Category: China

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China Stocks

HMIN Home Inns Update

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There are lots of praises for Home Inns (Rujia, most in Chinese). I saw this one in English. Actually from my own experience at four Home Inns in Shanghai I have both praises and complaints. So every coin has two sides.

On serious side, I noticed after Home Inns developed the new hotels in Nanjing and Qingdao this year, they are developing very fast in Xi’an and Anhui. This is all good. But I still have couple questions for them: as they add more hotels, how many are company owned (how many are franchised)? From my understanding they make a lot more money from company owned hotels. Also, how about pricing power? (do they need to discount to get people to stay?)

Note the stock hit all time high yesterday ($41.85).

Categories
China Stocks

Mindray MR Pre-announce Fiscal 2006

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I summerized its year 2005 and 2006 (low end) number here. I noted that the revenue year over year growth slowed a bit (consider first 9 months growth about 41%). This can be attribute to the continuing “anti-corruption” campaign in China hospitals.

                  2005               2006              YoY

Rev (CNY)  1,078,573,000 1,470,000,000 36.29%
    
Income         205,089,000    360,000,000 75.53%
    
Earning (CNY)           2.40                3.73 55.42%

You can read the news here.

Continue reading “Mindray MR Pre-announce Fiscal 2006”
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China Stocks

Bought Some EDU New Oriental

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I don’t know why the stock went down this morning after a good earning report. Anyway guessing stock price’s daily fluctuation is not my job. I did listen to the conference call (script by seekingalpha) and it seems to me Michael and Louis did well, although Michael’s English is not perfect. Some of the growth driver:

1) Elite English, I believe this is more like “business English”, I know in Shanghai there are “WallStreet English”, “Webber English”, etc. Don’t know how New Oriental will do in this new space. But profit margin in this area is better because those customers are not price sensitive.

2) Oversea English Test preparation: I believe things have not slow down because nowadays more and more Chinese high school graduates go overseas for undergraduate education.

They also talked a bit on goverment regulation on “private education sector” and coming lock up expired period.

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China Stocks

Michael Yu Minghong’s New Report Card

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All right, New Oriental announced the fiscal 2007 Q2 report today. Here is the report. It seems they are doing well. Some highlights include 33% YoY reveneue growth (beat est. 20%). “The growth was mainly driven by the increase in the number of student enrollments in language training and test preparation courses.” 

I imagine people just can not get enough English classes (spoken English, business English, kids English), and all kind of testings (IT, law, graduate school admission, in addition to traditional TOEFL/GRE/ACT/SAT).   

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China Stocks

A Stock A Day

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I was on shopping spree on stocks lately. Since I bought the Panera Bread (PNRA) last Friday, this Monday I bought some Telestone (TSTC), a Chinese wireless equipment maker; on Tuesday I bought some Ninetowns (NINE), a China based software company not new to me because I lost money on it in the past 🙁

These are two speculative plays. Telestone recently moved from Amex to Nasdaq, and it is posed to benifit from the 3G services adoption and Olympics in China. Ninetowns’ software business is stablizing after one year and half’s transition period; it also is building up B2B services through tootoo.com and globalmarkets aquisition.

I only took a small position on these two as they are a bit speculative right now. As you may see from their stock prices (about $9 for TSTC, and about $5 for NINE). I am going to hold them for longer time. I was reading Philip Fisher’s “Uncommon Profits in Common Stocks”, one thing amazed me is Phil will hold a stock as long as its fundamentals are good. I guess great investors like Buffett and Fisher all have great patience 🙂 

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China Stocks

New Oriental EDU to Report FY 2007 Q2 Earning

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on 8 am ET Jan 16. Here is link to web conference. And the dial in instruction can be seen here.  

I don’t have any EDU shares.

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Business China

New US China Direct Flight

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It’s official, the United Airlines won the battle. It will fly from Washington Dulles to Beijing, connecting two capitals. It appears to me American Airlines was the front runner but their pilot union doesn’t want to fly more than 15 hours from Dallas to Beijing, and that basically pulled AA out of race. I was thinking Continental’s New York and Shanghai route makes more economic sense because they are financial centers of the two countries. But obviously politics played a role here. With two existing routes from North America to Shanghai (San Francisco, Chicago), UA will have the biggest presence in US China routes. 

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China Stocks

Finally Some Rational Comments on Chinese Stocks Markets

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That’s from Andy Xie, former chief economist for Morgan Stanley (Asia), here is the link. The article is in Chinese. Basically he is saying the high PE ratio of Chinese domestic stocks can not be justified by the growth of economy. The profitability of company and the prosperity of economy are two separate things. Among the factors pushing up the stocks prices, he mentioned the growth of mutual fund industry and the slow housing market.  

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China Stocks

LFC China Life Insurance Debut Tomorrow in Shanghai

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The party is finally here. The ticker symbol is 601628 (not available at Yahoo Finance yet), it was priced at 18.88 (lots of 8 here). And it could go to 30s (note I usually make wrong guess, so take it for what it worth…)

The ticker symbol in Hongkong is 2628.HK (from Yahoo Finance). And LFC is the ticker symbol at NYSE.

Disclosure: I don’t have any postions on this.

Follow up (08Jan07, 7:48PM Central time): it opened 37.00 Yuan, up 96% from 18.88.

china life insurance LFC

Categories
China Technology

The Status of Internet Development in China

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Keso (Hong Bo), an outspoken blogger in China, summerized his views about the Internet in China in his blog. While I don’t 100% agree with his view, I think some of his points are well said. I am thinking current stock market in China kind reflect this “make quick money” theme.

By the way, Keso has some cool pictures on flickr.