Nanjing Dec 1937 and USS Panay

I would like shift my focus away from the stock market, and dedicate this special day to Nanjing and Chinese people all over the world. Nanjing is the sister city of Saint Louis.

Many Chinese people (e.g., my friend Wang Jianshuo) know the Nanjing Masasccre happened 70 years ago. Couple days ago I heard a story on NPR which talked about some Japanese and Chinese people got together at Nanjing Normal university theater to commerate. Note the place was an international sanctary which saved lots of Chinese refuge at that time.

And many American people know that the US warships were bombed by Japan in Pearl Harbor.

But for me until this morning did I know that a US navy ship USS Panay was hit by Japan on Dec 1937, in the Yangze River outside of Nanjing. They were doing some rescue for American at the time. The interesting part (for me) in this NPR story is a sailor got 1,200 USD from Japanese goverment and an apology from the emperor. Note at the time $800 can buy a new car.

Two new Chinese IPO

came to the US (NYSE) today.

One is VanceInfo, which I mentioned earlier in an earlier post. Quote myself:

“Also, I noticed the first Chinese software outsourcing company, VanceInfo, is going IPO in NYSE. Here is the prospectus. One word of caution: from my own experience, the Dec IPO ususally is not going to be a strong as the investment bankers try to make their bonus. So be careful.”

Another one is the first real estate developer (home builder, the one scared many people recently) listed in the US, Xinyuan Real Estate Co., based in Zhengzhou (Henan) China. Prospectus here. This one (NYSE:XIN) “The Company’s network covers more than 34 million people in five strategically selected Tier II cities, including Chengdu, Hefei, Jinan, Suzhou and Zhengzhou…”. One reason for the US listing is Chinese regutory is very tight on the listing of real estate developers, being afraid of the repeat of housing bubble seen in Japan, Hongkong and most recently the US.

Here is a link to a Xinyuan community in Zhengzhou (via Soufun). And Chinese intro: 鑫苑（中国）置业有限公司，成立于1997年，是一家专注于大型复合社区开发，拥有10余家分子公司的专业房地产企业集团。过去的十年，年均销售复合增长率86％，客户满意度近100％。公司已在郑州、苏州、成都、合肥、济南等地拥有房地产开发项目，目前在建面积超过200万平方。2006、2007年连续两年入选中国房地产百强企业，2007年跻身中国中西部房地产公司品牌价值TOP10。

Olympics tickets: 2nd call

For a Chinese 中文 version of this, click on my wife’s MSN blog.

The 2nd round of ticketing booking just got started. Here is the offical web site for Beijing 2008 tickets (Chinese, English). I understand they only take Visa (official sponsor of Olympics), and fund from Bank of China 中国银行 acct. Actually they sell tickets at many BoC locations inside China.

I was not serious about attending (due to cost and afraid of crowd), until couple days ago my co-worker said to me “maybe some day you can hold the ticket stub to your grand kids and tell them you went to Beijing Olympics…”.

So I checked out the air ticket fot the STL to PVG round trip at flyChina.com, I used July 19/Sept 20 to beat the traffic. It started at 1400 USD…Now if I could find some cheap tickets for the game. This Olympics thing will not be cheap. But I go home (China) once every year, so the air ticket is also fixed cost for me.

This is not just about the (potential) bragging rights. This will be my wife and my mom’s first Beijing trip if we can all make it. So money is not the No. 1 concern here.

Two baskets for our retirement accts

Roll over IRA
In early Nov. I received a letter from Vanguard, it says I am eligible to transfer some of my 401k to an IRA account. I thought about it, the pros and cons, and decided to do it yesterday. Here are my rationale:

1) Ideally I like to keep all my retirement in one place, but one problem is I am not very familar with the new funds avaiable in the new 401k plan. On the other hand, I have been with Vanguard for a while and I know some of the funds are really good (good enough to make me sleep well in the night).

When I say Vanguard is good, I am not only talking about the fees, the performance, etc; but also their brand: it is one of the most respected mutual fund companies in the world. I rememeber a few years ago NY AG Spizer investigated many mutual funds, and I did not heard Vanguard name there (come back to the sleep well factor…).

2) Diversify: this will also allow me to diversify my 401k (IRA); and I can compare the performance of two baskets as time goes on.

NetSuite Open IPO

(Update Dec 18) The company raised its IPO price range: now it’s between $16 and $19. I am NOT bidding it.

WR Hambrecht sent me an email about Open IPO. This got me to read its prospectus. NetSuite is a new kind of software company co-founded by Larry Ellison, the founder and chairman of Oracle. By new I meant they provide “software as service”, vs. the tradtional software companies such as Microsoft, in which a consumer buys product, install it, do some customization, and (possibly) run updates, etc. Quote its prospectus:

“NetSuite is a leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business management application suites for small and medium-sized businesses. We provide a comprehensive suite of enterprise resource planning, or ERP, customer relationship management, or CRM, and e-commerce capabilities that enables customers to manage their critical back-office, front-office and web operations in a single application…We deliver our suite over the Internet as a subscription service using the software-as-a-service or on-demand model. Our revenue has grown from $17.7 million in 2004 to $67.2 million in 2006. For the nine months ended September 30, 2007, we had revenue of $76.8 million. As of September 30, 2007, we had over 5,400 active customers…”

Money from MasterCard

If you used your credit card (MasterCard, Visa, Diner) overseas during 1996 to 2006, you may be eligible for a settlement refund.

1) CCF settlement: I received a form from CCF settlement, which stands for currency conversion fee anti-trust litigation. I remember I used my MasterCard in China in 2005 for my Ctrip booking. Now I am eligible for $25 refund from the settlement. Quoted from ccfsettlement.com:

“The lawsuit is about the price cardholders of Visa-, MasterCard-, or Diners Club-branded payment cards were charged to make transactions in a foreign currency, or with a foreign merchant, between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006. Plaintiffs challenge how the prices of credit and debit/ATM card foreign transactions were set and disclosed, including claims that Visa, MasterCard, their member banks, and Diners Club conspired to set and conceal fees, typically of 1-3% of foreign transactions, and that Visa and MasterCard inflated their base exchange rates before applying these fees.”

New blog theme

The loyal visitors of my blog may notice the face lift of this blog. I am using simplicity-10-widgets theme from solosteam webstudio, courtesy of Michael D. Pollock. It is fairly easy to set up but it did take me some time to upgrade my wordpress from 2.0 to 2.2, and get side bars working. I should also thank Google for helping me locate a few old pages during the process.

I believe this should help my readers to navigate the blog. Please let me know if you have any suggestions, ideas. Yes, the free gift certificate thing is still on.

CompUSA, Dell, TV-Guide and NetEase

Week in review Dec 2 to Dec 8

1) All remaining CompUSA stores to be closed (bloomberg). I think it’s understandable from business point of view, because selling computer is a tough business these days. It is a commodity business, and unlike other commodity such as gas or coffee, a customer only buy a new PC/laptop once every a few years.

Similarly, I can understand Dell computer lackluster financial performance lately, and its decision to sell PCs at BestBuy (reuter news). People used to buy Dell because it offers most bang (more disk and memory, faster CPU, etc) for the buck, but nowadays people buy computer and electronics not solely for the “bangs”, they look for the brand, design, fashion (think Apple iBook, MacBook).

2) MacroVision (MVSN), the licensing software company, announced to buy GemStar-TV Guide (San Jose Mercury News). Normally when company A buys company B, the company A stock will drop, and company B stock will rise. In this case, interestingly, both companies’ stock drop big. I, for one, can not understand why a software company will buy a traditional magazine company.

Compare Vanke with Toll Brothers

Vanke is the No. 1 home builder in China. Toll Brothers is a US luxury home builder. Comparing the profitability of those two are not really comparing apple to apple. But, the buyers of Vanke homes in China are mostly middle class, or in other words, their relative affulence level in China is about same the US buyers of Toll homes. Anyway here goes the data from Reuters (via Google Finance). I can see the following from the data:

1) Vanke is more profitable then Toll, because real estate is a long term growth industry in China. This is from net profit margine and operating margin.

2) Margin for both companies are declining, more so for TOL than Vanke. It’s understandable for TOL because of the weak US housing market. For Vanke it could be two things: increasing competition; sacrefying profitability for growth.

I do NOT hate Jim Cramer

But it appears he hates Chinese. Here is something this popular TV host said on CNBC Mad Money (Dec. 5):

Tiring of “the idea that money is any different depending on where it came from,” Cramer acknowledged, “I hate the Chinese … [but] if they buy a stake in our company, what’re you going to do?” That’s the way capitalism works, he said.

Here is the link to the Street.com.

I am not a fan of Jim Cramer; I watch his show mostly for entertainment. Also, couple days ago I found this Wikipedia entry for Cramer to be good.

Seriously, I think CNBC and Cramer owe the Chinese people an apology on this one.