Daily Brief Singapore: Secretlab, Sheng Siong, Lendela , Mi Material and more

Executive Summary

• Global Direct-to-Consumer Brand: Secretlab has grown from a niche esports chair maker into a mainstream ergonomic furniture brand, selling to customers worldwide through its own regional online stores. Designing products in-house and selling directly lets it bypass retail intermediaries, keep the full margin, and control its brand, while expanding from gaming chairs into desks, accessories, and, more recently, office task seating.
• Self-Funded and Cash Generative: The business has relied very little on outside equity since its founding and has returned to profitability with a net cash balance sheet. Its asset-light model, with minimal fixed assets and customer prepayments funding part of its working capital, allows it to fund product development internally.
• Inventory and Supply Chain Exposure: Because Secretlab owns its stock and ships bulky goods worldwide, it is highly sensitive to freight costs and demand swings. An aggressive inventory build after the pandemic boom, funded partly with short-term bank debt, compressed margins and led to a loss as excess stock was cleared.

• Sheng Siong (SSG SP) benefited from the SG60 cash handouts and expanded CDC (spending voucher) disbursement. 
• As growth plateaus and there are better stocks out there to offer yield and return, investors are likely to rotate out; hence, the 28x PER will normalize to 18-20x. 
• Investors could either do a short Sheng Shiong or sell their existing holdings to book profit. Another way is to pair this with Kimly (KMLY SP)with 2% positive yield. 

• Regional Loan Matchmaking Platform: Lendela operates a digital consumer finance platform across Singapore and Hong Kong, utilising a reverse-auction model to connect retail borrowers with over 100 licensed financial institutions. The company has processed more than 500,000 loan applications since inception, acting as an asset-light intermediary that centralises credit access without holding loans on its own balance sheet.
• Rapid Top-Line Expansion: The core value driver rests on the platform’s ability to generate high-intent borrower leads, which drove revenue from US$1.9m in FY22 to US$5.2m in FY24. This growth is underpinned by proprietary API integrations with lenders and national identity systems, creating a scalable business model that monetises exclusively through successful loan disbursements.
• Structurally Negative Unit Economics: The company relies heavily on expensive paid advertising channels to drive consumer traffic, resulting in a complete absence of near-term operating leverage. This high customer acquisition cost drove a widening net loss of US$2.3m in FY24; although the loss narrowed in FY25, continued cash outflows from a year-end FY24 cash balance of US$2.4m make further external capital likely to be required.

• Dominant Niche Supplier in Advanced Packaging: Mi Material (MIMATERIAL SP) holds a market-leading 24.0% global market share in precision solder spheres and specialty alloys, positioning the company as an indispensable component provider for the ongoing High-Performance Computing (HPC), AI processor, and advanced memory supercycle.
• Proprietary Alloys Driving Margin Inflection: Robust financial acceleration is underpinned by a strategic product mix shift toward patented and proprietary alloy formulations (notably the iSAC, Cyclomax, and AT35U series), which now account for over 56% of solder sphere shipments and drove gross margin expansion from 37.3% in 1HFY25 to 45.9% in 1HFY26.
• Strategic Value Unlocking via SGX Listing and Capacity Scaling: The SGX Mainboard initial public offering (indicative market capitalization of S$891 million at S$1.80 per share) provides dedicated growth capital to commercialize the Senai (Johor, Malaysia) facility, de-risking mainland Chinese operational exposure and capturing resilient Southeast Asian OSAT packaging demand.

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