Big beast still growing, November 5:
Towards the end of June China Mobile’s Hong Kong-listed stock hit HK$80 (US$10) for the first time. It passed HK$90 (US$11.57) in July then was back to around HK$80 during the US subprime crisis. It’s been pretty much one-way traffic since – it’s at HK$160 (US$20) now. It has become the fourth-largest listed company in the world by market cap (US$240 billion).
Citi – which, like a number of other investment banks, now backs China Mobile to pass US$190 – published some figures that put the telecom operator’s sheer power in perspective:
China Mobile accounts for nearly 50% of the total market cap of all Asian telecoms companies
Its market cap is US$155 billion more than second-placed global telecoms operator AT&T
It is singlehandedly responsible for the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan telecom index rising 59% so far this year
Citi also argues for the stock rising even further due to, among other factors, positive investor sentiment attached to an impending A-share listing (although no exact date has been set).
The first ‘O’ in BOCOG…, November 2:
… is supposed to stand for “organizing.” But, as we reported earlier, the sale of the second batch of Olympics tickets “organized” by the Beijing games’ planning committee quickly turned into a debacle. Only a handful of tickets were sold and the throngs lining up around the block at Bank of China branches around the country were told to try again another day.
The reason was that people buying tickets online can request them far more quickly than their counterparts who actually go and queue up. They also happened to have the added advantage, which apparently went unnoticed by BOCOG, of being able to submit multiple requests for tickets by simply clicking a lot.
Just 9,000 tickets were sold, despite the 200,000 submissions per minute. And yet, as Imagethief [blogger and Web Worm columnist] notes, a state media story on the event incredibly points this out as a good thing: “9,000 tickets sold after launch of second-phase sale.” The rest of the 1.85 million tickets couldn’t be sold, so everyone waiting in line – some for up to six hours – had to go home.