Socrates said, "writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory," creating "the appearance of wisdom, not the reality."
I think Socrates was wrong. AI helped me design, code and run the experiment, and write up the results. I vouch for every word.
webbsite.renavon.com is my new platform to continue the public Hong Kong company intelligence and transparency mission after webb-site.com shuts down in late October 2025. The original site built an invaluable resource and inspired advocacy for Hong Kong's commercial ecosystem. My attempt seeks to preserve and expand on David Webb's work with enhanced features and ongoing updates. Feedback and support from the community are welcomed.
I collected Israeli election results from gov.il, but they were a mess, so I had to clean them up. I also eventually found official geodata for the Israeli municipal boundaries, and joined them with the election results. Finally, I created a Shiny app in R putting it all together, using the Leaflet R package to make the interactive map.
The only major downside is how long it takes to initialize...
One big mistake in the article: ExpressVPN is in no sense a "US company". It is officially headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, but its operations are run by Chengbao Limited in Hong Kong, which was incorporated in Hong Kong in 2008 https://crhk.guru/company/chengbao-limited-1251650
Author here. The scraping is correct :) But you found something that's common on the registry: companies with very similar names, or even identical names at different times, even if they're completely unrelated (which they might or might not be here). However, I think you might have found an interesting connection...
There are three companies in the situation you describe:
* Good old Premier Dragon (0650420), which decided between 2016-09-08 and 2016-10-20 to be called China Electronics Optics Valley Union Holding Company Limited 中電光谷聯合控股有限公司. (You can check the original record from my site https://dataguru.hk/hkcompany?crno=0650420 by clicking on the company number near the top of the page, which activates some Javascript to trick Hong Kong's Companies Registry to show you the record, hence why I can't post a direct link to it here or on dataguru.hk).
* A slightly older company, 0581220, changed to CHINA ELECTRONICS OPTICS VALLEY UNION COMPANY LIMITED 中電光谷聯合有限公司 on its 20th anniversary in 2016-12-13. Notice the slightly different name, actually.
* A Cayman Islands-registered company, China Electronics Optics Valley Union Holding Company Limited 中電光谷聯合控股有限公司, which only got that name on 2016-09-30, during 0650420's tenure with this name. This company is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under symbol 0798. Its major shareholdings are public, and also available on my website, in this case here: https://dataguru.hk/hkexdisclosures_corporation?corporation=....
One reason I think you've found an interesting connection and that these companies are related is that you can see from the last link is that a major shareholder of the listed company is AAA Finance and Investment Holdings Limited, a BVI company... but company 0581220, a Hong Kong company, was called AAA FINANCE & INVESTMENT LIMITED 三A銀信投資有限公司 before it switched to China Electronics etc.
Wow. Thank you. I will include this as an addendum to my blog post!
Which phenomenon? Being the author of an article? ;)
If you mean "why are names of companies being changed every couple of months?", I really have no idea, especially given that some of these companies seem to be linked, so it's not like different groups of people are doing it. Perhaps.
If you mean "why is the Hong Kong government making its Companies Registry less transparent over time?", there are some landmines involving China and tycoons that I'm not going to risk stepping on here, at least right now.
Unfortunately financial and officer/director data for Hong Kong private companies is hidden behind a paywall (see details here under the section Tear Down That Wall: https://webb-site.com/articles/identity2.asp), although at least it is available, as far as it goes, but even then, the Ultimate Beneficial Owner is not public. [This is the situation currently being litigated against Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who it is claimed still controlled a Hong Kong company Skycom (https://dataguru.hk/hkcompany?crno=0644842) behind the scenes].
As an R aficionado, I totally agree, but it's not available on Metabase yet, which is the front-end I want to offer non-technical clients to visualise data. I should put in a PR...