< The 2014 All-China Research TeamJinjin WangUBSFirst-place appearances: 0
Total appearances: 4
Analyst debut: 2010Unranked last year, UBS’s Jinjin Wang returns to this lineup at No. 3, the position she earned in her 2010 debut. “Her calls on the sector were very successful in the past year,” one backer reports. One of those recommendations is a sell rating on Hong Kong–based China Mobile, which is a reflection of her larger cautious view of China’s telecommunications shares. The industry is moving to implement fourth-generation services, which means that “competition will pick up and capital expenditures will be moving to an uptrend cycle,” says Wang. “But whether 4G can help improve [average revenue per user], I’m quite bearish.” The weak economy is hurting domestic consumption, she notes, and the mobile penetration rate is already close to 100 percent, up from only 50 percent five years ago. Wang, who works out of Beijing, is also concerned that topline growth for the three largest wireless services providers — China Mobile, China Unicom (Hong Kong) and China Telecom Corp. — is down to low single digits, at the same time that capex, network support costs and utility costs are moving up. She is especially concerned about China Mobile, partly because it has a third-generation network that is lacking in coverage compared with its competitors and must build a 4G network with equal or larger reach to make up for the imbalance, thus pushing up capex costs to particularly high levels.