For investors, the fractious declarations of the new US ex-president and the recurring tensions between China and the United States are two inexhaustible sources of concern and upheaval.

Analysts at Jefferies, who are generally well aware of such developments, warn that these tensions will flare up again in 2025, and that the United States, supported as usual by the Europeans, is preparing to press the issue of Xinjiang once again.

This province in north-west China has long been under fire from NGOs who accuse Beijing of oppressing the Uighur minority. Strategically - and there's no doubt a link between the two - it is also one of the world's major cotton-producing centers.

According to Jefferies analysts, the major textile groups - including Nike and Adidas, which has already lost out in this case- have been informed of forthcoming retaliatory measures against Western groups sourcing from Xinjiang.

In this context, Fast Retailing founder Tadashi Yanai made a comment that was not well received in China when he explained in a BBC interview that he avoided the province for his group's tame products, citing in the process a subject too "political" to be openly discussed.

Since then, calls for a boycott of Uniqlo have multiplied on Chinese social networks, but the Japanese group's share price - which has enjoyed an excellent year on the stock market - doesn't seem to have taken this on board. Incidentally, this situation brings us back to our article on Fast Retailing last year.

At current levels of over thirty times operating profit, the Group's valuation seems to us to be on a slippery slope. The perspective here differs significantly if you're a Japanese or a Western investor, because in yen terms, sales have grown by a third in five years; in dollar terms, however, they've remained perfectly unchanged.

Nevertheless, in both yen and dollars, we can only applaud the remarkable expansion of margins, achieved without massive price increases despite a highly inflationary environment. This feat owes much to Uniqlo's success on the Chinese market, which now accounts for almost a third of consolidated exploration profit, i.e. as much as the Japanese domestic market.

In other words, a boycott movement - if indeed it were to take shape - would have far-reaching consequences. This is without even mentioning the impressive rise in competition from Shein and other emerging players in the fast fashion sector.