Is the story of "monster stocks" real or false?
Author | Su Ying, Zhang Kaijing
Editor丨Wu Lijuan
Source | Mustang Finance
The ebb and flow of the capital market is often only overnight, and after the stock price soared by 488% in 5 months, a notice that the controlling shareholder was liquidated will be the "monster stock" Hongbo shares (002229. SZ) to interrupt.
On June 12, Hongbo announced that it received the "Notice of Forced Liquidation Result", and one of the controlling shareholders, Henan Yutai Holdings Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Yutai Holdings), was forcibly liquidated on the same day of 1.5787 million shares in Caitong Securities, and the funds were used to return the financing of Yutai Holdings in Caitong Securities. After the passive reduction of shareholding, Yutai Holdings' shareholding ratio dropped from 14.3% to 13.98%, and it is still the largest shareholder of listed companies.
Source: Hongbo stock announcement
The listed company stated that the above events will not lead to changes in the company's controlling shareholders and actual controllers, and will not have an impact on the company's production and operation and corporate governance.
But despite this, investors in the secondary market did not seem to buy it, and the day after the announcement, the share price of Hongbo shares fell significantly, closing at 37.63 yuan per share on June 13, down 4.76%, with a total market value of about 18.8 billion yuan.
The controlling shareholder's shares were liquidated
In fact, the liquidation of Yutai Holdings' equity has long been known.
As early as May 2023, Hongbo introduced that Yutai Holdings had participated in margin trading and securities lending through the credit account of Caitong Securities, holding 30.3238 million shares of listed companies, accounting for 6.08% of the total share capital of listed companies.
At that time, Yutai Holdings was the largest shareholder holding 14.3% of the shares of the listed company, and the actual controller was Li Xiaolin, one of the actual controllers of Hongbo Shares, who held 94.23% of the shares of Yutai Holdings.
Later, due to the receipt of the court's notice of assistance in enforcement, Caitong Securities announced that the financing contract of Yutai Holdings in its credit account expired on May 18, 2023, and the latter needed to repay the financing debt of 62.7646 million yuan as agreed. However, as Yutai Holdings is a major shareholder of a listed company and is subject to the relevant requirements for reducing its shareholding, Caitong Securities has also given the company some room to ease its efforts and extended the default disposal date to June 12, 2023.
From the results, it is clear that Yutai Holdings was not able to repay the money within the agreed period, so Caitong Securities chose to sell stocks to collect debts.
On June 12, 2023, Caitong Securities sold 1,578,700 shares of Hongbo through centralized bidding, recovering about 63,114,400 yuan, just enough to cover the above debts. After the completion of the reduction, the shareholding ratio of Yutai Holdings has dropped to 13.98%, and the remaining shares in the credit account have also been transferred to the ordinary securities account.
Source: Hongbo stock announcement
Bai Wenxi, chief economist of IPG China, believes that the liquidation of the equity held by the controlling shareholder means a decline in the shareholding ratio of the actual controller and the weakening of the company's control for listed companies, which will naturally affect the company's future operation and market confidence, which is very unfavorable to the company's stock price trend.
It is worth noting that there is also an episode in this incident, in April 2023, Mao Wei, the former chairman of Hongbo Shares, transferred his 94.23% equity interest in Yutai Holdings and 100% equity interest in Hui Yi Trading (both of which are controlling shareholders of listed companies and are concerted actors) to natural persons Li Xiaolin and Yang Kai, and Li and Yang entrusted the voting rights of their shares to Mao Wei, so the actual controller of Hongbo shares was changed from Mao Wei to Mao, Li and Yang.
At that time, Li Xiaolin had promised that Yutai Holdings would not reduce its holdings in the company for the next 18 months after the completion of the transaction.
Source: Hongbo stock announcement
However, just two months later, with the liquidation of Yutai Holdings' shares, Li Xiaolin also violated the above-mentioned commitment not to reduce his holdings.
Zhang Qi, a lawyer at Beijing Yingke (Shanghai) Law Firm, said that although it is a fact that Li Xiaolin violated his commitment not to reduce his shareholding, because he was liquidated and did not voluntarily reduce his shareholding, whether he will be punished and the specific punishment measures need to be determined according to the investigation results of the regulator and relevant laws and regulations. He mentioned that if the regulator finds that Li Xiaolin's behavior violates laws and regulations, it may be punished with fines, prohibitions from serving as executives of listed companies, or directors and supervisors.
"NVIDIA concept" achieves 18.8 billion "monster stocks"?
Behind the liquidation of the controlling shareholder, the listed company in this incident is not ordinary, the stock price soared nearly 488% in 5 months, and it is also a well-known monster stock in the recent capital market.
The beginning of the story of Hongbo shares' "monster stock" must start with its hand-in-hand NVIDIA.
Back on August 15, 2022, Hongbo announced that it signed a "cooperation agreement" with Zhongguancun Zhongheng Cultural Science and Technology Innovation Service Alliance, NVIDIA, and InBev Digital, to jointly establish the Beijing AI Innovation Empowerment Center and cross the border in the field of artificial intelligence.
Among them, Hongbo shares provide funds, NVIDIA is responsible for technology, and the whole team is set up through InBev Digital to carry out industrial investment, cultivation and operation.
At first, after the above-mentioned cooperation was made public, it did not cause a significant splash in the market. Mustang Finance found that from August 2022 to January 20, 2023, the stock prices of listed companies fluctuated around 6 yuan per share to 8 yuan per share, and the trend was relatively stable.
The turning point occurred in late January this year, from January 20, the stock price of Hongbo shares began to enter a skyrocketing range, once rising from 6.72 yuan / share to 39.51 yuan / share on June 12, a five-month increase of 487.95%, becoming a dark horse in the capital market. The reason for the sharp rise in its stock price is related to the market's pursuit of ChatGPT concept stocks and AI concept stocks.
Source: Wind Data
On the whole, Hongbo's ChatGPT and AI concepts are directly related to NVIDIA, and InBev Digital's ChatGPT chatbot Xiaoe is based on NVIDIA's megatron base, and the company's AI computing power services and other businesses must also rely on NVIDIA's high-end computing power GPU chips to carry out.
In a word, the cross-border transformation of Hongbo shares is highly dependent on NVIDIA, but for NVIDIA, which has just exceeded the trillion-dollar market value, whether Hongbo shares are equally important needs to put a question mark.
What kind of company is NVIDIA? It is the world's first chip factory with a market value of $1 trillion, and now has a market value equivalent to about 3.2 Moutai and 2.3 Tencent, and its position in the artificial intelligence industry is almost monopoly. Hongbo shares, after frequently crossing borders for many years, have just stepped into the AI field in 2022.
Some insiders have commented on social media, "How to say this cooperation, say that there is no cooperation, say yes, you buy an NVIDIA graphics card, you can also be regarded as cooperating with NVIDIA, NVIDIA is also responsible for your after-sales." ”
In fact, another background of Hongbo cross-border AI is that as a company that has been immersed in the printing and lottery industry for a long time, Hongbo was once regarded as an Internet lottery leader. However, due to the impact of regulatory policies, the lottery industry has limited its deep cultivation in this field. Therefore, since 2016, Hongbo has successively planned to cross borders in many fields such as big data, mobile games, 5G, and blockchain, and these transformations have ultimately failed.
Source: Tencent Public Gallery
In 2022, Hongbo also tried to spend 357 million yuan to acquire Guangzhou Keyu, which is mainly engaged in small household appliance business, with total assets of only 16.7% of Hongbo in 2020, but 112.94% of Hongbo's revenue. However, the transaction still failed to be completed, and the reason given by the company was that due to the impact of the epidemic, the progress of the transaction work was not as expected.
The main business has been unable to break through, and the cross-border has also broken several times. In 2022, the revenue of Hongbo Co., Ltd. will only be 546 million yuan, which is even lower than the level of ten years ago, and the net profit will have the first loss of listing (-57 million yuan). Only then did Hongbo quickly turn to AI after terminating the acquisition of robot companies.
The cross-border step is not small, but the current management of Hongbo shares has few backgrounds in the AI industry. Zhou Weiwei, who was selected by the company as the general manager of InBev Mathematics in August last year, has focused on media and branding, and was the CMO and senior vice president of 36Kr at advertising company Doumeng Technology. Even if you look at the whole company, there will be only 137 R&D personnel in 2022, including only 2 with master's degree or above.
In this context, in May this year, InBev Digitals announced that it had hired Wu Dong, former chairman of Sohu Technical Committee and former vice president of JD Cloud, as CTO of InBev Digital.
Although Hongbo's liabilities are small, as of the first quarter of this year, the company's cash and cash equivalents balance was 949 million yuan. In recent years, tech giants have invested a lot of money and resources to develop AI technology, with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu recently announcing large-scale AI investment plans, including Alibaba plans to invest 100 billion yuan in the next five years. Therefore, can Hongbo's capital investment support its competition with giants in the field of AI? Also draw a question mark.
In this regard, the self-media "slow investment" that focuses on capital market research reminds investors that Hongbo shares have rubbed hot spots many times before, and now cross-border is also completely rubbing NVIDIA storytelling. "Slow Investment" also quoted an insider of Nvidia as saying, "We will not cooperate with small companies at this time."
Is cross-border AI virtual or real?
Zhang Xiaorong, president of Deepin Science and Technology Research Institute, believes that NVIDIA wants to find partners in China, according to the convention, the object of cooperation needs to have a considerable technical background and a certain industry status, generally a leading enterprise in the industry, and should not be a cross-border enterprise without technical background and no technical foundation.
It is worth noting that at present, searching for its partners in China on NVIDIA's official website can find a total of 124 results, including Advanced Datacom, Utronics, Juefei Technology, etc. (some of which have duplicates), but there are no Hongbo shares.
Source: NVIDIA official website
In addition, Zhang Xiaorong said that the business model of computing power leasing will also encounter some difficulties. "First, NVIDIA's advanced GPU cannot be obtained in China, and the computing power of the empowerment center is difficult to exceed the technical level of domestic large manufacturers, and it lacks competitiveness; Second, the AI computing power required to make large models are mainly a few large manufacturers, which can solve the computing power by themselves and do not need to rent third-party computing power for a long time. ”
Shen Meng of Chanson Capital believes that Hongbo has not been involved in AI technology or computing power services before, so cross-border is not only empty in concept, the actual operation is also full of uncertainty, and some of NVIDIA's high-end products are also restricted by the US government, so the real effect of this project is worrying, once there is an error, it may cause unexpected losses, so the performance in the secondary market is not highly correlated with the business itself.
In fact, in addition to Hongbo shares, there are many NVIDIA concept stocks such as Industrial Fulian, TZTEK Technology, and Yakang in the market. Among them, procurement is the most common partnership, but judging from the relevant announcements, most of the so-called concepts themselves do not have actual business support. Some market participants said that NVIDIA started with graphics cards, and its own industrial chain is not as large as Apple's.
It is interesting to note that in April this year, when the share price of Hongbo shares doubled from the beginning of the year, Mao Wei first transferred the shares, and then entrusted the voting rights of the shares back to himself, and then resigned from all positions in Hongbo shares.
In response to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange's letter of concern, Hongbo said that Yang Kai and Li Xiaolin were optimistic about the company's future development in the AI sector before they accepted the shares, while Mao Wei was temporarily unable to perform the chairmanship due to personal reasons, but he "has rich industry experience and professional judgment capabilities in the AI artificial intelligence sector." Mao Wei has been the general manager of a real estate company and hotel, and a supervisor of an automobile business park company, and his experience is probably the chairman of an intelligent security company.
"Cross-border uncertainty is large, and the performance of the secondary market is also detached from the business foundation, so investors should pay more attention to risk management and avoidance." Shen Meng said.
What do you think of "NVIDIA concept stock" Hongbo shares? Let's talk in the comment area!