1. China's regulatory clampdown has left investors bewildered and shocked. Most foreign investors have never experienced such extensive government intervention in other markets before.
2. It has been the way how China operated as they have regulated several industries in the past 20 years and this time isn't any different.
3. For example, some of you might remember the 2008 melamine milk scandal. 21 companies were tainted with excessive melamine including Mengniu and Yili, two largest dairy companies in China today. China government regulated the industry and punished a group of perpetrators to death and imprisonment. Thereafter the industry was cleaned up and you don't hear such problems anymore.
$MENGNIU DAIRY (02319.HK)$ share price went up 10x since 2008 while
$Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group (600887.SH)$ went up 40x. China didn't destroy the companies nor nationalise them.
4. I was involved as an investor in the next example. It was during 2016 where China was clamping down on corruption. If some of you can recall, China was very well known for corruption in the past. Now less so. The government arrested many top officials for graft and demand for luxury goods such as
$Kweichow Moutai (600519.SH)$ declined - few want to be accused of graft when they buy such items.
5.
$ORIENTAL WATCH (00398.HK)$ is a luxury watch retailer with majority of the sales coming from China. It got hit because of the anti-corruption drive. I bought the stock at the low and the business and share price recovered after the drive ended. I eventually sold for a 1.5x return. Today, it is up 5x from the price I bought.
6. I was involved in the third example too. In 2019, China regulated the pharmaceutical industry. They introduced a two-invoice policy to reduce the middleman distributors to just two for any drug. China was plagued with rising drug costs which the man on the street could face affordability issues. The key problem was the unnecessary middlemen who marked up the costs. This policy sent the pharma stock prices down.
7. One of which was
$CMS (00867.HK)$ I picked the stock up as the impact wasn't that big to them since they were a key distributor even under the new system. The share price recovered but I sold for a 34% gain because there was a short seller report that came up. Just wanted to err on the safe side. The company is still around today though and the stock went up as much as 2x from the price I bought at one point in time.
8. There were even more industries in which China had regulated in the past but I showed three examples here. Investors can in fact take advantage of these regulations as opportunities to buy stocks on the cheap.
9. Most investment literature is written by the west who operate in a system different from China. We cannot just adopt the same worldview and apply it to China. China is China. If you use other worldview to see China, you will only see what's wrong with it.
10. China is a central planning country and the government has a lot of power. This is unlike the US where legislative, executive and judicial powers are separated. Regulations are more effective in China than in the US (where they deliberate for months and still can end up in a stalemate). The features are cannot be more different.
11. The Chinese has a paternalistic culture where the father is the head of the household and is responsible for disciplining (子不教父子过). This is reflective of how the China government behave too. They see themselves as the head of the country and it is their responsibility to discipline anyone whose actions are deemed as harmful to the society.
12. People don't care about China in the past. But now they are too big to be ignored and they bring a culture that the world may not be accustomed to. Some of the rules will be rewritten inadvertently too.
