Here are attention-grabbing moves from companies boosting returns

Considering a slow-growth environment.

Barclays has noted that it has recently noticed two events that had caught its attention regarding companies boosting returns.

According to a research note from Barclays, these events are: just as the Tourism Board warned about the unsatisfactory 1 May hotel bookings, New World announced that it would dispose of some of its stakes in prime Hong Kong hotels to foreign investor ADIA.

Further, Wheelock has bought 2.6% of Wharf’s shares since June 2014 in addition to Sino Land’s recent share buybacks.

Barclays noted that it believes these events show how companies can boost returns in a slow-growth environment.

Here's more from Barclays:

New World sold hotel stakes to ADIA, receiving cash proceeds of HK$10bn New World announced on 30 April that it has entered into an agreement to sell some of its stakes in Grand Hyatt Hong Kong, Renaissance Harbour View and Hyatt Regency TST to Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA).

After the deal, the three hotels will be owned by a joint venture, which in turn is owned by New World Development, CTFE and ADIA in the ratio of 32%, 18% and 50%, respectively. According to the announcement, the deal would generate HK$10.082bn in cash proceeds (before expenses and subject to customary closing adjustments) and HK$15.5bn profit (before taxation and allocating to non-controlling interests) for New World. The three hotels are valued at HK$21.3bn at 1 March 2015 by Savills while the deal values the three hotels at HK$18.5bn.

The deal may be terminated if it is not completed on or before 31 October 2015. The company’s executive vice chairman, Adrian Cheng, said in a statement that the company was very pleased with this new joint venture and was looking forward to the beginning of what it hoped was a long-term relationship with opportunities to do more together with the new partner.

Tourism Board warns over unsatisfactory 1 May hotel bookings The chairman of Tourism Board said that the anti-parallel trading activities in Hong Kong had negatively affected the tourism industry in Hong Kong. He noted that the first two weeks of April had seen inbound tourist number dropping by a single digit percentage rate.

Although he said it would be difficult to gauge the first week of May situation at the current stage, the situation of hotel bookings, however, were not optimistic. Separately, the Travel Industry Council expects that incoming tours from China will drop 10% y/y for the first week of May.

He said that three-star hotels nowadays have 70% occupancy rates. Some guesthouse owners interviewed said that hotels had cut prices to attract more mass-end customers and some of them may need to be converted into strata-units or motels to continue their businesses.

Wheelock has bought 2.6% of Wharf’s shares since June 2014 Wheelock announced that it has bought a total of 78,415,000 Wharf shares from 16 June 2014 to 30 April 2015 at an aggregate consideration of HK$4,344mn in cash. This is equal to a price of HK$55.40/share of Wharf. As this acquisition is more than 5% and below 25% for the threshold for the purposes of Rule 14.07 of the Listing Rules, the acquisition constituted as a discloseable transaction.