Lai See

sale sign just the medicine to invigorate lacklustre stock price

It's ironic - and just a little sad - to see that Richard Li Tzar-kai's flagship, PCCW, managed its sharpest share rally in years only after news broke that the fallen wunderkind was getting ready to sell the company's major assets to Australia's Macquarie Bank.

It's been six long years since the shares collapsed along with the internet bubble, so Lai See supposes that most investors will have gotten over their grief by now. If not, then the sale of all of the company's telecommunications and media assets should be just what the doctor ordered in terms of closure.

Still, it's hard to imagine that after Rupert Murdoch's and Telstra's unhappy dealings with Mr Li, there are still Australians left for him to do business with.

As far as Lai See and a couple of his more cynical analyst pals are concerned, this latest news has a strange aroma. As much as anything it looks calculated to shake up Mr Li's curious arrangement with mainland partner China Netcom, which paid US$1 billion for a 20 per cent stake in PCCW only last year.

Fifteen months have passed but the PCCW-Netcom alliance has gone nowhere. The ballyhooed venture to expand into southern China has yet to materialise, and talk about a full-blown merger has died down, too, particularly since the departure of Edward Tian Suning, who was instrumental in persuading Netcom to invest in PCCW.