Each day on the dot of noon, a former naval artillery piece is fired from a platform at the eastern end of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong. Pulling the trigger is one of the 430,000 employees of Jardine Mathe-son, a British-run and family-owned conglomerate with interests in retail, property and carmaking. The ceremony harks back to Jardines' origins in the 1830s as an intrepid tea-and-opium trader, and is usually attended by a gaggle of tourists. It is an oddly public display by a firm that otherwise prefers to pass unnoticed. Over the past decade few Asian conglomerates have performed as consistently as Jardines. Propelled by a well-timed expansion into South-East Asia, the group's revenues have risen by about 18％ annually since 2005. As the chart shows, the performance of its main listed vehicle since Britain's handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has been strong even compared with that of two other successful "hongs" with roots in colonial times: Swire and Hutchison Whampoa. (The latter has just merged with Cheung Kong, another of Li Ka-shing's companies, to form CK Hutchison.) It is a sharp contrast to Jardines' sickly state at the turn of the millennium, when some of its investments in Britain had done poorly, and its future was unclear following the Hong Kong handover. The question is whether, now that Asian growth rates have fallen, it can find new ways to grow.
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