[smaili]

> Kemian Wood Industry, which used to boast of the quality of its composite floorboards, took radical steps to deal with the downturn. It switched its focus to online gaming and changed its name.

> A hotel group rebranded itself as a high-speed rail company, a fireworks maker as a peer-to-peer lender and a ceramics specialist as a clean-energy group.

I've heard of pivoting, but this goes way beyond that. Doing a complete 180 on what you're producing/selling and changing your name? That's both fascinating and scary at the same time. As a customer, how do you know whether the company you're buying from will still be around?

[88e282102ae2e5b]

I think it's worth entertaining the possibility that these companies are not actually producing anything after their "pivot" but are just bilking investors.

[pcrh]

It makes you wonder what the determinants of success are for a Chinese business. Would you trust cars made by Nike, if they suddenly started making them, or a airline run by the Hilton Group?

[ngd]

How about an airline run my a record label?

[pcrh]

Virgin is a bit of an exception. At the beginning it merely chartered aircraft run by others; it was a branding exercise rather than managing and running aircraft.

Conglomerates like GE do anything and everything, but the companies cited in the article appears to be relatively small, e.g.from making only floorboards to online gaming is quite a shift in operational requirements.

[ZeroGravitas]

Nokia used to make a big deal about their background in paper mills, rubber boots etc.

http://company.nokia.com/en/about-us/our-company/our-story

[jpatokal]

Nokia had a natural progression though. Rubber, rubber-coated cables and wires, analog telephone switches full of wiring, digital telephone switches full of software, mobile phones that talk to those switches! And this took about a hundred years.

[supercanuck]

or spaceships.

[timlovelee]

LG makes Shampoo

[vardump]

Samsung makes killer robots and tankers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGR-A1

https://www.shi.samsung.co.kr/eng/Pr/shipstory0201.aspx

[toomuchtodo]

Google makes robotic pack dogs for DARPA:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/14/5209622/google-has-bought...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YjvHYbZ9w

[meatysnapper]

Giant industrial conglomerates are a totally different case. We are talking about a normal, single-product/field company switching to something totally unrelated. That's totally insane.

[saryant]

Well, Hilton used to be owned by TWA and later United.

[lttlrck]

That's nothing like pivoting.

[saryant]

I was just pointing out a piece of historical trivia.

[xyzzy123]

Most of these seem to be more or less "backdoor listings". A company that wants to list (Zeus Interactive in this case) essentially "buys" a stock symbol by merging with a defunct or flagging company (Dalian Kemian). It's easier to list this way than doing an IPO.

So it's not really a "pivot" and I feel that the article is slightly misleading on this front.

E.g. for Kemian Wood see: https://zephyr.bvdinfo.com/version-2015528/FullEditorialNews...

This is quite common in Australia, I hadn't realised it was a thing in China until now.

In Australia there are fair number of zombie listings from mining / prospecting ventures that didn't pan out. Often they're wound back to basically being a P.O box. It is very, very common for tech companies to list by doing a reverse merger with a zombie.

See: http://www.afr.com/business/banking-and-finance/investment-b... for more details.

[jdhawk]

This probably has more to do with the extreme pain of licensing a new business in China.