< The 2014 All-China Research Team

Total Appearances: 2

Analyst Debut: 2010Returning to this roster after a three-year absence is Yanyan (Christine) Peng, who earns her first No. 1 finish. She joined UBS from Nomura in August 2010 and notched her first appearance on this list that year, as a runner-up. Peng, 35, reports on 13 Chinese nondiscretionary consumer stocks and has been steering clients away from Shanghai-headquartered snack foods and beverages manufacturer Want Want China Holdings all year. She maintains an anticonsensus sell recommendation on the shares, believing that the company is facing a “growth bottleneck.” For example, even as the domestic dairy industry experienced volume growth of 2 to 3 percent in the first half of 2014, she notes, sales of Hot Kid Milk, which account for 90 percent of Want Want’s dairy division revenue, slumped 8 percent. “Want Want’s single-product strategy has resulted in superior profitability but is now facing challenges from a product-diversification trend,” she attests. Margin dilution will be much heavier than investors expect, she adds, if management decides to become more aggressive in launching new goods. So far, Want Want’s stock has rewarded her position: Year to date through late last month, it declined 8.5 percent, while China’s broad market was flat. Overall, for the trailing 12 months through late November, the sector fell 19.8 percent, lagging the wider market by 17.6 percentage points. Primary headwinds have included “earnings disappointments and multiple contractions,” observes Peng. Challenges — like pressure to transform distribution channels as competition with e-commerce grows — remain, she adds. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in finance from Wuhan University, the researcher earned an economics master’s degree from Shanghai’s Fudan University. She began covering Chinese consumer names at Lehman Brothers in 2006 and joined Nomura via its 2008 acquisition of that firm’s Asia-Pacific assets.