Yanzijiang Shipbuilding (SGX: BS6) shares, or YZJ Shipbuilding as they’re commonly known, are down 3% in Singapore today. There’s no specific corporate news to drive this share price change. Also nothing particular about shipbuilding, the Chinese economy, the global maritime one. In the absence of specific news we have, of course, to simply assign the change in value to that ebb and flow of traffic across the market. The volume of trading is up, yes, in fact YZJ appears to be the most traded (by value) share on the Singapore exchange today so far. But there’s still no specific news we can see driving this. 

The background to the business: “ Yangzijiang Shipbuilding (Holdings) Ltd., an investment holding company, engages in the shipbuilding activities in the People’s Republic of China, Canada, Japan, Bulgaria, and other Asian and European countries. It operates through Shipbuilding, Shipping, and Others segments. The company offers products, such as large and medium-sized container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers, and liquid carriers such as chemicals, LNG, LEG, LPG, and other clean energy ships.”

It’s a big enough business, with substantial turnover. But there’s a certain information vacuum about the operating performance – this is because most of that information will be in the Chinese language and inside Mainland China. A problem we’ve talked about before. We out here, in English, don’t get that same detailed information flow we do on so many other stocks and shares. It’s thus difficult to track, let alone predict, share price movements. 

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YZJ Shipbuilding share price from Google Finance

We’ve also talked before about the variability of Yangzijiang Shipbuilding: “YZJ Shipbuilding (SGX: BS6) shares are up 5.5% at our pixel time in Singapore today. There is no specific announcement concerning this, no new piece of news. So the general assumption in the market is that this is simply a reverse of the losses of the past few days. The volume of trading is substantial, by share volume the leading trade on the Singapore market, by value of shares traded, the third. This is indeed a large amount for this stock, with most of the trade happening at the opening of the market and shortly thereafter. It is possible – as it always is – that something else is going on here. But as we say the general market assumption is simply that investors sentiment has turned slightly and the shares are making up that ground lost last week.”

Today’s events are rather a reversal of those back in June. And the June price movement never was explained by some late arriving piece of news out of China or anything. They were – as here – just substantial volume, the balance of which drove the YZJ share price one way or the other. 

Given the information vacuum it’s not really possible to say much more. Except, of course, to repeat our usual comment on Mainland China shares. As we don’t know, because we don’t get the information flow, it’s difficult to trade such equities.