It’s been an ugly transition. The company has the core market of multimedia system-on-a-chip products and that has left it at a much lower revenue run rate ($40 million-50 million/year) then it has enjoyed in the past. However, the company has taken steps to dramatically reduce costs, and yet invests a staggering portion of revenue in R&D and has massively increased its capabilities in other areas like higher end multimedia and also new markets like automobiles.

Q3 2009 Earnings Call

November 5, 2009 5:30 pm ET

The complete list of Chinese ADRs traded on U.S. organized exchanges is listed below:

We’ve recently been using the GuruFocus Benjamin Graham Net Current Asset Value Screener (subscription required) to generate regular watchlists of net net stocks. The GuruFocus NCAV screen has some superb functionality that makes it possible to create the watchlist from the screen and then track the performance of those stocks. We created our first watchlist on July 7 of this year using the July 6 closing prices. The performance of the stocks in that first watchlist over the last quarter has been nothing short of spectacular. Here is a screen grab (with some columns removed to fit the space below):

The chart shows the performance of semiconductor sector IPOs since the start of trading. Since InsideChips began tracking semiconductor IPO performance on January 1, 2005, only two companies, Hittite Microwave (HITT) and Cavium Networks (CAVM) fared well for investors who purchased the stock at the opening price.

PixelPlus, a Korean supplier of CMOS image sensor and imaging ASICs, went public in December 2005 but was de-listed due to its financial condition. Qimonda, a memory spin-off from Infineon, went public in August 2006 but entered insolvency proceedings earlier this year. Saifun Semiconductors, an Israeli non-volatile memory IP provider, was acquired by Spansion (SPSN), a Japanese pure-play provider of Flash memory solutions. Spansion itself, which went public in December 2005, is mired in financial difficulties and is last on the performance listiing.

Q2 2009 Earnings Call

August 3, 2009 5:30 pm ET

We are pleased to bring you the results of a 10x45 Bargain Hunter screen for cheap companies buying back their own shares. The screen results are sorted by the quarterly sequential percentage reduction in shares outstanding.

The screen results are based on the following criteria:

I was going through the Manual of Ideas site and taking a look at the previews and samples. If you aren’t aware, Manual of Ideas is a service that focuses on deep value companies. They issue newsletters that contain a truckload of ideas on companies you’ve never heard of.

The headline “Portfolio Managers' Review Picks Top 5 Ben Graham-Style Deep Value Investments” caught my attention since this has been the focus on Old School Value of late. The sample they have up is an 8 page report but all the “top picks” have been hidden in black; what got me more interested was the list of 100 companies passing the deep value screen. (The 100 companies list starts from page 4.)

Q1 2009 Earnings Call

May 6, 2009; 5:30 pm ET

The Manual of Ideas research team recently jumped into the proverbial stock market "bargain bin" to try to uncover some compelling values. Here is what we found:

Price Does Not Equal Value

GuruFocus.com is a site dedicated to delving into professional money managers’ every real-time portfolio move. I know that my 13-F posts are among the most popular for my blog so readers may find the services at GuruFocus.com useful as well. I took the opportunity to run one of their premium screens, the Benjamin Graham Net Current Asset Value Screener.

This screen mimics Graham’s famous “net-net” bargains. According to GuruFocus.com:

When it comes to Rambus (RMBS), a lawyer might be better qualified than a financial analyst to determine the direction of its shares. Wednesday was another fine example of this stock’s volatile responsiveness to legal and regulatory developments. Rambus shares rose 8.8% after a US District court in San Francisco ruled in their favor on Tuesday afternoon. RMBS is, after all, a high beta (~2.2) stock and large moves are to be expected. The stock has posted double digit percentage gains on 123 trading days since its IPO on May 14th, 1997. However, even when including the years before the tech bubble burst, most of these big moves have come from legal, not product or real earnings related developments.

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It may be time for investors to dust off their copy of Ben Graham and David Dodd's classic Security Analysis. Graham and Dodd paid a lot of attention to the liquidation value of companies as a way of lowering the risk of loss even under a worst-case scenario. They reasoned that even if a company fails as a going concern and is forced to liquidate, shareholders may get their money back -- or even make money -- assuming the company's balance sheet is strong and liquid enough to yield a material amount of cash for shareholders in the event of a liquidation of all of the company's assets.

The Financial Times argues in an article entitled "Liquidation risk grows as finance dries up" that liquidations -- rather than reorganizations under Chapter 11 -- may become more common as bankruptcy financing disappears or becomes prohibitively expensive. According to the FT,

Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

January 21, 2009 5:30 pm ET

In this kind of bear market, the phrase “throwing the baby out with the bath water” gets used quite frequently. However, there are some stocks that are truly worthy of this claim. Small caps in particular present some intriguing values with shares of profitable companies trading at a discount to tangible book value. Why consider buying opaque financial assets at pennies on the dollar when there are real companies, with little to no debt, that can be purchased at similar markdowns?

Our screens found five companies, in different industries, that are currently priced at significant discounts to tangible book:

July was a volatile month for the U.S. markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average started the month with some big losses, even closing below 11,000 for the first time in two years on July 15th. But since then, the index has reclaimed some of the losses after a pair of strong rallies, fueled by declining oil price. For the month, the Dow rose a meager 0.25%, the NASDAQ rose 1.42% and the broader S&P 500 index declined just about 1%.

During the month, the Shanghai Composite Index (^SSEC) showed some signs of life, briefly going over the 2,900-point mark early in the month before settling at 2,775.72. That’s a gain of 1.45%. The Hang Seng Index (^HSI) also recovered from the deep drop in June, gaining 2.84% in July.

Chinese stocks have been hit heavily during the last several months, and if you are bottom fishing, Chinese stocks with low price earnings to growth ratios [PEG] might be worth taking a close look at. Remember the lower the PEG, the better the buy. A PEG between one and two is good, and below one is great.

Here are the top ten China stocks by PEG:

Comparing to what happened to Chinese stocks listed on U. S. stock exchanges, the drop in major U. S. equity indexes is minor, though the Dow Jones Industrial Average did lose more than 10% in just one month (10.19%). During the same time period, the NASDAQ dropped 9.12% and the S&P declined 8.57% as jitters in the financial sector continued and there was no sign that the housing market has bottomed. In fact, the loss in June was the severest monthly loss since the Great Depression.

However,  if you are investing heavily in Chinese ADRs (like me), then I am sure you feel even more depressed when looking at your stocks’ performances last month. Of the 82 Chinese ADRs I track regularly, only 6 of them ended the month in the positive territory. All other 76 stocks dropped, and they dropped like a rock: 30 stocks lost more than 20% and 10 more than 30%.

After rebounding sharply in April, major U.S. stock indices ended May mixed. The Dow lost 181.81 points, or 1.42%, the NASDAQ rose 109.86 points, or 4.55%, and the broader S&P 500 added 14.79 points, about 1.07%.

Chinese stocks listed on U.S. exchanges also had a mixed month. Among the 82 stocks that make up the Chinese ADRs, 32 issues declined for the month, while the other 50 advanced.  Biggest winners of May are alternative energy companies such as Solarfun Power (SOLF) which jumped nearly 70% and LDK Solar (LDK) which gained almost 63%. Other gainers include China Architectural Engineering (RCH) and Renesola (SOL). At the other end of the spectrum, XinHua Finance Media (XFML) led the decliners with a drop of 28.67%, followed by ChinaEdu (CEDU) -21.29% and China Mobile (CHL) -14.52%.

April has turned out to be a pretty good month for equity investors. After all three major indices dropped to 52-week low in early March, stocks rebounded last month after financial firms indicated that the worst part of the current crisis may be over. The Dow ended April with a gain of 4.54%, the S&P added 4.75%, and the NASDAQ climbed 5.87%.

Chinese stocks traded on U.S. exchanges also had a solid month in April, rising along with U.S. stocks. Chinese ADRs also got support from favorable policies adopted by Chinese security regulators aimed to stabilize the market after the Shanghai Composite Index (^SSEC) lost half of its value in less than half a year. For the month, SSEC jumped 6.35% and the Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index (^HSI) surged 12.72%. Among Chinese ADRs, VanceInfo Technologies (VIT) led the way with a gain of 142.60%, followed by Sohu.com (SOHU)’s 53.18%. Chinese search engine Baidu.com (BIDU) also recorded a 52.57% gain in share price. The month’s biggest loser was Agria (GRO), China’s agriculture products, such as seeds and feeding products, provider, which saw its share tumbled nearly 50%, despite record food price.