Spoke w/ French Creole English Jewish Hakka Chinese nephew in Shanghai who owns and operates a coffee whole sale business with a retail tag-along
He used to be a … gold trader for a German firm which got rolled into Enron … early retired by selling China ops clientele to a Texas firm that later ended up w/ Enron residual … and started his coffee biz - the way to get gold into China was to buy gold-rich copper concentrate
Report:
- Retail / Wholesale (Shanghai / another city) was off 60% in whole of February / early March from a year ago
- Retail run-rate in second two weeks of March is 80% of a year ago
- Wholesale orders is now full, awaiting delivery, at 80% of same-time last year
- Optimistic for the immediate, but cautious for the interim, and so closed / closing the Hangzhou shop
- Wholesale biz is to hotels, restaurants, and other coffee shops (he himself is focused on S American coffee as my niece married to some coffee family somewhere on that continent), and recovering very fast
- Concerned about the second wave as overseas returnees and foreigners eventually allowed back in
- Currently international travellers must be quarantined in specified 2-3 star hotels (good for the coffee business) and such facilities in Shanghai are 100% full.
- International flyers to Beijing are not allowed to land in Beijing, but must first be first quarantined in Tianjin, Shanghai and a bunch of other cities (Dalian, etc etc)
- 100s of thousands of China students still to return to China from other troubled lands, and government-to-government dialogues happening
- But, never mind, business is alive and recovering fast, even as wary and trimming for second wave should such materialise. City readying per perpetual endurance war. He is concerned about the possible perennial-isation
Priced-in? Not necessarily, especially not in NY.
He is buying physical gold even as he is certainly aware of the bid/ask issue. He is simply deploying. Wonderful. |
