And in a class all by itself, the US$1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) club.
On Monday, the 4 billion A-share offering, priced at 16.7 yuan per share, finished its first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange at 43.96 yuan, rising as high as 48 yuan intraday. At US$1.005 trillion, PetroChina’s market cap is more than twice that of its US peer, Exxon Mobil (USD $486 billion), even though Exxon Mobil generated four times as much revenue last year and trades at only a quarter of PetroChina’s price to earning ratio, 13 to PetroChina’s 55.
But the craziness doesn’t end there. The lofty market cap comes with an asterisk: US$1 trillion only if you go by PetroChina’s local valuation. Shares traded overseas (Hong Kong and New York) values the company at roughly US$400 billion. One HK share (H-share) confers equity holders the same amount of ownership as one A-share, and one share of ADR traded on the NYSE grants 100 times as much ownership.
While PetroChina’s A share closed up today at 43.96 yuan, its H-share finished down 8.2 percent at HKD $18, or 17.65 yuan (1 yuan=1.02 HKD). The gaping difference is a function of many factors: Beijing’s restriction on capital flow, lack of investment choices in China, and of course, out-of-control greed coupled with widespread ignorance on the part of Chinese retail investors.
In a related story, billionaire investor Warren Buffet sold his entire PetroChina stake several months ago, calling the price action in China “carried away.”
Today Google announced the first piece of its “master plan” to enter the mobile phone market. Not with the much anticipated Gphone, but an operating system for mobile phones; Android.
Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.
Google hopes Android will power a variety of future mobile phones and boost the web on the move. Basically, it is building software to make the Internet run more easily on mobile phones.
It has been working with 30 partner companies. Including some of the world’s biggest handset makers and wireless service providers: Motorola, Samsung, LG, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefonica, etc. Conspicuously absent are Nokia, AT&T, and Verizon, among others. (Like Apple, on whose board Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits, European mobile platform provider Symbian, Microsoft, Blackberry maker Research in Motion…)
Silicon Alley Insider has published an interesting post on four remaining questions regarding Google’s mobile ambitions. Earlier post related to Google’s latest move can be found here: Shaking up the mobile phone industry, Mobile advertising and Google OpenSocial.
Yes, that was my reaction when I saw this webpage. The image above is just a Facebook clone, Xiaonei.com. It looks like the portal was started around 2005 (less than two years after Facebook was born), and since then, it has grown exponentially to cover around 2,000 university campuses in Greater China. They have just recently started to pan out their services to cover high schools and companies.
Facebook is about to enter the Chinese market will they be too late as Chinese fancy local stuff?
The future will tell.Thanks to a friend (since my Chinese is not sufficient) I am enrolled at Xiaonei.com! Now I am a proud student of Nanjing University. Add me! 
According to research conducted by the Center of Global Development (a think-tank), the Netherlands has the most effective policies to help the developing world. The report grades 21 rich countries on how well they support development. Each is assessed on seven areas including aid, trade, migration and the environment.
Netherlands is shortly followed by Denmark, Norway and Sweden. However there is still much room for improvement. Needless to say, rich countries can never do too much in improving the life of the lesser gifted ones.
Netherlands must make great improvement in the area of
Google unveiled its OpenSocial platform earlier this week, saying it would give outside developers tools to write programs for any of its social network partners.
“OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard (for developers) instantly out of the gates. It is going to have a reach of 200 million users, which is way bigger than anything else out there,” Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace, told reporters. Source
“OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”
Head on over to http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ to find out what the buzz is all about.
>>UPDATE @ November 3rd<< Nicholas Carr gives his opinion on Google’s OpenSocial.
Google’s introduction of OpenSocial, which, as Marc Andreessen explains, provides a kind of universal two-way connector between web applications and social networks, marks an important moment in the transformation of the World Wide Web into what I term, in The Big Switch, the World Wide Computer. The internet, as Google frequently points out, is the new computing platform, and OpenSocial – whether it succeeds or not – gives us a view as to how that platform may operate. Continue reading
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