This week’s readings include an opinion piece by Robert Shiller, a report on the Southeast Asian palm oil sector, reflections on the 20th anniversary of the Hong Kong handover from Philip Bowring, thoughts on the prospect of a US-China conflict and a look at how Facebook’s growth team got the company to two billion users. […]
Buybacks & Insider Purchases At Symphony
Symphony International Holdings Limited (Symphony) recently announced that the company purchased 4,500,000 ordinary shares at a price of US$0.84 per share for cancellation. The transaction took place on July 3rd, 2017. Following this purchase and cancellation of shares, the company’s issued share capital consists of 507,385,713 ordinary shares. In an earlier transaction, Anil Thadani, the […]
McKinsey: Dance Of The Lions And Dragons
In the past two decades, China has gone from being a relatively small investor in Africa to becoming the continent’s largest economic partner. To better understand the breadth and depth of the economic relationship between Africa and China, McKinsey & Co. recently undertook a detailed study that included on-site interviews with more than 100 senior African business […]
Elliott Raises Stake in Bank Of East Asia
Elliott Management Corporation (Elliott) recently increased their stake in HK-listed Bank of East Asia (BEA). Based on a filing submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on July 6th, 2017, Elliott bought 237,800 shares on the exchange at an average price of HKD 32.569 per share on July 4th (total consideration was ~US$990,000). As a […]
FSI Adds To Vitasoy, Mengniu Dairy Stakes
First State Investments (FSI) recently added to their stakes in both Vitasoy International Holdings (Vitasoy) and China Mengniu Dairy Company Limited (Mengniu Dairy). According to a filing submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on June 27th, 2017, FSI bought 218,000 shares of Vitasoy on the exchange at an average price of HKD 16.02 per share […]
Silchester Trims Orient Overseas Stake
Silchester International Investors LLP (Silchester) recently reduced their stake in HK-listed Orient Overseas (International) Limited (Orient Overseas). According to a filing submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on June 30th, 2017, the firm sold 441,000 shares on the exchange at an average price of HKD 54.094 per share on June 29th (total consideration was ~US$3.06m). […]
Milken Panel Discussion: Forces Shaping Asia
The Milken Institute have made a number of the videos from their 2017 global conference panels available to the public. Although the videos are slightly dated (the conference took place from April 30th-May 3rd), there is still a lot of interesting and relevant content across a wide range of topics. One of the panels was […]
Interview With Andy Rachleff
Andy Rachleff was recently interviewed by Patrick O’Shaughnessy on his Invest Like The Best podcast (you can find the link to the episode here). Rachleff is the co-founder and CEO of Wealthfront, an automated investment service firm with ~US$5bn in assets under management. Prior to Wealthfront, Rachleff co-founded and was general partner of Benchmark Capital, where […]
Readings For The Week (2/7)
A longer than usual reading list this week. Enjoy! Belle shows a less beautiful path for China tycoons: Zhang Lei, the founder of Hillhouse Capital, has to reinvent both the footwear retailer and his fund. Blockchain – the new technology of trust: Goldman Sachs thinks that blockchain has the potential to change the way we […]
John Lindfors, DST Global
John Lindfors, managing partner of DST Global, spoke with Jennifer Hughes of the FT at the RISE Conference in Hong Kong last year. The video is embedded at the bottom of this post. I actually attended the session in-person and found it quite interesting, in part because there’s not much publicly available information about DST. […]