What the Shanghai stock exchange giveth, Wall Street taketh away.
Hours after PetroChina shares almost tripled in value on their first day of trading in Shanghai, they slumped 11 percent in New York after a big investment bank said the stock was overvalued.
China’s biggest oil and gas company — the publicly listed unit of state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. — became the world’s first company with a $1 trillion market capitalization after its shares debuted Monday in its homeland.
The 4 billion new shares surged to 43.96 yuan ($5.90), nearly triple the IPO price of 16.70 yuan ($2.24). The initial public offering raised 66.8 billion yuan ($8.94 billion) — a record for a mainland exchange.
The Shanghai shares are meant for domestic investors and are generally off-limits to would-be foreign buyers. Chinese investors likewise have limited access to overseas-traded shares, crimping the leeway for arbitrage between the markets.
The buying frenzy in China, though, didn’t translate to Wall Street.
PetroChina’s U.S. shares were off sharply Monday, falling $28.56, or 11.2 percent, to $226.50 in afternoon trading.
In a research note, Bear Stearns downgraded the shares to underperform, noting they were trading at a 51 percent premium to the investment bank’s new year-end 2008 fair value and target price.
“PetroChina shares have risen 45.6 percent over the past month alone,” Bear Stearns said. “Time to take profit.”
Adding the value of PetroChina shares traded in Shanghai, Hong Kong and New York, and the 157.9 billion shares held by CNPC, the company’s total market capitalization rose to just over $1 trillion, far surpassing No. 2 Exxon Mobil Corp.’s $488 billion.
However, Bear Stearns noted, based on Wall Street consensus forecasts, PetroChina was trading at a 72 percent premium to Exxon Mobil based on a 2008 price-to-earnings valuation. “From an operational perspective, we see little reason for this disparity,” the investment bank said.
Indeed, when measured by earnings, Exxon remains a much larger company. Its $9.41 billion in third-quarter net profit, while down 10 percent from a year earlier, nearly matched PetroChina’s net profit of 81.8 billion yuan ($10.8 billion) for the entire first half of the year.
Exxon’s oil and gas reserves — a gauge of future profit potential — stood at 22.7 billion barrels by the end of 2006, compared with PetroChina’s 20.5 billion barrels.
The Chinese company has seen revenue soar amid surging oil prices but has struggled to boost production from its aging domestic oil fields. Like rival Sinopec, it’s been squeezed by a widening gap between soaring world crude oil prices and state-controlled prices for oil products in the domestic market.
But PetroChina’s strong showing was expected all the same. Chinese investors have shown a huge appetite for elite government giants that are seen as proxies for the country’s economic boom.
