The Wild West flavour of investing in China will be known to anyone who can spell IPO (or better yet Hanergy). But it’s not all multibillion-dollar stock losses andbillionaire chairmen gone Awol. Sometimes the losses are tiny, the companies obscure and the people involved are nobodies doing business in the middle of nowhere. Don’t let that fool you, though: even if the headline is small, the headache may be huge.
Consider the case of Sorbic International: a London-listed Chinese food preservatives company with a market capitalisation of only £1.5m but a problem big enough to make anyone think twice about going into business in a country where corporate governance is stuck somewhere back in the Qing dynasty.
Sorbic, which is based in the coastal province of Shandong but listed on London’s junior Aim exchange, this month gave the London Stock Exchange (Aim’s overseer) an update on the suspension of its shares that should be required reading for anyone who still thinks there is low-hanging wealth ripe for the plucking in the Chinese hinterland.