In 1980, the average person in China produced $195 worth of goods and services a year…
In 2025, that figure was $13,862.
That's roughly 70x growth in a single working lifetime… and you could make a case that it's the best growth story on earth.
Now look at what shareholders got.
Alibaba listed in New York in September 2014 at $68 a share… it was the largest IPO the world had ever seen.
Demand was so frantic the stock closed its first day at $93.89…
On Friday it closed at $99.64.
Twelve years with a mere 6% gain for anyone who bought on day one.
Over the same stretch, the S&P 500 more than tripled.
JD.com, sold to Wall Street as China's Amazon, listed at $19 in 2014. It started this month at around $26.
Then there's Didi, China's version of Uber. On June 30, 2021, it raised $4.4 billion from American investors at $14 a share.
But just two days later, Beijing's cyber regulator opened an investigation with the app being pulled from Chinese app stores. Within a year it had quit the New York Stock Exchange.
Why does this keep happening?
Because in China, the government is a partner in every business, and it holds a veto you'll never see in the annual report.
In November 2020, Alibaba's sister company Ant Group was days away from what would have been the biggest IPO in history. Regulators had just hauled Jack Ma in after he publicly criticized them… and the IPO was suspended. Five months later, Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion and Jack Ma learned who really owns a Chinese company.
It isn't the founder, and it certainly isn't the shareholders…
And last week, China's CSI 300 (roughly their equivalent of the S&P 500) officially entered a bear market, meaning it's fallen 20% from its peak…
So I see the "buying opportunity" headlines already arriving.
But I've watched this same movie play out for a decade…
The stocks get cheap… and then they get cheaper.
The economy keeps growing, but the CCP decides who gets paid.
70x growth for the country but just 6% for the shareholders. Meaning that the best growth story on earth has been a lousy investment, and I see no sign of that changing.
Oliver