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It used to be that you often saw posts about investing in undervalued china companies a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Than the usual comments about disappearing CEOs and ownership followed every time.
Now not even those posts remain, china is just erased, seems like almost no one owns it anymore, some alibaba bag holders probably still have some forgotten shares. Since of course, all those dreams have been repeatedly crushed for 5 years now.
JD (.com) is imo grossly undervalued. The only real problem with JD is that they are sitting on a big pile of cash they don't want to use (much), which is indeed suspicious (I think the market considers they will just spend it poorly). They have been going decent buybacks, at like 7% for 2025, still not much, they could do 20% and barely take a hit on the balance sheet.
The JD you are currently thinking of (ecommerce) is basically given to you for free (well, you are being paid). If we take the price of the stake in the spinoffs (of which they are majority holders) + cash, you have more than market cap. And that's without considering the stake in the fintech arm, which is not consolidated in the financials.
Market cap to GMV, a metric I like to use, is extremely low, at under 0.1 (if you look at revenue instead of GMV, you need to consider 1P vs 3P revenue, which is recorded very differently).
You see, if you take various known players with same main business model, I would say JD is most comparable to Coupang or Hepsi. Then Sea is somewhere between Meli and Kspi. Kspi being imo the best model of all (they capture all the fintech value chain, by being a bank, and controlling payments, besides the end user).
Now, if we focus on these 3: JD, Cpng, Heps, price to GMV is best for JD by far, and those are already undervalued companies (I consider these 3 most similar because their biggest focus is on ecommerce and shipping, less so on payments, or fintech).
The reason for poor performance is mostly one: PDD. They essentially destroyed the competitive landscape by initiating the race to the bottom business model all asian companies love so much.
So I don't see their gmv being worth as much as Cpng due to the competitive dynamics.
Their capex has been going down, and sg&a skyrocketing due to this food delivery bs. That makes their already valuation to be understated actually (expensed up front vs depreciated). Core business doing great, still growing decently, also ads adding more operating profits. When the food delivery marketing/incentives goes down, the cash flows will explode again.
At these prices imo a no brainer.