stlplaceI’m not picking on the China Construction Bank, this is a problem existing in all the banks. I can think of two reasons:
1) People are “managing their money” nowadays, e.g., people are withdrawing money from bank and put into the stock market; people are doing the certificate of deposit…
I bought some Home Inns (HMIN) again yesterday. Not surprisingly the stock dropped after I bought it, as things usually happen that way. But my time frame is from couple months to couple years, so I am not worried. The recent weakness of the stock is expected due to the new offerings and lock up expiration. Also I heard some rumors in China (two key managers left the company to join competitors recently, according to 21st century business herald). At the same time, the competition is heating up among budget hotels, as shown in this article from Pacific Epoch.
It’s show time. All the major car makers including domestic players such as Chery and Geely (remind me of Heelys), are putting up a big show in Shanghai new international expo center (is that the venue for 2010 World Expo, just be curious) this week.
Occasionally I received spam text messages from unknown people. People want to sell cars, apartments, etc. But yesterday I got a message from Home Inns (Rujia), it promotes the post “Golden week”(May 1 to 7) sales: it will give one night free during May 6 to 10 if I stay in their hotels for 3 nights. I can not stop laughing.
Separately, Home Inns is selling more shares (stocks), it will get $30 m from the proceeds to build more hotels. The competition among economy hotels in China are heating up.
That’s how I felt after spending a lot time in China in last 2 years. China is essentially the US in 1950 and 60s. The cars. The urbanization (people move from rural areas to cities). The chain restaurants, hotels, and hair salons. The malls. The new industrial zone such as ZhangJiang and MinHang. The credit cards. The new apartments and houses. The highways. The bullet train. The new banks (foreign and domestic).
Here are some of the pictures I took at ZiZhu IT Clusters (ZiZhu info and digital harbor if directly translated from Chinese). These buildings look like the ones in the States. Both Microsoft and Intel have presence there.
Second picture is taken at JiaoDa MinHang Campus, which is near the IT cluster. Two of my family members attended JiaoDa. I visited the campus in year 1992.
Note MinHang was the first development zone of Shanghai (earlier than world famous PuDong), the first Coca Cola bottling company in China was born there. Nowadays ZiZhu IT cluster is modeled after Silicon Valley. With the completion of Metro line 5 (from Xin Zhuang to MinHang), MinHang is much closer to the city. It’s interesting to think you can go from New York (downtown Shanghai) to Silicon Valley (MinHang) in one hour.
I believe the dealine is April 17 in the US. If you have not done so, this is a good time to do so. I found the Turbo Tax Online discount link still works (15% off).
On a separate note, more than 1.6 million people in China filed personal income tax for last year. Only individual has annual income over 120,000 Yuan need to report. The average income of that group was 320,000 Yuan (80% are workers, “Da Gong Zhu” in Chinese), and the average tax is about 50,000 Yuan. Wang Jianshuo has a good formula to calculate tax in his blog.
I remember in the old days (15 years ago) it took 8 hours to travel from Shanghai to Ningbo. Now it took less than 4 hours. They are raising the speed again this year, according to the news. The D series train is expected to travel at 200 Km per hour, much faster than 40 Km per hour in my college years. This is just another sign China has been through in last 15 years, on the economy.
Hit new high today, it closed above 3500 today (3531 to be exact).
I heard from the news on April 9, there were 180,000 new stock trading accounts being opened. As you may know the new accounts and trading volume of 1st quarter already exceeded last year’s No. Feel the power of Chinese stock investors (or speculators)? Someone did a simple calculation, let’s assume on average day 100,000 people opened the acct, and average account has 50,000 Yuan, that’s about 5 billion Yuan new money every day. If we assume 20 trading days for a month, that’s 100 billion Yuan a month. That’s on the demand (demand for stocks) side.
I started using online banking a few months ago because I want to check out the balance in my account (at the time I was in the US, there are no ATMs I can go check my balance). This is reletively simple at cmbchina, after you install an ActiveX control from the bank. Some open source guys are pretty upset about this but this is reality in China: Microsoft product is the de-facto standard.