#valuation--financials

#valuation--financials

Chinese stocks have spent the last five years really testing the patience of even the most hardcore contrarians. Between the property sector struggles, the crackdown on tech platforms, and the constant friction over chip exports and tariffs, valuations have been pushed down across the board.

However, alongside these tangible indicators sits another layer of value, one that does not always surface cleanly in financial statements and may even remain invisible if it is not properly understood or articulated: Put simply, intangible assets are the non-physical elements a company has built that enable it to generate revenue, scale efficiently, or defend its market position. In technology companies, this typically includes proprietary software, intellectual property, datasets, customer relationships, brand equity, and internal systems or processes.

The ETF holds 50 positions, but the top two dominate in a way that makes the rest almost incidental. Johnson & Johnson carries a 25.4% weight, and Eli Lilly and Company sits at 21.4%. Together they account for roughly 46.8% of the entire fund.

The emergence of so-called "agentic AI," systems that can perform tasks independently and support decisions, plays a central role in this. Two-thirds of respondents believe that there is currently more hype surrounding agentic AI than previous technological developments. At the same time, three-quarters are still discovering how this technology can be used effectively. According to Basware CEO Jason Kurtz, the time for experimentation is over; executives expect concrete results.

"Every morning the opening screen on my Bloomberg is what's going on with CDS spreads on Oracle debt," Morgan Stanley Wealth Management CIO Lisa Shalett told Fortune in October, seeming to speak for a market that was increasingly worried about the bursting of a bubble in artificial intelligence (AI).