怡和洋行

choi

Jardine Matheson | Return to China; A grand old trading house seeks a new propellant. Economist, July 4, 2015
http://www.economist.com/news/bu ... ellant-return-china

Note:
(a) "EACH day on the dot of noon, a former naval artillery piece is fired from a platform at the eastern end of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong. Pulling the trigger is one of the 430,000 employees of Jardine Matheson [怡和洋行 (前名渣甸洋行)], a British-run and family-owned conglomerate"
(i) dot
http://www.oxforddictionaries.co ... merican_english/dot
("on the dot]:] informal Exactly on time <he arrived on the dot at nine o’clock>")
(ii) Wikipedia on Causeway Bay: "Before urban development and massive land reclamation, Causeway Bay 銅鑼灣 was a heavily silted bay. Its former shape can be found on maps by tracing Tung Lo Wan Road 銅鑼灣道, which goes along the former bay."

(b) “Jardines owns Mandarin Oriental 文華東方酒店 * * * It said last month that it would open the first Pizza Huts in Myanmar, bringing a slice of modern civilisation, such as it is, to the long-isolated Burmese. But most of its profits come from only three of its firms. Hongkong Land’s [香港置地’s]  property portfolio includes many valuable sites in the territory’s central business district. [ii] Dairy Farm, a retailer [supermarkets, convenience stores, etc] * * * [iii] Jardines’ crown jewel is Astra, an Indonesian vehicle-maker and palm-oil producer, in which it began building a stake in 2000 and which it now controls. Astra accounts for roughly half of the group’s revenues, and its stellar growth helped underlying profits at the group’s two main listed vehicles—Jardine Matheson Holdings and Jardine Strategic [Holding] 怡和策略控股 —roughly to triple in the five years to 2010.”
(i) Jardine Matheson is somehow shortened to “Jardines.” See the URL:
http://www.jardines.com/
(ii)  Rather than subsumed under one or the other, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and HongKong Land are among Jardine Matheson's subsidiaries.
(iii) such as it is: "used to suggest that something you have referred to is of low quality or not enough ['儘管不好, 雖說不多']"
dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/british/such-as-it-is
(iv) 牛奶國際，全名牛奶國際控股有限公司  Dairy Farm International Holdings
(A) company website: incorporated in Hong Kong in 1886 by Scottish surgeon Sir Patrick Manson and five prominent Hong Kong businessmen [by importing 80 cows from UK.]  "The Company's founding objectives were: to improve the health of Hong Kong people by supplying clean and uncontaminated cows' milk at an affordable price and to realise a profit for its shareholders."
(B) acquired by HongKong Land in 1972
(v) Astra International (headquarters Jakarta; founded in 1857 by Chinese Indonesian brothers Tjia Kian Tie 謝建智 and William Soeryadjaya [the latter's birth name: Tjia Kian Liong 謝建隆]; acquired in 2000 for 50.1% by Jardines)

(c) “It seemed a gamble at the time, but in retrospect buying into Astra was a far-sighted bet on Indonesia—a sprawling country of 250m people that continues to fox many multinationals * * * Analysts say Jardines seems a more disciplined investor than others: it tends to buy small chunks of companies in a fairly narrow range of industries, before expanding its ownership of the spriteliest ones. By contrast with their peers at Swire, executives at Jardines prefer not to get involved with the day-to-day running of their subsidiaries, concentrating instead on broad strategy.”
(ii) fox (vt): “BAFFLE”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fox
(ii) spritely (adj): "variant of SPRIGHTLY"American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language. 5th ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co
www.thefreedictionary.com/spritely

(d) “Recent acquisitions may help Jardines to return to growth. In April it spent $615m acquiring a 25% stake in Siam City Cement, a Thai firm, perhaps hoping that Thailand’s military government will get going on some big, long-promised public-works projects. But lately its biggest bets have been in mainland China. At the start of 2014 the group took a 20% stake in Zhongsheng 中升集团, a Chinese car dealer, for $731m. Last summer Dairy Farm paid $925m for a one-fifth stake in Yonghui 永辉超市, a chain of supermarkets.”

get
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/get
(phrase "get going:  to make a start")

(e) “Bulking up in China pleases analysts who worry that Jardines has become overexposed to Indonesia. The risks are not just to do with the weakness of the Indonesian economy or the prickly nationalism of its government; campaigners worried about the environmental impact of Astra’s palm-oil plantations in Indonesia have lately taken to demonstrating outside Jardines’ Mandarin Oriental hotels around the world. Last month Astra promised to stop clearing forest to make way for plantations.”

take
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/take
(phrase "take to: to apply or devote oneself to (as a practice, habit, or occupation) <take to begging>")

(f) “In the mid-1990s, amid fears of what might follow after the handover of Hong Kong, Jardines switched its Asian stockmarket listings from there to Singapore. * * * Well-read Chinese will be aware that Jardines’ 19th-century founders lobbied hard for Britain to wage the first Opium War against China, over its attempt to curb imports of the drug by Jardines and other traders. But any lingering animosity—from that, or from the war of words that preceded the firm’s move to Singapore—does not appear to have held up Jardines’ recent big deals on the Chinese mainland. And the group has proved deft at navigating economic nationalism in Indonesia, where Astra is considered a local success story.”
(i) Founded in 1832 in Canton by two Scots and moved to Hong Kong with the cession of the latter under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking (remaining there ever since), Jardine Matheson’s headquarters has always been in Hong Kong--that is where its CEO currently works.
(ii) Introduction. Jardine Matheson, undated
http://www.jardines.com/the-group/introduction.html
(“Jardine Matheson Holdings Limited is incorporated in Bermuda and has a standard listing on the London Stock Exchange as its primary listing, with secondary listings in Bermuda and Singapore”)

* The noun headquarters can take singular or plural form of the verb.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/headquarters
("noun plural but singular or plural in construction head")