The Challenges of the China Market

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributors Tyler Crowe, Matt Frankel, and Jon Quast discuss:

• S&P 500’s (volatile) winners and losers in 2026 so far.
• The unexpected winners and losers.
• The changing Chinese market.
• Could Apple and memory be the next China market victims?
• Navigating fair values for stocks.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you're ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.

A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on July 2, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: The challenge of China's market today on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm your host, Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. We're going to really dive into the challenge that a lot of companies have been facing in China recently. We discussed it yesterday on yesterday's podcast related to Nike's earnings. We're going to scratch that a little bit deeper because there's a lot more companies than just Nike that are suffering this problem. But before we do that, it is July 2. Well, we're recording on the 1st, but, hey, you know what? For you guys, it's the 2nd, it means we're more than halfway through the year, and so far, the S&P 500 has been a wild place. We've had some incredible performance up and down the spectrum. I got to say, guys, I think so far this year, I think I've seen the widest spread of outcomes in the S&P 500 in a long time.

Jon Quast: Well, yeah. I mean, first and foremost, if my math is right here, we had 22 stocks double or more in the first half of 2026. Now, I'm talking about 22 stocks among the constituents of the S&P 500. Doesn't seem normal to me. I haven't checked the historical data, but having that many stocks double or more, I mean, we look at some of the higher-end stocks, the top five, I mean, it's far more than that. These are the largest U.S.-based profitable companies to have this many going up this fast; it just is remarkable.

Tyler Crowe: To your point, too, Jon, it's not just like the smallest companies going from, like, $20 billion to $40 billion. This is like Micron going from $500 billion to a trillion dollars or not that specific one, but that's an example, like massive companies making massive moves.

Matt Frankel: I feel like there were two tails of the first half, too. Like, the first quarter was ruled by fear. You had the Iran war starting. You had the SaaS apocalypse trade. That was all during the first quarter of the year. Then the second quarter was all optimism. I mean, the Iran war ended and restarted 78 times, and each time the market re-rated and had some positive, some optimism there. We saw the AI trade really start to pick up, especially when it comes to the picks-and-shovels plays. For the first time since 2003, small caps outperformed the S&P 500 for the first half of the year. By a significant margin. I mean, we saw a lot of kind of unique aspects of this year. You're right. It was a roller coaster ride. The S&P 500 is up for the year, but it was not a straight line getting there.

Tyler Crowe: Something you mentioned, too, while we were, like, pre-taping is I think this is the first time in a while that the Magnificent Seven stocks were actually underperformed the S&P 500 on a total basis. A lot of wacky Wednesday, everything is upside down, sort of feeling to what we've seen so far this year. Now, like you said, a lot of the things that we've seen so far have been like solid trends. I think people who have been listening to the show caught on to what's done well, what's done great? Stuff that stinks is like SaaS companies and not doing necessarily well because death of AI. Then AI infrastructure companies are the ones that were actually killing it. We're talking about the chip companies. A lot of the tangential industrial companies are associated. But there's a lot of other hidden aspects, and maybe unconventional winners so far in the S&P 500. Guys, what did you like when you looked down the list and we scoured them a little bit before the show, which one popped out? It's like, Hey, this is doing surprisingly well, and it's not like correlated with these mega trends that we're talking about here?

Jon Quast: I mean, to your point, it's basically the AI infrastructure build-out that is among the top performance in the S&P 500. But if you go down the list of ways, number 51. This doesn't even crack the top 10%. But this is Casey's General Store, and that ticker symbol CASY, this is a Midwestern convenience store and gas station chain, and it was up 41% in the first half. That's a tremendous six-month performance. It doesn't even crack the top 10% of the S&P 500, which is just remarkably laughable to me. But with gas prices going higher, I wasn't surprised that people were spending on gas necessarily. But I was wondering, is this consumer discretionary spend going to come under pressure? Well, restaurant sales, I mean, they were kind of under pressure here in the first half of the year. But look at Casey's, where it really makes its money is in the prepared foods part of its business. People go to the gas station. Now, you can get these grocery items as well, but the prepared foods are close to a 60% margin. This is the real moneymaker for the business. Same-store sales for prepared foods up 5% in the first half of its fiscal 2026, which just ended here in April. But that's a very strong showing in more of like the restaurant category here for Casey's, and it is driving a lot of its outperformance right now.

Matt Frankel: I think my biggest surprise, and Tyler kind of mentioned this, was that the MAG seven underperformed the S&P 500 for the first time in a while, and was how well the S&P 493 did, every other company in the index as a whole. I mean, there are some obvious examples of companies that are benefiting from the second wave of AI, and that's really what's driving it. The hyperscalers already had their benefit in the past few years. Just think companies like Micron, as Tyler mentioned earlier, and Sandisk, the memory companies are obvious examples. But then if you look at kind of picks and shovels plays that are a little below the radar, like Corning is a big surprise to me as how well it's done. GLW is the ticker symbol. It's a 175-year-old company that's a specialty glass and fiber-optic cable maker, and companies like Corning and others are being revalued as AI infrastructure plays because they're benefiting from that massive wave of data center spending. Companies like that, I think, are the biggest positive surprise to me, and there are several other examples of those.

Tyler Crowe: I think we're going to have to talk to the production team. I think we need to do a field research road trip, and we'll do a Casey's, Buccee’s, Wawa, all of the hyper-loyal customer base convenience stores across America. That could be a fun little research topic. Like we said, these are some of the unconventional winners, and like we said, the losers, you'll find a ton of SaaS companies, things like that. A lot of tech software companies, I guess, is the best way to put it. But obviously there's some down in the loser category. Same thing, unconventional losers. What were some of the things that you guys found that really popped off the screen there?

Jon Quast: For me, it was Tractor Supply Company. This is Ticker Symbol TSCO. It's down 36% in the first half of 2026. That makes it the 17th worst performer in the index. Now, the company is forecasting some tepid top-line growth, as well as EPS growth for the year. I'm not necessarily surprised it's underperforming the index, but I am surprised that it is down so sharply because it is still forecasting modest growth. It's not like the business is falling apart. It's actually down 50% from its all-time high, which is its biggest drawback in more than a decade. That really surprises me personally, this is a dip I took advantage of because I think that Tractor Supply Company is just a rock-solid business year in and year out. I think that its customers really do rely on it for a lot of things, such as their animal feed. This is a good dividend growth company, as well. 17 consecutive years of raising that dividend. I do have a place in my portfolio for dividend growth companies, and with the yield at close to 3%, that’s an all-time high for Tractor Supply Company. It's one that I went ahead and added in the first half.

Matt Frankel: I mean, there are some of the S&P 500 companies that perform poorly that I really wasn't surprised about, Intuit is at the bottom of the list. They should be worried about AI disruption fears. They make a lot of sense for this business on both the tax prep and the QuickBooks side of the business. One that really wasn't on my Bingo card to fall 37% this year was FICO Fair Isaac Company, the company behind the dominant credit scoring system. Yes, they're a SaaS company, but just the dominance, the relationships they have, I thought were more of a moat than they turned out to be. For the first time ever, we're really seeing serious competitive threats. Like, mortgage lenders can now use the Vantage score, which is the number one competitor for the first time ever. There are legitimate questions about how big of a moat their proprietary scoring system is, which has been a very well-kept secret over the years. If AI's capability of evaluating consumer credit risk improves to the point where it's not really needed anymore. That's one that surprised me.

Tyler Crowe: Yeah, I feel like a lot of that will also come down to not only can AI do it, but will regulators let AI do it? Fascinating story to see how willing we're going to feed all of our underwriting to the AI. Coming up next, we're going to talk about the challenge of selling into the China market recently.

On yesterday's show, we took a look at Nike's earnings. One thing that stood out to me when I was on the show there is the sales declines in China, and this is like a multi-year trend that's been going on. Nike's China sales are down like 30% than they were like five years ago. I wanted to pull on this some more, and you started to see this recurring theme with a lot of other companies. The top story in the Wall Street Journal this morning, business section, was declining market share for non-Chinese automotive companies in China. This comes on the heels of Starbucks selling a majority stake in its China operations to a local private equity firm. There are numerous consumer brand companies, especially in the beauty and health personal care space, that we’ve seen large declines, mostly because of weak China sales. There are a few of the many stories out there. Where China was once a major growth engine for a company, but now it's becoming a headwind. Guys, there's a couple reasons for it, but what to you or some of the things that you're seeing that could help explain this phenomenon?

Jon Quast: Well, I think that one thing that stands out to me is that China is capable of making really high-quality products now. You think about how it used to be. It used to be thought if you wanted to save money, you bought a Chinese product. If you wanted a quality product, you bought American. That's no longer the case. This is a trend that economists have noted for a while, but I don't think that that has sunk in to the consciousness of the general population, it's just entrenched in our minds that China makes low-quality products. But in reality, they've really upped their game. Their manufacturing capabilities are incredibly modern and incredibly tech-heavy. It's actually able to compete on both the low-quality products for just cheapness, but also your higher-end quality, they do have viable alternatives to some of these American brands. What is interesting is because it has invested so much in the manufacturing infrastructure, it's really hard for American manufacturing to compete on price. China does have some advantages when it comes to that, and I think that does make its products a little bit more of a viable alternative and does put some pressure on American companies.

Matt Frankel: The other side of it is Chinese consumption has declined significantly. China went from being one of the highest-growth economies that our companies can get into. Vehicle sales in China fell 20% year over year in the first quarter. There's a lot of other cases, or other industries where we're seeing declining consumption. Jon's right. China's manufacturers are making higher-quality products than ever before. They're innovating at a faster pace than we've seen in ever before. The combination of those two things are making it really hard on American companies to find growth in China.

Tyler Crowe: The weak domestic market forcing everyone to find markets elsewhere has been a big thing. I saw an incredible statistic where it was like, I think it was 20-something percent of sales in broader Southeast Asia of electronics, cars, and stuff like that were Chinese in 2014, and now it's like 64% really going into the show. They're starting to dominate some of their regional markets as well. I mentioned some of the companies that have already suffered a little bit. Guys, what are some of the companies on your radar that maybe have not seen the China headwind that we've talked about with Nike and others, but could be facing it sooner rather than later?

Matt Frankel: There's a difference between having seen the Chinese headwinds and having it priced into their stocks. One I want to call out is Apple. Apple is a company that has been meaningfully losing market share in China for years. I mean, the company has resorted to heavily discounting some of its products in China, and that's a practice as we know that Apple doesn't really do in the U.S. Luxury good makers in general are another example. LVMH is a big one. They specifically cited China's slowdown as an earning headwind. But I see Apple's the biggest not yet priced-in story. Huawei, their quality of their smartphones have just grown exponentially, and this could keep part of Apple's revenue base that's tied to China declining for years to come.

Jon Quast: For my part, I don't want to sound the alarm yet because I don't think that this is a problem necessarily yet, but AI memory is a huge trend right now. There are companies enjoying just unprecedented profit margins because of how in demand their products are and how little supply that there is. That is a trend that I do foresee continuing for some time. However, we do need to make note of some advancements, potentially advancements in the Chinese market, and that's from ChangXin Memory Technologies. It reportedly just reached parity with Samsung and SK Hynix with their memory products. Now, it would still need to level up just a little bit more to start taking on the top high-bandwidth memory generation for products that AI really needs. But it is closing that gap, and if all of a sudden a Chinese technology company could release a memory product that is on par, it might be able to spin off some of the market share, at least in the international markets, which would disrupt the supply and demand imbalance in the memory market.

Tyler Crowe: I want to test out, like a working investment thesis. It's not on a particular company. It's a little bit more of a theme. The companies we've mentioned, Nike, Apple, some of the memory companies, a lot of these companies benefited in the international growth phase immensely from, I would say, starting with NAFTA in 1990, all the way up until 2016, 2017, was this long-tailed growth of globalisation entering the Chinese market, entering global markets. A lot of these companies became dominant players in the international markets like China. I'm starting to think that now that these mature companies, ones that have gotten to the point like we need to win internationally, especially in China and Southeast Asia to grow our businesses. Further, I feel like those are weaker ones, and companies that not have yet reached we need to start winning internationally to grow. We still have a lot of room domestically. I feel companies in that phase are likely better investments today because the international markets are just far more competitive than what they used to be. That's my working thesis here. What do you guys agree, disagree? Where should I tweak this?

Matt Frankel: I think directionally, you're right. Many international markets, especially China, have become far more competitive over the past decade or so. I mean, consumption's declined, you're competing for a share of a smaller market with companies that are doing it better. Companies like Starbucks, like Nike, like the automakers, used to use that easy growth from international expansion playbook, and you simply can't do that anymore. I mean, when you look at the top ten, 20 performers of the S&P 500 so far this year, they are almost all U.S.-driven businesses that get most of the revenue domestically. That's not to say that international is never going to be a big growth driver again. I would refine that thesis to say the best move isn't to avoid companies that are pursuing international exposure. It's to favor companies that have more of a focused international strategy built on mastering a certain market or a certain technology in a certain market that have really a focus.

Jon Quast: Yeah, Tyler, I would disagree with you slightly. It's really hard for me to imagine a company, especially a technology company that does well over the long term that doesn't compete well internationally. Maybe there's a case for a retail chain in the U.S. or a restaurant chain that, you know, it doesn't need international to provide good shareholder returns, but a lot of these companies, if they are going to be some of these life changing investments, the ones that we want to own. Chances are, they're going to have to go to the international markets for growth, and they're just going to have to win in spite of the competition. I halfway wonder with some of these companies that are doing poorly in China, it used to be an easier game. I'll concede that point to you. I wonder if some of these early movers in China just didn't get lazy with how easy it was to just bolt on China operations and then start getting incremental revenue. Now all of a sudden it's harder and they were caught with asleep at the wheel because some companies are doing well still in China, and one that I'd like to point out is Decker Outdoor. This is Ticker symbol DECK. This is a parent company of shoe brands Hoka and Ugg. It's really still growing sales in China. It's selling them for full price, so it's maintaining those strong profit margins. Management says there's only 30% brand awareness yet in China. There's potentially still room for ongoing growth in China. I think that some companies are competing well, and I think that those deserve some attention.

Tyler Crowe: Slight shout-out to hook up because I just got my new SpeedGoat 7s, and I get saying, that is a fantastic product. They're not even paying me to say that. Free advertisement. There you go, Deckers. Coming up out for the break, we're going to hit the mailbag.

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Tyler Crowe: Hey, everyone. Here's your quick reminder. As always, if you want to get your question read on air and for us to answer it, go to podcasts at fool.com. That's podcasts with an s at fool.com. Always remember. Keep it Foolish. Keep it short enough. We can read on air, and we cannot give any personalized advice to try to keep it relatively impersonal, and thoughts about generic companies or investing thesis and stuff like that.

Today's question comes from Mark Frost, from the Isle of Wight. Basically, he's confounded or bemused, was his word, at some of the price discrepancies in a lot of companies, and it ties back to what we were talking about with the S&P 500, six-month returns for here. His thing is AI hardware suppliers, he gives a list of quite a few of them with price-to-earnings ratio is over 40, saying their current price is way ahead of fair value. Whereas some of the big software companies and the hyperscalers, Microsoft, Meta, Google, he argues, where fair prices are way above current share price, and they have these long track records of really good cash generation profits, things like that. Understanding the argument concerns about AI eating into these business models in each case, they own the customer relationship. Basically, he's asking like, What am I missing here? Is it just herd mentality that we're seeing this wide discrepancy of unconventional valuations, or is this maybe a dynamic he's not seeing right now?

Matt Frankel: I mean, essentially, he's right that it's herd mentality. I mean, investors are willing to pay a high premium for companies that have high confidence future growth, like Caterpillar, for example, as opposed to tangible cash flow at reasonable multiple, but with uncertain future growth or innovation potential, like Salesforce and Microsoft and those kind of companies. In other words, the market is pricing AI infrastructure demand with high confidence and low risk while pricing AI giants with skepticism. Now, to be clear, I don't know if the market's right on either side of that right now, and quite frankly, I don't think it is. There are a lot of AI infrastructure players whose valuations, in my opinion, have gotten a little bit ahead of themselves, but it is hard mentality when you see groups of stocks like those move together.

Tyler Crowe: The only thing I would say to, like, the predictable cash flows of the Microsoft's medos of the world is the operations cash flows are very predictable, but the amount of money they're spending has completely changed, and I think that does change the dynamic in terms of free cash flow because we've seen companies like Meta taking on debt, we've even seen Alphabet announce an equity raise because they're basically saying we're going to outspend our operational cash flow in the coming years. It's not just the period where it's like, we're throwing off all this excess cash. It is changing the spending dynamic for a lot of these companies.

Jon Quast: Yeah, to go back to the question, the first part was essentially hard mentality, and I think we could do a whole episode on herd mentality, quite frankly, because I think that is a very tangible force in the market. I agree with Matt. I think that it's going to become even higher in the future. Here's why. It's just becoming so much easier to have access to information and to research companies. To me, it's only natural that more people would be discovering companies than compared to in the past. You look back at Warren Buffett back in the day. I mean, he's flipping through these booklets on paper one by one to find ideas. Not a lot of people are going to do that, but with even AI tooling, I can make some prompts and start going down some rabbit holes and discovering some companies. I think that will lead to more people discovering things. I think that does increase the possibility of herd mentality. I will point out that herd mentality isn't necessarily wrong. The herd can be right, and so I want to play devil's advocate right there.

I'll play devil's advocate here too. I mean, you look at Caterpillar stock trading at 51 times earnings. That's unusual. It's five year average down at 20 times earnings. More than double what it normally trades at. But does it have above-average earnings growth potential on the horizon? I would say it potentially does there as well. Some analysts are calling for 60% earnings per share growth over the next three years. You can imagine a scenario where, in particular, it's reciprocating engines. It's looking to triple its capacity to produce those. You could see a scenario where three years and beyond, earnings growth even picks up more because business demand is so strong. Maybe those earnings growth do carry it and justify the valuation today. Now, that's not my highest bet for the future, but I am saying if you told me that you wanted to buy Caterpillar stock today at these valuations, I wouldn't think that you were crazy. I think there is some justification to what's happening.

Tyler Crowe: I'll keep my notebook out. I feel like rt mentality will be a great either Evergreen or one of those ones where we have to pre-record. But that is all the time we have for today. Matt, Jon, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm going to hit the disclosure, and we'll get out of it.

As always, people in the program may have interest in the stocks to talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on peer. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show. Thanks to our producer Bart Shannon and the rest of The Motley Fool team. For Jon, Matt and myself, thanks for listening, and we'll chat again soon.

Jon Quast has positions in Starbucks and Tractor Supply. Matt Frankel, CFP® has positions in Starbucks. Tyler Crowe has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, Casey's General Stores, Caterpillar, Corning, Deckers Outdoor, Intuit, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Microsoft, Nike, Salesforce, Starbucks, and Tractor Supply. The Motley Fool recommends Fair Isaac and Lvmh Moët Hennessy - Louis Vuitton, Société Européenne. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.