🌏 MSCI 🇨🇳 / Asian Stocks - Reading and Watching 💹

First Time Investing 🐣
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With Asia-listed companies in the pipeline, if you are interested in companies in that part of the world, get this book. It’s from 2014 but it’s still relevant.

From the Inside Flap

Financial scandals and irregularities can occur globally, but most recently have begun a steady climb in Asia. Until now not much had been documented about these incidents, and there remains a significant lack of corporate governance in these markets. Asian Financial Statement Analysis: Detecting Financial Irregularities was created to address this knowledge gap while keeping the global investor in mind. Coauthored by two leading authorities in the field, it is the first ever in-depth study into detecting financial irregularities specifically in the international financial reporting of Asia-Pacific companies.

… Together they have created a practical guide for anyone looking to perform effective forensic analysis on the financial statements of Asian companies, generally for the purpose of making solid investment choices.

The first section of the book lays out a proven framework for detecting irregularities in profits, financial position, or cash flow. Its subsequent chapters illustrate the most common irregularities in the Asia-Pacific region and some of the warning signs to look for. Each chapter also includes a useful checklist of different analysis techniques, an overview of the most common games that companies play, and a full case study of an Asia-based company to help illustrate the concepts in a holistic manner. The authors’ personal experiences in both global and Asian financial markets enrich the text and offer readers a firsthand look at real world scenarios, helping them further scrutinize companies within that same space.

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Trailer:

Watch it here (3/5 stars on Amazon Prime):

Trailer:

Watch it here:
https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80221646

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I don’t have much to add to this conversation, but a personal thank you to you for your very high quality contributions man. :clap:

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Always do your due diligence, etc etc

Ctrip owns Skyscanner.

Baidu to sell $1bn of shares in travel website Ctrip

Sale of one-third stake intended to boost cash reserves at Chinese search engine group

China’s search engine giant Baidu is selling roughly $1bn of its shares in Ctrip, China’s largest travel-booking website, bolstering its cash on hand after a difficult year for profits.

Ctrip, which owns UK flight search engine Skyscanner and is known as Trip.com outside of China, announced on Wednesday in a stock exchange filing that it will sell 31.3m of its Nasdaq-listed shares that are currently owned by Baidu. The sale makes up a third of Baidu’s stake in Ctrip, and Baidu will remain its largest shareholder after the sale.

Baidu has struggled to maintain its position in the “tech trinity” of China’s most-valuable tech companies alongside Alibaba and Tencent, who were faster to adapt to the mobile age. Its profits have suffered in recent years as a result of scandals over medical advertising and falling advertising revenues.

Baidu, whose primary app offering is its search engine and news feed, is facing harsh competition in advertising revenues from apps that offer transactions and social media data for better targeted advertising, such as Tencent’s WeChat social messaging app and Meituan Dianping’s takeaway app.

In May, the company reported its first quarterly loss since listing in New York in 2005. Cost-cutting helped the company return to profit in August, but its net profits were still down 63 per cent on the previous year.

Source - Baidu to sell $1bn of shares in travel website Ctrip

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Always do your due diligence, etc etc

This is a repost from a thread on Alibaba.

Ant Financial to be spun off and be listed.

Ant Financial was priced/valued at $150 billion last year in May 2018, with Carlyle, Sequoia and Warburg Pincus joining the round. It was “valued” at $60 billion in April 2016.

A fundraising document seen by Reuters showed Ant planned to list both in China and Hong Kong in 2019.
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Four-year-old Ant, which was spun off from Alibaba when the group went public in New York, has diversified over the years into credit services, asset management and online banking, besides owning the Alipay payment platform.

Source - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ant-financial-fundraising/chinas-ant-financial-raises-10-billion-at-150-billion-valuation-sources-idUSKCN1IU0EZ

In :cn:, most retail payments pretty much go through either AliPay (via Ant) and WeChat Pay.

FT:

Alibaba restructuring paves way for Ant Financial IPO

Chinese tech giant will own 33% of $150bn payments affiliate

Alibaba has finally won approval for its restructuring of Ant Financial, paving the way for an initial public offering of the $150bn Chinese payments company.

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Alibaba proposed the restructuring, which will see it exchange the right to 37.5 per cent of Ant Financial’s pre-tax profit for a 33 per cent equity stake, as long ago as February 2018 as it looked to put the payments affiliate on course for a public listing.

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Ant Financial is the world’s most valuable private fintech company, and grew out of Alipay, the payments system founded by Alibaba in 2004. It also owns Yu’e Bao, the world’s largest money market fund, and Sesame Credit, a credit-rating system.

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The completion of the restructuring clarifies the ownership structure of Ant, although the issue of new equity for Alibaba will dilute investors such as Singapore investment arm Temasek Holdings, which coughed up an aggregate $10bn in a fund raising in May last year that valued Ant at $150bn.

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Numbers published in Alibaba’s annual report imply Ant produced a pre-tax profit of around $200m in the last fiscal year. But the unit has fallen into the red in some quarters.

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Earlier on Tuesday, Eric Jing, chairman and chief executive of Ant, said Alipay and its e-wallet partners currently serve a collective 1.2bn users globally — a 20 per cent increase since the end of December 2018. Of these, 300m users are outside of China.

Source - Alibaba restructuring paves way for Ant Financial IPO

From January 2019 - FT:

Ant Financial’s money market fund shrinks to 2-year low

Regulator calls for Tianhong Yu’E Bao to be downsized amid concern about systemic risk

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The world’s largest money-market mutual fund, Ant Financial’s Tianhong Yu’E Bao, was at its smallest for two years by the end of last year as Chinese regulators pressured it to downsize over concerns about systemic risk.

Ant Financial owns a 51 per cent stake in Tianhong Asset Management, which manages the flagship fund. But the Yu’E Bao platform now offers 13 other money market funds from outside fund managers, which offer the same seamless integration with Ant’s online payments service, Alipay.

Yu’E Bao — whose name translates as Account Balance Treasure — allow users to make payments directly from the money funds using Alipay and also offers on-demand redemption into the user’s bank account.

Launched in 2013, Tianhong Yu’E Bao’s assets under management fell to $168bn by the end of December, down from a peak of $250bn at the end of March, according to the fund’s latest quarterly report.

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In 2017, China’s securities regulator published new rules that imposed reserve requirements on money market funds and restricted their freedom to invest in higher-yielding but less liquid assets. In June, the agency limited instant redemptions to Rmb10,000 ($1,480) per day in an effort to control liquidity risk.

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In February last year, Tianhong Yu’E Bao voluntarily imposed restrictions on the total amount that a single user could invest in the fund. In May, it started introducing new money funds on to the platform. Non-Tianhong funds managed $190bn in assets by the end of last year.

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All agree that Ant’s core asset is customer data from payments made by Alipay’s 700m active users. And even as Tianhong Yu’E Bao’s assets under management have shrunk, the number of its investors rose to 559m by the end of June from 474m six months earlier, according to the fund’s latest report.

Meanwhile, non-Tianhong funds on Yu’E Bao, have about 40m investors, whose transaction data are also accessible to Ant.

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Source - Ant Financial’s money market fund shrinks to 2-year low