Set, Go! – New year, clean slate

Tian Xuan Zhou (Oliver)
Bachelors Student, New European College – Munich

First and foremost, happy new year and good luck this year!

As I imagine that absolutely no one could have predicted how this year has panned out so far. US strikes on Venezuela, the capture of Mr. Maduro and now further US pressure on the sovereignty of Greenland swept across the headlines. Although, none has managed to capture my interest and attention more than the potential ipo market thus far. SpaceX, OpenAi, Anthropic, just some of the big names that are testing the waters of an ipo with SpaceX top line valuation coming in at a staggering 1.5 trillion USD.

Discord is the latest name to make this headline, a rapidly growing messaging and VoIP^[1] social platform, debuting in March this year. So far from what I’ve read, there seemed to be a lot of short sellers within retail traders. There is this idea among them that Discord has a main and “only” revenue source of the nitro subscription which they deemed fragile. This number of subscribers currently sit at 7.3 million as of mid 2025 which is almost 3% of their active ~ 250 million users.

Image from Discord themselves

However as an active user and nitro subscriber myself, it is easy to see that they are doing much more to diversify their revenue stream. Recent additions of collaborations for rewards with different applications and video games as an opt-in feature for users which is not forced upon users even if they are not subscribed alongside a new shop feature for purchasable cosmetics with their new in app currency system. Although as a user I have yet to make any purchase on cosmetics, I can see that a lot of users have cosmetics on their user profile.

Interesting to see their valuation as they have previously rejected a $12 Billion acquisition offer by Microsoft back in 2021. Their latest major funding round raised $500 million at a $14.7 billion valuation in September 2021 led by Dragoneer, this was 40x revenue at the time. Valuations have since then fluctuated, as of March 2025, Discord had raised ~ $1.1 billion total, with recent estimates at around 6-10 Billion valuation in the private market, this is 7-12x revenue.

Considering that reddit is trading at 30x revenue and the lowest range being snapchat at 3.8x revenue. From a company growth perspective from ~ 140 million monthly active users in 2021 to ~ 250-260 million in 2025, representing an ~ 85% increase over four years, this is a user growth rate higher than reddit over this time period. In addition revenue since the start of 2021 at ~ $310 million to 2025 top line revenue coming in at ~ $850 million. It seems to me that the value is there, that is assuming that the valuations fall within the 6-10 Billion range (I have my doubts, to me seems low, it is not led by Dragoneer any more but JPM and GS)

***Disclaimer before market updates, sorry in advance, I am slightly out of the loop because of holiday so it will be shorter

HK/CN market

Lion dance performance during the Hong Kong Dragon and Lion Festival in Tsim Sha Tsui on January 2, 2026. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.

January 1st, almost like a new years gift, the Communist Party’s official journal Qiushi published an article calling for “more powerful and precise measures” targeting the property market, seems like the sector has taken a worse turn to a threshold that Beijing has decided that decisive action is needed in an attempt to stabilise the sector and along with it, the overall economy, so now we wait.

Meanwhile, south of the border in Hong Kong, another all time Ipo graph. MiniMax debuted, on January 9th, is up 109% from its initial $165 HKD per share. MiniMax is an AI company focused on developing large-scale foundation models for text, image, audio, and multimodal applications, currently backed by investors such as Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings.

• Home appliance. Haier Smarthome 6690HK, since last update, basically flat. Not much to say, there was an increase in institution holdings with Blackrock increasing from 7.72% to 8.34% on January 2. TCL 1070 HK, also flat. I think it will trade flat until new policies or subsidies to support the sector.
• E-commerce. PDD US, +6.48% since last update. Popmart has been underwhelming, -1.5% since the switch to PDD, so a good pivot. Also a waiting game, as much of the Chinese economy will be doing. Look for Beijing announcements for new policies or subsidies to help boost consumption.
• Xiaomi 1810HK. Super underwhelming to say the least. ~ -2.2% since the last update. With the increase in southbound holdings and share buybacks, to be honest I don’t really have an idea what is going on. So I am staying away from this for now.

US market

We have all seen the headlines, furthermore a 1.5 trillion defense budget targeted for 2027 saw a huge rally in the defense sector, and up next, Greenland. US job reports however fell more than expected in November, it seems like this no hire no fire trend is here to stay, so no room for a rate cut yet for the Fed, but who knows. Im sure Mr. Trump is looking forward to getting rid of Mr. Powell on the 15th of May.

• US financials. Steady as a rock, as usual, at this point unless there is something noteworthy I will not mention much. What is interesting is JPMorgan taking over Apple’s credit card business, interesting to see what they do with that.
• US tech. SPX and Dow Jones have hit record highs, led by gains in large technology names however there is some selling off in areas of tech as investors rotated toward other sectors, such as energy and consumer names.
• Quantum computing. Nothing significant, sector remains highly volatile, still should be staying away.
• RDW US, +31.5% since last coverage, this is now +56.1% since initial coverage, so I would like to think it was a good job by me. Redwire started the year by winning a contract to provide docking systems for the Nyx spacecraft. The company is also actively trying to expand themselves into Europe to win more potential contracts.

^[1] Voice over internet protocol