Investment Highlights

• We maintain our BUY recommendation on Media Chinese International (MCIL) with an unchanged fair value of RM0.34/share, pegged to a P/B multiple of 0.7x. We raise FY19F earnings by 18% on account of better contribution from the group’s travel segment.

• MCIL’s 2QFY19 core net profit came in above our expectations at RM12mil, bringing 1HFY19 net profit to RM25mil. This accounts for 62% of our full-year forecasts and 59% of consensus estimates.

• 1HFY19 profit rose 6% amid 9% higher turnover mainly driven by stronger revenue from the travel segment which offset lower revenues from the publishing and printing segment. We note that the strengthening MYR and CAD against the USD has had a positive currency translation impact of approximately RM17.7mil on the group’s turnover and RM2.8mil on group PBT respectively.

• Segmental review:

o Publishing and printing segment: Overall PBT dropped 25% as revenue fell 2%, declining across all sub-segments amid weaker adex spend and increasing competition from other digital and social media platforms.

 Malaysia & SEA: Both PBT and revenue shrank by 8% and 1% respectively affected by dwindling adex spend on print media which lowered advertising income. The decline in revenue was offset by increases in the cover prices of the segment’s newspaper titles.

 Hong Kong, Taiwan & China: Revenue fell 2% as increases in adex spend on the local property and recruitment sectors and luxury labels were offset by loss of revenue following the disposal of the group’s magazine operations in mainland China in early 2QFY19. As such, LBT widened by 41%, further impacted by newsprint prices surging 16% YoY.

 North America: Revenue decreased by 13% while LBT widened by 33% amid softer economic conditions especially for the local property market which was one of the major sources of adex revenue for the segment, and continued shift of adex spend to digital platforms.

o Travel and travel-related services: PBT and revenue soared by 84% and 33% respectively driven by an increase in incentive tours especially to Europe and tours to Russia for the FIFA World Cup.

• Improving digital business: Digital revenue grew positively as the group leveraged its leading Chinese print media position in Malaysia to drive digital adex take-up by offering combined print and digital packages to allow wider reach for advertisers. However, we note that the monetisation of digital initiatives remains challenging for media players amid the structural shift in media.

• 2HFY19 outlook: The coming quarters are anticipated to continue to be challenging for MCIL, especially for its publishing and printing segment amid expectations of subdued adex in most of the markets it operates in and management’s expectations that the uptrend in newsprint prices will continue to impact the group’s margins.

• After the recent selldown of MCIL’s shares, we believe that MCIL shares have been oversold and value has emerged as contributions from its travel segment start to offset weaker performance from its publishing and printing segment.

Source: AmInvest Research - 30 Nov 2018