The three core elements collectively build a leading competitive advantage, as CHICMAX (02145) enters a time of valuation restructuring.

As time enters 2026, the valuation differentiation of the new consumption sector of the Hong Kong stock market has entered a deep water area, and funds are accelerating towards concentrating on the leading companies that are "barriered, certain, and with long-term growth prospects". In the field of Chinese beauty and skin care, CHICMAX (02145) has always been a unique presence: seizing the outbreak of traffic dividends, it quickly rose to the forefront of the Chinese beauty and cosmetics track, and then through multidimensional synergy of category, channel, and innovation, it built a replicable and verifiable value system. The 2025 annual performance released on March 26 is the key to understanding the intrinsic value of CHICMAX. This company, with "single focus, multiple brands, globalization" as its core strategy, is attempting to build a moat through category innovation, channel deepening, and profit optimization, redefining its long-term value in the Chinese beauty and cosmetics field. The matrix of multiple brands achieves sustainable growth relay Looking back at 2025, the growth of CHICMAX is clear and powerful: as a fast-growing beauty company, it has a strategic vision and long-term layout, maintaining its leading position in core business, enriching its product matrix layout, and driving internal growth. This consolidates the company's leading position in the industry, injecting strong momentum for long-term growth. Performance has always been the best "touchstone". The financial report shows that in 2025, the company achieved operating income of approximately 9.178 billion yuan, a substantial increase of 35.1% year-on-year. The annual gross profit was 7.015 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 37.3%, and the net profit reached 1.154 billion yuan, an increase of 43.7% year-on-year. At the same time, CHICMAX also announced a final dividend of 0.75 yuan per share, in addition to a mid-term dividend of 0.5 yuan per share, with a total cumulative dividend amount of approximately 498 million yuan for the year, further confirming the company's profit growth and management's confidence in the company's operations. It is reported that the company has always attached importance to shareholder returns since its listing, with a total cumulative cash dividend amount exceeding 1.573 billion yuan. What is more valuable is that CHICMAX is building a sustainable growth model with a "stable base, comprehensive product matrix, and precise reserves" through the brand layout across the entire track and all age groups. From the product perspective, the core brand Han Shu, as the "ballast stone," achieved high annual revenue of 7.36 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth of 31.6%, laying a solid foundation for profit safety, achieving sustainable lifecycle of major products. Throughout the year, Han Shu maintained the strong growth of the Red Waist and other explosive product series, with a cumulative sales of more than 18.1 million sets across all channels. It also relied on core technologies such as "X Peptide" and "Bosophen" to deploy a new matrix. Among them, the X-Peptide super-frequency series has achieved accumulative sales of more than 2 million sets across all channels. The operation capability of mature explosive single products reflects the company's stable cash flow and valuation support. It is worth noting that this year, Han Shu has made significant breakthroughs in category expansions, with continuous efforts in multiple categories such as body lotion, shampoo, face masks, and facial cleansers, marking an accelerated upgrade towards "comprehensive brand of all categories". The extension of categories not only enriches Han Shu's product matrix but also establishes a long-term connection between the brand and users by meeting consumers' skincare and hair care demands in many aspects. While the main brand maintains stable growth, CHICMAX's second curve, newpage One, comprehensively covers skincare needs for all age groups from 0-18, launching the infant, school-age, and adolescent series. The core products, Anxin Frost and Acne Essence Oil, have grown rapidly, consolidating the leading position in the high-end children's skincare race. The brand achieved revenue of 880 million yuan in the year, a strong growth of 134%. In addition, CHICMAX is actively laying out the Nth growth curve, building long-term growth "moats" through the ecological layout of multiple brands and categories. Multiple brands, including Anminyou and Jifang, are steadily growing in segmented markets, continuously refining their product and operational capabilities in multiple channels, contributing to the company's stable growth. The layout in the hair care and makeup tracks reflects CHICMAX's in-depth exploration of all categories. In the hair care field, Han Shu continues to enrich its category matrix, while Jifang accurately targets segmented markets, achieving precise positioning of customer groups and markets, driving steady brand development. In the makeup field, Han Shu's brand development momentum continues to improve, and the emerging brand NAN beauty is focusing on the pre-makeup segment, with a differentiated positioning to achieve stable development, becoming an important part of the multi-brand puzzle. More importantly, CHICMAX's multi-brand layout is a synergistic growth driven by the research and development middle platform, and the explosive growth in 2025 is just the beginning of the company's continued profit generation through the core diverse matrix. The company focuses on core self-developed technologies that can be reused across multiple brands, leading to a continuous decline in marginal research and development costs, and the scale effect will gradually emerge. The dual drive of research and smart manufacturing reconstructs the hard technology valuation logic of Chinese cosmetics From the perspective of the capital market, the pricing logic of consumer companies in the Hong Kong stock market has shifted from "short-term growth driven by traffic" to "long-term value driven by technology". CHICMAX has keenly observed this trend and has built a rare hard technology barrier in the Chinese cosmetics industry through "research-based foundation + intelligent manufacturing investment", becoming a representative target of "China-made smart manufacturing" in the Hong Kong stock market. Research strength is the core moat of a beauty company and the core advantage that sets CHICMAX apart from the industry. In 2025, CHICMAX applied for 61 new patents and was granted 49 new patents in the same year. At the end of 2025, CHICMAX's new research center was officially put into operation, marking a new stage in the group's research strength. In the same year, Dr. Karl Lintner, the pioneer of global peptide beauty field, served as the chief scientific advisor for CHICMAX. By creating an "1+N" open innovation independent research and development platform, CHICMAX continues to promote the efficient transformation of "production, education, research, and medical", linking global cutting-edge research tracks, and building a solid product technology barrier. Independent research and development of core raw materials and core technology not only frees the company from dependence on international raw material giants but also continuously boosts product gross profit margins and profit quality, fundamentally changing the industry malaise of "heavy on marketing, light on research and development", laying the core foundation for the company's long-term growth. The ability of intelligent manufacturing is the core guarantee for the company to convert research results into profitable products. In 2025, Han Shu's smart factory was officially put into operation. The smart factory covers an area of 20,000 square meters, with a daily production capacity of up to 2 million bottles. The Phase I and Phase II projects of the 12 billion yuan total investment of the SMP Technology Park have a combined daily production capacity of 3.5 million bottles. The heavy asset smart manufacturing layout not only realizes the autonomy and controllability of the supply chain and optimized scale costs but also gives CHICMAX stronger profit resilience during the consumption recovery cycle. Through a whole chain quality control system, while continuously enhancing brand strength and user reputation, it also provides solid support for channel expansion and global layout. The dual drive of research and smart manufacturing ultimately translates into continuous optimization of the company's profit quality: core technologies bring premium product pricing, steadily pushing up gross profit margins; autonomous intelligent manufacturing brings cost optimization, promoting efficiency and cost ratios improvement, and continuous improvement of the company's net profit margins, contributing to high-quality growth, that is, "revenue with profit, profit with cash flow". Establishing a global foundation, constructing a cross-cycle capability It is observed that the competition in the beauty and skin care track is essentially a competition of channel access and user experience. CHICMAX, through years of layout, has completed the closed-loop verification of Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co., Ltd.'s overall channels. This company is one of the few enterprises in the industry that fully understand online global traffic and can realize the end-to-end landing on offline channels. The deep release of channel value has arrived in the moment. In 2025, online channels contributed 8.618 billion yuan in revenue for CHICMAX. With Douyin as the core, the company achieved full coverage on mainstream e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com, and Kuaishou, showing a balanced layout of "steady growth on core platforms, rapid breakthrough on emerging platforms". More importantly, the company's online operations have been upgraded to a refined model of "brand mentality + major products + user operations", achieving a continuous decrease in online customer acquisition costs and a steady increase in user repurchase rates, gradually moving away from reliance on traffic dividends. Its online self-operated revenue reached approximately 7.838 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 47.6%, providing the best evidence. In addition, since returning to offline channels in 2024, Han Shu has collaborated with multiple retail channels such as KKV and Sanfu. The company's layout is not simply about channel distribution but is based on the core strategy of sinking brand mentality and reaching users in all scenarios. Recently, Han Shu's Shanghai New World department store grandly opened, a move that is a significant milestone in building a "good brand, good products, good quality, good happiness, good value" image, and achieving important integration and linkage achievements of Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co., Ltd. This two-way empowerment of the full-channel capability of Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co., Ltd. enables SHINNE MEI to have strong anti-cyclical capabilities in the fluctuating consumer environment and gives the company higher certainty in its revenue growth. Currently, the full-channel layout has three core meanings for CHICMAX: to enhance brand strength, constantly leading with explosive online products, truly establish brand mentality offline, and increase the brand premium consistently; to enhance operational stability, the customer loyalty and repurchase rate of offline channels are much higher than online channels, effectively hedging the risk of online traffic fluctuations; for accumulating core capabilities for globalized layout, the operational and management experience of offline channels will be the core foundation for the company's future expansion into overseas offline markets. In the earnings conference held on March 27, CHICMAX clarified its core strategy of "single focus, multiple brands, globalized", with a solid underlying capability blueprint that is achievable and verifiable, opening up incremental space for the long-term growth of the company's valuation. CHICMAX's globalization strategy, driven by "technology going global + brand going global", will start with the Southeast Asian market, hoping to replicate the path of international cosmetics giants: it has self-developed core raw materials, a top global research team, and a self-controlled intelligent manufacturing supply chain, enabling it to export technology standards; its mature multi-brand matrix can adapt to the consumption demands of different countries and different populations, achieve precise positioning in different global markets, and avoid the risk of "cultural differences" from single-brand globalization; the company's proven full-channel operation capability can be directly replicated to overseas markets, realizing the rapid deployment of Wuxi Online Offline Communication Information Technology Co., Ltd.'s full-channel capability. This "technology-shared, brand-complementary, all-customer-covered" multi-brand model is the growth path of international cosmetics giants such as L'Oreal and Shiseido, in line with the core logic of capital markets giving a long-term valuation premium. For the market, the core value of the internationalization strategy is that CHICMAX will completely break through the growth boundaries of a single market, bringing long-term growth imagination for the company. Conclusion From the perspective of the capital market, Hong Kong stocks are not lacking in funds, but in truly high-quality targets with certainty of growth, core barriers, and long-term value. Especially with the boost from the confirmation of annual performance reports, Hong Kong's new consumption sector, with its lower valuation levels and high performance elasticity, is attracting investment institutions to accelerate their "gold rush". In this year's annual performance, CHICMAX has fully shown the underlying logic of its high-quality development: leveraging a multi-brand matrix to support sustainable growth, building core barriers through research and smart manufacturing, maintaining management stability through comprehensive channel layout, and opening up long-term growth space through global strategies, transitioning Chinese cosmetics brands from "Made in China" to "Chinese smart manufacturing", providing a strong answer. Currently, CHICMAX is one of the most certain scarce targets in the new consumption sector of Hong Kong stocks. From the risk-return perspective of investment, the company has a strong downward safety cushion and high upward elasticity. However, the current valuation is seriously mismatched with its top-tier position and growth potential and continues to be in an oversold state. As the company's strategy continues to land, global capital will systematically reevaluate its value, which is expected to bring a dual impact of performance and valuation.