After market close on August 28, JOINN (06127) released its preliminary first-half 2026 earnings report. During the reporting period, the company achieved operating revenue of 704 million yuan, up 5.27% year-on-year; net profit attributable to shareholders reached 748 million yuan, a surge of 1,126.80% year-on-year; corresponding non-GAAP net profit attributable to shareholders jumped 2,931.69% year-on-year. Yet the market did not grant this "monkey cycle"-driven paper profit any additional premium.

On the trading day following the announcement, JOINN's H-share price closed down 3.32%, and the decline persisted through September 11, with the stock falling 16.21% over that period. However, when JOINN officially disclosed its first-half 2026 financial report on September 29, its H-share price surged 15.62% the next day. Driven by rising volume and price, the company's stock price hit an intraday high of HK$32.58 on October 6, setting a nearly three-year high for its Hong Kong-listed shares.

Why did the same financial data produce such different market reactions for JOINN?

When the "Monkey Leader" Meets Industry Beta

During the two periods when JOINN disclosed its preliminary interim results and its official interim report, the stock traced a "V-shaped" trajectory. From a technical standpoint, between August 10 and September 11, JOINN's H-share closing price fell from HK$26.64 to HK$21.20, a cumulative decline of 20.42%. During this period, its moving averages formed a standard bearish alignment; in terms of momentum indicators, both RSI and KDJ entered clearly oversold territory in the latter half of the move, but short-term rebound conditions failed to receive bottom confirmation on the MACD trend — the MACD did not show a bullish divergence with rising momentum at that time.

On the volume front, JOINN's stock price exhibited an overall trend of declining volume alongside declining price from August 10 to September 11. Within this range, the volume during the main decline phase from August 28 to September 11 was notably lower than in the earlier period, indicating that selling pressure was not released in an extreme manner during the latter half. On September 11, its intraday turnover rate dropped to just 1.99%, below the period's average daily turnover rate of 4.13%. Such low turnover suggests that funds had not yet formed a consensus on bottom-fishing. Therefore, this round of decline in JOINN's stock price was clearly not a panic-driven liquidation by on-market funds, but rather continued position reduction and insufficient buying support following a decline in institutional risk appetite.

Industry beta factors were evidently one of the key drivers steering JOINN's price action during the aforementioned period. The Hang Seng Healthcare Index shifted from an earlier uptrend to high-level consolidation between August 10 and September 11, declining 4.43% over that period; meanwhile, the medical R&D outsourcing index fell 10.52%. On the technical front, JOINN's relative strength curve remained persistently below the industry curve. JOINN's H-share price notably underperformed the sector during this range, which on the other hand indicates that industry beta only guided the downward direction to some extent — the core catalyst that triggered the main decline phase was still the preliminary earnings report the company disclosed on August 28.

The market's interpretation of this preliminary earnings report at that point clearly focused on "paper profits from monkey price revaluation." Although investors saw "surging profits," the preliminary report also showed that the company's core safety assessment business remained in a loss-recovery phase. Coupled with the downward guidance from industry beta at the time, the market initially priced JOINN at a "profit quality discount," so the stock continued its prior downtrend after the preliminary interim results were disclosed.

H Shares Show Stronger Elasticity Under Positive Catalysts

As mentioned above, after nearly a month of decline, JOINN's stock price showed clear oversold indicators on the technical front by September 11, with short-term momentum extremely compressed. By then, its trading volume had dropped from over 16 million shares on August 10 to fewer than 2.5 million shares. As oversold signals became increasingly evident and short-selling momentum significantly exhausted, the "ignition" from industry beta sounded the horn for a new round of rebound for JOINN.

On September 14, Hong Kong-listed biopharmaceutical and CXO sectors led gains. Asymchem surged 14% that day, lifting the share prices of Pharmaron, Tigermed, and JOINN. Under the transmission of industry beta, JOINN's H shares closed up 5.38% that day, delivering the first recovery candle after the oversold condition.

When market sentiment reversed, investors also began pricing in the positive factors in JOINN's performance. In the preliminary earnings report disclosed on August 28, JOINN not only showcased its exaggerated profit growth driven by the "monkey cycle," but also disclosed net operating cash flow of 457 million yuan for the period, up 180.89% year-on-year. As one of the CROs with the largest experimental monkey reserves in China, approximately 90% of JOINN's stocked experimental monkeys are self-bred and self-used, so the company's cash flow performance is less affected by monkey price fluctuations, instead serving as an important window into the performance of its core safety assessment business.

On the other hand, rising monkey prices further elevated JOINN's "moat of scarce capacity from self-owned monkey sources," leading some investors to value the company as a safety assessment platform possessing scarce non-human primate model resources. After the official first-half 2026 financial report was disclosed on September 29, the above view was validated: new orders signed in the first quarter of 2026 totaled approximately 910 million yuan, up 111.6% year-on-year; cumulative backlog orders reached approximately 3.1 billion yuan, up 40.9% year-on-year.

In other words, the volume and price levels of JOINN's Q1 orders smoothly extended into Q2. The surge in orders means the company's "monkey price elasticity" now has a clear path to operational realization. On the news front, Hengrui Medicine's announcement on September 29 of a $2.6 billion BD deal with Novo Nordisk further raised market expectations for demand in drug R&D and safety evaluation outsourcing services.

Driven by both news and fundamentals, these two logics directly supported JOINN's single-day stock price surges on September 18 and September 30.

It is worth noting that in this rally since September 14, JOINN's H shares have demonstrated stronger elasticity. Data shows that JOINN's Hong Kong-listed stock price rose 40.2% over the period, significantly outpacing the 22.9% gain in its A-share price and the 9.34% gain in the A-share medical R&D outsourcing index over the same period. The correlation coefficient between JOINN's A-share and H-share daily returns during the period reached 0.818. This indicates to some extent that JOINN's A shares are linked to sector sentiment, but its H shares show clear excess returns, displaying stronger independent pricing characteristics.

From an external perspective, around September 30, domestic innovative drug outbound BD transactions remained active. The simultaneous strengthening of the Hang Seng Stock Connect Innovative Drug Index and Hong Kong-listed innovative drug and CXO names undoubtedly provided a favorable market environment for JOINN's H-share rally.

In terms of stock price performance, given that JOINN had long traded at an AH discount, when the company experiences an order inflection point, biological asset revaluation, and resonance between GLP certification and AI pharmaceutical narratives, JOINN's A-share price gains tend to be more moderate as the A-share CXO valuation anchor is more stable, while its H shares are more prone to a "low base plus high elasticity" rally.

Additionally, after the official disclosure of the first-half 2026 financial report, the recovery of JOINN's core safety assessment business was further confirmed. Hong Kong funds will clearly have a stronger willingness to allocate to JOINN as a high-elasticity alpha target with the scarce advantages of "rising monkey prices plus rigid experimental monkey supply plus order inflection point."