Daily Brief Consumer: Goodbaby International, Christian Dior SE, Air China, Cafe de Coral, Ninja Van, TSE Tokyo Price Index TOPIX, Minth Group and more

• Goodbaby International (1086 HK) disclosed a scheme offer from Mr Song Zhenghuan (Chairman and founder) at HK$1.50, a 38.9% premium to the undisturbed price. The offer is final. 
• The offer looks light next to peers, at 0.38x book and 2.0x EV/EBITDA against an 11.4x peer median. However, the offer looks fair compared to historical trading ranges.
• The vote is low risk, as no independent holder holds a blocking stake. The last AGM showed little opposition, and thin trading makes it hard to build an activist stake.

• Welcome to Curator’s Cut – a fortnightly roundup of standout themes from the 1,400+ insights shared on Smartkarma.
• In this cut, we look at where value remains in a difficult year for luxury, review momentum in offshore services, and assess two sides of the insurance sector. 
• Want to dig deeper? Comment or message with the themes you’d like to see highlighted next.

• August air activity largely matched July’s improved pace of growth (versus weak Q2)
• The improvement in domestic activity has been more dramatic than in outbound 
• Effectively, high fuel costs appear to be keeping travelers closer to home here in Q3

• Share buyback, dividend increase to 30 cents, yielding around 7.6% with PBR 1x and 0.4x price to sales are good catalysts to own Cafe de Coral (341 HK) .
• Greater Bay connectivity provides an opportunity to expand margin as the cost is lower, as well as to capture customer leakage when HK residents travel to China over the weekend. 
• Cafe de Coral (341 HK) benefits from the economic downturn when customers pull back from premium dining.

Executive Summary

• Strategic Pivot to Enterprise Logistics: Ninja Van is restructuring its Southeast Asian operations to transition away from commoditised e-commerce parcel delivery towards higher-margin business-to-business and cold chain services. Following a withdrawal from the Vietnamese express market, the company is scaling specialised offerings such as temperature-controlled transit and less-than-truckload freight to capture more defensible revenue streams.
• Improved Operational Cost Efficiency: Recent cloud infrastructure migrations have improved peak delivery efficiency by 40%, while targeted workforce reductions and exits from unprofitable volume have lowered operating costs. This disciplined focus on margin preservation over top-line expansion enabled the company to narrow its pre-tax losses by nearly a third in FY2025 to US$102.0m, despite revenue contracting to US$702.0m.
• Platform Captive Fleet Competition: The expansion of in-house delivery networks by major e-commerce platforms continues to capture market share and compress third-party logistics margins. Together with a tighter funding environment, this loss of pricing power contributed to an internal funding round that cut its valuation by half to about US$1.0b and necessitates ongoing operational downsizing.

• Cash flow is of the utmost importance for companies operated under the going-concern assumption. Therefore, companies and businesses are valued by discounting their cash flows at the cost of capital.
• To determine whether there have been improvements in each item this year compared to the previous one, it seems that using an accounting measure such as ROIC is convenient approach.
• The reason Japanese companies have low operating margins is that many have low gross profit margins. Management strategy—including allocation of resources to develop products with high gross profit margins—is necessary.

• Goodbaby International (1086 HK), a maker of juvenile products (strollers/pushchairs, child car seats), has announced an Offer, by way of a Scheme, from founder/chairman Song Zhenghuan. 
• Song is Offering HK$1.50/share, a 38.9% premium to last close. And a 53.06% premium to the 10-day VWAP (possible news leakage?).
• The Offer price is final. Dividends will be netted. This transaction should be wrapped up in around four months, ahead of the 24th March 2027 long-stop.

• Along with other Hong Kong stocks, Minth Group (425 HK) share price took a beating this year that is caused by market sentiment rather than fundamentals. 
• They launched a robot-making factory in Serbia, a JV in Indonesia, that in the near term drained FCF but revenues and earnings are still growing. 
• With PER 8x, EV/EBITDA 6x, and PBR<1, Minth has become a value stock that calls for  re-rating.