Billionaire Warren Buffett turned Dalian Dayang Trands into China's best-performing clothing stock after saying he wears the company's suits and praising it as "wonderful".
Dayang, based in the northeastern city of Dalian, surged by the 10 per cent daily limit for a fourth day in Shanghai after Dayang posted a video on its website of Buffett congratulating the company and chairman Li Guilian on its 30th anniversary.
The stock closed at 14.67 yuan (Bt72), its highest since January 2008.
"I have to tell you that I now have nine suits all made in China. I threw away the rest of my suits," Bershire Hathway's chairman and CEo Buffett, 79, says in the video, adding that his business partner Charlie Munger and Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates also wear Dayang's outfits.
Dayang is up 261 per cent this year, the most of 25 appael comapnies traded in Shanghai and SHenzhen.
The company, with 2008 sales of 894.6 million yuan, and a market value of less than $350 million (Bt12 billion), does not have any "disclosable business relationship" with Buffett, it said.
"Buffett has a lot of influence on the stock market and so when Dalian Dayang shows him wearing their suits, that has an impact," said Kong Jun, a Shanghai-based analyst at China Jianyin Investment Securities.
Kong recommends investors buy Dalian Dayang's shares.
Buffett assistant Carries Kizer confirmed Buffett recorded the video at Li's request.
"It was something they asked him to do and he agreed," Kizer said in an e-mail.
Dayang's spokesman could not be reached for comment.
"It's been a long time since I got compliments on how I look but since I'm wearing Madam Li's suits, I get compliments all the time," he says.
Buffett, the world's second-richest lman with an estimated fortune of $37 billion according to Forbes magazine, jokes inthe video that "maybe Bill and I could start a clothing store-and sell the compaby's suits, adding that "some day we might even be rich, who knows?"
Gates is the world's richest man with wealth of $40 billion, according to Forbes.
Li founded Dayang in September 1979 with 85 employees, according to its website.
She now has around 6,800 workers and about 40 per cent of sales are derived from the US and Europe.
"Imagine starting 30 years ago with a sewing machine and now turning out maybe 5 milliuon suits or something like that a year," Buffett says in the video.
"It's a story that should inspire people in China and inspire people around the world."
The company has 20 stores in 11 cities in China, according to its website.
Ait is 250-square metre store in Beijing's Finance Street Shopping Centre, tailored suits range from 6,800 yuan at the cheapest to 21,000 yuan when made with Loro Piana cloth, said a saleswoman in the shop. Off-the-peg outfits cost about 8,000 yuan.
Visitors the shop, which features plush armchairs, can order an entire wardrobe from suits to shirts, belts, leather accessories, shoes, ties and cufflinks. Customers buying suits at the top end of the price range may be looked after by Ivano Cattarin, who left Giorgio Armani to become Dayang's chief designer, the sales-woman said, declining to give her name.
Chinese President Hu Jintao wore a Dayang suit when he met former US president George W Bush at the Asia-Pacific Economic Forum in 2007, according to a bound volume in the store's waiting area.
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