In 2017, the shipping giant of former Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee HwaOrient overseas co., Ltd.It was acquired by a mainland company.

Shipping is the industry started by the Dong family. Tung Chee-hwa's father, Tung Haoyun, came to Hong Kong in 1948 and founded OOCL. In its heyday, Tung Chee-hwa had 149ships of various types, with a total tonnage of 12 million tons, the highest in the world. Dong Haoyun died in 1982, and the company was handed over to the eldest son, Tung Chee-hwa.

The strong periodicity of shipping has made Tung Chee-hwa go through a lot of hardships after taking over, and OOCL has constantly fallen into the cycle of "making money-buying ships-losing money-selling ships". In the second oil crisis, without the rescue of Fok Ying Tung and mysterious forces from the north, the foundation of the Dong family might have been ruined.

Even before the acquisition in 2016, OOCL still lost $219 million. Just then, another white knight arrived: the acquirer from the mainland priced OOCL HK $49.2 billion, while the Tung Chee-hwa family owned 68.7%, so they would cash out HK $33.8 billion in one fell swoop.

This white rider is famous in the A-share market in the future and is known as the "king of the sea".COSCO Shipping Holdings .

The predecessor of COSCO Shipping Holdings isChina ocean going. This kind of company that dares to use "national name + industry" is usually under the jurisdiction of No. 26 Xuanwumen West Street in Beijing. But investors have mixed feelings about Cosco: it quadrupled to become a Daniel stock in 2007 and then became a "ST", down nearly 90 per cent.

Later, Cosco merged with another central shipping giant, China Shipping Container, and changed its name to COSCO Shipping Holdings at the end of 2016. It is a well-deserved "eldest son of Republic Shipping", nicknamed "China Magic Luck" by quacks. Of course, no matter how big the shipping company is, it still can't get rid of the cycle.

For example, in 2016, before the acquisition of OOCL, COSCO Shipping Holdings lost as much as 9 billion. However, after the completion of the merger and acquisition, COSCO Shipping Holdings's transport capacity ranks among the top three in the world. Therefore, if you ask shareholders about the acquisition of endowment porcelain, shareholders must be endowment porcelain.

Unfortunately, after the merger, COSCO Shipping Holdings also copied the trend of his cousin's "Chinese magic car". The stock price fell all the way, and no one mentioned "Chinese magic luck" any more. Until 2020, when the epidemic rocked the global shipping industry, COSCO Shipping Holdings rose tenfold in one breath, rising from "seal" to "sea king".

You know, cyclical stocks, which have been lying on the floor for many years, have not given such a long face to the plate for a long time. Some analysts estimate that COSCO Shipping Holdings's net profit this year will reach 77.5 billion, almost 2 Maotai. If you add up all the profits in COSCO Shipping Holdings's history, it's not that much.

Not only COSCO Shipping Holdings, 2020 is also a big year for the global shipping industry. European ocean giant Maersk has tripled, Eva and Wanhai in neighboring Taiwan Province have increased more than 20 times, Yangming Shipping has directly increased 46 times, and OOCL, which has been sold to COSCO Shipping Holdings, has also increased more than fivefold.

Interestingly, when COSCO Shipping Holdings acquired OOCL, in order for OOCL to maintain its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, it was necessary for the public to hold no less than 25 per cent. So COSCO Shipping Holdings transferred some of the equity he just bought at a par price to several institutions, including Li Ka-shing's CK Hutchison department.

In April 2021, against a backdrop of a booming shipping industry, Li Ka-shing sold HK $853 million of OOCL shares at a discount of 12.3 per cent, directly smashing OOCL's share price by 14 points. As a result, Li Chaoren's share price rose another 70% as soon as the front foot was sold out.

Li Ka-shing's operation is also an inspiration for investment:We can't understand both national transportation and sea transportation.

It is difficult to understand national transportation, but it is not complicated to understand shipping.

Although shipping is closely related to capital and politics, the essence of this business isDeliver express delivery at sea. Therefore, the characteristics of express delivery can also be seen in the shipping industry-there are economies of scale, oligarchs, elimination of the small, mergers of the industry, and naturally a fierce price war.

Express delivery wants to do large-scale, either more outlets and more people, or buy more planes and build more airports. If you want to do large-scale shipping, either sell more freighters or figure out how to get a ship to pull more goods. For the latter, the industry's solution is simple and brutal:Make the boat bigger.。

To judge the size of a ship, there is a special unit in the shipping industry:TEU (standard box). A 10000TEU ship means that the ship can hold 10000 standard containers 20 feet long, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high and 25 cubic meters in volume.

At the beginning of this year, the EverGiven, stuck in the Suez Canal, was a super ship with a maximum theoretical capacity of 20124 to 20388TEU. The workers who dug the Suez Canal would never have imagined that humans would build a behemoth like EverGiven.

The history of human shipping can also be condensed into a history of "bigger and bigger ships". Every once in a while, a leading company will take the lead in launching a campaign to build large ships, which in turn will lead to the upgrading of the entire industry. The last big ship-building movement was initiated by a shipping giant headquartered in Denmark.Maersk。

In 2011, Maersk ordered 20 18000TEU ships from Daewoo, South Korea, ranking first in the world in terms of carrying capacity. This cargo ship not only carries a large capacity, but also saves fuel. It can transport 182 million Huawei Mate Pad and 111 million pairs of Li Ning Co. Ltd., consuming about 2006 cubic meters of fuel, equivalent to only 11 milliliters of fuel for each Pad.

You know, fuel prices were as high as $700 a tonne in 2011, and saving fuel alone can make other shipping companies want to move.

Watch the boss take the lead in the roll, number twoMediterranean (MSC)Follow up quickly and sign 11 new ships close to 19200TEU by charter, the third.Dafei (CMA-CGM)He also gritted his teeth and symbolically "upgraded" eight new 16000TEU ships to 17700TEU.

Subsequently, Mitsui of Japan, Hebrot of Germany, and Hyundai merchant ships of South Korea also began to order dumplings in turn, and the arms race escalated rapidly.

However, when it comes to scale, Western capitalist countries still cannot beat China: OOCL has unreasonably booked eight 18000TEU ships, and Taiwan Evergreen has tightened its belly and chartered about six 18000TEU ships. At that time, China Shipping, which only ranked seventh in the world in terms of transport volume, directly announced that it had ordered five 19100TEU cargo ships, with a big posture if it wanted to play.

Unexpectedly, before the delivery of 20 large ships, Maersk immediately announced that 6 19000TEU ships would be ordered again. At the same time, it announced the launch of the "Daily Maersk" service on the Asia-Europe route, meaning that if the owner booked the space, he could get the promise of "just-in-time" and claim compensation from Maersk once the time limit was overdue.

You know, the Asia-Europe route is one of the most profitable shipping routes in the world. Originally, 20 18000TEU ships in Maersk were able to operate twice a week after a round trip of 70 days. If we add six 19000TEU ships to cooperate with the "Maersk" service of overdue compensation, small and medium-sized companies will basically have no money to make. Even if you gnash your teeth to build a ship, it is difficult to surpass Maersk in terms of carrying capacity.

As a result, the global shipping industry has reached the second stage after the ship-building movement:Keep warm in a group.

Almost at the same time as Maersk launched the "Tiantian Maersk" service, the second Mediterranean and the third Dafei announced the formation of the "Dida Alliance" to declare war on Maersk. As a result, less than two years after the alliance was established, the second and third found that they could not beat the boss even if they merged. On the contrary, they forced the younger brothers behind to form an alliance and work together to erode their share.

So in June 2013, Mediterranean and Dafei decisively used the law of "join if you can't beat it" and announced the formation of a "P3 Alliance" with Maersk.Instead of chopping sickles at each other, it is better to cut leeks together.

At that time, the three giants accounted for 46.7% of the total capacity of Asia-Europe routes, far less than 4.8% of the fourth place. The shipping company connects the shipper and the port, and once the share has the bargaining power, it is only a matter of time before the price starts.

For a big manufacturing and export country like China, once the P3 alliance lands, they can not only use the advantage of transport capacity to increase freight rates and reduce the profits of Chinese shippers, but also force Chinese ports to reduce prices through bargaining power. It is a fatal blow to both China's shipping companies and China's manufacturing industry itself.

After nearly 180 days of review, the P3 alliance was finally rejected by China's Ministry of Commerce in 2014 under the anti-monopoly law. Lidinsky, the only former FMC chairman in the United States who voted against P3, once praised:"from the perspective of overall cooperation, China has made a decision to relieve the anger. "

With the P3 alliance stillborn, the second Mediterranean resolutely defected, and the eldest Maersk once again formed a "2m alliance". The old San Dafei, who was stabbed, bought Singapore's Oriental Sea Emperor, and China Ocean Shipping and China Shipping, which ranked sixth and seventh in the world at that time, also chose to stay warm together and merged into today's COSCO Shipping Holdings.

But mergers and cooperation around the world have not saved the sluggish shipping industry. In 2016, three gray swans were born after Brexit, Trump's victory and Italy's defeat in the referendum, and global trade fell to a freezing point. even Maersk lost $1.9 billion-its second loss since World War II.

In line with the principle of "you die earlier than me", Maersk relies on its mass advantage to start a price war in the industry's trough. At that time, the cost of boxes on the Asia-Europe route was close to $1000, and Maersk once beat the price to $75, directly killing the seventh largest shipping company in the world at that time.Hanjin Shipping. Of course, other shipping companies are also full of sorrow, COSCO Shipping Holdings's acquisition of OOCL also took place during this period.

With the gradual exit of small and medium-sized companies and the end of the price war, global shipping has gradually formed three major shipping alliances: the "2m alliance" of Maersk and Mediterranean, the "Ocean alliance" of waist companies COSCO Shipping Holdings, Dafei and Evergreen, and the loose alliance of many hip companies.

The essence of this protracted maritime war is to absorb the excess capacity generated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.And pass throughThe ship is huge, the alliance is super and the price war has no bottom line.After the trilogy, the global shipping industry has completed a historical round of supply-side reforms, and the number of shipping companies in major alliances is only half of what it was a decade ago.

For an industry that "does not open for ten years, but opens for ten years", it seems to have come to the end of its hardships.

The worst news for global trade in 2021 was not the congestion of the Suez Canal, but the detection of a COVID-19 patient at Yantian Port in Shenzhen in May.

The port, located on the north bank of Dapeng Bay in Shenzhen, carries nearly 1/4 of China's trade with the United States. With the emergence of confirmed cases, the whole Yantian port was nearly shut down, 357000 containers were idle, and 357000 cargo ships were queued up and had no hope of changing ports. Maersk once said that the impact of the congestion was more serious than that of the Suez Canal.

The port shutdown means a reduction in supply, while a decrease in supply means a rise in freight rates. As soon as the news of the epidemic in Yantian Port left, A-share sailors pulled COSCO Shipping Holdings up the trading limit.

The shipping industry itself is a typical representative of "periodicity". Take COSCO Shipping Holdings as an example: in the first quarter of this year, COSCO Shipping Holdings made a net profit of 154small targets, an increase of 52 times over the same period last year.You know, the profit of this quarter is more than that of the past ten years combined.

After World War II, the market law represented by periodicity has gradually emerged in the shipping industry. 95% of the world's industrial products are transported through ocean containers, and shipping itself has become a weather vane of global economic prosperity: when the economy is booming, rising demand makes capacity bottleneck, freight rates rise immediately, shipping companies also need to "dumplings" to take the opportunity to expand their share. But when the economy began to decline, a large number of newly built ships became excess capacity, the relationship between supply and demand reversed, and the industry fell back into the trough.

Therefore, the true face of the shipping industry is actually "bulls, short bears and long bears", which allows shipping companies to fight for money day by day, only during the short window period when excess demand leads to capacity bottlenecks.But the sudden outbreak in 2020 magnified this window.

On the demand side:After the epidemic, the Federal Reserve released more than 20 trillion US dollars in watermark banknotes, a large part of which was directly sent to the hands of the public, resulting in a surge in consumer demand.

On the other hand, the "home economy" brought about by the epidemic has made the popularity of e-commerce in the United States and even around the world show an irreversible growth trend. On the one hand, the popularity of "North American Alipay" Square, INC. has increased nine times since the epidemic, and on the other hand, Chinese cross-border e-commerce SHEIN has conquered territory in the American girl market.

On the supply side:The sudden epidemic has paralyzed the global industrial chain, and the supply of consumer goods and industrial products around the world has almost fallen on China's shoulders. The most profitable Asia-Europe route was left out in the cold, and cargo ships and sailors from all over the world crowded on the Sino-US route to start 996.

Overlooking San Pedro Bay from above, more than 30 ships lined up for 20 kilometers along the coast, waiting to be unloaded at long Beach Port (Long Beach) in Los Angeles. Due to strong imports, the usual single-line 4 million TEUs has now increased to 5.5 million TEUs. As a result, Los Angeles is blocked not only on land but also at sea.

To make matters worse, the problems on land in the United States are more serious than those in a mess at sea. The railway line originally connected to the port of long Beach was suspended due to a forest fire in California, resulting in highway congestion and an exponential increase in the difficulty of handling the port's "cargo ship barrier lake".

Yantian Port was shut down due to the epidemic, which dealt another fatal blow to the supply side. Craig, vice president of North American transportation giant Seko Logistics, said at one point that the offer for shipments from Shanghai and Yantian to Los Angeles reached $25000 / FEU (FEU refers to 40-foot containers, about twice as much as TEU).

According to this quotation, the total freight for 300 containers will reach US $7.5 million, and that is the price for a 2800TEU ship. In other words, 300 boxes can be exchanged for another ship.

To sum up,Releasing water to expand demand, the epidemic to compress supply, and freight to ride on rockets.

So, according to the previous routine, step up the construction of new ships to ease the shortage of transport capacity, and take the opportunity to increase market share?

As a matter of fact, shipping companies are not unaware of the lack of capacity. The "demographic dividend" of new ships launched in the last round of shipbuilding is almost eaten up, and ships are generally facing the problem of "aging" and are in urgent need of upgrading. As a result, even OOCL, which was once too bad to take care of itself, spent NT $9.6 billion on building new ships.

But ship orders take at least 2-3 years to be delivered. on the other hand, shipyards do not want to lose money because of skyrocketing global raw material prices. Various factors have caused this round of global capacity bottlenecks to last longer than ever before.

In other words, the global cargo ship "newborn" is not enough, the "aging" is serious, and shipyards do not want to have a baby because of the rising price of raw materials.

To say the least, even if the shipyard wants to live and the shipping company wants to buy it, the congestion to the port may be a drop in the bucket:

As congestion grows, American workers at long Beach have begun to play the Marne card, starting at seven times the average wage and working only four hours a day, two or three days a week. Even if the crew of the sea is 996, it cannot solve the problem of land-side unloading and transportation.

However, the port congestion will one day ease, and the shipping industry will never escape the fate of the cycle. For ocean shipping, the freight rate is the door of life. If you want to escape the cycle, the key lies in the stability of the freight rate.Whether it is super-large ships, inter-industry mergers, or oligarchic alliances, the purpose is to achieve "autonomous control" of freight rates.

After a decade-long war, the three liner alliances now control 90% of the world's capacity and have an absolute say in the entire shipping market. At the beginning of the outbreak, demand from countries around the world was almost stagnant, and the shipping industry ushered in unprecedented challenges. In an urgent situation, the alliance announced a large-scale suspension of flights to maintain freight rates by cutting capacity. As of May last year, a total of 12% of the world's total capacity was idle.

The existence of the super alliance is equivalent to a "visible hand", which regulates the price fluctuation and reduces the fluctuation of the shipping cycle to some extent.

In addition, COSCO Shipping Holdings, as a member of the Ocean alliance, also took advantage of the tight supply window to sign a large long-term agreement with customers (shipping at the same price within 2-3 years) to lock in the price, which is equivalent to buying a layer of insurance for the collapse of the future cycle.

At the same time, COSCO Shipping Holdings also launched the "synconhub platform", in which the shipper's mobile phone issued an order to book the space, chose the delivery service independently, and applied to print the bill of lading, directly killing the forwarder as a middleman.

The former maximizes the ironing cycle, while the latter raises the income ceiling by changing the business model.The disturbance of short-term freight rates, the fracture of the global and American land-side supply chains in the medium term is difficult to repair, and the long-term exploration of COSCO Shipping Holdings's digitization.This has become the core reason for COSCO Shipping Holdings's momentum in the capital market.

It's just that whenever the cycle stock goes up in the scene, some people will say"the cycle becomes long, this time is different."

As a super white horse stock, COSCO Shipping Holdings's 10-fold increase should be "rich first" a lot of people, but in fact is this the case?

Let's first look at domestic institutions. At a time when China's shipping industry is ushering in a harvest year, there are only a handful of institutions that have made money from COSCO Shipping Holdings. With the quarterly reports of public offering funds released one after anotherIn the second quarterly report, public offering positions accounted for only 0.99% of COSCO Shipping Holdings's outstanding shares, which was only 3.7 million shares more than in the first quarterly report.

On the whole, the established fund Huaxia has 21 funds holding COSCO Shipping Holdings in the fourth quarter of last year, which is the fund company that bought the most in the early stage. If you take it apart, the people who hold the most COSCO Shipping Holdings in the first quarter of this year are Lu Qiuyuan of Hua'an, Lin Jing and Zheng Yu of Huaxia.

In addition to the Huaxia fund, which has the details of the king in the last cycle, there is also a person who has braved the wind and waves in the "five Golden Flowers" market.Chen GuangmingIt is rumored that Chen Guangming's Ruiyuan fund began to study shipping a long time ago and made more than 5 billion yuan on COSCO Shipping Holdings through special accounts (no public information verification).

Public information shows that the ones who really make a lot of money on COSCO Shipping Holdings come from investment institutions in established capitalist countries.

On March 29th, 2021, when the latest round of Hong Kong stock market COSCO Shipping Holdings was launched, the American Legend Quantification FundAQR Capital ManagemeNtLi Ka-shing did the opposite, increasing its holdings by HK $76.25 million at an average price of HK $9.34, bringing the total number of shares to 135 million shares. after the increase, Hong Kong stock COSCO Shipping Holdings nearly tripled.

Cliff Asness, the founder of AQR, bears some resemblance to Chen Guangming. As soon as the shock of the circuit breaker was decided in 2015, Chen Guangming shocked the market with a speech entitled "the timing of value Investment." in 2020, Nasdaq had just recovered from the epidemic. Asness's article "what exactly is real value investment" made the market rethink the voice of "value factor superfluous".

Apart from AQR, those who have outperformed S & P for 15 years in a rowBill Miller (Bill Miller)Increased holdings of cruise companiesNorwegian Cruise LineThe prototype of the "big short"Michael Burley (Michael Burry)Acquired shares in three shipowners in the first quarter. Although the predators do not necessarily buy is a collection of goods, but it is indisputable that they all make a lot of money in shipping stocks.

In China, COSCO Shipping Holdings's tenfold increase has become an embarrassing scene for many institutions: in these years of stagnant cyclical stocks, excellent cyclical stock researchers have either been laid off or transferred to study liquor or new energy. So much so that before COSCO Shipping Holdings announced that he had made a profit of 15.3 billion in the first quarter, some brokerages gave an outrageous forecast of only 4 billion in 2021.

Restricted by the cold market, cycle researchers are not popular, and rumors abound that coal researchers are eating boiled cabbages in coal mines. For cycle analysts, there is a level of career change to see futures, no level of industry transfer to deliver takeout, and the rest of the level of staying is uneven.

The reason behind this is not difficult to explain. Qiu Guolu, who has recently been "educated" by investors, laments the "night talk" of Gao Yi's assets this year:"We have seen some very senior and excellent cyclical stock researchers change careers to become junior researchers at TMT, which is a pity. "

Of course, there are also analysts who are right. Han Jun, an analyst at Citic Construction Investment Co., Ltd., who is named "Sea King" by netizens in Snowball, is one of them.

In May 2020, Han Jun observed two data anomalies: one was that demand plummeted as a result of the sudden outbreak, but the container freight index rose year-on-year; the other was that weekly data on US imports began to pull up in a straight line. Subsequently, he introduced the first COSCO Shipping Holdings research report to the market.

Coincidentally, the day after the release of the research newspaper, COSCO Shipping Holdings also fell to the bottom of 3.14. After that, Hai Control started the supercycle. On June 9 this year, Han Jun raised the target price to 38 yuan, and the A-share "cloud sailors" were in high spirits and blocked the limit the next day. In A shares, it is rare for retail investors to attach so much importance to the seller's research and reporting.

Therefore, many of the main players who make money on COSCO Shipping Holdings are actually retail investors of all kinds, including front-line practitioners in industries such as seafarers and freight forwarders, and some have even accurately calculated COSCO Shipping Holdings's profits in the first quarter. The method is also enough to make the seller's organization ashamed--Press the calculator.

In some unpopular periodic stocks, employees of "warm ducks are the first to feel the smell of spring" tend to be ahead of the organization. So someone joked:COSCO Shipping Holdings is a 10-fold share pushed up by the people's trolley.

Shipping and vaccines are the two industries that benefited most during the global pandemic.Whether it is Sinovel, which makes vaccines, or COSCO Shipping Holdings, who works in shipping, they are all "money printing presses."

Similarly, such companies, which have the "right to print money" against a bleak background in other industries, are usually industries that need to implement the will of the state. Therefore, although the political color of shipping is gradually fading, it is an industry that cannot escape the political and economic environment, especially for super state-owned enterprises like COSCO Shipping Holdings.

About 10 kilometers southwest of Athens, Greece, on the banks of the Aegean Sea, there is a blue sea and blue sky.Port Piraeus (Port of Piraeus). Piraeus, which means "the place of holding the passage" in Greek, is the key node of "Belt and Road Initiative". Cosco acquired Bigang in 2008, making it the largest and fastest-growing port in the Mediterranean in just five years.

After winning the Belgian port, COSCO Shipping Holdings continued to sell, successively buying ports such as Valencia in Spain and Zebuluhe in northwest Europe, with the latest target being one of the three major ports in Europe, which is also the hamburger port of Germany's core assets.

With Bigang as a transit hub, COSCO Shipping Holdings can use the "Central European Land and Sea Express Line" to transport Chinese goods to Eastern Europe by railway. On the other hand, many ports along the Atlantic coast have formed a "Diamond Express" route, which is China's first remote route not based on its own land but purely overseas.

The ultimate goal of the two transport routes is to break Maersk's price hegemony in Asia-Europe shipping-- the east-west routes of Asia-Europe Line and the United States Line are often the lifelines of Asian shipping companies. therefore, Maersk often uses the methods of price war on the east-west line and making money on the north-south lines such as "Europe-Africa" and "North America-North-South" to crack down on Asian shipping companies, which is attributed to the collapse of Hanjin Shipping.

Now, once Maersk accurately attacks COSCO Shipping Holdings on the east-west front, the latter can be countered with "Diamond Express".

Whether it is Huawei's mobile phone, Li Ning Co. Ltd. 's running shoes, Longji's silicon chip, Ningde era battery, all rely on this sea lifeline, box by box to go overseas. For exports, one of the pillars of China's economy, the significance of these layouts is much more than the cheering of the capital markets.

The large ports with the integration of ocean routes and the key points of commerce and trade, and the investment layout all over the world-- COSCO Shipping Holdings's various actions may not have that great waves in the secondary market, and the impact on the financial statements is not always positive, and it is also difficult to let the "Sea King" escape the fate of the cycle. But the ups and downs of the stock market are not the value of the company.

Like the giant state-owned enterprises behind many super projects, the mission entrusted to COSCO Shipping Holdings by history is not the swords of the rough rivers and lakes, nor the infighting of the capital world, but a step-by-step process under the will of the country. play a key ballast stone in China's economy.

From a certain point of view, if you understand shipping, you will understand national luck.