Daily Brief Consumer: Prosus NV, Alibaba, Young & Co.’s Brewery, Jersey Mike’s Subs, PDD Holdings, Lotte Shopping Co and more

• Prosus NV (PRX NA) is coming up “cheap” on my monitor versus Tencent (700 HK). And Naspers (NPN SJ) “rich” to Prosus.
• Preceding my comments on Prosus/Tencent/Naspers are the current setup/unwind tables for Asia-Pacific Holdcos.
• These relationships trade with a minimum liquidity of US$1mn, and a % market capitalisation >20%.

• Alibaba Group has pushed itself deeper into the global artificial intelligence race with the preview of Qwen3.8-Max-Preview.
• The company says the new model is among the most capable systems available and ranks behind only Anthropic’s Fable 5.
• That comparison comes from Alibaba, so independent testing will still matter.

• It has now been a few weeks since TikTok Shop stopped operating in Indonesia.
• As the immediate dust raised by the action has settled, all the key stakeholders – sellers, brands, investors, enablers, influencers, and of course the teams at TikTok – are back at their drawing boards planning their next moves in Indonesia.
• Outside of Indonesia meanwhile, many have asked the question –will other countries follow suit?

• It has been a challenging couple of years for Lazada, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.
• After entering – and arguably helping create – the region’s modern online shopping market in 2012 as a first-mover (then backed by Rocket Internet), Lazada’s competitive environment got tougher and tougher over the years.
• First, Shopee emerged as a formidable regional competitor from 2015/2016.

• In this insight, we look at the potential index changes for the F100 and F250 in the run-up to the September 2026 rebal.
• We expect an F250 member to be deleted in the first week of August 2026. The race for the replacement name is on.
• We see an imminent market transfer for Volex that has consequences for F250 in September 2026.

• Jersey Mike’s Subs Inc. is a high-growth franchisor of fast-casual submarine sandwich restaurants, operating over 3,300 stores across the U.S. and Canada. This IPO aims to fund continued expansion.
• As of Q1 2026, systemwide sales were $4.3 billion, with 3,378 total stores and 50% cumulative same-store sales growth from 2020-2025.
• Total revenues were $185 million for the thirteen weeks ended March 29, 2026, with a net loss of $(24) million for the same period.

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• Successful Elimination of Cross-Holding Complexity: The September 2023 unwind removed the restrictive cross-holding structure, resolving South African Companies Act limitations and enabling the open-ended share buyback to run continuously at both the Naspers and Prosus levels.
• Robust Buyback Accretion and Funding Runway: As of September 30, 2025, the open-ended repurchase program returned $42 billion, repurchasing 30% of Prosus’s free float and generating 18% NAV per share accretion. Supported by the July 16, 2026 irrevocable undertaking to tender Prosus’s 16.8% Delivery Hero stake to Uber for approximately $2.5 billion in cash, the group’s funding runway has meaningfully diversified beyond its primary reliance on selling Tencent shares.
• Friction Points Restricting a Full Structural Unwind: A complete corporate merger or elimination of the dual-listing structure remains blocked by prohibitive capital gains tax liabilities in South Africa, stringent exchange controls, and Dutch dividend withholding tax implications on cross-border capital distributions.
• Incentive Alignment Tension: While the buyback remains highly accretive, executive incentives under CEO Fabricio Bloisi are heavily weighted toward operational profitability and active ecosystem expansion (as evidenced by the $1.3 billion in Ecosystem adjusted EBITDA in FY26), creating an internal tension between executing passive arbitrage buybacks and building a large-scale operating technology group.

• Onshore-to-offshore capital repatriation is structurally and politically constrained. Beyond the standard 10% withholding tax and State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) approvals, PDD Holdings’ massive RMB 436.1 billion cash pile is politically protected; returning billions to offshore US ADR holders while domestic merchants face margin pressure violates the implicit regulatory expectations of Beijing’s “Common Prosperity” agenda.
• The $14.5 billion (RMB 100 billion) Xinpinmu initiative marks a high-risk transition to a capital-intensive, first-party model. Unlike Temu’s asset-light consignment roots, this private-label brand strategy requires complete inventory buy-outs, dedicated warehousing, and substantial working capital drag, generating a significantly lower and slower initial return profile as PDD takes on direct inventory write-down risks to bypass tariff and compliance exposure.
• Corporate governance is entirely decoupled from near-term stock valuation or shareholder pressure. Co-CEOs Chen Lei and Zhao Jiazhen view cash preservation as existential ammunition for domestic market share defense and global geopolitical hedging. Large-scale share repurchases will not be triggered by a cheap multiple, but only by a domestic growth collapse that strips away reinvestment channels or by direct regulatory mandates to support domestic capital markets.

• Temu, the cross-border e-commerce platform of Chinese PDD Holdings (owner of Pinduoduo), has caused a great stir in Southeast Asia’s e-commerce landscape after its launch in Thailand in mid  July.
• The platform has achieved remarkable success in Western markets, especially in the US, where it became themost downloaded app, surpassing Amazon, and has reached 70 markets worldwide within just 24 months.
• By directly connecting manufacturers and wholesalers – mainly in China – to customers around the world, Temu offers a unique value proposition of low prices through its cross-border model, as highlighted by its tagline “shop like a billionaire”.

• On 22 July, Lotte Group Chairman Shin Dong-bin announced that he plans to sell 324,100 shares (1.15%) of Lotte Shopping Co (023530 KS) to secure cash liquidity. 
• The sale is scheduled to take place via open-market trading over a period starting on the 21 August. Post the stake sale, his stake in the company will decrease to 9.08%.
• I think Lotte Shopping’s share price could decline by additional 20-30%+ in the next several weeks due to further liquidity concerns on the entire Lotte Group.