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James Dimon got a $30 stock for $10. It took 11 years to close the gap.

When Stephen Bearce bought 100 Bear Stearns shares at about $30 each on Friday, March 14, 2008, he was betting the investment bank would be taken over and he would turn a quick profit. He was only half right.

JPMorgan JPM 0.28% Chase & Co. struck a deal to buy Bear Stearns that weekend for a small fraction of the price Mr. Bearce paid. It took until this month for him to break even.

Eleven years after scooping up Bear Stearns, JPMorgan’s stock value has tripled, hitting an all-time high. It is up about 40% this year, beating the KBW Nasdaq Bank Index. The nation’s biggest bank is now worth about $430 billion, more than one-third larger than its closest competitor, Bank of America Corp. BAC 0.14%

The gains mean JPMorgan Chief Executive James Dimon’s stake crossed $1 billion for the first time—not counting options and other restricted shares—and his purchases since the crisis have earned about $150 million.

Mr. Bearce’s gains are far more modest. “It only took 4209 days but I am finally even!!!” the Virginia financial adviser wrote in an email.

While Mr. Bearce represents a narrow slice of investors who bought Bear Stearns shares just before the JPMorgan deal, there is a classic Wall Street lesson in his lengthy round trip: Money is made slowly and lost quickly.

JPMorgan shares plodded along for the better part of a decade but have doubled since 2016 as profits soared and postcrisis regulations loosened. Bank of America and Citigroup Inc. shares remain below their records, as does the KBW index. Just this month, the financial sector of the S&P 500 surpassed the record it set in 2006. Every other S&P sector had reached that milestone by the middle of 2016.

“The largest banks are in the midst of some of the greatest structural change in their history,” said Mike Mayo, a bank analyst at Wells Fargo & Co. “Some banks are hitting all-time highs, but if you were involved in the troubled banks, it’s been a slog.”

When the deal closed in May 2008, Bear Stearns investors got a little more than one-fifth of a JPMorgan share—worth around $9.35—per Bear share. (The original offer of $2 a share was later bumped.) This month, for the first time, 0.21753 of a share of JPMorgan was worth $30, Bear Stearns’s closing price the Friday before the deal was announced.

Mr. Bearce, 50 years old, has a few extra dollars now. He considered selling for tax purposes but decided to keep the position as a memento.

“I tried to catch a falling knife,” he said. “I’m going to keep reminding myself how dangerous knives are. Let this be a lesson.”

The pain was worse for many others. Bear Stearns shares lost two-thirds of their value in the month before the deal was struck. Longtime CEO James Cayne sold his entire stake before the deal closed when the shares were trading at around $10.

What JPMorgan got from Bear Stearns is a complicated calculation. Most Bear Stearns employees didn’t stay, and JPMorgan has paid billions of dollars in mortgage-related settlements tied to Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual Inc., its other crisis-era deal. Mr. Dimon has said he wouldn’t do the deal again.

Still, Bear Stearns expanded JPMorgan’s investment-banking and trading operations, especially those that do business with institutions and hedge funds. There have been other benefits, as well: This year, Mr. Dimon and his lieutenants moved into the old Bear Stearns headquarters while JPMorgan tears down its offices across the street to build a 70-floor skyscraper.

Some analysts doubt that JPMorgan stock will continue to outpace rivals next year. It is trading at 5% above the average analyst price target of nearly $130, and more analysts have a “hold” rating on the shares than a “buy” recommendation, according to FactSet.

KBW analyst Brian Kleinhanzl recently downgraded the stock. “We usually classify JPM as a best-in-class stock that investors can own over a long time period, but over the next twelve months we do not expect shares to outperform,” he wrote. “We believe the recent move in shares has pulled forward some of next year’s gains.”

Mr. Bearce said he has no plans to sell.

“It will be a story to tell my grandchildren,” he said.

German company has surpassed Blue Apron as demand for home-delivered kits cools overall

HelloFresh HFG -0.22% SE has risen to the top of what turned out to be a smaller market for meal kits than many companies and investors expected.

The German company is adding users with simple recipes and a big menu, surpassing rival Blue Apron Holdings Inc. APRN 0.79% in 2018 and 2019 as the biggest U.S. provider of kits for dinners with pre-apportioned ingredients and instructions for customers to cook at home.

Now HelloFresh is working to sustain that success as growth in demand continues to be tepid. Less than 5% of U.S. consumers used meal kits in the past 30 days, according to a recent survey by research firm NPD Group, up from 3% a year ago.

“The overall market is still growing, but not as much as we thought,” HelloFresh Chief Executive Dominik Richter said in an interview.

Tatiana Mac, a product designer and developer in Portland, Ore., subscribed to HelloFresh for seven months about two years ago. Now she buys meals from the company only sporadically.

She found it difficult to cook three meals every week between her travels and other engagements. She said she was tired of paying $10 or more for each meal and having to throw out all the packaging that comes with each kit.

“While I love food and I love cooking, I don’t often have the energy for it,” said Ms. Mac, 33.

HelloFresh has about 1.5 million customers in the U.S., up from about 71,000 in 2017. Quarterly sales have doubled in that time to $246.5 million in the most recent period. The company said it is on track to deliver its first full year of profitability in fiscal 2019. Its U.S. business had its first quarterly profit in August, about five years after entering the market.

Meanwhile, Blue Apron, which helped build enthusiasm for meal kits after its founding in 2012, has faded. The company’s customer count has fallen from a peak of above a million in 2017 to fewer than 400,000. Quarterly sales have more-than halved since 2017 to under $100 million for the most recent quarter.

Nicholas Yarbro, who attends the University of Texas at Dallas, tried Black Friday deals for HelloFresh and Blue Apron earlier this month. Mr. Yarbro, 22, said HelloFresh is cheaper and offers easier recipes to follow. He and his girlfriend get four meals a week.

“There is less prep time with it. All you do is chop, and everything is prepackaged and well-labeled. Directions are super simple,” Mr. Yarbro said. He has discontinued Blue Apron and plans to stick to HelloFresh

Blue Apron was also hurt by problems at a fulfillment center in New Jersey that took longer than planned to get operating smoothly, according to former employees. The center, which opened in early 2017, took about a year and a half to become fully operational. High fees to get the facility working efficiently ate into Blue Apron’s marketing budget, costing the company customers.

Blue Apron declined to comment.

Once valued at nearly $2 billion, Blue Apron has seen its stock plummet by more than 90% since going public in 2017 to $7.61, giving the company a valuation of roughly $100 million.

“Meal-kitting doesn’t fit as many lifestyles as many folks believed,” said Matt Davis, who left Blue Apron in 2017 after leading the operations team to found Mosaic Foods, which makes frozen bowls of tofu and beets.

Many smaller rivals that cropped up in recent years are also losing customers or shutting down. Meal-kit companies secured $89 million of venture funding in 2019, according to PitchBook Data Inc., down from a peak of $179 million in 2017.

One reason behind the tough outlook: Meal-kit makers have largely gone after the same cohort of younger, city-residing consumers, leading companies to roll out heavy promotions to stand out. They spend even more on discounts to bring customers back when they cancel, which further squeezes their margins.

Albertsons Cos. closed the Plated subscription service it bought in 2017. The business, backed by venture-capital, hasn’t been profitable, people familiar with the business said. Kettlebell Kitchen shut down in November after six years in business. When it raised about $30 million in 2018, Kettlebell was losing $12 million a year, said a person familiar with the company.

Pat Vihtelic, founder and chief executive of the Home Chef meal-kit maker that Kroger Co. bought last year, said his company has been profitable since the second half of 2017.

HelloFresh plans to keep growing with a bigger menu that includes faster recipes, vegetarian and low-calorie options. The company is also working to branch into kits for lunch, snacking and a wine club for people to pair with the kits they are cooking.

“Our core demographic is the people that are already cooking at home,” Mr. Richter said.

That acknowledgment could put a cap on HelloFresh’s growth potential, said Tom Allchurch, a former executive at HelloFresh and Sun Basket, an organic-focused meal-kit maker founded in 2014.

“Kits are too much work. There is a point to which they will stop growing,” Mr. Allchurch said.

Police used tear gas, pepper spray and arrests as protesters rallied in streets, shopping malls

HONG KONG—Christmas in Hong Kong descended into a flurry of tear gas and arrests as police clashed with protesters in neighborhoods around the city, signalling an escalation of tensions after weeks of relative calm.

Riot police fired off pepper spray in areas including Mong Kok and Kowloon Bay on Wednesday, Christmas Day, while also arresting black-clad protesters, according to local media. They also used pepper spray inside some malls.

In the early hours of the morning, a teenager tumbled off a balcony at a restaurant in Mong Kok after police entered to search for protesters, local reports said. Local media said he was in stable condition and suffering from hand and leg injuries. Police said in a Facebook post that no force had been used against him, although three others were arrested.

A protester, Sam Chan, said he was outraged by what he saw as excessive use of force by the police. The 25-year-old salesman said he has been recording police action at protests in recent months to preserve the truth.

“We are not afraid until the police show up,” he said. “They use tear gas when nothing is happening. They say they will do something, and then do something else.”

Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, called the protesters a group of reckless and selfish rioters who ruined holiday celebrations for locals and tourists alike. “Such illegal acts have not only dampened the festive mood but also adversely affected local businesses,” she said in a Facebook post.

The Christmas Day clashes followed a night of turmoil around Hong Kong marked by rubber bullets and Molotov cocktails.

Hundreds gathered on Christmas Eve in the tourist-heavy neighborhood of Tsim Tsa Tsui to chant “Fight for Hong Kong” and “Five demands,” referring to the five demands for change sought by residents. Riot police fired several rounds of tear gas near the Peninsula hotel, a luxury British colonial-era establishment that has been hit hard by slumping tourist numbers.

As people fled, a protester threw an object at police, prompting an officer to fire rubber bullets. Some protesters later threw Molotov cocktails at a local police station, according to a government press release.

A branch of HSBC that had closed the account of a nonprofit organization billed as helping protesters was set on fire, local media reported. In a Facebook post Wednesday, HSBC said it was saddened and disappointed by the acts of vandalism at its Mong Kok branch. It said the account was closed in November because it was not being used for its stated purpose. In an earlier statement, HSBC said the closure was unrelated to the current Hong Kong situation.

Other protests erupted in shopping malls around the city. At a shopping center in the Yuen Long area, a protester plunged off a balcony while running from police, according to a video circulating on social media. He was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer and was in a stable condition, according to local media.

Only about half as many Hong Kong Catholic churches, anticipating unrest, held Christmas Eve midnight masses compared with last year, local media reported.

Protests have roiled Hong Kong for over six months, with no signs of the protest movement losing steam. The past few weeks have been punctuated by smaller protests, many at malls frequented by holiday shoppers. In early December, as many as 800,000 people took to the streets in a mostly peaceful rally, among the largest since the pro-democracy movement started June 9.

The protests were originally sparked by an extradition bill, since withdrawn, that would have allowed Hong Kong citizens to be sent for trial in mainland China’s opaque justice system. But the protesters have four other demands, including a judge-led independent inquiry into police conduct during the protests and the right to directly elect leaders.

The semiautonomous Chinese city has been deadlocked because neither Mrs. Lam—who must appease the leaders of China’s authoritarian government as well as local residents—nor protesters have shown any signs they are willing to back down.

Tens of billions of dollars in financial assistance from the Chinese government helped fuel Huawei Technologies Co.’s rise to the top of global telecommunications, a scale of support that in key measures dwarfed what its closest tech rivals got from their governments.

A Wall Street Journal review of Huawei’s grants, credit facilities, tax breaks and other forms of financial assistance details for the first time how Huawei had access to as much as $75 billion in state support as it grew from a little-known vendor of phone switches to the world’s largest telecom-equipment company—helping Huawei offer generous financing terms and undercut rivals’ prices by some 30%, analysts and customers say.

Huawei is vying to build next-generation 5G telecom networks around the world. While financial support for favored firms or industries is common in many countries, China’s assistance for Huawei, including tax waivers that began 25 years ago, is among a number of factors stoking questions about Huawei’s relationship with the state.

“While Huawei has commercial interests, those commercial interests are strongly supported by the state,” said Michael Wessel, a member of a U.S. congressional panel that reviews U.S.-China relations, in an interview. The U.S. has raised concerns that use of Huawei’s equipment could pose a security risk, should Beijing request network data from the company. Huawei says it would never hand such data to the government.

The largest portion of assistance, about $46 billion, comes from loans, credit lines and other assistance from state lenders, the Journal’s review showed. The company saved as much as $25 billion in taxes between 2008 and 2018 due to state incentives to promote the tech sector. Among other assistance, it enjoyed $1.6 billion in grants and $2 billion in land discounts.

Huawei said in a statement that it received “small and non-material” grants to support its research, which it said were not unusual. Much of the support—for example, tax breaks to the tech sector—was available to others, it noted.

The Journal in its research made use of available public records, including company statements and land-registry documents. The Journal verified its methodology with subsidy analysts, including Usha Haley, professor at Wichita State University, and Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C., organization that criticizes some tax incentives and provides widely consulted subsidy data.

State assistance for Huawei isn’t always quantifiable. In 1999, China’s central government arranged an unusual intervention to rescue the company from allegations of tax fraud, according to accounts by Chinese and other officials.

Local tax breaks for Huawei spurred anonymous accusations around 1998 that it was evading taxes. As the company faced a business slump, Li Zibin, then mayor of Shenzhen city, where Huawei is based, said he took Huawei’s plight to Chinese then-Vice Premier Wu Bangguo.

Mr. Wu, who oversaw state-owned companies, wasn’t sure at first if he should act. He viewed Huawei as privately owned, according to a transcript of Mr. Li’s remarks at a state conference in 2012. Mr. Wu eventually agreed to assemble a team of auditors, Mr. Li said. Huawei was cleared within weeks. Messrs. Li and Wu didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Huawei’s official grants, disclosed in annual reports, total $1.6 billion since 2008. In the five years to 2018, they were 17 times as large as similar subsidies reported by Nokia Corp. , of Finland, the world’s second-largest telecom equipment maker. Sweden’s Ericsson AB, the third-largest, posted none in the period.

In China’s southern city of Dongguan, state records show, Huawei bought more than a dozen state-owned parcels in largely uncontested auctions between 2014 and 2018 for its research campus. The company paid prices that were 10%-50% of average prices for similarly zoned land in Dongguan, according to Chinese property-value databases. The discounts saved Huawei some $2 billion, according to a Journal review. Huawei declined to comment on the estimate.

Other savings came from state policies to promote China’s tech sector. Tax deductions and exemptions helped Huawei save up to $25 billion in income, value-added and other taxes in at least the past decade, the Journal estimated. Responding to the estimate, a Huawei spokesman said the company is globally tax-compliant.

In his remarks at the conference, Mr. Li said local officials began waiving or reducing levies on Huawei, including income and value-added taxes, in the early 1990s.

Financial support helped Huawei undercut rivals. In 2010, the European Commission found that Chinese modem exporters including Huawei had benefited from subsidies, according to a confidential report reviewed by the Journal. The commission cut short its probe after the complainant prompting the probe reached a “cooperation agreement” with Huawei. Huawei denied receiving such subsidies.

Besides subsidies, Huawei since 1998 has received an estimated $16 billion in loans, export credits, and other forms of financing from Chinese banks for itself or its customers, the Journal found.

China’s state-controlled banking system underpins cheap loans that lower costs for Huawei and its customers to buy Huawei’s products on credit. State lending facilities for Huawei were among the largest in history.

Mega-lenders China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank of China in the last two decades made available more than $30 billion in credit lines for Huawei’s customers. World Bank and official data indicate these banks were lending to Huawei’s clients in developing economies at some 3% in at least Huawei’s first decade abroad, around half of China’s five-year benchmark rate in since 2004.

A Huawei spokesman told the Journal that CDB’s $30 billion credit line “has seldom been more than 10% subscribed,” and customers’ use of the facility “fluctuates over time.” In 2011, Huawei Deputy Chairman Ken Hu said CDB had lent Huawei’s customers $10 billion since 2004.

Huawei said that lenders—mostly non-Chinese banks, it said—account for only 10% of Huawei’s financing needs as of the end of last year, funded at commercial rates, with the rest coming from the company’s own cash flow and business operations.

“If you’re going to buy a house, and if you are able to say you got backing of a half-million dollar line of credit, that’s going to make you a much stronger bidder,” said Fred Hochberg, former chairman of U.S. Export-Import Bank. “What Huawei did, cleverly, is to make sure that, when they made a bid, it came with financing terms” that surpassed those of competitors.

Official data show Swedish export authorities provided some $10 billion in credit assistance for Sweden’s tech-and-telecom sector as of 2018; Finland authorized $30 billion in annual export credit guarantees economywide from 2017.

Huawei’s largest American competitor, Cisco Systems Inc., received $44.5 billion in state and federal subsidies, loans, guarantees, grants and other U.S. assistance since 2000, Good Jobs First data show. Cisco didn’t comment.

China’s foreign ministry said in a statement to the Journal that Huawei is a private company “like many others in China” whose achievements “are inseparable from a good policy environment.”

In summer 2009, Huawei pitched to Pakistan a surveillance system for its capital, Islamabad. Pakistan’s prime minister accepted, but Islamabad lacked funds, and its procurement rules required competitive bidding, Pakistan court filings say.

The Chinese offered a solution. China Ex-Im would lend Pakistan $124.7 million for the project and waive most of the 3% annual interest on the 20-year loan. There was a condition, Pakistan Supreme Court filings show: Pakistan could choose only Huawei. Pakistan’s government decided to proceed without competitive bidding.

“On the recommendation of Ex-Im Bank, the prime minister of Pakistan selected Huawei,” then-interior minister Ahsan Iqbal told Pakistan officials.

A Chinese embassy report showed Beijing’s then-ambassador to Islamabad officiating at the project’s inauguration in 2016 alongside Pakistan’s interior minister, standing before an array of glowing security monitors.

“The Chinese government funded it and Huawei built it,” the embassy said

KKR announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire OverDrive, Inc. (“OverDrive” or the “Company”), the leading digital reading platform for libraries and schools, from Rakuten USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rakuten, Inc. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.