The Guardian is a very high quality paper. Despite being in one of the most right-winged universities, I was a regular reader of this socialist paper.
Recently it has this story: The reason for this is that corporate America now no longer principally seeks to create value by building businesses over time through marshalling human capital, investment and innovation. Instead it tries to extract value by financial engineering and sweating assets in an increasingly feral form of capitalism.
It is just as true in Hong Kong. Yes we are on the same wave length, I am talking about PCCW. Although I do not hold any PCCW/HKT stocks, too many folks got seriously burnt, and to a large extend, Richard Li was responsible. It was a big financial engineering exercise that went horribly wrong (at least to some people), and we now have the first negative-equity corporation ever in history.
Having said the above, the corporation itself is not in such a poor state. Okay they get the special treatment from the idiots at OFTA for being the 600lb gorilla in the market, but still they own the majority of cables that carry signals under Hong Kong. They have the expertise, the manpower and the financial backing to run a top-notch telecom company, and it would be difficult to argue otherwise that they are a top-notch telecom company. Their mobile network is just better than everybody else, and Netvigator as an ISP is arguably second to none in the territory. It would not be fair to say that they are not trying to create value through investment and innovation.
I surely hope Richard has learnt his lessons.
11:53:16 PM 
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