus while the bottom line came in slightly below the Street. The FY2Q17 guidance was also solid, better than the Street expectation. For FY2017, the company is maintaining a rapid expansion plan. While the rapid growth in capacity may put pressure on margins, we believe it can be near term and the positives to both top line and margin growth can be long term. We see upside potential to FY2Q17 as well as for the full year based on our proprietary data. Therefore, we maintain our BUY rating and our PT of $68.00.……

BIDU will report 2Q16 results on Thursday, July 28 after the close of the market followed by an 8pm EST conference call. We are expecting the company to report 2Q revenue in line with its preannounced guidance of 9% - 10% Y/Y growth. 2Q16 is a bad quarter for BIDU, as 1) the death of a young cancer patient triggered the government to review BIDU’s medical and healthcare sector; and 2) the search business is now classified as advertising, in which two-thirds of BIDU’s revenue will incur another 3% tax as cost, which will impact the gross margin by 2%. After all these negatives, we believe that at least in the midterm, the negatives and uncertainties are in the stock and BIDU will still be a dominant vendor in online search before mobile search replaces PC. Therefore, we maintain our BUY rat……

AOS will report 2Q16 results on Tuesday, July 26 before the market opens. According to our data tracked from the largest e-commerce channels in China,Tmall.com and JD.com, we project AO Smith’s China sales to grow about 13% Y/Y in USD term after taking into consideration the unfavorable impact of currency depreciation of about 7%. If all our modeling assumptions are right, and based on our data, we believe AOS total sales may just be inline with consensus at 6% Y/Y decline.……

XRS will report FY1Q17 results before the market opens on Tuesday, July 26, 2016with an 8:00AM EST conference call. Based on our proprietary data, we believeXRS’s FY1Q17 results are likely to outperform consensus expectation driven bystrong growth in total course offered and course attendees offset by the decline inASP. The growth in attendees, we believe, is mainly driven by the growth in itscapacity. As the capacity continues to increase, we also believe that the companyis likely to have high growth in fiscal year 2017. Therefore, we maintain our BUYrating and raise our PT to $68.00 from $48.00.……

MJN will report 2Q16 results on Thursday, July 28 before the market opens.According to our online sales data tracked from China e-commerce sites (Figure 1),we project China/Hong Kong sales of Mead Johnson to be stable or slightly downsequentially in 2Q16 in USD term after considering unfavorable currencydepriciation at about 7%. If we adopt what we believe is the most reasonable ratiosof online sales to total sales in China, China to Asia, and Asia to total MJN, webelieve the company is likely to report 2Q16 total revenue better than consensus at6.6% Y/Y decline.……

EDU reported strong FY4Q16 top line results of 20.1% Y/Y, which beat consensusexpectation, and EPS came in a penny below the Street after about 7% RMBdepreciation. For FY1Q17, the company guided revenue in USD terms belowconsensus due to the RMB depreciation. While FY1Q17 is a weak quarter, it is themost important quarter for the full year growth; therefore the company isaggressively doing promotions to recruit new students, which has already resultedin about 200K enrollments from the summer classes. From last year’s experience,we believe the promotion can benefit the rest of the year with a high retention rateof about 50%. As we believe EDU’s fundamentals and outlook are strong, wereiterate our Buy rating and raise our price target to $52.00.……

EDU will report FY4Q16 results on Wednesday, July 20th before the markets openwith an 8am EST conference call. Based on our proprietary data, we expect EDU toreport FY4Q16 results better than consensus driven by the increase in utilization ofboth courses and attendees. For the bottom line, we are expecting better marginsas a result of less new school openings and higher tuition per student per course.For FY1Q17, the company is offering low rate courses aggressively. While it maypressure FY1Q17’s financial performance, it is an effective way of recruitingstudents for the entire year. As we believe EDU’s fundamentals and outlook arestrong, we maintain our Buy rating. We are suspending our price target of $34.00and will revisit the PT after earnings.……

2Q16 results may be better than consensus – eBay will release 2Q16 resultson Wednesday, July 20th after the markets close followed by a 5pm ESTconference call. According to our proprietary data, we expect eBay’s 2Q16 resultsto come in higher than consensus expectation at 2.97% Y/Y growth.……

2Q16 is likely to come in below consensus expectation – According to ourproprietary data, Lending Club’s loan originations are likely to decline 20.1% Y/Yand 44.4% Q/Q to about $1,528M (Figure 1), along with the decline of loanorigination volume. The decline in loan origination amount is below the companyexpectation of one-third Q/Q decline. As such, the Street expects its 2Q16 toplineto decline 27.3% Q/Q or $110.65M, which we believe could be too optimistic.However, after the low during the week of May 30 to June 5, 2016, our data showsthat the situation has been improving since then (Figure 2), but the improvement isslow.……

Apple’s F3Q16 may be weaker – While Apple’s online sales in China are stillgrowing, our proprietary data suggest that its total Greater China sales is likely tobe weaker than consensus expectation in FY3Q16. We use two sets of data tomake our projections of Apple’s Greater China sales:……

WUBA will report 1Q16results on Thursday, June 2 before the markets open with an 8am EST conferencecall. Our proprietary data suggests that WUBA is likely to report 1Q16 resultsbetter than the Street expectation due to the increase in both membership andbidding businesses. More importantly, we believe WUBA is likely to improve its non-GAAPoperating margin in 2016 compared with 2015, due to the deconsolidation ofGuazi and 58 Home. We initiate the coverage of WUBA with a BUY rating and pricetarget at $61.00……

VIPS is going to report its 1Q16 results on Tuesday, May 17, 2016 after market close and will hold a conference call on Wednesday, May 18, 2016 at 8:00 am. Based on our proprietarydata and calculations, we believe VIPS is likely to report 1Q16 revenue resultat about 44% - 48% Y/Y better than consensus expectation at 43% Y/Y growth.……