I can imagine several more such as iEC wanting to become a significant player in the global sports world but recognising that they know nothing about it so buying a club on the cheap, getting some hands on experience for a couple of years then dumping them and getting properly involved with a "real" club.
Just imagining obviously, this couldn't possibly happen.
I can't see why they would bother doing that - if they already had us, they had the club set up how they wanted, they had already pumped in loads of money and had the cash ready to buy into buying a bigger only for the need to invest further - why go to the extra expense, time and effort of doing another take over when they could use us as the vehicle to take them to the Prem - it would end up drastically cheaper and easier to work with what they had to make us a Prem club rather than try and sell us off and then negotiate a deal to buy another club.
Once you are in the Prem the small revenue streams we currently have from our small crowd mean a lot less as the vast majority of most clubs income (outside the big 6 or 7) will come from being in the Premier League either directly in tv money or the sponsoship opportunities, far eastern market interset that it generates.
A good example of this is if ourselves Swansea, West Brom, Wolves, are all in the Prem our revenue streams would likely be quite similar as the gate reciepts that currently seperate us becomes a small piece of overall revenue yet look at the difference in prices agreed for the sales of the 2 clubs in the Prem vs the 2 outside of it.
West Brom 200m
Swansea 110m
--------
Wolves 45m
Wigan 15-20m
If you were an investor and you had 200m to burn you could spend 200m up front to get West Brom who were by no means a big brand overseas or guarenteed Prem survival. Or you could get little Wigan for about 10% of that initial cost and then even if you spent unpresidented levels at this level say 50-60m to buy promotion (banking on doing it before FFP kicked in after 3 years). You'd have us up to the Prem League money making promise land for about a third of the cost of just buying a bottom half current Prem club.
I'm not suggesting that they will go down that route, but i don't think for a split second that we would be a stepping stone to a bigger club for the simple reason that the clubs that have a real global brand value worth having (Liverpool, United, City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs) are not going to be available. If The Chengs had the desire and finances to go and get one of them they wouldn't even be considering messing about with us as a practice run as controlling one of those clubs compared to us will be so different. While the rest of the clubs in this country are not really hugely different in terms of revenue potential when they are in the Prem and don't have particulary big brand recognition overseas to make them massively better options if you already owned one yourself. So to a large degree for what they need - a football club, playing in the Premier league to make into a cash cow on the back of the tv exposure - we can fit that purpose as well as most other clubs if they are willing to invest enough to get us to the Prem.