How are Outstanding Shares Calculated?

[Rob]

I have a question about how you calculate shares outstanding for
foreign companies that trade on American indexes like NYSE. I’m
confused about that because checking Google Finance, Yahoo Finance,
MSN Finance, Nasdaq, and the company’s most recent filing with the
SEC, all five say the same company has a different number of shares
outstanding.

For an example, this is the number of shares each source says Aluminum
Corporation of China Ltd (ACH) has outstanding:
Google Finance: 540.98 M
Yahoo Finance: 132.91 M
MSN Finance: 110 M
Nasdaq: 18.766 M
6-K filed with the SEC this month: 9.58 B

You may be able to tell why I’m confused, because it seems impossible
for a company to have more than one number of shares outstanding. Each
source calculates the market cap using the same price but the
different numbers of shares outstanding, so according to Google it has
almost 30 times as high a market cap than is reported by Nasdaq. With
the way ACH reported billions in its 6K but all other sources quote
millions, I’m guessing Yahoo, Google, MSN, and Nasdaq are showing it
in the form of American Depository Shares (ADS). That doesn’t explain
why the four of those have different numbers though, and in its annual
report it says an ADS represents 25H shares, so its 9.58 billion would
represent 383.2 M, far different than any numbers the other sources
show.

So can you please explain how Google calculates shares outstanding for
foreign companies trading on American indexes.