Repurchase Of Share Capital Of Sino-us Listed Companies A Comparative Study

Share repurchase is widely used in American capital market as one of the most important way of capital management. Listed companies buy their own shares to reduce the issued stocks and the capital stocks. After the share repurchases of these companies, its structure of capital stocks can be adjusted, and EPS can be strengthened. Share repurchases appeared firstly to dodge the government controls on the cash dividend. In 1973, the America government started to exert restrictive controls on cash dividend, which made many companies to find other ways to distribute the profits. Along with the coming of the bull market in the 1980s, share repurchases began to develop rapidly in America.In the recent years, some companies in China began to repurchase their shares in the capital market. As the stocks in China can be divided into negotiable stocks and non-negotiable stocks, share repurchases in China should be essentially different with that in the USA.There are 6 chapters in this thesis:The first chapter is a general introduction of share repurchases, which includes the definition and the classification of share repurchases.The second chapter is the summary of literatures on share repurchases in both America and China.The third chapter describes the current situation and the characters of share repurchases in America, including the development and current situations, the legal foundation, the way to repurchase shares, the motives and the capital sources of share repurchases. Through the statistical table about the amount of share repurchases in NYSE, Amex and NASDAQ from 1971 to 2004, we can find the amount of repurchased shares takes 7.1% of the aggregate market value, and the trend of the share repurchases amount is positively related with the Doe Jones Industrial Average Price Index.The fourth chapter describes the current situation and the characters of share repurchases in China, including the development and current situations, the legal foundation, the way to repurchase shares, the motives and the capital sources of share repurchases. The thesis lists the repurchases happened in China from 1992 to 2007 to describe the development and the current situations.The fifth chapter compares the legal foundation, the way to repurchase shares, the motives, the capital sources of share repurchases and the repurchasing price in America and those in China. Through the comparisons, we can gent some conclusions to find the unique characters of share repurchases in China.The last chapter describes the problems of share repurchases in China and tries to find some appropriate ways to solve these problems and to facilitate the development of share repurchases in China.