A good idea for a book, could be to dig in behind the scenes of the incredible global spending spree of Chinese companies like Dalian Wanda, Anbang and HNA. I find this whole thing very interesting. I won’t have time to go into all the details here and I don’t have all the details myself either (I think very few do). But I encourage you to read up in media on what these companies have been up to lately. I think quite a few “special situations” will occur over the coming years, when these companies need to unwind their massive oversees holdings. HNA seems to be the one who hold most listed equities.
HNA – the short version
My investment case in Rezidor is related to HNA, so here is a very short version of what I managed to gather from the history of HNA. HNA started out as a local/regional airline for the Hainan island in China, dubbed China’s Hawaii. Side note, I actually visited the island once. It’s popular among Chinese (and Russians to some degree), but the luxury resort Sanya is way overpriced compared to Thailand/Vietnam etc. During early 2000’s HNA diversified from its airline business to becoming HNA Group, moving into tourism, logistics etc. The structure is not easy to grasp. Equity analysts at UBS tried to map out this corporate structure in a recent report titled “What if HNA Group is the black swan of the equity and bond markets in 2018?”. See below (click to maximize):
These different entities then went on a pretty crazy shopping spree worldwide, snapping up assets all over the place. I encourage you to listen to this “funny” episode of just how crazy HNA’s spending spree has been: