Gree:2017outlook -strategically targets to gain share
Maintaining Buy with new target price at RMB38.87
We expect domestic market sale-in volume to rise 16% to 70m in 2017 We maintain our Buy recommendation on Gree as we believe it will benefit from its strategy of offsetting the rise in raw material prices with new model launches. This move to not raise its retail prices too aggressively will help gain volume. However, given its lion’s share in the market, we expect Gree’s share to increase 2ppt to 45%. Meanwhile, its plan to diversify the business from AC is likely a mid-term strategy, which is unlikely to have key contributions in the short term. We raise our NP for FY17/18 by 21%/15% and introduce the 2019 forecast. We raise our TP by 36.5% to RMB38.87, which is a combination of earnings revisions and is based on rolling over of our first DCF forecast year.
We expect domestic market sale-in volume to rise 16% to 70m in 2017
This is based on a 2.2% rise in retail demand to 69m sets (buoyant property market and government promoting central AC) and ~3m inventory channel restocking. Please refer to Figure 19 and Figure 20 for our retail demand model.
Outlook for Gree
We expect a 21% rise in sales in 2017, of which 81% would come from AC, up 23%. In our model, we expect a 19% rise in sales volume to 42.9m in 2017, which will likely normalize to 6% each year for 2018/19. We expect overall GPM to increase 0.5ppt to 34% due to launch of new models and we expect EBITM to improve 1.7ppt to 14.2%.
Raising target price to RMB38.87from RMB28.48; risks
We use DCF to value the company with a new target price of RMB38.87 (old RMB28.48), as we roll over the DCF forecast year to 2027 and raise our FY17/18 forecast by 21%/15% (details on page 3). We also introduce the 2019 forecast. Our target price implies 12x/11x FY17/18 PE, which is at a premium to its historical valuation point during de-stocking of channel inventory, and dividend yield at 4.6% for FY17E. Downside risks include competition, subsidy policy, and M&A.