Money Matters | How farming publicly traded companies has become a part-time job for novices
Issuers with key characteristics of shell companies were given the green light to list by regulators
George, 20, a fresh graduate, recently got a part-time job – shell farming.
It’s not about going into the water at Lau Fau Shan to nurture the oysters suspended under sea. His job is to turn a cookie business into something big enough for listing in the Growth Enterprise Market. He is farming publicly traded shell companies.
On top of a regular salary, he was promised 15 per cent of the numbers that he’d managed to “grow” the cookie shop into within a year or two.
That will be at least HK$3 million, given the minimum requirement of HK$20 million positive operating cash-flow for a GEM listing.
The bright young man, whom Money Matters knew as a toddler, has been earning his own tuition fee for years. But creating a listing firm from a biscuit shop with only three outlets is hard to imagine.
His boss comforted him with what he called a standard formula - find three more outlets to add to the shop; make an e-bakery platform that delivers to mainland China and the financial numbers will be taken care of by the specialists.