FactSet: revenue growth at China's tech giants is slowing; the average target for Meituan's shares fell 20%+ in March, while Tencent and JD's targets fell 10%+
Clarence Leong / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @jchengwsj Tweets: Jonathan Cheng / @jchengwsj : Revenue growth is slowing at some of China's biggest technology companies, reducing one of the industry's key selling points for global investors, as forceful antipandemic measures damp consumer demand in the world's second-largest economy. @hwclarence https://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The sell-side is capitulating in stages. After the 2021 regulatory crackdown erased a combined $823B from China's tech giants' market value and February's worst two-day drop since July 2021 rattled the sector, the March target cuts mark a new phase: analysts are no longer just discounting regulatory risk, they are marking down the growth itself.
The numbers behind the cuts were already visible in earnings — Meituan posted a Q4 net loss of roughly $830M despite 31% revenue growth, with antipandemic lockdowns suppressing the consumer demand its delivery business depends on. The FactSet data quantifies how quickly Wall Street's models caught up.
First-order effects
- Global investors holding Tencent, JD, and especially Meituan lose the sector's core pitch — hypergrowth — as FactSet data shows average March targets cut more than 10% for Tencent and JD and over 20% for Meituan.
- Meituan bears the brunt immediately: its food-delivery and local-services model is directly exposed to lockdowns that suppress consumer spending, compounding the Q4 net loss of ~$830M it reported weeks earlier.
Second-order effects
- With growth decelerating on top of the earlier $823B crackdown selloff, valuation math compresses twice — lower multiples applied to lower forecasts — forcing funds to choose between averaging down or rotating out of Chinese tech entirely.
- Rivals competing for the same constrained consumer wallet face margin pressure rather than share gains: when demand shrinks economy-wide, cost discipline and profitability replace user growth as the metric analysts reward.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, China's tech giants reprice from global growth assets to domestic value plays — a structural de-rating confirmed later by Tencent's first-ever annual revenue decline and by Meituan trading below its 2018 IPO price, down 85% from its peak.
- A sustained slowdown pushes these companies toward profitability-first strategies and diversification beyond China's consumer market, reshaping what global allocators expect from the sector's largest names.
The trend: China's tech sector is transitioning from a regulation-driven selloff to a fundamentals-driven one, as slowing revenue growth strips away the growth premium that justified its valuations.