Mad Hedge Technology Letter
September 30, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(CHINESE TECH GLITTERS IN THE SHORT-TERM)
(BABA), (JD), (PDD), (BIDU)
Posts
The bazookas have been unloaded, and the results are big.
The aftermath is reverberating through the rest of the world’s equity markets.
The Chinese economy is in the dumps and the Chinese communist party is using every tool in the proverbial toolkit to pull them out of their slump.
Juxtapose that in the face of a demographic time bomb and we could say that it is in the nick of time.
Now that we have decades of data on the issue, the Chinese economy has major structural issues and instead of fixing it, they are throwing liquidity at it.
Chinese purchasing power is about to drop through the toilet pipes, but I believe bellwether stocks like Alibaba (BABA), JD.com (JD), Pinduoduo (PDD), and Baidu (BIDU) will perform quite well.
China is all about ecommerce at the retail level anyway and Alibaba will be able to reverse a years-long slump on the back of Beijing’s sweeping stimulus measures.
Flooding the system with liquidity will paper over the cracks and should get consumers out and about instead of eating instant noodles in their little apartments.
Retail is now moving in the right direction again.
Although, long term this does nothing to address the major structural issues in the system, the short-term transfusion should help putting money in consumer’s pockets and liquidity on Chinese corporates will outperform.
Market-support measures initiated by the People’s Bank of China included mortgage rate cuts and an unprecedented $114 billion stock-buying facility.
The renewed positive market sentiment for Alibaba reflects its resilience after struggling in recent years, owing to Beijing’s 32-month crackdown on Big Tech firms and the mainland’s shaky post-pandemic economic recovery.
BABA lost nearly half their value over the past five years.
China’s largest operator of online shopping platforms and a major domestic artificial intelligence (AI) technology player, Alibaba recently won praise from the State Administration for Market Regulation for complying with rectification measures, ending more than three years of regulatory scrutiny that has hung over the company’s operations.
Alibaba’s cloud computing services unit last week announced at an event in Hangzhou the release of more than 100 large language models – the deep-learning technology underpinning generative AI applications like ChatGPT – to the global open-source community and a new text-to-video model, as the company showed its rapid progress in this field.
Earlier this month, Alibaba founder Jack Ma called on employees of the business empire he created 25 years ago to “believe in the future” and “believe in the market” amid stiff competition.
The Chinese Communist Party and their heavy handed approach has a lot to do with many tech companies fizzling out.
It is impossible to really kick start growth when they are suppressing it.
However, now is the time when the government has realized they are overdoing it and have unleashed the animal spirits.
Ultimately, the Chiense government is the arbiter of who gets to do business and how well in China.
In the short-term, Chinese tech stocks will outperform American tech stocks.
Chinese tech stocks are cheap by almost every metric – buy the dip in Chinese tech.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
February 7, 2024
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(IS BABA WORTH A TRADE?)
(BABA), (PDD)
Remember when Chinese tech was supposed to topple Silicon Valley?
That was just a few years ago and it is mind-boggling how the situation has had a sudden about-face.
Chinese tech has been left twisting in the wind of mediocrity while American tech has forged through and seized the opportunity to become the best tech industry on the planet.
Some of the weaknesses are quite glaring and the most obvious one comes in the form of Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba’s 75% nosedive from a 2020 record high.
The crash has flattened its valuation to an all-time low and put its market capitalization on a par with upstart rival PDD Holdings (PDD).
Alibaba’s revenue for the three months through December only rose 5.6% from a year ago, the slowest growth in three quarters amid difficult economic conditions and steep discounting.
Forward earnings estimates for the company have fallen about 4% over the past month.
China’s online retail market is saturated and the backdrop is getting worse.
Alibaba and JD.com are the old men in the nightclub club while fresh faces like Douyin Mall, run by TikTok owner ByteDance are chomping at the bit.
At the same time, persistent deflationary pressure and declining wages have driven a price war that is being won by discounters like Pinduoduo, the local equivalent of PDD’s Temu.
Alibaba is forecasted to cede market share as they face fierce competition from rivals like Douyin and PDD.
Another focus would be whether they are able to import new drivers to maintain their overall growth.
Alibaba spent $9.5 billion on share buybacks last year, a record high.
Revamp efforts led by the company’s new management include scaling down non-core business while stepping up investment in global expansion and artificial intelligence.
It’s focusing on improving core operations, including moving resources from its Tmall site to Taobao in order to better meet demand for cheaper products, though it may take time to see results.
This focus on lower prices will lead to weaker revenue growth, which is certainly negative to near-term sentiment and share price. The company’s core business growth will likely “remain lackluster in the next four quarters.
With many things in China, this is a race to the bottom and BABA is getting a proper taste of that Chinese medicine.
Lower prices are met with even lower prices and it becomes a war of attrition.
Investors don’t like to hear that.
In the most recent earnings report, net profit declined by 77%.
Overall sales growth last quarter rose by just 3%.
This company used to be a supercharged growth company and in just a few years, they have almost been swept into the dustbin of history.
BABA stock is down today over 5% from the poor earnings report as the stage is set for BABA to hardly grow at all in the foreseeable future.
Many from Gen Z have remarked how discount e-tailers like PDD’s Temu have flooded American social media platforms with ads.
This trend has resulted in negative impacts to BABA’s staying power in e-commerce and the profit margins are in the firing line as we speak.
At $73 per share, the stock might be in for a dead cat bounce for a trade.
Long term, the stock has lost its luster and lost its mojo.
BABA shouldn’t be touched with a 10-foot pole as the entire Chinese economy goes through the motion of a slowly forming zombie corporate structure.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
June 21, 2023
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(IS ALIBABA INVESTABLE?)
(BABA), (BIDU), (PDD)
Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba (BABA) is essentially a proxy for the Chinese economy and that’s not a good thing lately.
The last few years have been poor.
Single digit growth for the nations’ best tech company is not going to cut it for a prototypical growth company, but it’s not all their fault.
The company has been mired in chaos amid a faltering economy.
At a national level, China is quickly turning into the next Japan with a rapidly aging workforce, a mountain of debt, and youth unemployment going through the roof.
Throw in a dollop of geopolitical strife against the biggest economy in the world and this cocktail of lethal variables has meant that its top ecommerce company is stinking up the park.
It was just 10-15 years ago when China was the place to be flourishing during a golden era of prosperity and opportunity.
Now this paper tiger, its ghost cities, and social credit system are defensive as ever with its siege mentality after the self-induced Wuhan incident. The incident literally went viral in 2020 which lead to mass lockdowns and robot dogs barking orders.
This isn’t necessarily the best backdrop for tech firms to flourish.
In a desperate way to restart growth BABA has now gone back to the well like calling for Michael Jordan to unretire for the 3rd or 4th time.
Funnily enough, they are calling on the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai to save the company.
Tsai understands the business intimately: he was right beside Ma at Alibaba’s inception in a Hangzhou lakeside apartment in 1999.
Another former friend is also called on to save the company – Eddie Wu, current chair of the Taobao and Tmall Group which is the name of BABA’s digital platform.
The former computer science major is credited with helping develop the company’s ad platform and the PayPal-like Alipay, now part of the Ma-backed Ant Group Co.
The company never regained its stratospheric growth, particularly as new entrants such as ByteDance and Pinduoduo (PDD). sapped its core business. It began to lose market share in the cloud, its other engine of growth, to state-backed rivals.
Long-time BABA rival Baidu Inc. — once dismissed by investors as having missed the mobile revolution — introduced China’s first ChatGPT-like AI service Ernie to positive reviews, highlighting how Alibaba and its peers may be falling behind in next-generation technology.
Beyond technology, much of the market has fixated on the imminent restructuring, and its potential to unleash a half-dozen publicly traded companies, starting with more mature units like the cloud and logistics.
In Baidu’s wake, Alibaba unfurled its own large language model dubbed Tongyi Qianwen. That might be key to ensuring the company name endures 102 years, as co-founder Ma once famously and repeatedly declared was his over-arching ambition.
BABA has told us they are rolling out their new generative AI apps but the Chinese communist party has flagged as something that must go through them.
Technology intersected by authoritarianism usually ends up a failure.
Creative juices aren’t flowing and the dynamism saps the creativity juices.
I highly doubt that Chinese generative AI can hold a candle to the Silicon Valley iteration.
Nothing they have rolled out signals they are ahead of Microsoft or Google.
If readers want to get into the future of tech through stocks, avoid China and focus on the best of breed.
Mad Hedge Technology Letter
January 15, 2019
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(THE BALKANIZATION OF THE INTERNET),
(AAPL), (FB), (CTRP), (PDD), (BABA), (JD), (TME)
The Mad Hedge Technology Letter has a front-line seat to the carnage wrought by the balkanization of technology that is swiftly descending across all corners of the tech universe.
In technology terms, this is frequently referred to as “splinternet.”
A quick explanation for the novices can be summed up by saying splinternet is the fragmenting of the Internet causing it to divide due to powerful forces such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and interests.
The rapid rise of global splinternet news stories will have an immediate ramification on your tech portfolio and it’s my job to untangle the knots.
What investors are seeing is the bifurcation of the global tech game into a binary world of Chinese and American tech.
Most recently, Central European country Poland, who was thought to be siding with the Chinese because of the growing presence by large-cap Chinese tech in Warsaw, announced government security had arrested a Huawei employee, Chinese national Wang Weijing, for allegedly spying on behalf of the Chinese state.
For all the naysayers that believe the administration’s hope of curtailing the theft of western technology was a bogus endeavor, this recent event buttresses the notion that Chinese state-funded tech companies are truly running nefariously throughout the world.
In fact, Poland has little to gain from this maneuver if you take the current status quo as your guidebook, and I would argue it is a net negative for Poland because Chinese tech is deeply embedded inside of the Poland tech structure bestowing profits and internet capabilities on multiple parties.
Making the case stronger against China, Poland has no flagship tech communications company that would serve as competition to the Chinese or could directly gain from this breach of trust.
The fringe of the Eurozone Central European nations and Eastern European countries bordering Russia running developing economies rely on Huawei and other low-cost Chinese tech suppliers like ZTE to offer value for money for a populace who cannot afford $1000 Apple (AAPL) iPhones and exorbitant western European telecommunications infrastructure equipment.
The Chinese beelining to this burgeoning area in Europe has given these less developed countries high-speed broadband internet for $10-$15 per month and 4G mobile service for $7 per month, a smidgeon of what westerners fork out for the same monthly service.
Poland rebuffing Huawei is an ominous sign for Chinese tech doing business in the Czech Republic and Hungary as European countries are moving towards denying Huawei in unison.
The last few years saw China create the same recipe of success for fueling economic expansion mimicking the American economy.
The tech sector led the way with outsized gains boosting productivity while analog companies transformed into digital companies to take advantage of the efficiencies high-tech provides.
At the same time, Beijing has initiated a muscular response to the accelerated growth of local tech companies.
The foul play of American tech in Europe has given impetus to Beijing to launch a power grab on local tech structures such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.
This couldn’t be more evident at Tencent who has failed to secure any new gaming licenses for their best gaming titles.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), a battle royale multiplayer, has been deprived of massive revenue because of Tencent’s inability to win a proper gaming license from the Chinese authorities to sell in-game add-ons.
In total, lost revenue has already cost Chinese video game companies over $2 billion in revenue since May 2017.
Beijing wants to temper the growing clout of private tech companies who were the recipient of the Chinese consumer’s gorge on technology in the last 20 years.
These companies have never been more infiltrated by the communist party and this can be mainly attributed to the acknowledgment by Beijing that Chinese tech companies are too powerful for their own good now and are a legitimate threat to the powers above.
That is what the sudden retirement of Founder of Alibaba Jack Ma told us who infuriated Chairman Xi because Ma was the first Chinese of note to meet American President Donald Trump at Trump Towers pledging to create a million jobs in America.
Ma later rescinded that statement and was put out to pasture by Beijing.
What does this all mean?
As the broad-based balkanization spreads like wildfire, Chinese and American tech companies’ addressable markets will shrink hamstringing the drive to accelerate revenue.
The potential loss of Europe for the Chinese could give way to Nokia, Siemens, and other western telecommunication companies to move in hijacking a bright spot for Huawei.
If Apple isn’t punching above their weight in China, well that almost certainly means that local tech companies aren’t having a cake walk in the park as well.
The winter sell-off turned the screws on tech first and then the rest of equities obediently, Chinese tech could have a similar domino effect to the Chinese economy boding badly for Chinese ADRs listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Last year, the Shanghai index was one of the worst performing stock markets in the world.
And if the trade wars are really ravaging a few key limbs from local Chinese tech firms, then companies exposed to the Chinese consumer such as Alibaba (BABA), JD.com (JD), Pinduoduo (PDD), Ctrip.com International (CTRP) and Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) could fall off a cliff.
This has already been in the works.
These companies are a good barometer of the health of the Chinese consumer and have had an abysmal last six months of price action.
The vicious cycle will repeat itself with worsening Chinese data drying up the demand for Chinese tech services and the Chinese consumer tightening their purse strings as they try to save money from a cratering economy.
It could become a self-fulfilling prophecy and that is what other indicators such as negative automobile sales and a rapidly failing real estate market are telling us.
The 65 million ghost apartments dotted around China don't help.
This could be the perfect opportunity to instigate wide-ranging reforms to open up the financial, insurance, a tech market to the west, something many analysts thought China would do after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO).
However, Beijing’s retrenchment preferring to pedal mercantilism and cold-blooded power grabs could offer Chairman Xi the prospect of further consolidating his authority by sticking his fingers deeper into the local tech structures giving the state even more control.
I would guess this is a false dawn.
American tech will confront balkanization headwinds of its own evidence in Vietnam as the government blamed Zuckerberg’s Facebook (FB) for failing to root out anti-government rhetoric which is illegal in the communist-based country.
If you haven’t figured it out yet – there is an underlying suitability issue with western tech services that tie up with authoritarian governments.
It many times leads the western tech companies to be a pawn in a political game that later turns into a bloody mess.
The weak rule of law has spawned a convenient practice of blaming western tech to distract from internal disputes strengthening the nationalist case of a purported western tech firm gone rogue.
This could lead Facebook to be removed in Vietnam, and the $238 million in ad revenue that will vanish.
Headaches are sprouting up across Europe with Facebook clashing with more stringent data privacy rules through General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
German’s largest national Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag claimed from sources that the Federal Cartel Office will summon Facebook to halt collecting some user data.
This could take a machete to ad revenue in a critical lucrative market for Facebook, and this experience is being echoed by other American tech companies who are running full speed into complicated regulatory quagmires outside of America.
Adding benzine to the flames, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein speaking at a cybercrime symposium at Georgetown University’s Law Center in Washington added to the tech misery explaining that to “secure devices requires additional testing and validation—which slows production times — and costs more money.”
This is not bullish to the overall tech picture at all.
Hamstringing tech is not ideal to promoting economic growth, but the decades of unchecked growth is finally reverting back to the mean with regulation rearing its unpretty head and the balkanization of tech forcing countries to pick between China or America.
The silver lining is that the American economy remains resilient taking the body blows of a government shutdown, interest rate drama, and trade war uncertainty in full stride.
The net-net is that American and Chinese tech firms could experience decelerating revenue growth far dire than any worst-case scenario forecasted by industry analysts.
Therefore, I forecast that American tech shares have limited upside for the next 6-10 weeks and Chinese tech is dead money in that same time span.
Any rally is ripe for another sell-off if there are no meaningful breakthroughs in the trade war and if China’s economic data continues to falter.
The global growth scare could actually come home to roost.
The supposed narrowing of trade differences has been nothing more than tactical, and procuring any fundamental victories is a hard ask in the short term.
In an ideal world, China would open the floodgates and allow the world to join them in an economic détente, however, based on Chairman Xi’s record of purging his mainland enemies and the military, slamming the gates shut and padlocking them seems more likely at this point.
Seizing the rights to an untimed Chairmanship term has its perks – this is one of them and he is using the entire assortment of options available to him.
Traders should look at deep in-the-money vertical bear put spreads on any sharp rally to specific out-of-fashion tech names saddled with regulatory and data balkanization headwinds, or tech firms with a large footprint in mainland China.
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