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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, December 9, 2007

Associating with Beijing Olympics pays off for many

Associated Press

NEW YORK — Companies that have paid to associate with the 2008 Beijing Olympics are trouncing their competition in the stock market this year.

Shares of the games' partners, sponsors and "exclusive" suppliers have returned 34 percent through November, compared with a 10 percent return from blue chip U.S. stocks.

Dow Jones Indexes, the owner of the Dow Jones industrial average, created a custom 2008 Summer Games index of 33 companies from nine countries to measure the stock performance of Olympic sponsors and suppliers. Together, they have a market cap of $2.04 trillion.

The index, which isn't officially sanctioned by the Olympics, includes Germany's Adidas AG, South Korea's Samsung, Canada's Manulife Financial Corp., and China Mobile Ltd.

Besides putting money into each company's shares individually, it's not possible to invest in the Olympics index, at least for now. "If any interested person wanted to license that, by all means, we're not against it," a Dow Jones spokeswoman said.

High-profile sponsors, including General Motors Corp., have begun to bail out of costly advertising arrangements with the Olympics.