stlplaceHere are the results. I listened to Home Inns Q1 conference call (see the scripts here).
Some of the positives:
1) Revenue growth 65% Year over Year. Profit did not follow because of foreign change loss, tax expense and share based compensation. Note the foreign exchange loss won’t be one time as they continue moving the IPO money (in USD) to China (RMB), and you know these days the USD depreciates (wrt RMB) non-stop.
I really don’t want to talk this stock any more. But thought I may shed some light on this company’ new controversy, here is an article from market watch. To put long words short, Xinhua Finance Media Limited, failed to mention its CFO was under SEC investigation in its IPO prospectus. I don’t know legal side of the things, it seems they failed at least the investors. Similar things can be said for its underwriters?
Separately, I received their paper prospectus in the mail a while ago. This thing is about 400 pages, about 2 inches thick. I don’t know why they send this in the paper (investors can always read it online). Maybe they could boost their printing division’s revenue a bit by doing this.
Since I am on this topic, let me put up some sites may be helpful to Haigui or expatriates. Note I still think for ordinary person like me, doing a software engineer job in the US is usually easier than doing similar things in China, unless you are in Silicon Valley. But one can argue China has more opportunites (career/business). Also for most of us we have family and friends back home, both are important. Life is not only about work and money, right?
1) Monster HK: biggest job search site in the world, that’s the Asia site.
2) amCham Shanghai: America Chamber of Commerce job site, it has some expat jobs.
One thing I noticed during China trip is it’s difficult for college graduates to find a decent paid job. This applies to the graduate student too. I don’t have statistics but this is what I heard from friends, relatives, and the media. This reminds me a similar trend in the US, in recent years college graduates here had a hard time to find jobs too. Things improved as the US economy recovered from the recession.
You can read all this in JRJ.com if you know Chinese. My take on this is policy only works when market does not anticipate this. This time China Central Bank did give the investors (speculators) a surprise. But fundamentally, the growth of economy won’t slow down, and the company earning growth should continue for a while. Even in the short term, it may embolden the speculators because this removes another cloud (expect no interest hike for a while). People simply won’t move money from stock back to savings to get the 0.27% interest increase.
I think these two reasons also explains why the stock market is so hot in China?
This is the report. From the Conference call, it appears they made a mistake on the announcement, I believe there was a typo on the first bullet (should be 40% rather than 24.7% YoY if exclude the large bid in 2006)
My comments on the results:
I came back to St. Louis last night after staying in Shanghai for the last 10 weeks. The united 836 flight from Shanghai to Chicago took about 13 hours; it took another 5 hours to get from ORD to STL (4 hours stop over included). At one point during my 4-hour wait, I thought about driving from Chicago to St. Louis only takes 5 hours (300 miles). When I was in China, I heard about the MagLev (bullet train) from Shanghai to Hangzhou. It will take half an hour if completed (100 miles), making Hangzhou more like a suburban of Shanghai.
(Update) Here is a Chinese article explains more details. The minimum balance is RMB 300,000 to open an account inside China. Other restrictions apply.
(Original) I was wondering why the Chinese ADRs all rose today. Although I heard the China central bank is allowing domestic bank buy oversea stocks through QDII. This MarketWatch article connected the dots for me. I think this is a small way the goverment tries to divert some money from the red hot domestic stock market, especially the B shares market.
There are lots of rankings among B-schools. But I think the best B-school in the world nowadays is China. This seems biased because I am from China. OK how about I say India?
Seriously, here are my reasonings: China is at its first stage of captalism. As I said in my previous post “is China imitating the US too closely?” China is learning from the west in many ways: from consumer goods to infrustructure (highways, 3G), from banking system to stock market, from Merge & Acquisition to branding & distribution, from automobiles to real estate, REIT, etc.
(Picture taken at SunIslandClub in Shanghai suburban Qingpu.)
I mean the stocks (SBUX), not the latte. I believe the “so-so” same store sales number for the Q1 is the main reason for the recent drop. The stock is still not cheap by looking at PE (37), with projected rev/earning growth at about 20%. But this is Starbucks, normally they don’t go on sale. Near term, I believe SBUX is very much relying on the developed countries (a.k.a, US) for most of its revenue. For instance, in last 6 months I saw they opening up some new stores (some with drive through) in St. Louis and other midwest cities.