The historic model produced by Fiat has nothing to do with it, nor the Bear and the Bull, usually protagonists of the financial markets: this time panda should be written with a small "p" and refers to the bamboo-loving mammal that lives in the forests of the Asia. The animal, which in the past was at risk of extinction (it is also a symbol of the WWF) and which is also related to the bear, was the unexpected protagonist of the session on Monday 12 June at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The reason? The birth of a giant panda cub in the Ueno zoo in the Japanese capital: a very rare event in captivity, which had not occurred for five years and which sent the shares of two Nikkei-listed restaurant chains, Totenko and Seiyoken, soaring.
At 12.38 local time, Japanese TV NHK interrupted its programs to announce the news: immediately the stock of Totenko, a restaurant specializing in Chinese cuisine, gained 38%, then closing with +6,67%. More or less the same reaction for Seiyoken, a chain that instead serves French cuisine and which saw its shares rise by 11% at the time and by 6,48% at the close of the Stock Exchange. What does two restaurants, which one hopes don't offer panda meat on their menus, have to do with the birth of a puppy? Simple: both chains have a restaurant a few meters from the zoo and investors have bet on the possibility that they will be taken by storm, considering that in Japan such an event usually attracts the curiosity of millions of citizens and tourists.
Even according to the estimates of the financial magazine Nikkei, a baby panda with its birth alone can generate an economic impact of 242 million dollars. And this would explain why the two titles had a surge as early as February (in particular Totenko which has gained 47% since the beginning of the year), when the zoo announced that ShinShin, the mother of the cub (her name means "truth" in Japanese), she had become pregnant with her partner Riri (which means "power"). The two pandas arrived in Ueno, a zoo founded way back in 1882, a few days before the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The disastrous circumstance did not discourage them: the two had already given birth to a cub in 2012, which however died after few days of life. ShinShin and Riri are two of the 420 giant pandas living in captivity in the world while their presence in nature is estimated at almost 2.000 units. This time it seems that the family project has gone through, and the markets are also celebrating.
