Study: Once You Get Past the Accounting Fraud, Chinese Reverse Merger Companies Are Great

A paper presented in August at the annual meeting of the American Accounting Association in Anaheim, Calif., found that “the current Sino-phobic reaction to Chinese reverse mergers may be overblown.” In an effort to assess the performance of these often maligned companies, the study concluded that “as an asset class, Chinese reverse-merger firms (CRMs) have performed as well as or better than comparable firms already listed in the same exchanges in the United States. CRMs also perform much better than U.S. RMs on multiple dimensions, even after many CRMs were delisted or demoted due to recent scandals. The emerging picture is that, despite a higher incidence of accounting problems, the CRMs are more mature and less speculative than their U.S. counterparts.” [AT]