First Read China Industrials Takeaways from fireside chat with UBS EMEA Capital Goods team Automation: positive signals on demand; AI empowerment in the long run Global Research ab 6 March 2025 Positive on e-bus/CM/Mining equipment; Tariff the main concern on truck UBS European Capital Goods Analyst Hemal Bhundia sees continued e-bus demand in the buses segment. For OEMs, bus margins have improved due to the greater profitability from e-buses in his view. For the trucks sector, the US tariffs on Mexico, whe ...

1) Foreign investors turning more +ve: On the back of i) positive government stance demonstrated by the recent meeting between President Xi and the tech entrepreneurs. His supportive statement to private enterprises also provides assurance, ii) GenAI adding structural growth angle to China internet space. It is interesting to note that among our meeting with 60+ investors, only 1-2 asked about the recent macro trend while the rest mainly focused on the long term AI potential. Investors see this rally more s ...

ab 6 March 2025 Global Research China AI Intelligence AI agents: AI applications' frontier What are AI agents and why does it matter? Given the strong traction gained through DeepSeek-R1 (which emphasizes iterative problem-solving capability with high cost efficiency) and recently unveiled general- purpose AI agent Manus, we believe LLM development in China is entering the inference-dominated phase, which echoes Microsoft's comments that AI investments are increasingly dictated by real-world application dem ...

ab 3 March 2025 Global Research EM & APAC Equity Strategy China rally: How far have we travelled? EM earnings cuts accelerate After a volatile start to the year - MSCI EM is up c2% YTD (underperforming DM's 3%) - although we point out that this is heavily lifted by China. EM ex-China has underperformed DM by 5%. Overall, we also see a decent YTD trend of reversal of 2024 winners and losers (with the exception of China and Singapore, which continue to outperform). Fundamentally, EM continues to see earnings ...

Global Research ab 20 February 2025 First Read A: 1) Consumption recovery and CMR outlook: We estimate Taobao Tmall to continue to narrow market share loss in Dec-quarter, thanks to its refocus on GMV and de-emphasizing low price. The no. of 88VIP members also continued to grow double digit YoY to 49m. With the new mgmt team led by Mr. Jiang Fan since Nov-24, the key focus would be the update on e-com strategy, CMR growth outlook and potential synergies with AIDC ahead. Our channel checks suggest that merch ...