North Korean state media on Saturday referred to leader Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter as a “great person of guidance”, employing a term usually reserved for senior leaders and hinting at her status as a potential successor, analysts said.

Both the English- and Korean-language versions of an official Korean Central News Agency report on Kim and his daughter’s visit to a greenhouse farm used the plural form of the honorific, suggesting it applied to both of them.

“The great persons of guidance, together with cadres of the Party, the government and the military, went round the farm,” read the English-language report, which ran with images of the pair.

Analysts said it was the first time Kim’s daughter — never named by Pyongyang’s state media, but identified as Ju Ae by South Korean intelligence — had been described as such by the North.