Meeting postponed
CHINA'S Guangzhou Shipyard will postpone its 1994 annual general meeting for a week because it failed to attract the numbers required by Chinese laws to convene the meeting.
The meeting will be held on May 29 instead of May 23 as originally planned. The original date was announced on April 6.
Under Chinese law for convening the AGM for companies listed overseas, two-thirds of voting shares of the company should attend.
Guangzhou Shipyard, in April's announcement, requested shareholders wanting to attend the meeting to send a written reply 20 days before the meeting.
However, up to last Wednesday, the company had received replies representing 210.9 million voting shares or 42.64 per cent of the total voting shares.
The Chinese shipbuilder reported last month attributable profit for shareholders was 183.08 million yuan (about HK$164.77 million) under Hong Kong accounting standards.
The figure included an exceptional foreign exchange net gain of 73.3 million yuan.
Its profit was up 65 per cent, from 111.22 million yuan in 1993, including an exceptional net gain of 5.7 million yuan from the interest income on subscriptions derived from its H-share issue.
If the exceptional items were stripped out of profits, Guangzhou Shipyard would have reported a meagre earnings growth of four per cent.
The treatment of its foreign exchange gain in the 1994 financial statement has been controversial because the item has been used to pump up profit.
The company's turnover soared 97 per cent to 1.53 billion yuan from 775.62 million yuan.
The company recommended a final dividend of 12 fen.
But dividend distribution was calculated on the lowest profit from the Hong Kong or the Chinese financial statements.
