Hong Kong Stock Review: Hong Kong Stocks Decoupling

The Hang Seng Index surged, completely decoupling from last night's massacre of semiconductor stocks in the U.S. and the continued collapse in South Korea today, with Alibaba being the most exaggerated rebound engine, catalyzed by the market's preview of the company's performance.

The cloud business has accelerated for two consecutive quarters, with OPM improving from 9% in Q1 to double digits. The profit margin continues to improve after the self-developed chips from Tmall Genie are consolidated. Additionally, real-time retail (flash sales) has reduced losses faster than expected. Although e-commerce CMR is still declining, the gap between "CMR growth rate vs EBITA growth rate" is narrowing, indicating that subsidies have not increased and competition during the 618 shopping festival has not escalated. Other losses have also decreased, and while investment in Qianwen training remains unchanged, transparency will improve, and management will begin to disclose information separately.

The main point is that multiple institutions share the same view: the market's previous bearish pricing on Alibaba has been fully or even excessively priced in, and profits are nearing a bottom. Going forward, accelerated cloud revenue, increased MaaS ARR, and improved profit margins will all serve as continuous catalysts.

On the other hand, Tencent has risen for the seventh consecutive day. With the release of the Hy3 model, reasoning capabilities have significantly improved, but more importantly, it is not just the model itself; the WeChat ecosystem already has a complete trading intent. The monetization of Agentic AI will come through merchant subscriptions rather than from the consumer side. Meanwhile, the user growth rate of Workbuddy has exceeded expectations, and combined with the vast customer pool of WeChat for Work, there is significant potential.

As for concerns about token consumption—chatting only requires hundreds of tokens, but agentic transactions need tens of thousands of tokens. Tencent's token consumption will only see explosive growth when agentic GMV takes off, and by then, the volume of tokens will not be an issue.

Of course, the internet sector is undergoing a comprehensive recovery—this is driven by capital rotation following a significant drop in storage, which further leads to short covering in Hong Kong stocks.

Unlike overseas markets currently facing liquidity and leverage issues, domestic conditions, coupled with previous policy guidance for capital to flow back, make it relatively difficult to have an independent market trend. AI is constrained by overseas developments, and continued collapse will only spread to more regions, while domestic demand also requires more stimulation