First Principles Brief

First Principles Brief

Structured business analyses built from first principles. These briefs examine what a company does, why it exists, and how it succeeds for long-term investors.
Jul 15
Trip.com Group Limited (TCOM): Is Travel Still the Product, or Is the Platform the Asset?

Trip.com Group Limited (TCOM): Is Travel Still the Product, or Is the Platform the Asset?

The business itself made intuitive sense. Travel is not a fad. People still want to move, explore, visit family, take holidays, and experience places beyond where they live. The form of travel may change. The human desire behind it is unlikely to disappear.
21 min read
Jul 07
Sheng Siong Group Ltd (OV8.SI): Can a Supermarket Compound?

Sheng Siong Group Ltd (OV8.SI): Can a Supermarket Compound?

Sheng Siong's competitive position rests on three components. None is a single decisive wall. Each is an operating advantage that means little on its own and matters because it works with the others: location, procurement, and fresh food execution, coordinated across the network.
25 min read
Jun 21
Zijin Mining Group (2899.HK): Finding Advantage in Difficult Ground

Zijin Mining Group (2899.HK): Finding Advantage in Difficult Ground

At the surface level, Zijin exists to resolve a physical supply deficit. Decarbonisation, electric vehicles, solar and wind, transmission grids, and the computing infrastructure behind AI all require more copper at a time when the global mining sector has been starved of new supply.
22 min read
Jun 05
Pan-United Corporation Ltd (P52.SI): Concrete Is the Business. The System Around It Might Be the Moat.

Pan-United Corporation Ltd (P52.SI): Concrete Is the Business. The System Around It Might Be the Moat.

There is also a durability argument that I keep returning to. Concrete has not fundamentally changed in a hundred years. You can make it greener, stronger, lighter, smarter to deliver. But the thing itself, a material that hardens into infrastructure, is not going away.
17 min read
May 19
Haidilao (6862.HK): Is Service the Moat, or the Cost?

Haidilao (6862.HK): Is Service the Moat, or the Cost?

Haidilao's service quality did not emerge from a training manual. It was built through a specific mechanism: a master-apprentice incentive structure where store managers are compensated not just on their own store's performance, but on the performance of managers they trained
13 min read