New York, New York – November 18, 2010 – Andrew Barron Worden, Chairman and CEO of Barron Partners, LP was a featured panelist at the 2010 Maxim Growth Conference held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City. The topic was “Is it High Risk to Invest in China?” Dr. Echo Yinghui He,a Senior Equity Analyst at Maxim, moderated the session, which drew about 200 people.

Dr. He noted that manufacturing is the most common sector associated with Chinese companies and asked Mr. Worden is Barron had identified any other promising sectors. Mr. Worden pointed to cleantech as an area of tremendous potential. Mr. Worden explained the reason for his cleantech enthusiasm. “We look for companies where the government is aligned with the business interests [of the company]. The Chinese government doesn’t like pollution because people are unhappy about it … also the county doesn’t have a huge amount of oil reserves. So the government has made a strong push toward clean energy. We think there will be three or four trillion U.S. [dollars] spent in the next two decades in China on cleantech with nuclear being biggest and wind being second.”

Dr. He also asked Mr. Worden about mitigating risk when investing in Chinese companies. “Our most important tool at Barron is having a talented local, Chinese-speaking team on the ground conducting due diligence and helping to navigate the cultural differences between Chinese and U.S. companies, which might not be so apparent.”

Reflecting upon those differences, Mr. Worden drew a laugh from the crowd, “You’ll go to visit a company in China and there will be a room full of people in suits, but the guy in the corner wearing the t-shirt is the one who is the boss.”

Mr. Worden cited other tools such as “six degrees checks” and questioning local competitors about a company to determine the quality of their reputation in the industry. “If you call around to their competitors you can get a good idea of the company’s revenues and margins.”

Regarding the relative safety of investing in the U.S. versus Chinese stocks, Worden used a colorful example. “Let’s pretend there are two countries, county Green and country Purple. In country Green you can buy ten stocks in companies where you are quite certain the numbers are real. These companies however have really high overhead structures, thin profit margins, and little growth. In country Green there is almost no economic growth at all. Also these Green country companies have no competitive edge in the world market. In country Purple there are also ten stocks. Here perhaps in two or three of these companies the numbers might be a bit suspect. However, in country Purple the companies have very low costs, very strong profit margins, high growth and a strong international edge. Also, country Purple is growing really fast. Now, let’s ask ourselves, would we rather invest in country Green or Country Purple? And our goal is to invest only in the ones in country Purple where the numbers are solid.”

Participant questions ranged from legal and regulatory to methodologies for analyzing companies. The other panelists included Dr. Yale I. Jen, Senior Equity Analyst – Maxim Group, Bob Ai, Principal – Merlin Nexus, and Caryn Schechtman, Partner – DLA Piper LLP (US).