Global Sources made offer for InfoCom trade shows

In a 54-page circular submitted to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 14th February, Sage International revealed that Global Sources offered them HK$6 million for their exhibition assets. (See pages 8, 9 and 24.) Sage claims that the offer was received on 7th February 2011 - after Global Sources first expressed an interest in Sage's exhibition portfolio as early as May 2010.

Sage (formerly Info Communication) is instead opting to sell its exhibition business back to the founder of those exhibitions, Eddie Leung, for just HK$3 million. Sage offers a number of reasons for selling to Leung instead of taking Global Sources' higher offer all of which boil down to: it would be too much trouble, effort and expense to take the higher offer.

Infosky (Sage's subsidiary which operates its exhibition business) posted revenues of HK$47.8 million and a net profit of HK$2.4 million for the year-ended 31 March 2010.

Leung has done pretty nicely on this transactions as he seems to have sold his stake in InfoComm in October 2007 for HK$55.2 million. (At least we think that is what happened. You would have to be a forensic accountant to wade through all of these filings.)

The management of Sage International best hope well-known, Hong Kong-based shareholder activist David Webb doesn't decide to have a look at these string of transactions - in which minority shareholders have not fared so well.

Some of our other posts on Info Communication's woes can be found here.

HKTDC and Paper Comm jointly launch Better Living Expo

News this week: Hong Kong, 29^th November: The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) and private trade show organiser, Paper Communication Exhibition Services (PCES), have signed a memorandum of agreement to jointly launch a new lifestyle products and services trade show which will be held from 22^nd – 24^th July 2011.

Named the “Better Living Expo”, the three-day trade and public show will be hosted at the AsiaWorld-Expo (AWE). The show will reportedly include products and services covering beauty and well-being, hobbies and learning, back-to-school products and value shopping.

Coal mines, forests....anything but B2B

We reported before on Kenfair's acquisition of a coal mine (click on the Kenfair label if you want to follow that saga more closely). It seems that they were trend setters.

We wondered why non-exhibitions people were buying into Eddie Leung's Info Communication, the Hong Kong GEM-listed parent company of Paper Communication, organiser of industrial trade fairs in China. All is now becoming clear as they too appear to have gone into the coal mining business. This set the market alight on Friday when volume spiked to 142,550,000 shares, 147 times above the daily average of 966,034. Mind you, after all that excitement, the share price ended up down 3¢ at HK$0.32.

Meanwhile, B2B online market TradeEasy has gone down the same route, announcing the acquisition of a forestry project in Papua, Indonesia for US$157 million. We first reported that back in October in the same posting linked above relating to Kenfair's entry into the coal-mining business.

It seems that the China's hunger for natural resources is looking like a better bet to some than US consumers' demand for Chinese-manufactured bric-a-brac these days.

Suspensions all around

As far as we know, Kenfair's shares are still suspended with acquisition deadlines pushed out to Friday (12 October). Now we see that the other Hong Kong listed exhibitions business, Info Communication, parent of Eddie Leung's Paper Communication, has also suspended its stock "pending release of an announcement in relation to a potential disposal of shares by a substantial shareholder of the Company, which is price sensitive in nature".

I wonder if they're related or if there is a separate reason for both these transactions taking place at the same time? We shall see within a few days I suppose.