Shanghai unit poses as software company to raise market value in stock exchange

A company in China found a way to combine the P2P lending craze with Shanghai's enthusiasm for tech stocks to boost their market value by 10% a day. Gabriel Wildau at the Financial Times has the story of Shanghai Duolun Industry, which jumped 10% on Monday (the maximum daily limit allowed on the Shanghai exchange) after it announced that it had changed its name to P2P Financial Information Service Co and purchased the URL. The thing is, Duolun is not a peer-to-peer lending company and it reportedly has no plans to become one. It admitted as much in a filing.

The website doesn't have any information on P2P lending ei ther. It doesn't have anything at all except a few stock photos of attractive people and a reminder in several languages that “This domain is worth $100 million.“

That's all it takes. It sounds like a story straight out of the dot-com days of the late 1990s, when every company with a website felt like the hot new tech startup and every investor thought they had found a golden ticket.

Judging by the money pouring into the Chinese stock market this year, this won't be the only story you hear.

In fact, the FT notes in a separate article that almost 100 Chinese-listed companies last year changed their official names, and often instituted radical shifts in strategy, as they seek to jump on the tech bandwagon.