Posted Dec 21st 2007 4:54PM by Steven Halpern
For 25 years, Steven Halpern, editor of TheStockAdvisors.com, has surveyed the leading financial newsletter advisors asking for their favorite stocks for the coming year. This article is one of 100+ ideas in the Best Stocks for 2008 report.
"My favorite conservative idea for 2008 is China Mobile (NYSE: CHL)," says Tony Sagami, editor of The Asia Stock Alert.
Because of instant delivery and low cost, text messaging has rapidly become a wildly popular means of communication among young people.
"Text messaging over SMS (Short Messaging System) wireless systems is very popular in America. But one country sends more text messages than anybody else in the world: China.
"One out of every two SMS text messages sent in the world are sent in China. Typically, the cost of a text message in China costs about 10 fen (or 1 cent), so we're talking about a mountain of money. Indeed, in China mobile phone users are expected to send over 1 trillion text messages by the end of this decade.
"For investors, that gargantuan growth spells opportunity. And in China, the company poised to serve and profit from this trend is China Mobile, the largest wireless phone company in the world with 356 million subscribers and a dominant share of the rapidly growing Chinese wireless market.
"The number of mobile phone users in China has swelled to over 460 million in 2006. Currently, there are 93 million more mobile phone users in China than fixed-line phone users. To put those numbers into perspective, that is more users than all the US wireless providers combined ... 233 million mobile phone users.
"But wait! According to the Chinese Ministry of Information, an additional 3 to 4 million new mobile phone users are created each month.
"China Mobile is simply one of the most profitable ways to participate in the Chinese growth miracle and is a stock that I believe could triple in value by the end of this decade due to the new innovations — like text messaging — and the growing thumb culture population."