Huabao and the Queen of Cashout
The Shanghai Daily (subscription required) has taken to calling Zhu Linyao as the "Queen of Cashout". She is otherwise known as the controller of Huabao - an interesting company I have previously written about.
She is the second biggest insider-seller of any Chinese stock according to this list - having cashed out about half a billion US dollars this year.
I have now emailed with many people who have an interest in Huabao. Some visited the (recently purchased) reconstituted tobacco leaf plants - and they were moderately impressed. Some visited the flavors plant (the legacy business) and they found a few blue drums and a vat full of strange liquid but nothing redolent of a business then worth over USD3 billion. They ran a mile from the stock.
The most impressive website any of the people I communicate with has found is for their Peacock brand. They sell 572 products (far less than most retail shops) including "tomato sauce" and "cheese powder". Press "new products" and you get a one word answer: "no". A similar response is given for "food flavor". Isn't this meant to be a flavors company?
This compares as I noted in my previous blog post with maybe 100 thousand pages of text on the website of the major company in this industry (Givaudan).
It is unlikely you make 60 plus percent margins reselling flavored yogurt on an obscure Chinese website. I am not joking - see this link.
The only way that the margins - almost five fold the margins of Western competitors - are possible is by selling at an inflated price to the Chinese state owned tobacco companies. And indeed that is what the bull story is as many of my readers have pointed out.
I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of those sales. My only correspondents who have visited the factories responsible for those sales found a few blue drums. But there might be a large and complex factory behind that or there may be other sites so their word should not be taken as complete.
Moreover Price Waterhouse Coopers audited the accounts and they tell me the sales are real so I presume they are. Whatever: if real it is likely that one day the State Owned Enterprises will try to renegotiate the deal which seems unreasonably favorable to Huabao...
Maybe that is why Zhu Linyao is the "Queen of Cashout".
John