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Business China

New Oriental and Yu Minghong

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Amid all the craziness of Home Inns Ru Jia’s IPO, another well known Chinese company did IPO on NYSE on early Sept, that’s New Oriental Education group. For Chinese students seeking study abroad in the US in 1990s, New Oriental is nothing new. Although I have not attended their classes because at that time their classes are still limited to Beijing, I did got the vocabulary book nicknamed “Hong Bao Shu”. The book was edited by Mr. Yu Minghong, who also founded the school. From what I heard, when Mr. Yu speaks in the classroom, it’s pretty much like a rock star performs in the stage (or Bill Gates speaks in the stadium for his Microsoft employees).

I did not pay enough attention on its IPO because I was in China at that time. Now I have a little time to look at its F-1 forms, quarterly report, web page, listen to the conference call and reflect what I heard about the English education in China. I believe it is a good company and its stock may be a good long term investment. Compared to Home Inns’ position in China, I think it has a more dorminant position. But there is negatives too: it’s very dependent on Mr. Yu, both as owner (to set vision) and as management (execution, operation), I don’t know how can he manage that? Also it is not Wall Street friendly as Home Inns because Mr. Yu is not known to Wall Street (unlike Home Inns founders, they already made name from Ctrip).   

Categories
Business Web

Its the capitalism

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Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, surprised the IT/software world again yesterday with the Unbreakable Linux annoucement of “support of Red Hat Linux support and charge less than Red Hat does”. That news crushed the Red Hat stock today, it went down 24%. There are many good technical blogs explains and discusses Oracle’s move. Here is blog one and two. I am going to put it in plain English terms and share some of my thoughts on Open Source and Linux movement.

So Oracle is the guy who sells beer at baseball stadium, and Redhat sells peanuts. Sometimes they work together (parter) because a customer needs both beer and peanuts. They are happy because they both make money; Oracle makes more money because it has a higher sales revenue and profit margin. One day this Oracle guy decides to roll out its “Larry” brand peanuts, at half the price Redhat guy sells. As much as customers like Rehat’s personality, many customers decided to buy peanuts from Oracle.

Seriously, I think this is a big blow to the Open Source and Linux movement. Open source and linux have been buzz words in the technology world in recent years, partly because of people don’t want to see Microsoft taking all the market share, partly because its superior technology. Note many innovations are made by volunteering programmers all over the world, for the benefit of the technology community. IBM, the big blue, also put great effort behind Linux development for competition reasons (hint, to compete with Microsoft). To be fair, Oracle also contributed the Linux development in the past. Of course Redhat is the biggest player in the Open Source world: unlike all the proprietary software companies keep the source code inside company and derive revenues from software licensing, Redhat shares its source code with the community and solely derives its revenue from support and service. Now with Oracle’s jump into the ring, where is Redhat’s future? The following is what I saw from Redhat web site.

Continue reading “Its the capitalism”
Categories
Business

Shopping for Shoes II

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I bought my second pair of shoes on the web. You may wonder how can I buy the shoes without trying out in the store. Yes I did. I found out the price is much cheaper in the online store, $85 vs. $130. I felt pretty bad for the store clerk who showed me the product. But again I am not a rich guy now. As you may know, the world second richest man Warren Buffett also uses coupon at the “Diary Queen” store. By the way, he owns the Diary Queen Inc. So essentially he is putting money from the left pocket to the right  🙂  

This is my first shoes purchase from web. Online shopping (and banking) is nothing new to me. Amazon started it with books and CDs about 10 years ago. The interesting part is, with the development of e-commerce, we can now combine both the web and brick mortar stores to buy almost anything online: from appearel, cosmetics, electronics, shoes and even cars. This does not mean the real store will phase out. I think they need to provide more value (better service, better price, more choices) if they want to compete with the online stores. In other words, they have to earn it. Otherwise, people will just go online and buy everything from Amazon. Also, the stores both have online and offline presence such as WalMart, Best Buy and Target will have some advantages providing customer services (compare to pure online stores).  

For those curious minds, I got this Johnston Murphy Shuler Bicycle Toe from Zappos. 

johnston murphy shuler bike 

Categories
China Stocks

Home Inns IPO Date

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I could not find the offical date for the IPO date. The only thing official is it will debut this week. Since now it’s 12:50 PM Eastern Time, I don’t think it will go out today. That means we only have 2 days left.

Sohu has an aritlcle which did mention it will go on Oct 26 evening Beijing time. But it also says it’s the Oct 25 US day time. So go figure.

Also, the yahoo Finance is up for “HMIN”, although there is no content.

Incidentally, the World Series game 4 is rained out today. My sympathy to those people who paid “pretty penny” for the tickets. I heard the tickets start from $500 on the market.

PS, according to Sohu, the price for Home Inns share is $13.80 and it will go out Oct 26. This thing is as intense as  the baseball World Series 🙂  

Categories
Site Info

Added tags

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I added the “tags” for this blog. There are two places you can see the “tags”: under the time in each post; the right side bar (under “tags”). So what is “tag” exactly? Using non-technical terms, tags is like “key words”. “Tag” helps organize and search the blogs.

To use it, you just simply click on the “tag”, and it will show the related articles which contains that “tag”. The “tags” cloud map in the right side bar ranks the popularity of each tag by the size of “tag”. The larger the font, the more popular it is.  

If you are really curious about how to make this work in WordPress blog, here is the link for “Ultimate Tag Warrior plug-in”.

Believe it or not, although “Google search” is so good, in lots of cases the “tags” created by human beings are much better in organizing and searching blogs. I am also including the definitions for “tags” from the blog search engine Technorati here. 

Categories
China Stocks

Bubble is building

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Home Inns (Rujia, ticker symbol HMIN), which is due to IPO this week, is getting $ 1.0 billion orders for its $ 95 million listing (7.9 million shares in the range of $ 10 to 12, with over allocatement option of 1.185 million shares). See the article from Reuters here. Does anyone has the order vs. offering ratio (a.k.a. supply vs demand) for Baidu (BIDU)?  

As of now I still don’t know the exact date of its IPO. But I saw this lastest SEC filings. From most sources it appears Oct 25 Wed is the debut date.

If you know Chinese, here is the coverage from Sohu.

rujia home inns

Categories
Stocks

Stock Lesson VI

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It’s the earning season again. Many companies already came out with their 2006 Q3 (July to Sept) earnings. Some are good (Apple, eBay and Google), some are bad (Intel, Motorola and Yahoo). Some people are happy because they bought Google before the earning; some people are not because they bought Yahoo…

I don’t know why people want to bet on the earnings. But I played exactly this earning game when I was new to stock market. And the results is not pleasing at all. Betting on earning is pretty much like “guess the coin toss” because we as outsiders don’t have any edge. But for those brave hearts who really can not resist the excitement, here is my lessons and suggestions:

Continue reading “Stock Lesson VI”
Categories
Saint Louis

Shopping for Shoes I

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Did quite a bit shopping lately. This all started one Monday evening I felt bored and went to shopping mall. I stepped into a “Sleep Solutions” store and the associate showed me the “personal computerized sleep profile analysis”. This reminded me of similar computerized thing in a shoe store. Basically it helps the consumer choose the right product and at the same time, it has some promotion effect (see, this thing is computerized so it must be advanced). Anyway, the old lady bragged about the mattress they got (the most expensive one is $2300!), and she told me she won’t be stingy on two things: the bed and the shoes. Because we as human beings usually spend much time on those two things. And the quality of beds and shoes can have big effect on our health. I think what she said is right. Since I don’t want to shell out that much money for the new bed, I decided to get a pair of new shoes right away.

There is a “New Balance” store near my home and I visited there and got some education about the sports shoes. Basically there are 3 main categories, walking shoes, running shoes and in-court shoes. The store has all kinds of things but it does not have my size. Also it’s full priced. My friend mentioned the Sport Authority to me so I visited them. And I found the Avia 2050 Running shoes which I bought. Here is a picture:

http://www.runnersworld.co.uk/news/images/avia2050x160.jpg 

Another good thing is on sale.

One of my coworkers ran a full distance Marathon in the weekend. While I don’t expect run as much as him, I am going to run a little more now that I got a new pair of running shoes.         

Categories
Site Info

Changed Location URL

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I changed the location of this blog from http://www.stlplace.com/blog to http://www.stlplace.com/. I don’t expect anything to break because of this change. You should see some improvement on the web page loading time after the move.

Since nothing is perfect in life, do let me know if you see any problems. Thanks!

Categories
China Stocks

Analysis of Home Inn and Jin Jiang

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I saw this Chinese article about Home Inn and Jin Jiang. The author obviously did a good job here. For those who can not read Chinese, Jin Jiang Star is a competitor of Home Inn (Ru Jia). Jin Jiang Group started this economy hotel chain in 1997 (note Ru Jia started in 2002). From Home Inn’s F-1 Form, I saw Jin Jiang, Home Inn and Motel 168 had 20%, 18% and 16% of the China economy hotel market share, respectively. I stayed at both the Xing Ya Star (2002) and Jin Jiang Star (2004), and they are both comfortable.

It’s interesting to see, although Jin Jiang is the “first mover” in China’s economy hotel market, and they have lots of experience in the industry, they are not the dorminant position or even No. 1 brand. One reason it grew from the Jin Jiang group, whose main focus is the high end market. I think they are serious about this segment now since Home Inn is doing the IPO.

By the way, you can see Home Inn’s road show video from IPO home.