Stocks

People bought the stock because the pen company was about to be delisted

ddddd · views 6 ·
Last month, retail investors in Korea started buying shares in a ballpoint pen maker and a fish-cake company. Not because either business had improved. Because they did not want them to disappear. In July the Korea Exchange raised its continued-listing bar. A KOSPI-listed company whose market cap falls below 30 billion won now enters the delisting process. One month in, 192 listed companies were below the line. Two of them were Monami and Hansung Enterprise. Monami is Korea's best-known pen brand. Hansung is the seafood processor behind Crami, the crab stick sold in every Korean supermarket, and word went around social media that it had sponsored concerts for Korean War veterans for 25 years running. Buy orders arrived with the argument that a company like this should not be allowed to vanish. Not just the shares. People bought the products too, until online orders sold out and shipping backed up. One thing shows through here. Most grounds for delisting are beyond a shareholder's reach. A disclaimed audit opinion or negative equity does not dissolve because strangers cheer for you. Market-cap failure is the exception. If you buy, it goes up. It was the one channel where sentiment converted directly into regulatory effect. Then it came back. Monami has fallen more than 60% from its mid-July high, and its operating loss for the first half widened rather than narrowed. Hansung tripled and then slid back near where it stood in June. Clearing the line for a day does not release you. A company has to stay above it for more than two months straight, and public feeling did not last that long. The US has continued-listing thresholds of its own. When a company drifts under one, what do retail investors there actually do about it?
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