Pig and Chicken Farmers Are Big Winners in China's Silicon Valley
Pig and Chicken Farmers Are Big Winners in China's Silicon Valley
(Bloomberg) -- The big stock-market winners in China’s technology hub of Shenzhen aren’t artificial intelligence and semiconductor companies. They’re farmers.
Chicken breeders Shandong Xiantan Co. and Shandong Minhe Animal Husbandry Co. have climbed around 40 percent this year, while pig farmer Muyuan Foodstuff Co. is up 35 percent. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s agriculture index has rallied more than any other subgauge in 2019, and is the only one to eke out a gain in the past three years as the city’s benchmark slid 21 percent.
Analysts attribute the more recent gains to the likelihood of higher pork prices as African swine fever dents supply. And while trade tensions with the U.S. have affected the price of soybeans, which are used as animal feed, progress in talks could result in China importing more from America, lowering breeders’ costs, said Dai Ming, Shanghai-based fund manager at Hengsheng Asset Management Co.
A pork producer is standing out in Hong Kong too: WH Group Ltd. surged 11 percent over the past three days. It was one of the top performers on the city’s benchmark Wednesday.
In another boost, the government has promised to support share listing and fundraising by qualified agriculture firms, according to official guidelines.
There may also be a longer-term, structural reason for the bullish sentiment.
“The agriculture sector has had a totally different story to tech firms over the past few years,” said Sun Jianbo, president of China Vision Capital Management Co. in Beijing. “China is still at the early stage of large-scale farming and, with this trend picking up, the sector’s revenue is growing steadily.”
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Muyuan and Wens Foodstuffs Group Co., another meat producer, have more than doubled their profit since 2014, though they’ve yet to report 2018 earnings. Wens Foodstuffs has risen 17 percent in Shenzhen this year, about half the advance by Muyuan, which has driven much of the Shenzhen agricultural gauge’s advance over the past three years as it more than tripled in value.
Gains in farming-related stocks have made them much more expensive. The agriculture gauge in Shenzhen trades at about 49 times reported earnings -- more than double the broader index -- according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Shenzhen’s agriculture index rose 0.5 percent Wednesday, while the broader gauge climbed 1.9 percent.
Meanwhile, tech companies “have seen the business environment worsening,” Hengsheng’s Dai said. “For example, the smartphone supply chain is seeing intensifying competition and shrinking margins.”
After years of breakneck expansion, global smartphone makers are grappling with slowing revenue growth. Apple Inc.’s Chinese phone shipments plummeted an estimated 20 percent in the final quarter last year, while Xiaomi Corp. fared even worse, research firm IDC said this week.
“Tech stocks bumped into a boom-and-bust cycle over the past three to five years,” Sun said. “In the long run, agricultural stocks are still attractive. China has many small family farms, which is inefficient -- they will be transformed into large-scale farms in the future.”
--With assistance from April Ma and Ron Harui.
To contact the reporters on this story: Kana Nishizawa in Hong Kong at knishizawa5@bloomberg.net;Jeanny Yu in Hong Kong at jyu107@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Richard Frost at rfrost4@bloomberg.net, Magdalene Fung, Will Davies
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