Page Industries Ltd. share price target

PAGE Industries’ (PAGE) revenue performance has been decent (-8% YoY / 8% 5Y CAGR). Decline in value growth has been lower than that in volume growth (-11%) due to price hike taken during Aug’22 and premiumisation benefits. Overall recovery has been slower than expected due to general demand slowdown and intensifying of competition from peers (led by excess inventory).

In this report, we take stock of Page Industries’ (PAGE) last 5-year performance (compared to previous 5 years) vs peers (in the listed space). Key observations: (1) Innerwear industry underperformed NIFTY 50 during FY18-23 due to relative slowdown in the underlying business.

Jockey is the only top brand that competes in both men and women innerwear segment with same brand name (out of 208 brands, only 30 brands follow similar strategy – none of them are in top 10 list). We believe having specialist brand image is imperative to drive differentiation in women-wear segment.

Recommendation: With a 3% downside from the CMP, we maintain a HOLD rating on the stock.

4QFY23 print was significantly (~40%) below ours/consensus estimates led by general slowdown in the category, ARS (software implementation challenges) (this is likely to persist for two more quarters – and has been constant reason for underperformance since past few quarters) and negative operating leverage.