Yeahka (HKG: 9923), the leading payment-based technology platform in China, announced its 2022 interim results in late August. During the period, total revenue climbed 17.1% to RMB1,641.8 million, gross profit rose 52.1% to RMB529.3 million, and gross margin increased from 24.8% to 32.2%.
“Yeahka’s 1H revenue and adjusted EBITDA beat our estimates. Management highlighted multi-channels strategies to embrace in-store e-commerce opportunities and reaffirmed full-year GMV guidance. We expect it to maintain fast growth trend in 2023 due to the huge addressable market ahead. We revise our payment volume assumptions in 2H due to the recent resurgence of the pandemic and estimate take-rate to be better than expected for the full year,” Jefferies says in its newly released research report.
Jefferies emphasizes that Yeahka is one of the 16 payment service providers with a national bank card acquiring license and mobile phone payment license from the PBOC, which currently has 7.3m active payment service merchants. The payment business provides traffic, merchants and data insights to Yeahka, in particular payment and online marketing services. Backed by its merchants and consumer networks in payment, Yeahka adds value to merchants through SaaS products in digitization, online marketing through DSP platform and fintech services.
According to the report, Jefferies maintains its Buy rating with PT of HKD21 on Yeahka based on PEG. It applies a 10% discount to PEG due to uncertainties of macro headwinds and pandemic outbreak, factoring in the recent business developments with a focus on GPV and customer growth, while the support to merchants and investments in new initiatives are important for the long term.