Note: This article is part of Morningstar Canada's Emerging Markets Week Special Report
Andrew Willis: We recently talked about how developments in Chinese technology driven by an army of app-enabled online shoppers and highly integrated internet-based consumption habits are surpassing other sector developments in the country. But now, we learned that certain micro and macro issues might be putting a damper on these developments and sentiment is decidedly more bearish than a few months ago.
The trade war between the U.S. and China, more stringent regulations over certain internet sectors including those that are major advertisers and weaker macroeconomics have put pressure on the internet assets covered at Morningstar China. This has led to recent downgrades in the Morningstar fair value estimates which tell investors what the long-term intrinsic value of a stock is and to help them see beyond the present market price.
One local element we are closely tracking is advertising spends in the Chinese tech sector. Weaker consumer sentiment can lead to slower e-commerce traffic which in turn leads to reduced confidence among advertisers. This could put pressure on corporate advertising budgets, especially brand advertising, as the return on investment is more difficult to justify. Our analysts believe performance-based advertising will be less affected, but lower advertising budgets will lower the growth rate of names such as Baidu, Tencent, Weibo, Sina, and to a lesser extent, NetEase and JD.
Also, given that travelling is more discretionary in nature, our analysts also expect to see reduced travelling budgets and therefore lower growth at online travel agencies such as Ctrip. With China tech taking off at the beginning of this year, it's worth watching to see if advertising revenues slow this otherwise fast-moving and still promising sector.
For Morningstar, I'm Andrew Willis.
