As recently revealed on this blog, Carson Yeung has recently tied up a “co-operation project” deal with the Chinese city of Dafeng. At that time, there wasn’t much information available about the project in itself, and I was left wondering what was going to happen. However, I’ve been able to source two more news stories – one via official Chinese news agency Xinhua, and one via Carson’s own HK newspaper Sing Pao Daily News. I should credit Jeff Au, who’s posting of the Xinhua picture on Facebook led me to that story in particular.

The Xinhua news story is brief, but translation with a web tool points to a value of the deal as HK$500million, which is about £40million. As to where we’re going to get £40million to invest in this deal I have no idea – but I would assume it’s going to be another stock market manoeuvre. Interestingly, nothing has been announced to the HKSE about this deal as of yet.

The Sing Pao story went into a lot more detail; unfortunately their website is incredibly slow to load and the only way I was able to access it is via the google cache. As you can see, there is a bit more meat to this story – which as Carson owns the newspaper you’d probably expect.

From the Sing Pao article, it says that BIH intend to first of all develop a sports related tourism facility in the area. It says that the people representing Dafeng had chosen Carson and BIH because they feel that Carson has the knowledge and the confidence to be able to push through the deal; indeed, it’s all about branding as they feel that the “Birmingham” brand (along with the club) will have enough prestige in China to make it an attractive prospect for people to visit. They say that the project will take three to five years to complete in all. The people from Dafeng also point to the fact that Dafeng has a very good harbour, capable of docking massive ships, along with a big international airport close by, and that these factors along with the relative open space that they have will make the area a sound economic investment.

I feel I have to sound a note of caution still; whilst there is undoubtedly more meat to the bones than the vague story I linked to last week, there still doesn’t seem to be that much more than a concept at the table at the moment. From having a look around the net I get the impression that they’re looking to Carson to build some sort of “sports-themed” resort; I have to be honest and say that a Birmingham “sports-themed” resort in China seems a bit weird, and I can’t see why people would go for it. However, if Carson was to pull something off like this it would undoubtedly give us another revenue stream, and give the parent company a better chance of being profitable.

I’m a little concerned that nothing has been properly announced to the HKSE; that says to me that this deal isn’t much more than a couple of bods saying that they might do something – I suspect it will need an announcement to the stock exchange to clarify the nuts and bolts of the deal, who is going to pay for it and where the money is going to come from. Until that time I’m going to reserve judgement as to what I think about it, but I will continue to keep an eye on things and see what develops.

Tags: BIH, Carson Yeung, China, HK