Warren Buffett famously remarked that you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. China’s receding waves are not only revealing a bunch of skinny dippers, but also highlighting the ties that bind many of them to the mother ship that is Tencent.
The tech titan has seen more than $150bn lopped off its market value since the January peak. Many of its holdings have taken a tumble too: China Literature, which doubled in price on its Hong Kong debut last November, is now below the HK$55 at which it sold shares. Search engine Sogou languishes well below the $13 at which it listed in New York the same month.
Part of this reflects the general swoon in China tech stocks wrought by the slowing economy and US-China trade wars. But it also reflects the increasing concentration in ownership and supplier relations in the sector — a sort of Chinese version of Japan’s keiretsu, the cross-shareholdings that accelerated the unspooling of share prices when that nation’s bubble burst.