12 Hours After

Chapter 17. An Orphan Adopted Into A Chaebol Family, Part I

Translator: Khan

Editor: RED

The category that gave me a golden opportunity was Entertainment. Having received useless real-estate news from Economy, I clicked on Entertainment and IT/Science one after another, and my eyes were wide open when I saw the title of the article in Entertainment.

[Jiwoo Entertainment is acquired by China’s BEU Group.]

‘In the stock industry, an acquisition is a very important event. If one company becomes a takeover bid for another, a huge amount of money will be brought in by a new parent company. In addition, the parent company usually presents a new revenue-generating model to its subsidiary to increase the size of its original business or link it up when it acquires the subsidiary.’

‘Therefore, the acquisition will not only dramatically improve the financial situation of the subsidiary with the parent company’s funds, but also increase sales, resulting in a sharp increase in the financial statements. The replacement of the parent company is an event in which cheap stocks are transformed into gold stocks.’

I clicked on the article without hesitation.

——————

[South Korean entertainment company Jiwoo Entertainment has been acquired by China’s BEU Group. Kim Dong-il, a founder and the largest shareholder of Jiwoo Entertainment, announced today that he has signed a contract to sell 32.67 percent of his stake to China’s BEU Group. This changed the largest shareholder of Jiwoo Entertainment to BEU Group, while Jiwoo Entertainment cooperates with BEU Group’s various Chinese subsidiaries (BPU, Shinhwa Film Company) to secure domestic artists to enter the entertainment business in China.]

——————-

I had definitely heard of Jiwoo Entertainment. I turned on MTS and searched for Jiwoo Entertainment. However, a phrase stood out at the top of the stock market, rather than the price of the stock. The words “Issues of Administration” were written in red.

‘Issues of Administration?’

‘Issues of Administration is a ticket to a company that had been deficit for several years or when it is on the verge of collapse. It is a kind of stigma attached to stocks that lose money for more than a year or when their financial statements have not improved, they are in the process of delisting. It is literally a stock that has received special care.’

‘In general, it is better not to trade stocks attached to such Issues of Administration. This is because they do not know when or how they will be delisted. If the stock is delisted, the stock will be either destroyed or sold out of the market, allowing only a small number of people to trade. In that case, they are traded at a slightly higher price than normal waste paper. There is no guarantee of the future.’

I was troubled for a moment. ‘… this is a dangerous stock.’

I looked up the chart for Jiwoo Entertainment.

“Huh…”

The stock chart had a clear downward curve. Although there were occasional spikes or declines, they eventually had a graph of a linear function with a negative slope, which seemed to be hand-drawn from either the weekly or monthly candlestick chart.

It was $18 three years ago… It’s only $3 right now… a sixth of it… There must be a lot of people who killed themselves.

‘There are usual times when any stock is good or bad.’

However, this stock had steadily been negative over what had happened. I looked up the financial statements. However, they were also very unusual.

‘Huh? But sales are good, right?’

Sales were steady. Or rather, they were growing slightly.

‘Who are the singers and celebrities that belong here?’

I opened a search window and searched for Jiwoo Entertainment. At the top of the list, I could see a girl group, Nine Tails.

‘Oh… Nine Tales belongs to this company.’

A girl group, Nine Tales was the third or fourth popular girl group in Korea. Ha Yeon-seo, the leader, had a remarkable beauty that rarely fell out when they considered the top visuals of the Korean girl groups, so there were few Korean men in their twenties or thirties who did not know about them.

‘Nine Tales are pretty popular, but… what happened to the company with Ha Yeon-seo?’

I found a stockholder notice board of the general portal. There was no better place than this to judge the situation of the company.

—————–

[Oh, it’s down again today… I’m going to the Han River today. I’ll have to go drink some Soju.]

[You idiot, are you holding this stock? Sell it quickly. The winner is the one who sells it first.]

[This stock is finished. Look at the chairman of the company. He is gambling with company money.]

[Oh, poor Nine Tails… They can’t even release a new album because of Dong-il, son of a bitch!]

[I’m a fan of Nine Tails’ Jung So-yeon. I’ll pick up the knife and go to Jiwoo Entertainment. Wait for me, Dong-il, you son of a bitch!]

———————

Looking at the bulletin board, I had a question.

‘Who’s Dong-il?’

I seemed to see the name somewhere, and when I read the article again, I found that he was the founder and major shareholder of Jiwoo Entertainment. He was being criticized by unnamed shareholders because he did not operate the company well.

‘Well, it is normal in the stock market. If anyone is down to a sixth of his wealth, he will want to swear even if he holds onto the chairmanship. Nevertheless, he has to blame his fingers for buying stocks before that, but it is hard for the average person to blame himself.’

Somehow I found a good source here.

‘Chairman Kim Dong-il was gambling with company money?’

‘CEO Risk. It happens often.’

Recently, a director of Peanut Airlines returned on a flight for the U.S. to Korea, as a stewardess made a mistake. At that time, the company saw its market capitalization evaporate by as much as one billion dollars, with a decline of –10% for a week.

‘What the hell did he do?’

I wanted to find out more about the story, but I didn’t have time. It was 8:58 a.m. now. Only two minutes were left until the beginning of the market. It was not enough time to further analyze why Jiwoo Entertainment, which had Nine Tales and Ha Yeon-seo, was doing this. What mattered to me was whether this stock would go up or down.

If there was a rumor of acquisition spreading in the market, the stock price might soar as soon as the market opened, so a decision should be made quickly. I put aside all those specifics and searched for just one more key factor that would affect stock prices right away.

[BEU’s market capitalization.]

‘What’s most important when news of acquisition comes out like this is how powerful the parent company is. An acquisition is a situation similar to when an orphan at an orphanage goes through the adoption process into a family. In some cases, he or she is adopted by an ordinary family, or by a Chaebol family. The former is not bad, but the latter is a sharp improvement in the company.’

I watched the search result. Because BEU was not a Korean company, there was no information about it. Instead, I could look it up on the news.

[… BEU, which organizes the Hallyu (Korean Wave) concert, is a Beijing-based general entertainment company, with a market capitalization of about twenty billion dollars.]

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Twenty billion dollars was huge money. If we combined Korea’s leading entertainment companies, ZM, YC and PJY, the total amounts would be less two billion dollars, and its size was ten times larger than those.

‘This is… I have to buy it.’

Of course, I was a little uncomfortable with the Issues of Administration, but it was August now. March, the period when a lot of delisted companies were put out, had passed, and it was not a dangerous time. Although there was something wrong with the company, if the parent company would change this evening, the problem would disappear.

If the money problem was 80% in life, the money problem was 99.9% in the company. I decided to turn on MTS. The time was 8:59 a.m. It was a minute before the market opened. I entered the password and moved my hand to the buy button.