Consumer Discretionary

Report by LightStream Research

Mio Kato provides his take on the crossholdings sell-down - the trend of governance reform in Japan continues with Toyota, Toyota Industries and Aisin selling shares of Denso. Denso is buffering some of the flow impact by repurchasing roughly half of the shares to be sold. While the size of these moves is relatively large, Mio believes their impact could be disproportionately large for the market as a whole. He considers this to be further confirmation of the relatively positive backdrop for asset allocation away from China and into Japan, especially in the long-term.

Consumer Discretionary

Report by Entext

Sean Maher adds Geely to his autonomous driving thematic basket which also includes Denso, Renesas and General Motors. Sean notes that Geely is planning a 2024 commercial Level 4 self-driving launch (much sooner than consensus expectations). He is seeking more China exposure this year - the country is starting to lead in automated deployment and local stocks have derated dramatically despite world class IP. On the big question re. whether Level 4+ autonomy needs Lidar - Sean would continue to bet on ‘belt and braces’ hardware redundancy winning and the Chinese crashing the cost of Lidar sensors as they scale up.