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Journalist China
Business news from China By Doug Young.
Doug Young, journalist, has lived and worked in China for 20 years, much of that as a journalist, writing about publicly listed Chinese companies.
He is based in Shanghai where, in addition to his role as editor of Young’s China Business Blog, he teaches financial journalism at Fudan University, one of China’s top journalism programs.
He contributes regularly to a wide range of publications in both China and the west, including Forbes, CNN, Seeking Alpha and Reuters, as well as Asia-based publications including the South China Morning Post, Global Times, Shanghai Daily and Shanghai Observer
Domestic and overseas investors have been feasting on a flood of sour loans being churned out by China’s economic slowdown, mostly by buying shares in big state-run firms that try to recover money from those bad assets. In the latest wrinkle of that story, 8 major institutional buyers have spent a hefty $2.4 billion to purchase 21 percent of China Huarong Asset Management, one of the leading bad asset managers.
But bad asset management isn’t always such an easy game to play, as another group of China-backed investors is learning after their ill-advised purchase 2 years ago of insolvent Swedish car maker Saab. That group, called National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB (NEV) has declared bankruptcy, signaling an end may finally be near for the Swedish car maker that probably should have died several years ago. Read Full Post…
A headline this morning about a potential new China smartphone chip tie-up for Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) made me realize that this company that once ruled the global semiconductor market has been rapidly losing relevance these last few years. I can remember a time not long ago when finding news about Intel was a huge achievement for any reporter, as the company dominated the market for chips used to power most of the world’s PCs. Nowadays, Intel can’t even seem to attract the attention of China’s anti-trust regulators, who are conducting a series of high-profile probes on top computing names like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM). Read Full Post…
China’s anti-monopoly regulator wants to set the record straight: Reports that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is being probed for monopolistic behavior related to its Windows operating system and Office suite of products are incomplete. In fact, the US software giant is also being probed for monopolistic behavior related to its Internet Explorer web browser, and its media player product.
Perhaps this clarification doesn’t sound that strange to anyone outside China, but it’s actually quite unusual coming from the highly secretive State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC). The regulator is one of 2 government agencies conducting a wide range of recent anti-trust probes into mostly foreign firms, raising concerns among multinationals and western governments that they are being unfairly targeted by Beijing for such probes. Read Full Post…
Corporate culture is seldom on public display for most of China’s top tech firms, even though such culture often determines the success or failure of a company and is well known to industry insiders. The internal cultures at PC giant Lenovo (HKEx: 922) and smartphone sensation Xiaomi were the subject of chatter in the blogosphere this past week, as executives from inside and outside the companies discussed the less visible side of these well-known names. In Lenovo’s case, the talk came from a company executive herself, on the release of her new book. The latter saw a couple of outside executives comment on less attractive elements behind the inside culture at China’s hottest smartphone maker.
Meantime, the viral “Ice Bucket Challenge” was also all over the tech sphere, with nearly every major executive mentioning the topic on his personal microblog. Many also took the plunge that raises money for a rare neurological disease, but has also been derided as little more than a publicity stunt. Read Full Post…
Just a week after Internet giant Tencent’s (HKEx: 700) name emerged as an unlikely bidder for a stake in the retail business of leading oil refiner Sinopec (HKEx: 386), the pair have announced an unrelated tie-up to co-develop a number of Internet-related, non-energy businesses. The new partnership does seem a bit odd, as these 2 companies are about as different as they could possibly be. One is a fast-growing private company in the high-tech space, while the other is a slow-growth giant in a traditional space monopolized by state-run behemoths. Read Full Post…
Sometimes reporting on China’s high-tech industries feels like being trapped in a world where the same things happen again and again, as Beijing and companies repeatedly make the same mistakes. The nation is famous for its boom-bust cycles fueled by companies piling into the latest hot products, leading to price wars and battles for market share before most players go bankrupt or leave the space. A similar phenomenon has occurred in computer operating system (OS) space, where China has tried repeatedly to foster development of products that can supplant Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) dominant Windows OS and more recently Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) popular Android OS for smartphones. Read Full Post…
A new report on big investment plans in digital media by Hunan Satellite Television is shining a spotlight on this aggressive company in interior China, and its potential to become an important consolidator as Beijing looks to revamp the stodgy traditional media sector. According to that report, Hunan Satellite is planning to invest 1 billion yuan ($160 million) in its Mango TV service, which delivers video over the Internet and other digital platforms and competes directly with private sector firms like Youku Tudou (NYSE: YOKU) and Baidu’s (Nasdaq: BIDU) iQiyi. Read Full Post…
Let’s take a break from the usual tech and trade war chatter today to look at the healthcare sector, focusing on the newly released maiden results from private clinic operator iKang (Nasdaq: KANG). The results look relatively solid but unspectacular, though that didn’t stop investors from dumping iKang’s shares in after-hours trade after the report came out. Even if that 17 percent sell-off holds in regular trading on Tuesday, iKang’s shares are still up about 40 percent from their IPO price back in April. Read Full Post…
After months of hostile exchanges, accusations and negative publicity, the tone in a series of disputes between Chinese and foreign companies and governments abruptly shifted late last week with new signs of conciliation from both the foreign companies and Chinese government. One case involved leading global smartphone chip maker Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) , which is being probed by Beijing for anti-competitive behavior. The other involved computing giant IBM (NYSE: IBM), whose hardware could soon be shunned by many state-owned banks after Beijing warned of national security concerns earlier this year. Read Full Post…
You know a company is starting to mature when it becomes the subject of headlines beyond its control, which is what we’re seeing in the case of 2 of the latest news bits involving smartphone sensation Xiaomi. In the brief 4 years since its founding, Xiaomi has proven itself a master of marketing, able to keep its name constantly in the headlines through a strategic series of news leaks, sensational sales figures and other media savvy tactics. The latest headlines themselves are relatively benign, one involving a new gaming tie-up and the other involving a minor scandal related to pirated products. Read Full Post…
Rising online search star Qihoo 360 (NYSE: QIHU) has reached a major milestone, winning 30 percent of China’s traffic for the first time just 2 years after the launch of its So.com search engine. Despite that huge achievement, Qihoo’s newly released quarterly results show it’s having a harder time monetizing its search business, which may partly explain why its shares are down 20 percent since a peak in the spring. From the perspective of an observer, these latest signs still look quite encouraging and might even prompt a Qihoo skeptic like myself to consider buying the company’s stock at its current price. Read Full Post…
