Company with heart - and profits - targets GEM
The first 'social enterprise' on the mainland is to be listed in Hong Kong after Christmas.
Pocket-size wooden comb and chopstick maker Carpenter Tan aims to raise more than HK$100 million in the Growth Enterprise Market to export Chinese handicrafts.
It is a small business with an annual turnover of slightly over 100 million yuan (HK$113.52 million) last year, but it has a big heart: about 56 per cent of its 530 production employees are people with disabilities.
A social enterprise is a fairly new term to describe businesses that have primarily a social mission.
Carpenter Tan was founded in 1997 as a social enterprise in Chongqing, where the municipal government granted tax concession to the firm for hiring disabled people.
Unlike other firms' prospectuses, which bore investors with data and figures, Carpenter Tan used its pages to explain its corporate culture, which can be summarised in three words: 'Honesty, work, happiness'.
The firm believes everyone, including the disabled, should work hard and have the opportunity to be employed. Apart from maximising the wealth of the shareholders, it values contributions to the community as one of its principal goals.
With a 25 per cent profit margin, it might not be the best new stock you want to own, but at least it is a company with heart and profits.
Rural fashions farmtastic
Only in Japan. Agence France-Presse reports that a Japanese model is doing her bit to make peasant garb a little bit more chic as city girls move back to their rural roots. Shiho Fujita, 24, has led a group of kawaii (cute) 'gal farmers' in doing their bit to revitalise agricultural Japan, where many farms have closed as their owners have aged and their children run off to the cities.
'Since there are no farm clothes I like, I have come up with the idea of designing cute ones myself,' Fujita said.
Her new overalls are made from stretch denim to be comfortable and have pockets for a mobile telephone and an iPod, without which no cute girl peasant would be caught dead. She says her next project is designing plastic gloves to protect girls' long fingernails.
Bigger the fall, bigger bounce
The law of gravity reads, what goes up must come down. The opposite may hold true when it comes to investments.
Almost three weeks until the year-end, we found blue chips that were battered the most last year seemed to have the biggest rebound this year.
The best performer so far is Foxconn International Holdings, whose shares were up more than 200 per cent from 2008 to yesterday's close of HK$7.86. The Taiwan handset component maker dropped 85 per cent last year from HK$17.50 that January.
Citic Pacific has had a similar rebound. Its shares fell 80 per cent in 2008. The conglomerate under chairman Chang Zhenming has shot up 157 per cent this year to yesterday's close of HK$21.50.
At the other extreme, Hongkong Electric and CLP Holdings, which were among the best performers during the global downturn last year, were the laggards this year with a negative return of between 1 and 3 per cent.