Tag: HMIN

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Stocks

Not a Pretty Day

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I mean the stock market. Dow lost more than 400 points. My brokage account lost about 10% of its value today. The biggest decliners are Home Inns (HMIN) and Mindray (MR); but Crocs (CROX) and Heelys (HLYS) are not helping either 🙁

Now the question is: is this a healthy correction? Or the beginning of (dare I say) bear market? I don’t have the answer. Personally I feel the market needs some sort of correction, especially in China, where the reality did not support the hefty stock prices. But do I think US consumers and business suddenly hit the break on everything? Probablly not. Same thing can be said else where.

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China Stocks

Focus Media FMCN is on the Focus

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It will report the earnings after market today. The Street est. earning is $0.62, but I think the whisper number is much higher. In other words, even if it beats the earning, if it issues a soft guidance, the stock may get punished tomorrow. This is the danger of  “playing ERs” with hot stocks. Interestingly, Sage Brennen has this question regarding “does this screen work”. Actually I had same question before, one of the reasons I did not buy FMCN.

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Stocks

How Did I Find Growth Stocks

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New Oriental (EDU, based in Beijing): every Chinese student came to US for study knows that, no need to say anymore. 

Home Inns (Rujia, HMIN, based in Shanghai): my friend in my hometown told me about this in summer 2004. He is a small business owner and he thinks that Rujia is clean and economical. He would stay there when he visits Shanghai as long as he does not see his foreign clients. I believe business travallers make up more than 50% of Rujia’s business.

Mindray (MR, based in Shenzhen): found out shortly after its IPO. I always liked medical device makers, both from investment and health/science point of view. The barrier of entry is high: unlike English (or IT) training, you put ad on newspaper, hire some English teacher and find students and a classroom, you are good to go. For medical device, you will need R&D talents (hint: graduates from HUST), good sales and customer support, all of which you can not get overnight. The risk: lawsuits, regulatory procedures.

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Business Stocks

Home Inns is Getting Expensive

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I mean the stocks, not the motel price. It’s being mentioned by IBD (Investors Business Daily) as No. 1 stock this Monday. IBD publishes 100 stocks every Monday based on its own rating system. Because a lot institutional investors trade stocks based on the IBD (whether there is merits or not is another story), the stock went up again today to $47.

A little background about IBD: IBD was founded by a savvy a stockbroker and writer named William J. O’neil. Here is an introduction about William on wikipedia. He also wrote some books such as “How to make money in stocks”. At one time I took very seriously on IBD’s rating system, but not now. I remember once a friend told me he found the “holy grail” of the stocks: IBD and William O’neal’s books. By the way, I told him at the time I liked to buy Google at about 160 (November 2004), he said “No”.

My point is: I like to read books, newspapers and magazines, listen to radio, or watch TV, but I won’t take all these blindly.      

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China Stocks

Market Cap of Home Inns HMIN

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I made a mistake on the market cap of Home Inns (Rujia, just like home), in my previous post (corrected now). The correct number is stock price * number of shares, or

$44.93 * (32,283,906 / 2 + 5,874,237 )  = $839,479,146
The number of shares 32,283,906 is from its Q3 2006 report. 5,874,237 is the IPO shares on Oct 26, 2006. Note it’s 2006 revenue is about $73 m. So the market cap/sales revenue is about 11.5

Is it high? Yes it’s high among hotel industry. But not high if compared to SINA (also about 10 right now). Note HMIN is growing much faster than SINA these days (70% vs. 30%). I also looked at Baidu’s number, it’s market cap is $4.15 B, and est. 2006 revenue is $106.4 m. The ratio is about 39. BIDU is expected to grow at 68% by WRHambrecht’s James Lee (click on the PDF report). Note growth is only one factor here, we also need to look at the profit margin, etc. if we want to compare apple to apple.

rujia pic

Categories
China Stocks

Home Inns Doubled from Debut

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It’s about $44 now. Today IBD published an article about Home Inns. The author’s view is a little too optimistic: as I understand serious domestic competitor includes motel168, besides the Jinjiang Inn. I noticed Jinjiang Inn also offers free broad band Internet now, as this was a key differentiator for Home Inn/Ru Jia in the past. Super 8, the US motel Chain, is also expanding very aggressively in China.

home inns bed check

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Stocks

Home Inns HMIN on Seekingalpha

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I published an article about Home Inns HMIN on Seekingalpha (Yahoo Finance) today. This was loosely based on my previous post in this blog on Jan 3.

Seekingalpha is a financial (stocks in particular) blog platform, and it’s a Yahoo Finance partner.

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Categories
China Stocks

Home Inns HMIN Yahoo Message Board

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Yes. It’s up and running now. Here is the link. I don’t know exactly how new IPOs got the message board started. It usually takse many requests, and lots of patience.

Oh, don’t take the discussions (especially the price target) too seriously. Because if you believe it and trade accordingly, you may regret later. That being said, I did see some intelligent analyses on the message boards from time to time. But a lot more emotional rants too. You are warned.

No message board for New Oriental (EDU) yet. The funny thing is that Mindray (MR) board was inherited from Morgan Food (used to have ticker symbol MR), and the board works 50% of the time. No wonder Yahoo stock did not do well lately 🙂

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Categories
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
Stocks

My Current Holdings

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I have the following stocks in my Scottrade account as of today Jan 3, 2007. I remember the beginning of last year I only have 200 shares of Symantec (SYMC)

Crocs (CROX): 46 shares, it seems people can not get enough of those funky shoes.

Heelys (HLYS): 62 shares, it seems everyone is skeptical of this except me 🙂

Home Inns (HMIN):  68 shares, +100% YoY growth, Chinese version of La Quita Inn (as I read the Peter Lynch book lately)

Mindray (MR): 111 shares, China’s No. 1 medical device maker, about 50% YoY growth, is opening a new facility in Nanjing, looking for expansion in the Yangtze delta region which is the economy center of China nowadays. Good move.