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Pristine20 said:
NJ5 said:
Pristine20 said:
NJ5 said:
Pristine20 said:

I just found out that PetroChina is more valuable than ExxonMobil even though it made less profit. What gives?

 

The latest company profits don't matter that much. For example, many banks have lost a lot of money recently, but that doesn't mean they don't have assets anymore.

What can happen is that when a company makes small profits or loses money for a long enough time, investors can decide that it means the assets are not worth as much anymore. As a consequence, there will be a sell-off and the stock price (and market cap) will go down.

 

 

 Yeah but isn't that what explains HSBC's $2 trillion asset  worth vs its $180 billion market value?

No, look at HSBC's stock price in the last year (market cap is just stock price times number of stocks):

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=HBC#chart1:symbol=hbc;range=1y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

Their liabilities may have increased, but not that much. It's normal for the market cap to be quite below the assets value.

 

Thats strange. So HSBC is basically devalued and currently can be sold for much cheaper than it's worth?

 

Read my post above to answer your question.

 

Reason Petrochina is worth more than Exxon is two fold :

- Chinese market has experimented tremendous stock growth this last years and as a result some companies are now overvalued

- Exxon is a company having very little growth these days ( main impact on Exxon profit is price of oil) whereas PetroChina still has huge growth potential. ( the more cars in china, the more gaz to refine and sell..)

Most of the time you will find out that company with huge growth potential have a higher market cap that company with stable/low growth but higher revenue.. Mainly because a huge factor in the price of a company's stock is the P/E ratio and especially the future P/E ( Price/Earnings).

 

 



PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !

PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !