Clarifying CEO pay makes things murkier

lesDunes Resort Club and TPC Myrtle Beach, along with other assets. “It’s a big change for the golf business,” says Dou, president of Founders Group International, the company he and Dan Liu, chairman of Yiqian Funding, created to manage the courses. “Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we bought too many courses. But I think the market is at the bottom and will come back.” Yiqian Funding, the biggest course owner on the Strand, is diverging from the well-worn path of Chinese investors who’ve driven up property prices in big cities from Sydney to Vancouver. Liu and Dou are gambling on a smaller market and a novel strategy. As younger Americans shun a sport that Jack Nicklaus called too slow, too hard, and too expensive, Yiqian Funding plans to lure players and investors from China. Even as the Strand’s Myrtle Beach, once a haven for bingeing college students, upgrades its image with fancy resorts, the prospect of thousands of Chinese flocking here seems farfetched. The region’s 320,000 resi- Atlantic Ocean dents include fewer than 1,000 Chinese Americans. It takes at least 15 hours, plus one stop, to fly to Myrtle Beach from Shanghai. “It’s very difficult to get here,” says Mike Buccerone, president of East Coast Golf Management, which operates six courses on the Strand. “You have to fly over a lot of places —California and Las Vegas— where the Chinese like to go.” One factor that may encourage Chinese golfers to make the trip: As part of a campaign against corruption and extravagance, China’s government has closed unauthorized golf courses and punished officials who used public funds to pay for their rounds. Liu, 38, a college dropout, software programmer, and serial entrepreneur, brushes off the naysayers. “Never say never,” he says. In six years he turned Yiqian Funding, based in Nanjing, into a company with more than 6,000 employees that arranges $1.2 billion in home and business loans annually. Dou says Liu plans to add as many as 1,000 branch offices in China to sell golf vacations and real estate in Myrtle Beach. He’s also planning to develop an oceanfront hotel and is building a home at his World Tour Golf Club. He and his family are

Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Pawleys Plantation Golf & Country Club

In Command of The Grand Strand

Yiqian Funding bought 22 courses in a bid to attract Chinese golfers to the East Coast

Purchased course

10 miles moving to Myrtle Beach in August.

The Chinese investors didn’t intend to own golf courses. Dou, a New Yorker who came to the U.S. from China 25 years ago for graduate school, searched coast to coast for real estate deals before he and Liu settled on the Strand. Its mild winters, coastal grandeur, and abundance of land to expand appealed to them.

During a 20-year construction boom that started in 1986, the number of courses along the Strand doubled, driven by demand for condos that line the fairways. At the peak in 2000, golfers played about 4.2 million rounds a year on the Strand.

The number has been stuck at 3.4 million since 2012, and golf course values have plunged. When

Liu and Dou discovered they could buy a golf course for a few million dollars, about the same price as an apartment in Shanghai, they were sold. “Price was most important, and location,” says Liu, whose company made its purchases from September to April. “It’s beautiful.”

Liu and Dou are making improvements to several courses and have started construction on about 80 homes. They purchased about 2,000 lots for houses and condos and sold 20 units to Chinese for $200,000 to

$300,000 in June. “Maybe the golf business isn’t so good, but you can make money from the real estate,” Dou says. Jane Zheng, a broker at Keller Williams Realty who’s helped Chinese investors buy retail property and housing in Myrtle Beach, agrees. Home prices began to rise in 2013, but they haven’t kept pace with Florida and Nevada, leaving room for growth. “Myrtle Beach has a lot to offer, but the Chinese don’t know about this place,” says Zheng, a former pharmaceutical research scientist from New Jersey. “Dan’s group will do a good job to let Chinese know and appreciate it. They know how to sell in China.” —Vince Bielski The bottom line Yiqian paid $105 million for 22 golf courses in South Carolina, hoping to lure Chinese players and condo buyers.

Compensation Complicating the Calculation of CEO Pay

The SEC wants to add new metrics to illuminate an elusive figure “Shareholders are not going to “It’s very difficult to understand this type of analysis”

get here. You have

to fly over a lot of How much did Jeff Immelt earn places—California last year? In General Electric’s and Las Vegas— annual proxy statement, the figure is where the Chinese $9.6 million, which seems modest by like to go” today’s standards for the chief executive officer of America’s eighth-largest company. On the same page, you’ll find a much higher tally: $37.2 million. That’s his “total pay,” a figure that the Securities and Exchange Commission has required companies to report since COURTESY PAWLEYS PLANTATION 2006. It includes long-term compensation such as stock options and pensions and is presented as an effort to clarify a murky number. “Shareholders need intelligible disclosure that can be understood by a lay reader without the benefit of specialized expertise or the need