Steven,
I just got off the phone with Amy. She said that the company is fine and nothing bad is going on with it. She said the company's management is conservative and not as fully aware of the cultural differences between Chinese investors' needs and wants and those of non-Chinese as it perhaps should be. Naturally, she was very diplomatic about how she tried to convey this idea. She said they have sent them news about all the bad press Chinese listed companies are getting over here. But, obviously, that hasn't seemed to make a lot of difference in how management using press releases to communicate with investors.
A couple side notes are worth mentioning. She did say they are looking to hire a different auditor but of course that won't happen until they've got the 2010 year-end reporting done. We didn't talk about it beyond that and I'm not putting much significance on it. But she brought it up as an indication that management is looking into making a meaningful change that specifically has non-Chinese investors in mind.
Also, I did ask her about skin care products and what the likelihood was of one of them coming out this year. Her first response was that she didn't think that would happen this year. Management has decided to focus on the cigs and given that they are still a small company with limited resources they feel they can't get too thinly spread out. Hence, the concentration on the cigs for now. As a kind of afterthought she then added that perhaps one of the skin care products would come out latter in the year. But it was clear from her initial response that she doesn't think that is particularly likely.
I also mentioned that I was hearing from various boards that people were sending Hawk emails inquiring about CKGT and not getting any response. She found this odd. I then told her I went to the website today and tried to sign up for PR releases to be sent directly to my email address. The computer generated message I instantly got back was something like: you haven't selected any company and we're sorry but you've been banned from this service. Amy said there must be something wrong. I said I would think so and maybe there's also something wrong with the contact section of their website as well wherein people think they are sending them an email but it doesn't go through. This seems quite doubtful to me, but I know virtually nothing about how the internet or web pages actually work. So perhaps there's a glitch in that too. Would seem incredibly lame on the one hand. But on the other, how would they know if they aren't receiving all their emails?
Anyway, I was glad to have talked to her, especially with you of all people starting to seriously think this company might be a scam. Not surprisingly, she said I shouldn't expect any news during the Chinese New Year. She seemed to imply that perhaps soon thereafter there might be something. But Hawk evidently has no authority to do press releases and apparently has little influence on management. So I'd never construe her passing comment on the matter as an indication we should expect to hear something in late February.
Steve
AI
