It is easy to gripe about market froth; it is harder to tell where speculative fever begins and genuine growth ends. Consider Hong Kong-listed software maker Kingdee. On Monday, Chinese eretailer JD.com took 10 per cent of Kingdee, and the two announced a partnership. Tencent — JD.com’s largest investor — Alibaba and Baidu work with Kingdee already. Last month, Amazon signed a pact with Kingdee to push cloud computing in China.
Investors are chasing Kingdee too. Its shares have doubled in the past two months. It is no anomaly. The tech heavy ChiNext index in Shenzhen trades at 52 times estimated earnings and is up 6 per cent this week alone.
Chasing a trend in China is safer once official sanction has been secured. This March, during the government’s annual progress report, authorities stressed information technology as a source of industrial efficiency and economic rebalancing. Out came the buzzwords: cloud computing, big data, ecommerce and internet banking were all cited as areas of focus for 2015.