Investment Highlights

• We maintain our BUY recommendation on Salutica with an unchanged fair value of RM0.95/share, pegged to an FY21F PE of 14x. We keep our forecasts unchanged.

• We have gathered the following developments from the group since our previous update:

• In 1QFY20, Salutica’s order fulfillment had been impacted by material lead time constraints due to customization of certain product parts from suppliers. The group said that as at January 2020, the material lead time constraint seen in the previous quarter has normalized.

• Higher contribution of its new 3rd generation truly wireless stereo (TWS) headphones to be captured in 2QFY20, leading to expectations of higher revenue. Production started in August 2019 (end-1QFY19) and there was an initial low launch volume of the product captured in the previous quarter.
• On 28 October 2019, Apple had launched its new in-ear true wireless airbuds, AirPods Pro in the US, with features such as active noise cancellation and transparency mode which allow users to listen to music and still hear the sounds of the environment around them e.g. in traffic while going for a run. The price of the AirPods Pro is US$249 (39% higher than Customer A’s new TWS headphones’ price of US$179). Despite this, Salutica said that Customer A’s forecasts remain unchanged. We thus maintain our forecasts.
• Salutica has been working on diversifying its client base in order to reduce customer concentration risk and The Edge Markets MY website reported that the group is in the midst of securing 6 new customers from Australia, Canada, Europe, Vietnam and the US although we note that the projects potentially secured would start from a small base.

• We reiterate our BUY recommendation on Salutica as we are still optimistic on the group’s earnings recovery in 2020 due to a slate of product launches i.e. the aforementioned new TWS headphones and the production of four computer mice for Customer A.

• The group is expected to gain from its exposure to the growing TWS market which is seen to benefit from the trend of removal of headphone jacks in smartphones. Meanwhile, in the next 3–5 years, Salutica plans to address the hearable devices market to go beyond music with various applications such as in hearing enhancement, fitness tracking, health monitoring, and better compatibility with virtual assistants e.g. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

Source: AmInvest Research - 17 Jan 2020