Huachuang Securities has initiated coverage on Mobvista (01860), issuing a "Strong Buy" rating and a target price of HK$17.7. The brokerage views Mobvista as a leading global third-party programmatic advertising player, with its growth flywheel powered by network effects and AI infrastructure investments. The firm is optimistic about the company's growth potential in the global third-party programmatic ad market and sees its IAP (In-App Purchase) products driving the next growth cycle.
Huachuang Securities forecasts revenue of $2.7 billion, $3.7 billion, and $4.6 billion for 2026, 2027, and 2028, respectively. Adjusted net profit is projected to be $150 million, $260 million, and $380 million for the same period. Using a PE valuation methodology, the brokerage assigns a target PE multiple of 25x for 2026, resulting in a target market capitalization of $3.7 billion, or approximately HK$28.7 billion. This translates to the HK$17.7 per share target price.
Key Investment Thesis
Mobvista is a global advertising and marketing company focused on the programmatic advertising sector, specializing in mid- to long-tail traffic. Founded in 2013, it initially started with non-programmatic performance advertising. It launched its programmatic advertising platform Mintegral in 2016 and began building a SaaS tool matrix in 2019 to optimize its marketing ecosystem, covering scenarios like statistical analysis and cloud cost optimization.
The Mintegral platform is the company's core asset, where the synergy between network effects and AI Infrastructure forms its growth engine. The platform's primary business model involves earning spreads by algorithmically matching advertisers with media inventory. The programmatic advertising industry exhibits a significant flywheel effect, and the company has developed a "traffic-data-ROI-budget" growth cycle through years of accumulation. By 2025, the number of apps with its SDK integrated reached 117,000, with daily ad requests exceeding 400 billion. It ranked in the top four globally for ROI in the entertainment, utility, on-demand service, and gaming categories on the Singular 2026 ROI Index.
The company is continuously increasing investment in AI infrastructure, advancing projects like "Project Stargate" and componentization, while focusing on cultivating and incentivizing R&D personnel. This high-performance foundational infrastructure ensures algorithmic leadership. Mintegral's development has progressed through a platform-building phase (2016-2018), an algorithm optimization and ecosystem expansion phase (2019-2022), and entered an intelligent bidding phase in 2023. It has successively launched products like IAA ROAS, Target CPE, Hybrid ROAS, and IAP ROAS, gradually expanding its advertiser budget from IAA to hybrid monetization and IAP advertisers.
Benefiting from the scaling of its intelligent bidding products, the company's year-on-year revenue growth rates for Q3 2024 to Q2 2025 were 55%, 63%, 46%, and 48%, respectively. As IAP ROAS products gradually scale up in the future, they are expected to propel the company into a new period of high revenue growth.
Market Opportunity and Positioning
The global mobile in-app advertising market is vast. According to Statista and Newzoo, it reached $407 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow to $663 billion by 2030. In terms of transaction methods, programmatic advertising has become mainstream due to advancements in big data and AI, accounting for 85%-90% of the global market in 2025 according to MAGNA. Regarding platform types, walled garden platforms like Meta and Google hold about three-quarters of the market, with the remainder primarily consisting of third-party ad platforms.
Benefiting from factors like antitrust/privacy laws, technology-driven innovation, and demand from small-to-medium developers, the market share of third-party ad platforms increased from 15% in 2020 to 25% in 2025. Based on its calculations, Huachuang Securities believes Mobvista's Mintegral has become one of the leading players in the third-party programmatic advertising market, holding a 1.9% share of the global mobile ad market in 2025. This places it behind AppLovin (5.4%) and The Trade Desk (2.8%).
Risk Factors
Potential risks include weaker-than-expected global mobile advertising industry sentiment, slower-than-anticipated technology iteration and algorithm effectiveness, slower commercialization of intelligent bidding products, intensifying industry competition, changes in data privacy and platform policies, and overseas policy and compliance risks.
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