Super Hi International reported Q1 2026 results on May 20 and handed the market a split verdict: revenue beat estimates cleanly, but earnings per share came in almost flat against a far higher bar.
The headline numbers frame the week's tension. Total revenue hit $225.9 million, ahead of the $215.6 million consensus. Yet Q1 EPS landed at just $0.01, a steep miss against the $0.26 estimate the Street had pencilled in. Operating profit grew 7.7% year-on-year and the operating margin expanded to 6.2% from 4.1% — genuine progress. But the EPS gap was wide enough that the stock drifted lower, closing Tuesday at HK$10.64, down roughly 1% on the day and off 3.6% for the week. The broader weakness stretches further back: shares have lost nearly 6% over the past month, even as management described same-store sales growth of 4% and table-turnover improvement to four turns per day across its 127 overseas Haidilao restaurants.
The lending market sharpened in response to the result. Cost to borrow has climbed roughly 13% over the past week, reaching 6.7% annualised — well above the 2.2% reading on Monday, May 18, which appears to have been an outlier. Looking back across the past 30 days, borrow costs have generally oscillated between 5.9% and 7.9%, so the current level is not at a historical extreme, but the direction of travel is clearly higher post-earnings. Availability is in genuinely tight territory: at 50.5%, roughly one share remains in the lending pool for every two already borrowed. That is down about 11% over the past week and is notably tighter than the 60–69% range that prevailed through much of April. Against the 52-week context, availability has touched as low as 0.6%, so there is room to tighten considerably further if bearish conviction builds. Short interest itself is essentially unchanged — at 1.78% of the free float, down about 0.7% on the week, it is low by any absolute measure. What's shifted is the cost of maintaining those positions, not the number of them.
The ORTEX short score has held steady around 69 throughout May, a reading that reflects the combination of cost-to-borrow trends, availability tightness and short-interest dynamics rather than signalling outright crowding. At 1.78% of float with days-to-cover above 32, the short base is not large enough to generate meaningful squeeze risk, but the tightening borrow pool means any new shorts are paying noticeably more for the privilege. Valuation multiples give context: the stock trades at 18.6x trailing earnings and roughly 1.9x book, while EV/EBITDA is near 5x — moderate multiples that have drifted slightly lower over the past week as the price softened. The earnings yield factor ranks in the 64th percentile on a 30-day basis, consistent with a business that is cheap relative to its earnings pace but where near-term profit delivery remains lumpy.
The earnings call provided a few forward-looking anchors without changing the structural story. CEO Yu Li outlined a pipeline of double-digit reserved new stores, continued expansion of the "Red Pomegranate" multi-brand incubator now spanning 10 brands and 18 stores across formats ranging from Canadian malatang to Japanese izakaya. Other business revenues — central kitchen external sales, food product sales, new brand restaurants — grew 166.7% year-on-year in Q1 and now account for 6.4% of group revenue. CFO Cong Qu highlighted margin improvement on headcount efficiency gains and flagged that central kitchen B2B supply-chain sales, while lower-margin, are diluting fixed costs. The EPS miss appears rooted partly in one-off items and the pace of investment in new store quality, rather than deterioration in the core hotpot model — but the Street had clearly not calibrated to that level of gap.
On the ownership side, UBS Asset Management holds a dominant 52.6% position, which structurally limits the freely traded float. Vanguard added 787,000 shares in the March quarter, a modest positive signal. Insider data in the snapshot is over 18 months stale and carries no weight here. Analyst data is similarly dated — over two years old — and the mean price target of around $2.13 almost certainly reflects an earlier share structure or currency mismatch against the current HK$10.64 price; it is best disregarded entirely. Among named peers on SEHK, Haidilao (the parent brand) fell 5.7% over the same week, suggesting the broader hotpot/Chinese dining complex came under pressure simultaneously — the weakness in Super Hi is not purely idiosyncratic.
What to watch next: the half-year result expected around August 26 will be the first major data point testing whether the operating leverage story — higher traffic, improving employee efficiency, falling fixed-cost ratios — can finally translate into an EPS trajectory that matches revenue momentum. Between now and then, the direction of borrow availability and cost-to-borrow will signal whether the post-earnings reassessment among shorts deepens or fades.
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