RE: Y/e results12 Jun 2026 13:36
Suark / AGBR, I get your scepticism about the latest numbers which appear to show a slowdown in rollout, in Lucky World this is the case but let's consider the following:
The lack of explanation for the Q1 slowdown is a fair criticism of management's communication. Going from ~200 shops a month to the 2,000+/month run-rate required to hit the 15,000 Q2 target is a massive step-function that looks highly improbable right now. Management has form for being optimistic on hardware timelines (they missed the 9k target for year-end 2025, only hitting it in early 2026).
But before concluding the story is broken, we need to look at why the rollout is slow, why the GTV is exploding despite the slow rollout, and the mechanical reality of that NAV markup.
1. The Rollout Bottleneck: Capex & Working Capital
Up until very recently, Hui10 was operating with a massive handbrake on: working capital drag. Under the old system, Hui10 had to pre-fund the lottery prize pools. This meant every new shop connected required a cash drain before it made a penny. The Yinsheng Payment facility (which removes the pre-funding requirement) only kicked in recently, and the Helikon £30m funding (which pays for the terminal hardware) is drip-fed based on regulatory milestones.
You cannot install 2,000 terminals a month if you don't have the cash to buy the terminals or the working capital to fund the transactions. The "snail-pace" isn't necessarily a lack of demand from shopkeepers; it's been a logistics and funding constraint. Now that the Yinsheng facility is live and Helikon cash is hitting the account (the first £5m tranche just landed in Jan), the physical capacity to deploy should accelerate. Will they hit 15k by June? Maybe not. But the ability to ramp is now fundamentally different than it was in Q1.
2. The Network Effect vs. The Physical Footprint
The most important data point in the interims wasn't the shop count; it was the GTV velocity. The commenter is looking at the 9,543 shops and seeing failure. The market should be looking at the RMB 674m GTV and seeing a network effect.
If shop growth is slow, but GTV is quadrupling, it means revenue per shop is exploding. The shops are not just selling paper tickets to walk-in traffic anymore; they are acting as digital nodes for the UnionPay QuickPass app. Hui10 is proving that a connected shop generates exponentially more digital volume than a disconnected shop. I'd much rather have 9,500 shops doing RMB 70m a month in GTV than 15,000 shops doing RMB 5m a month. The physical rollout is a lagging indicator of hardware logistics; the GTV per shop is the leading indicator of business viability.
3. The NAV Markup: "They got some balls!!"
The commenter is right that the 52% markup to £496m (taking total NAV to £498m) looks aggressive given the slow hardware rollout. But it's vital to understand how IIG values Hui10. Management didn't just arbitrarily decide to mark