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As home prices fall market collapse becomes a possibility

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JUNE 2014 VOL. 25, NO. 6

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THE HOUSE VIEW Published monthly since 1990 Publisher China Economic Review Publishing Editor Oliver Pearce Staff Writer Don Weinland Chinese Editor Liu Chen Associate Editor Skye Sun Interns Greg Isaacson, Sunny Oh, Sean Lee, Ryan Kilpatrick Art Director Jason Wong Editor at Large Graham Earnshaw Associate Publisher Gareth Powell Director of Sales and Marketing Ralph Wang Account Manager Jerry Cheng

04 BALANCING REFORM AND GROWTH | There are ways for China to reform its economy and grow at the same time

MONTH IN REVIEW 06 NEWS BRIEF | The biggest China news stories in May

Q&A AND COLUMNS 08 LIVEABLE CITIES | Xintiandi designer Ben Wood talks about why China must regenerate its urban centers

10 HOW TO BREAK FREE | As China considers SOE reform, officials should think twice about following the Anglo-American model of selling ownership to the stock market

CHINA ECONOMIC REVIEW (ISSN: 1350-6390) is published by China Economic Review Publishing

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12 FINANCIAL EXPRESS | Charting the next step in the central bank’s rapid reforms

ECONOMICS & POLICY 19 ECONOMIC REPORT CARD | How do analysts rate China’s economy as it approaches the half-year point?

21 SIDELINED ONCE AGAIN | No urban life in sight for many of China’s migrant workers

23 FEAR OF HEIGHTS | China’s housing market: Worrying about the possibility that it all comes crashing down

26 FADING ATTRACTION | If China wants to remain a top business destination it’s time for leaders to heed global competitiveness reports

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MARKETS & FINANCE 28 A CRAVING FOR CASH | China’s SMEs head to pawnbrokers as credit tightens

HKABC membership membership approved approved and and certifi certified ed HKABC

29 HEAD TO THE TROUGH | How WH Group made a pig’s breakfast of its IPO

THE HOUSE VIE W

Balancing reform and growth There are ways for China to reform its economy and grow at the same time

B

eijing bureaucrats must be exhausted by chasing a sputtering economy as they look for ways to keep it moving. Some finetuning here, a bit of state spending there – all with the aim of meeting a GDP growth target. But if they want to stop fixing problems on the fly and see development move onto a selfsustaining track they will need to run even faster for at least a while.

In late April, the State Council announced further steps in its plan to revitalize the economy by opening up key areas to non-state participation.

The government will cut more corporate red tape, allow private capital in 80 investment projects in key industries ranging from pipelines to solar and start working on opening up strategic sectors such as oil exploration to non-state players. Some analysts see this as a sign that Beijing is making good on its reform pledges.

At the Third Plenum policy meeting last November, the government promised to push ahead with change.

In March, the annual Government Work Report to China’s parliament said that top planners will open up investment projects in finance, petroleum, electricity, railway, telecoms, resources and public utilities. Implementation is happening faster than most expected.

The latest plans can kill two birds with one stone: Support an economy that slowed from 7.7% growth in 2013 to 7.4% in the first quarter without making the fiscal headache worse.

“Opening up more attractive investment areas for private capital will help to invigorate the economy and avoid a further build up of government debt,” Barclays Research said in a note.

Local authorities and state-owned enterprises have accumulated debts of more than US$3 trillion. These are the entities responsible for most of the investment in infrastructure in China that has kept economic development

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China Economic Review | June 2014

on track with government goals. Asking them to borrow more to fund a new round of construction would go against current efforts to deleverage the economy.

Beijing is luring private capital to replace state cash, but investors from the private sector need convincing.

They chase commercial returns, not promotion at government entities. Officials also need to avoid a state-asset fire sale akin to the one that put Russia’s best-connected businesspeople at the helm of its most-valuable assets upon the fall of the Soviet Union.

Private sector enterprises find working on state-directed projects challenging on the rare occasions that they are allowed in. Approvals are slow and the decision-making process is opaque. Such projects can also be very lucrative. China is spending tens of billions of dollars on railways, energy, ports and IT infrastructure – the very sectors the government is opening up.

The State Council said it would give more autonomy to firms in making their investment decisions while more clearly delineating the boundary between market and government.

Project approvals will be sped up and non-state firms will be able to invest directly in sectors that are not included on a “negative list” instead of needing a bureaucrat to review every investment.

Such measures will “help to adjust

the structure of the economy and make investment a more effective driver of growth,” HSBC economists said in a note. Eventually, private capital could even be allowed into the most valuable state-controlled sectors such as utilities, oil and gas exploration, water reserves and airports.

Yet the voice of doubters remains loud, and can even be heard in loyal state media. Some say that previous opening up pledges have not been honoured; others argue that powerful vested interests at state-backed firms refuse to budge. Their scepticism is well-founded.

“The Chinese government has pledged to allow a large role for market forces in sectors that are dominated by state-owned firms, but this pledge has been made many times before and the reality has historically fallen short of the promise,” Bill Adams, senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group, told China Economic Review before April’s announcement.

Top leaders must do more to prove that they are genuinely open to private capital otherwise the market will just dismiss these latest plans as inconsequential talk. They can start by providing more details. No timeframe has been given for the 80 projects; no value has been assigned to them either.

There was also no official mention of whether foreign firms can participate; this is not just a question of tapping deeper capital pools but also of bringing in external expertise.

China Economic Review has long argued that the economy needs to slow so that important reforms can take root. One of the key tenets of this is to improve resource allocation and prevent waste and overcapacity. Introducing private investment into statemonopolized sectors can address this.

China might even be able to reform and keep growing at the same time, so long as those bureaucrats in Beijing are willing to put in that extra mile.

NEWS ROUNDUP

MONTH IN REVIEW China’s President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin signed a US$400 billion gas supply deal in Shanghai, Financial Times reported, citing statements from Putin and Russia’s energy minister.

Under the deal, which comes after 10 years of negotiations, Russian natural gas giant Gazprom will supply China National Petroleum Corporation with up to 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year for 30 years, beginning in 2018. Analysts said the implied price was US$350-$390 per 1,000 cubic meters. Gazprom said it would invest US$55 billion, and China will provide at least US$20 billion of investments.

price growth moderated both in firsttier and less-affluent cities. Prices in Beijing rose 0.1% from March, while Shanghai prices increased 0.3%. “China’s property market is on a very dangerous brink,” said Xu Gao, chief economist at Everbright Securities. The real estate slowdown has prompted local municipal governments to relax property curbs.

China’s exports beat expectations of a slight decline for April by posting a 0.9% increase on a year earlier to US$188.5 billion, reversing a 6.6% decline in March and an 18% nosedive in February, South China Morning Post reported, citing the customs bureau. Imports also reversed to a slight increase of 0.8%, compared with a decline of 11.3% in March. In February, imports rose 10.1% from a year earlier. “China’s export growth will show a marked rebound starting in May, as the high-comparison-base [from last year] factor fades,” HSBC economist Ma Xiaoping said.

GET IT DONE: On a visit to Shanghai Vladimir Putin secured a gas deal with China that had been in the works for a decade

a trial basis involving more than 10 banks as early as the end of May.

Credit: Alex Vickery

ECONOMY

Credit: Melinda

FINANCE

The price of new homes in 26 cities in China either stalled or fell in April compared to the month before, the biggest slowdown in more than a year and a half, Bloomberg reported.

National housing prices climbed 9.1% in April compared to a year earlier, slowing for a fourth month. Home-

The People’s Bank of China will soon let banks offer large-denomination certificates of deposits to individuals and companies, as it continues financial reforms, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources close to the central bank. The minimum investment will be set at around US$16,000 (RMB100,000) and the interest rate offered has been set at 3.4% on one-year CDs, slightly higher than the maximum 3.3% that banks can pay on a one-year fixed deposit. The CDs will be available on

China’s top economic planning body signaled it would let local governments directly sell municipal bonds for the first time, Reuters reported, citing a statement by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) on its website. Chinese media previously reported that Beijing was set to allow direct bond sales for 10 governments including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangdong. The NDRC statement did not

CHINA BY NUMBERS Number of people killed in Qingdao factory wall collapse

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China Economic Review | June 2014

$300m Value of investment Baidu is making in Silicon Valley R&D center

Number of mainland IPOs regulators plan to allow in H2 2014

$33bn

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Value of grid project State Grid is awaiting approval for

refer to these plans, but said China will create a financing system for local governments that will let the sale of municipal bonds be a major source of funding. Opaque financing vehicles will also be phased out.

China’s broadest measure for new credit fell as senior officials resisted calls for monetary stimulus, Bloomberg reported, citing official data. Aggregate financing fell from RMB1.55 trillion (US$249 billion) in April to RMB2.07 trillion in March. New local-currency bank loans were RMB774.7 billion, down from RMB1.05 trillion the previous month. Even as a bearish property market and poor manufacturing data threaten to slow China’s economy, the reluctance to issue new credit suggests the country’s leaders are willing to accept lower growth rates.

POLITICS & SOCIETY

Vietnam accused China of sinking a Vietnamese fishing ship about 17 nautical miles southwest of an oil rig that China placed in disputed waters off the Vietnamese coast, The Wall

$12.8bn Funds Agricultural Bank is raising through share offer

Street Journal reported. Chinese officials claimed that the fishermen were behaving recklessly and collided with a Chinese fishing vessel, but have also reiterated that ships will continue to be denied access within a three-mile radius of the rig until it finishes drilling exploration in mid-August. All 10 men aboard the vessel were rescued, according to Vietnam’s coast guard.

The Chinese government plans to decommission as many as 5.33 million cars throughout the country this year that fail to meet domestic fuel standards, Reuters reported, citing a policy document. The bid to improve air quality was announced alongside new targets for the closures of coalfired heating systems and the installation of new equipment to reduce emissions at power stations, steel mills and cement plants. The State Council document did not say how the plan would be implemented, but subsidies previously offered for voluntary scrapping may be extended to "yellow label" vehicles that fail to meet minimum standards.

BUSINESS

China’s Bright Food Group will buy a majority stake in Tnuva, Israel’s largest food company, Reuters reported, citing a spokesman for the Shanghai-based multinational. The spokesman said Bright Food has signed a preliminary agreement to buy 56% of the specialist dairy produce supplier from private equity firm Apax, but did not disclose how much it has agreed to pay. Israeli news websites reported the deal valued all of Tnuva at US$2.5 billion. The spokesman cited Israel’s “highly developed agriculture and animal husbandry techniques” in reference to the acquisition.

At least this many Chinese evacuated from Vietnam by boat

3,000

30% Size of stake Sunac is buying in developer Greentown

China’s Sina Corp saw a non-cash loss of about US$40 million in the first quarter, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sina’s net loss was US$33.2 million, or US$0.52 per share, in the three months ended March 31, compared with a loss of US$13.2 million, or US$0.20 a share, in the same period a year earlier. The losses were related to its microblog Weibo Corporation going public in April.

Weibo reported a loss of US$47.4 million for the quarter, or US$0.31 a share.

Credit: Philippe

Credit: Mitya Aleshkovsky

NEWS ROUNDUP

The British former head of drug maker GSK’s China operations and two other company executives have been charged by Chinese police with bribery, Reuters reported, citing a state media report. The three executives were charged with bribing doctors, hospitals and officials in the industry and commerce departments of Beijing and Shanghai to boost sales of the company’s products in China. The crackdown on GSK reflects a growing determination by Chinese authorities to stamp out corporate bribery and corruption, which can drive up pharmaceutical prices.

The year China expects to deliver its first commercial jet

2015 China Economic Review | June 2014

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O P - E D : U R B A N R E G E N E R AT I O N

Liveable cities

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or the people in China that are being swept up iin the greatest urbanizzation in the history oof the modern world, what is their promise of w a better life?

Walt Disney, a great Ben Wood A American visionary said: ““You cannot change people’s lives but you can change the environment they live in.” I want to talk about new ways of working together with the leaders of China and companies to, for the future, create even better urban environments.

When I was growing up in America I spent every daylight hour that I was not in school exploring the rural environs around our family farm.

Growing up with nature and the land around us was my family’s promise of a better life. Today I live in a city of 24 million people and this childhood pursuit of happiness seems a long way off, like the secret garden in a children’s fairly tale.

More than a decade ago Shanghai adopted the slogan “Better City Better Life.” The people here have better lives than when I arrived 16 years ago.

Their lives are better because smart people knew it would take a great deal more than skyscrapers and high rise apartments with indoor plumbing and air con to make a better city. Sixty years after my father taught me how to drive a tractor on a farm in America my “secret garden,” my “nature” is the tree lined streets and narrow lanes of Shanghai and the millions of social transactions that take place in them each and every day.

Forty years ago America was busy destroying many of its historic neighborhoods in the name of urban re-development. It was America’s “cultural revolution.” A prominent architectural

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China Economic Review | June 2014

critic for The New York Times at the time wrote: “We get the cities we deserve.” She meant by this that if we do not like the city we are living in we have only ourselves to blame. This was true in America then and it is true now here in China.

In a recent conversation with a group of government officials, urban planners, developers and architects I said: “In China people get the cities we deserve.” By “we” I mean that the people in power and the real estate developers they empower and the designers they hire when land passes from the public to the private sector.

What should be implicit in every one of these transactions is the promise of a better life. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Sometimes the rules and regulations that are designed to protect China’s cities from bad development often make delivering on this promise next to impossible. Having the power to make rules and having the power to imagine what makes a

better life are very different.

I often take my visitors to Shanghai on one of our elevated highways on trips to show them the countryside. They are always amazed at how the cityscape of downtown transitions into a seemingly endless horizon of mid-rise residential towers. They all ask why the buildings are lined up like legions of troops in rank and file. I tell them that it is because of the rules.

Better life? Maybe not. On the ground these residential blocks are surrounded by landscapes all too often devoid of the rich vernacular patterns of settlement they replaced. Row after row of the exact same building type all facing the same direction does not engender the kind of social interaction that was a part of every day life in a rural village.

Urbanization that results in this monotonous mid-rise soulless sprawl is a striking demonstration of how unintelligent smart people can be.

The real debate we should be having is why so many of our city planners

MODEL ZONE: Ben Wood’s Xintiandi leisure and shopping district in downtown Shanghai has become a template for regeneration across China

Credit: Charlie Xia

Credit: Cecilia Chan

Ben Wood, the man who designed Xintiandi, in Shanghai, talks about why China must regenerate its urban centers

O P - E D : U R B A N R E G E N E R AT I O N

consider the modern density afforded by a city of skyscrapers, block long super malls and gated mid-to-high rise residential compounds preferable to a slightly less dense traditional plan of more fine grained urban fabric.

We should be asking ourselves do we deserve a city of suburbs where you have to get into a car every time you want to go anywhere? A city that has days when the air is so polluted it is unsafe to leave home? A city clogged with cars that can only be driven on alternate days with even and odd numbered license plates?

No, we deserve better. We should be able to live in a city where every block is a city within a city; where on every block people live, work and play; where the traditional urban fabric of a human-scaled, tree-lined street is dominated by pedestrian activities, not automobiles and super high-rises; where buildings are made of materials still in their natural state; where the color grey comes from an overcast

“We should be asking ourselves do we deserve a city of suburbs where you have to get into a car every time you want to go anywhere? ...

A city clogged with cars that can only be driven on alternate days with even and odd numbered license plates?" sky and not from a monochromatic curtain of aluminum extrusions and tinted glass panels.

One of the paradoxical advantages of traditional human-scaled urban neighborhoods is privacy. A dense collection of small public spaces like Xintiandi has lots of convenient places to stop and chat. You can be on friendly terms with dozens of people who live or work near your home. You never feel the slightest obligation to invite any of them to your home for tea. A market economy dominated by corporations and financial institutions is already replacing the interests of the public sector as the driving force in city building. New luxury lifestyles are being marketed like famous fashion brands to entice people to spend more.

Is this the promise of a better life? Not unless you think driving a Ferrari is a true measure of one’s net worth. Overpromotion of luxury lifestyles is not a promise of a better life.

I am sure most people would rather be remembered for what they created and not for what they consumed.

I know I would.

China Economic Review | June 2014

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OP-ED: SELLING OFF SOES

How to break free As China considers splitting SOEs from government control, officials should think twice about following the Anglo-American model of selling ownership to the stock market

S

Credit: Walmart

tate-owned enterprises, or SOEs, have made a rremarkable contributtion to the growth and d development of the Chinese economy over C tthe past 30 years. They h have provided a stable llong-term environColin Mayer m ment for investment and eencouraged the development of the enterprise m ssector in line with public aas well as private intereests.

But SOEs are in rretreat. Between 1998 aand 2010, the share of S SOEs declined from 337% to less than 5% by n number of firms, and ffrom 68% to 44% by Julian Franks aassets. Calls from inside C China are getting louder for further downsizing and corporate governance reforms of the still very substantial SOE sector. Under the new administration of Xi Jin-

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ping, policymakers have put forward proposed reforms of governmentbacked enterprises. The question that remains to be answered is what should take the place of state ownership in the future.

A decade or more ago the answer would have been easy. The investment banks in New York or London would have advised the Chinese government to sell its stakes via secondary offerings to a mixture of banks, financial institutions and private investors, preferably foreign as well as domestic. The objective would have been to use this opportunity of state sales to create an Anglo-American type of capital market characterized by dispersed ownership and high levels of liquidity.

It is far from clear today that this strategy is right for China. A former Minister of the UK government, Paul Myners, has characterized the UK stock market as comprising "ownerless corporations." The origins of this description can be traced to the highly dispersed nature of ownership in UK stock markets, where institu-

NO POWER: Dispersed ownership of companies means investors such as pension or mutual funds have too small stakes to be active and lack the skills to understand the companies they invest in

China Economic Review | June 2014

tions such as domestic and foreign mutual funds, pension funds and insurance companies dominate the market. Most of these investors hold too small stakes in companies to be active investors and lack the skills to understand the companies they invest in. The result is that control is vested in the company’s board members who have little ownership and often manage the business at a high cost and with poor performance.

Operating as a publicly listed company is also becoming less attractive.

Harvard professor Michael Jensen predicted ‘the eclipse of the public corporation’ in 1987, well before the wave of ‘going private’ started around 15 year ago. The Economist in 2012 reported that the number of listed American companies had fallen by about 37% from 1997 to 2012, while in the UK the decline was even more dramatic, at 43%. Many of the companies that have been delisted have been taken private by management and private equity funds tired of the perceived short termism of the stock market.

It is therefore not obvious that the Chinese government should try to emulate the Anglo-American model of ownership and control. It simply may not be the best one. There is however, another reason not to follow this route and that is, in order to function effectively, the AngloAmerican model is dependent on a complex set of institutions, including markets for corporate control and well-developed systems of corporate law and enforcement. China does not have many of these institutions, or rather has different institutions, and grafting Anglo-American stock markets onto the Chinese institutional structure will simply not work.

Japan’s experience of attempting to emulate US capital markets when its institutions were simply not ready

Credit: Jim

OP-ED: SELLING OFF SOES

PRIZE ATTRACTION: In the current reform of SOEs giant energy companies such as CNPC that sit on juicy assets are being opened up

for such a task is instructive. When Japan was defeated in the Second World War, the American Occupying Authority sought to dissolve and sell-off Japanese family dominated companies, the zaibatsu, which had been implicated in Japanese militarization. Shares in the zaibatsu were sold to employees and investors in local communities. The result was that Japanese share ownership in the mid-1950s was more dispersed than the stock markets of the UK and the US. Laws were passed, including a Glass Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking, and bankruptcy legislation and security regulation were introduced modeled on the US system.

The experiment failed and had substantial unintended consequences.

Shares held by individuals were sold, and gradually accumulated by banks and other financial institutions resulting in a system of “insider” corporate cross-holdings that has only recently begun to be unwound.

Why did Japan fail to develop its capital markets along Anglo-American lines when seemingly all the ingredients were in place? The answer is that Japanese institutions were simply not developed to support the outsider system of ownership. An example is the emergence of investment funds, which have been important in both UK and US capital markets, and

“It is therefore not obvious that the Chinese government should try to emulate the Anglo-American model of ownership and control. It simply may not be the best one.” at one point comprised about 10% of the Japanese market. Institutions created these funds in Japan to dispose of unwanted stock and sell them to private investors but insider dealing and breaches of trust in combination with other scandals led to the rapid disintegration of this market and instead the emergence of a market dominated by corporate insiders.

What are the alternatives to Anglo-American systems that China could pursue? There are several.

Oversight of SOEs could be extended through state asset management companies managing China’s sovereign wealth and state pension funds.

Employee share ownership and employee-owned enterprises could be increased and the rights of workers enhanced through their representa-

tion on the boards of companies, as is widely observed in many central European corporations in Austria and Germany. Private and public pension funds similar to those found in Canada, the Netherlands and Sweden could provide the engaged, longterm, sustainable ownership that China seeks.

The main message from the experience of Japan and other countries is that whatever path China chooses, it should be tailored to its particular social and cultural context and the role that is sought of enterprises in Chinese society. While there are important lessons to be learned from other countries, it should not be presumed that their models can be transferred from elsewhere without significant adaption to the Chinese context.

Julian Franks is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Colin Mayer is Peter Moores Professor of Management at Said Business School, University of Oxford. Their joint paper with Professor Hideaki Miyajima of Waseda University, ‘The ownership of Japanese corporations in the 20th century,’ will soon be published in the Review of Financial Studies.

China Economic Review | June 2014

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AS FAST AS YOU CAN: The People’s Bank of China (headquarters pictured below) is pushing the country’s other financial regulators to keep abreast in the race to reform

Financial express CHARTING THE NEXT STEP IN THE CENTRAL BANK’S RAPID REFORMS

COVER STORY: FINANCIAL REFORM

C

hina may be about to tick another box on its lengthy to-do list for financial reform. In late May media reports claimed that the People’s Bank of China plans to allow banks to issue certificates of deposit to ordinary bank customers this year, another encouraging stride toward interest rate liberalization and a baby step in overall financial reform.

A list of the tasks that China needs to undertake to remake its financial system is readily available. In fact, there are several versions. Each related ministry and regulator has its own index for the next step in opening up. The securities commission, for example, is trying to wipe the domestic stock market clean of fraud and false reporting while also creating investment opportunities for foreigners. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange is ever so slowly allowing the yuan to trade more freely. The central bank itself may have the longest list. PBOC is the trailblazer of financial reform, if not announcing changes to the system then pushing others to do so.

It’s often hard to keep up.

In mid-March People’s Bank chairman Zhou Xiaochuan set a new pace for change. In perhaps the biggest announcement on financial reform in years, Zhou said China could fully liberalize interest rates by 2016.

Ending state control over the interest rate paid on bank deposits is the final step China must take in interest rate liberalization. The cap on the rate, currently set at 3%, has kept the cost of lending artificially low during the last two decades of relentless development. That ceiling, along with a floor on borrowing costs that was scrapped nearly a year ago, gave state banks ample room to lend the deposits of the masses to state-owned firms and local governments at below market prices. Without reform, China faces the risk of an increasingly high debt China Economic Review | June 2014

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COVER STORY: FINANCIAL REFORM

to GDP ratio while the return on its investments grows smaller and smaller.

Allowing certificates of deposit for the public, which give qualified bank customers a slightly higher return on deposits, would show the central bank’s determination to meet Zhou’s tight two-year deadline on interest rate reform.

But this 2016 date is a single point on a timeline that stretches far beyond the horizon. Which reforms happen before or after that date are debatable, even contested. That’s because a change in one area of China’s fragile financial structure could, at least in the short term, undermine another reform somewhere else in the system.

Freeing interest rates is just one of four major financial reform initiatives. The other three are liberalizing exchange rates, reforming capital markets and opening China’s capital account. None of these takes priority over another. As the People’s Bank pushes forward, not only must it consider the pace at which other financial players are crossing items off their lists, it must be sure the entire economy, down to the level of property developers and regional governments, is on board. However,

in local authorities far from Beijing, some cadre may not have received the checklist for reform yet.

How to stall forex reform Two years is a blink of an eye in China’s overall reform, and the new timeline has found critics. Just a month after Zhou’s announcement on uncapping deposit rates, another top financial regulator put forward his own version of how reform would sweep the financial sector.

Yi Gang, the chairman of the State Administration for Foreign Exchange and one of five PBOC deputy governors, said the exchange rate should be liberalized before interest rates can be fully freed. This has caused some commotion among analysts, most of whom have long viewed foreign exchange reform as a far more distant goal than interest rate liberalization.

“Yi Gang’s concern is perhaps that interest rate liberalization is likely to result in higher interest rates and attract more speculative inflows, making it harder for foreign exchange reform,” said Wang Qinwei, an economist at research firm Capital Economics in London.

Nixing the cap on deposit rates would shake China’s growth model

Who is Yi Gang?

As the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and one of the five People’s Bank of China deputy governors, Yi Gang’s opinion on financial reform matters. During a talk in April, the 56-year-old official said foreign exchange reform should come before interest rate liberalization. This pointed to a different direction to what many economists had viewed as the charted course for financial change in China, which set FX reform at the distant end. There’s good reason to believe that Yi’s voice will be heard. A week before his comment on foreign exchange reform, he was named a deputy head of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, a top

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China Economic Review | June 2014

economic planner established in the early 1980s and itself a rising authority within the Communist Party. Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief China economist Lu Ting put it bluntly in a note to investors: “Heed what PBOC’s Yi Gang says.” Still, many economists disagree with the idea that foreign exchange liberalization should be next on the financial reform to-do list. “That’s a theoretical sort of statement because in theory [foreign exchange and interest rate liberalization] should actually happen at the same time,” says Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior analyst at investment bank Credit Agricole. “It’s certain that foreign exchange will not be fully freed anytime soon.”

to its core. The cost of borrowing would rise as banks start to compete for deposits by paying higher interest.

That in turn could give rise to a new wave of arbitrage on the yuan.

With a currency seeming set only on an upward trajectory, those with the means have borrowed dollars offshore, exchanged them for renminbi on the mainland and invested in places such as money market funds. The primary culprits in this “carry trade” are traders. As the cost of borrowing rises, so do the yields on money market funds, making them an increasingly attractive investment option.

It could also stall foreign exchange reform.

Carry trade has wreaked havoc on reformers and customs officials alike. For years, it has warped China’s export data. In an attempt to halt the practice, PBOC began pushing the value of the yuan lower in February.

In response traders halted the arbitrage and exports fell by 15% year-onyear in March.

The practice also artificially drives up demand for the yuan and could make the currency appreciate further than the Chinese government would like. Yi’s worry is that hot inflows of cash attracted by interest rate liberalization would make exchange reform unruly and potentially destabilizing.

“What factors could slow the foreign exchange reforms?” asks Alex Fuste Mozo, chief economist at Andorra-based Andbank. “Crystal clear: Their own Chinese companies engaging again in speculative activity.”

Fuste Mozo has pointed out that the biggest risks lie in the slow pace of foreign exchange reform. As more and more trade is conducted in renminbi, the demand for convertibility increases. Slower changes to the forex scheme could spell out overall delays in the grand prize of financial reform: The opening of the capital account.

All arrows point out Hot inflows of cash are one thing; a massive outflow of capital is another – perhaps a far greater threat of destabilization to the Chinese economy.

That prospect has bound policymak-

COVER STORY: FINANCIAL REFORM

Four pillars of financial reform Interest rate liberalization Latest: On December 8, 2013, PBOC gave approval for interbank negotiable certificates of deposit.

Next: Allow certificates of deposit for ordinary bank customers.

Finale: Cap on interest rate on deposits is removed.

COMPETING VOICES: PBOC governor Zhou Xiaochuan, third right, CBRC chairman Shang Fulin, second right, and CIRC chairman Xiang Junbo all have their own thoughts on finanical reform

ers such as SAFE and the China Securities Regulatory Commission in a struggle to safely open markets to the outside world.

China’s capital account is still largely closed, preventing any sudden surge of cash in or out of the country but also keeping much-needed foreign capital at the doorstep. In 2003, the CSRC and the central bank began slowly opening the domestic equity market with programs that allot quotas to foreign institutional investors. A similar outbound program opened in 2006 allows domestic institutional investors to invest in capital markets abroad. A system for investing offshore yuan back onto the mainland also exists.

These experiments for opening the capital account have grown rapidly since 2011 and quotas for the inbound program, the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor scheme, or QFII, have quintupled from US$30 billion then to US$150 billion today.

A major breakthrough came this March when the CSRC and Hong Kong’s securities regulator announced that qualified investors in Shanghai would soon be given a quota of US$40 billion to invest in the Hong Kong stock market. A similar cohort in Hong Kong would be allowed to invest up US$48 billion in the Shang-

hai stock market.

This most recent step in capital account reform, called the ShanghaiHong Kong Connect, was applauded by analysts but it reveals, yet again, another serious problem in the sequencing in overall financial reform, namely a lag in reinventing China’s domestic capital market.

The mainland equities market is stricken with problems such as insider trading and false reporting on earnings. China’s major stock indices have been among the worst performing in the world for several years and the losers have generally been retail investors. Trust in the market has been all but depleted.

At the same time, the CSRC maintains an overbearing role in the approval process for companies coming to market. The regulator closed the IPO pipeline between November 2012 and January 2014. Nearly 1,000 firms queued for approval; some reportedly went bust in the desperate search for capital. The CSRC has promised to move away from its rigorous approval process for new listing by enacting an IPO registry, where all companies that meet a set list of regulations can sell shares on the market.

However, it’s stumbling in that effort.

In 2014, the regulator has signaled that it will continue to tightly con-

Capital markets reform Latest: On February 19, 2014, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission raised the ratio that insurance companies are allowed to invest in securities from 25% of total assets to 30%.

Next: The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) must ditch its IPO-approval system and adopt a registry for new listings.

Finale: China’s capital markets are highly diversified and stock exchanges are regulated efficiently, protecting domestic retail investors and attracting foreign institutional investors.

Foreign exchange reform Latest: On March 17, 2014, PBOC widened the daily trading band of the yuan from 1% in either direction to 2%.

Next: PBOC interferes less with the daily referencing rate that sets the price the yuan starts trading at.

Finale: The yuan trades freely on international markets.

Capital account liberalization Latest: On April 10, 2014, the CSRC and the Hong Kong securities regulator announced a program that will give investors in Hong Kong and Shanghai limited access to each other’s bourses.

Next: Issue new rules on how capital flows between the mainland and the Shanghai free trade zone Finale: Foreign investors can easily access China’s capital markets and domestic investors can freely access international markets.

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COVER STORY: FINANCIAL REFORM

BAD DEAL: Convertability and exchange of the renminbi is still tightly controlled in China and full liberalization could be years off, experts say

trol the number of IPOs, allowing just 100 firms to list in the second half of the year.

The laggard pace of capital markets reform at home will stall any major openings in China’s capital account. Chinese investors tired of losing money on domestic bourses will jump at the first opportunity to put their money into better-performing capital markets overseas; meanwhile international investors aren’t exactly eager to access China’s exchanges. The QFII quota proves this point: Of the US$150 billion available to foreign investors, nearly US$100 billion hasn’t been used.

“If the capital account is fully open there would be huge outflow,” says Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior analyst at investment bank Credit Agricole in Hong Kong. “It would reduce banks’ deposit bases and the ability to fund growth in China and lead to a collapse of the exchange rate.”

International foreign investors already have diversified stock portfolios whereas Chinese do not, Kowalczyk pointed out, another reason why more capital would pour out than in.

When reform is not enough For the People’s Bank, perhaps the 16

China Economic Review | June 2014

“If the capital account is fully open there would be huge outflow” - Dariusz Kowalczyk, Credit Agricole most difficult aspect of coordinating financial reform will be trying to get state-owned companies and local governments to follow their lead.

China isn’t just waist deep in reworking its financial system. The country is also carrying out muchneeded overhauls in nearly every corner of the economy. That includes shaking the way in which local governments fund their public works, how rural migrants move to cities and how state-owned enterprises operate.

All of these overlap with financial reform, especially with the liberalization of interest rates.

China’s budget law prevents local governments from taking on debt.

To circumvent this rule, towns, cities and provinces have set up companies, called local government financ-

ing vehicles, to borrow in their place.

These companies go on to hire other firms, often state-owned, to build roads or erect apartment buildings and the funds stay off the government balance sheets. A national audit publicized on the last day of 2013 showed that local governments had racked up nearly US$3 trillion in debt; some county-level authorities had debt-toGDP ratios of more than 70%.

This model of growth at the local level is inherently flawed. Local governments base their public works on centrally set economic development targets. Officials, who are flown in for temporary leadership posts, must hit the targets to be promoted to another position somewhere else, leaving a pile of debt behind. Generating growth has relied on the rapid building of infrastructure often without consideration for demand or how projects will produce a profit capable of paying off the loans used to fund them.

The cheap cost of borrowing has played a major role in this process.

For decades, banks have channeled depositors’ money to local governments and state firms at a very low price. The recipients have few budget constraints because governments aren’t sensitive to changes in interest rates as long as the money keeps coming. After all, officials in Beijing have mandated local officials to grow this way.

Interest rate liberalization is set to give the model a painful death.

Once the cap on deposits is scrapped and interest rates rise, banks will no longer be able to funnel cheap money to local governments. The question is: Can local governments stomach this kind of financial reform?

“I recently realized that financial liberalization is not enough,” said Shen Jianguang, chief China economist at Japanese investment bank Mizuho in Hong Kong. “Actually, what I think is wrong now is that financial liberalization has progressed very fast but fiscal reform as well as SOE reform are lagging behind.”

Progress is being made on the local level – albeit slowly. Since 2011, China has experimented with municipal

COVER STORY: FINANCIAL REFORM

New Shanghai FTZ rules dampen hopes for finanical reform

NO EXIT: Officials have touted Shanghai’s free trade zone as the epicenter of financial reform in China but many questions still remain on the potency of the experiment, particularly how capital will move between the zone and the mainland

After a long wait, the People’s Bank of China late last week issued two sets of rules on how trade accounts will function within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. The rules were effective immediately but companies hoping to do business, or move money, between the mainland and the FTZ might have a few more questions for regulators.

The new rules allow for several types of renminbi transactions such as foreign direct investment and lending between the zone and the rest of the world. They specified how accounts for foreign firms, or non-resident accounts, would interact with the resident accounts of Chinese companies.

This is good news for firms that plan to do business contained within the zone. China is set to open new areas of business such as cloud computing and e-commerce to foreign companies. Those businesses should be able to begin moving capital into the zone to fund operations.

Despite the latest installment to the growing list of documents regulating

the zone, overall sentiment is down on the financial experiment, which was announced last July and believed to be the pet project of Premier Li Keqiang, China’s No. 2 in charge of the economy.

After the central bank issued 30 theoretical points on the trade accounts last December, it said a follow-up on the implementation of the accounts would come within three months. The wait was almost twice as long as originally expected. And, crucially, the announcement last week was missing guidelines on how capital will move from the zone onto the mainland. “[The lack of those details] disappointed the market the most,” said Li Yimin, an analyst at SWS Research in Shanghai.

The notice in December pointed to a channel for moving renminbi from the zone onto the mainland, as well as channels for investing capital from the zone into mainland equity markets.

But those waiting for rules that will allow businesses to move capital in-

ward or arbitrage on exchange rates between onshore yuan and offshore yuan will likely continue to be disappointed with the release of each new piece set of rules, Li said.

At this stage, renminbi in the zone will be treated like offshore yuan, which trades at a different rate in places such as Hong Kong and London compared to onshore yuan. Within the next six months, the People’s Bank will consider allowing transactions in other currencies depending on the success of the current regulations.

Freeing up the movement of capital between the zone and the mainland is a matter of overall financial reform.

Opening that channel is akin to prying open China’s capital account, a step in the reform process that’s still far off.

Several other reforms such as foreign exchange and interest rate liberalization may need to happen before regulators will consider opening a channel between the zone and the mainland.

“This is going to be a long process,” Li said.

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COVER STORY: FINANCIAL REFORM

bond markets in which cities will be able to issue their own debt.

In order to value the bonds, these governments must first straighten up their balance sheets, a long, tedious process. As regional governments build infrastructure, the value of those projects are usually assessed upon completion. But appreciation or deterioration of these assets has not been recorded in most places. Experts who spoke with China Economic Review said this process is still far from complete and local bond issuance will not happen anytime soon.

That means that a change to interest rates could limit local government access to capital long before they have found an alternate means of funding.

Local officials may soon find their economies running on an empty tank.

The 2016 timeline announced by PBOC governor Zhou in March was likely meant to grab the attention of these governments and other parties set to be shaken by reform.

“I would think that announcing in advance a liberalization of deposit rates is designed to give banks, governments and SOEs time to adjust their policies, capital structures and approach to a more market-based financial system,” said Michael Spence, a professor at New York University and winner of the Noble Prize in economics.

Black swan The entire economy will need to prepare.

China’s growth is slowing yet the cost of borrowing is rising, putting mounting pressure on the property sector, one of China’s most important sectors for growth and employment. Residential real estate prices are slowing while developers are left with great amounts of housing supply on hand. Most of these businesses are highly leveraged and rely on advanced sales of new homes to pay off debts.

Financial reform is not helping developers. If property sales continue to fall, developers will be increasingly reliant on a steady channel of credit to roll over loans and avoid default.

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China’s financial watchdogs China Business Regulatory Commission The CBRC is the chief regulator for commercial banks and now leading the regulatory charge against shadow banking. Other responsibilities include keeping a lid on local government financing vehicles, rural finance and some aspects of interbank lending. The CBRC uses a loan-quota system and loan to deposit ratios to keep a lid on bank lending but the tools are outdated and arduous for banks. Despite leading to spikes in China’s interbank rates, the regulator is reluctant to scrap these controls.

China Securities Regulatory Commission The CSRC regulates futures, stock exchanges and securities. Yet, since securities firms and brokerages became a conduit for banks to funnel funds into the shadow banking sector, it has had a growing stake in regulating off-balancesheet lending. By the end of 2012, close to 90% of assets under management at securities firms were tied to banks.

China Insurance Regulatory Commission The CIRC oversees insurance companies but is taking an increasing role elsewhere in China’s financial sphere. In February, it loosened curbs on insurers’ investments into securities; China’s insurers can now invest a larger proportion of their clients’ money in trusts, property and equities. If these investments into shadow banking grow to a more significant scale, the CIRC will have a growing stake in shadow banking, and will push for additional regulatory authority over the industry.

National Development and Reform Commission The NDRC is the chief economic planner of the country. Endowed with broad powers and responsibilities, it regulated wide swathes of China’s financial markets. Its wide-ranging responsibilities and staff of civil servants, however, made it ill equipped and too slow to respond to rapidly developing financial markets. Within the past three years, the NDRC has lost regulatory privileges to both the CSRC and the CBRC although it has become China’s premier antimonopoly body.

People’s Bank of China As China’s central bank, PBOC is in charge of monetary policy and holds the levers on the flow of cash in the economy. As shadow finance and its associated risks have increased, PBOC has grown averse to footing the bill in the event of systemic contagion in the banking system. Central bank policymakers are now some of the most ardent proponents of a crackdown on shadow banking.

cash to distressed companies.

A black swan event could be hidden somewhere in this confluence where economic slowdown meets financial reform.

Real estate loans account for 20% of total outstanding loans at China’s commercial banks, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. At the same time, up to a third of the country’s GDP is directly connected to property development with the residential sector accounting for about 70% of that growth.

“If [real estate] suffers a slowdown then the whole growth of the economy is under pressure,” says Kowalczyk. “One of the reasons we have delays in interest rate liberalization is precisely because of economic weakness, in particular in the real estate market.”

As PBOC continues to check items off of its to-do list and push harder for advances in financial reform, it will need to make sure that it doesn’t nudge the property sector off a cliff.

E CO N O M I C S & P O L I C Y: 2 0 1 4 G D P F O R E C A S TS

SLOWED DOWN: The world’s second-largest economy is decelerating faster than many thought it would and forecasts for 2014 see further weakness

Economic report card How do analysts rate China’s economy as it approaches the half-year point?

A

pproaching the end of the first half of the year it’s clear that China’s economy is firmly in a period of slowdown.

This is not necessarily a bad thing – China Economic Review has long argued that growth needs to come down for crucial reforms to take place that can unleash a new era of less frenzied but more sustainable economic development. Nevertheless it is still important to watch the pace of deceleration. Many observers are now keenly paying attention to looming risks including the possibility of a property market collapse and a meltdown in the shadow banking sector. Here is a review of what some of the major foreign observers are saying about China’s economy today.

BBVA Spanish bank BBVA does “not expect any immediate economic hard landing, financial crisis or a collapse in the national real estate market.”

But the bank’s economists reckon the Chinese authorities’ efforts to curtail rapid credit expansion from shadow banking could depress growth. They also see that government efforts to tackle a whole host of problems ranging from overcapacity to pollution would further weigh the economy down.

Still, it is possible to take encouragement from figures that indicate China is moving away from the inefficient investment-driven growth model to one more stimulated by domestic demand. Consumption

is now the “main driver of GDP growth, ahead of investment and net exports.” Ultimately, China’s economy should stabilize but that will hinge upon the central government successfully negotiating the fine tightrope act of “sustaining shortterm growth and boosting long-term growth potential.”

BBVA forecasts GDP growth of 7.2% in 2014.

Capital Economics London-based Capital Economics has a slightly different approach to gauging China’s future growth trajectory by focusing on labor policy.

In recent months, the consultancy argues, Chinese economic officials have stressed that they prioritize China Economic Review | June 2014

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employment growth over that of GDP. These new jobs are supposedly needed to take in the growing number of migrants moving into cities. Capital Economics estimates that the number of urban jobs needed to maintain a lower bound of 7.2% growth at 10 million, which is within the “government’s current comfort zone for GDP growth.”

However, if weaker growth prospects hurt job creation, the government might need to take extraordinary measures like the mini-stimulus undertaken in April. But China’s shift to a more services-based economy, which tends to be more laborintensive, could shield it from the housing market meltdown as “more capital intensive parts of the economy run into headwinds.” In fact, this transition would strengthen the labor market, solidifying the “case for believing that policymakers will not react to a further gradual loss of economic momentum by introducing significant stimulus,” a rather contrarian view. Full employment and a slower rate of economic growth are not mutually exclusive for the country, defying the oft-repeated economic mantra that jobs cannot exist without growth.

Capital Economics forecasts GDP growth of 7.3% in 2014.

Deutsche Bank Deutsche Bank is emerging as the chief bull among China watchers, with a GDP growth forecast above that of Beijing’s official 7.5% target for this year. The cause for such optimism? A rebound in exports.

Even after Beijing recently announced it would hasten the pace of RMB liberalization, which could strengthen the currency against the dollar and thus make its produces less competitive, Deutsche Bank believes real export growth will prop up China’s economy this year. “More important, though, we expect the external sector to re-emerge for the first time in four years as a source of growth in the economy.” This is because the rate of RMB appreciation is slowing down, headline reforms such as the Shanghai free 20

China Economic Review | June 2014

SKY’S THE LIMIT: Only a damaging credit boom can push China’s economy beyond the clouds

trade zone and improving external demand from the US and Euro area.

Stronger exports therefore would give policymakers some room to scale back investment-driven fiscal stimulus policies, which have been blamed for the massive build up of non-performing loans and debt levels. The overall effect of export-driven growth should be to quicken the pace of structural reforms.

Deutsche Bank forecasts GDP growth of 7.8% in 2014.

Standard Chartered Standard Chartered sees slowing growth in credit and housing sales, the most reliable indicators of economic growth this year. That could be the trigger for a weakening in the overall economy. The bank’s China economists note that growth in total social financing, the widest measure of money supply, decelerated sharply to 16.3% in March from 17.2% in February. Other indicators of growth momentum such as property investment growth were also suffering similar slowdowns.

These worrying signs should prompt Beijing to “gradually loosen policy in Q2 and Q3,” in the form of cuts to the required reserve ratio and increased investment. Even though, it admits, there are fierce critics who

argue that cuts to the RRR would represent an about-face from policymakers keen to deleverage and end an era of easy money, it expects “proponents of a cut to win the day in Q2.”

Standard Chartered forecasts GDP growth of 7.4% in 2014.

GavekalDragonomics But what if the above is still too rosy? Research and consultancy GavekalDragonomics leans towards the more bearish assessment on China this year. Analysts there say that 7.4% growth in the first quarter already made meeting Beijing’s 7.5% target for 2014 difficult, while a correction in the property that intensified in April means hitting the growth goal is seemingly “impossible.”

Real estate is at the heart of the assessment as prices look like falling nationwide. They note that the last time the property market had a similar correction in from mid-2011 to mid-2012, 1.7 percentage point of growth was shaved off of GDP. Although the impact this time would be less severe as the economy is already weakening, it could be painful. Overall, “on a quarterly basis GDP is very likely to fall below 7% by end-year, and could even get closer to 6%.”

Credit: Max

E CO N O M I C S & P O L I C Y: 2 0 1 4 G D P F O R E C A S TS

E CO N O M I C S & P O L I C Y: M I G R A N T W O R K E R S

HOMELESS: The migrant workers who built the Chinese miracle have for years lived in shoddy but cheap homes in central parts of cities but as urban regeneration gathers pace they are being pushed out to the suburbs and face an uncertain future as members of the urban classes

Sidelined once again No urban life in sight for many of China’s migrant workers

I

n February and March, the Shanghai government leveled dozens of acres of two- and threestory slums just south of the city’s historic Bund district. The shantytown, a few hundred meters from the Huangpu river that divides the metropolis, was home to some local Shanghainese, but the cheap rents pulled in thousands of migrant workers hailing from across China. The prime location also no doubt attracted major property developers eager to build on one of west Shanghai’s last significant plots of riverfront land. It was only a matter of time before the old houses were torn down.

The demolition has made many winners. Landowners in deals such

as these walk away with great sums of money. The developers will hope to make an exponential return on the original investment in the land.

The losers were undeniably the migrants who lived in the rickety slums. Life in a Shanghai shantytown, which might be devoid of heating and plumbing, is by few measures comfortable. But cheap housing such as this underpins migrants’ lives in a place where the average monthly rent can easily surpass a monthly wage and increases in property prices regularly outpace growth in incomes.

Last year, the average price of land in Shanghai increased by nearly 20% year-on-year for months on end, yet the National Bureau of Statistics said

that migrant workers’ wages climbed by just 13% year-on-year in 2013.

Staying above water can be difficult.

However, there is hope for some of these migrants – and for about 100 million of the 250 million workers that live in China’s cities without the proper documentation.

In March, as the last brick walls of the Shanghai slum were knocked down, the central government set a rough timeframe for phasing out the hukou system, under which rural migrants are barred from accessing welfare benefits in the cities in which they work. By 2020, the plan says 100 million workers and other permanent residents will receive urban hukous.

Urban hukou status opens the China Economic Review | June 2014

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Credit: Matt Ming

door to a suite of resources for migrants. Without it, they struggle to gain access to basic health care and schooling for their children. Crucially, they’re also excluded from China’s affordable housing program, a central government scheme that subsidizes the rent on modern housing for poor urban hukou holders. The program is the centerpiece of China’s effort to integrate rural workers into urban economies, where it’s hoped they will earn and spend more money, and eventually drive China’s economic growth.

For those on the hukou short list, this is encouraging news. The government has earmarked US$19.2 billion for affordable housing this year alone, an increase of 14.3% on similar programs last year. By 2020, it also plans to renovate urban slums that currently house about 100 million people.

Moving such a crowd into stable urban housing during the next six years is an ambitious plan. But that still leaves more than 150 million migrants to fend for themselves in the big cities and no solid timeframe for assisting them. The government has remained quiet on the fates of those left out of the sweeping reforms because they lack the resources to get the required papers.

Local governments and property developers already find themselves under intense pressure in dealing with current hukou holders, let alone those

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who don’t have them yet.

“The demand for affordable housing of those with local hukous is so great that local governments will not care too much about migrants [without hukous],” says Kam Wing Chan, a professor at the University of Washington.

The challenge is coming up with the houses at the right price.

The affordable housing program is facing a debilitating bottleneck in supply. Starved of funding, local governments have few avenues to fund urbanization initiatives. With the central government passing the buck of urbanization reform to local governments, they in turn have passed some of the responsibility for building affordable housing to property developers who can ill afford to do so at present, says Youqin Huang, a professor at CUNY Albany.

Property developers are often required to designate 5% of new residential properties as affordable housing. However, these projects routinely fall short of covering the costs of development, leaving companies at a loss. At the same time, the same firms are in the midst of a liquidity crisis. Housing prices are slowing and property investment is declining – even nose-diving in some regions.

Developers often skimp on the lowincome projects, rendering them “low-quality and vacant,” Huang said.

If local governments are barely able to provide new hukou holders

HE DOESN’T BELONG: China still has no answer to housing its migrant population

China Economic Review | June 2014

with suitable homes, migrants without hukous hardly stand a chance.

Far from providing shelter for many migrant workers, the massive plan to renovate shantytowns could leave many of them struggling to find new accommodation. Under the new plan, when a shantytown is demolished, affordable housing should be raised in its place. This should put many migrants with hukous into stable homes. But workers without hukous will be forced from their humble slums with no replacement in sight.

They are often unable to afford the market rates on commercial rentals.

Even low-quality affordable housing isn’t a certainty on the slums that are torn down. Local governments, which by some measures generate 60% of revenues from land sales, simply can’t afford to allow for cheap housing to be built on pricy land; they will still try and maximize the value of their assets. This is likely the case with the Shanghai shantytown demolished a few months ago.

After two decades of urbanization driven by economic growth, the majority of Chinese migrant workers find themselves at yet another crossroad without a clear path toward integrated city life.

These workers have spilled into urban centers from provinces near and far, peddling fruit and vegetables, powering factories and – beam by beam – raising some of the world’s greatest skylines. But they don’t take part in the life of the cities they build, instead living on the fringes of society and increasingly, the hard, industrial edges of conurbations like Shanghai.

By Kam Wing Chan’s count, many migrants will never integrate fully into China’s cities. The plan the government put forward this year is “largely the same as the old one,” Chan said. Leaders in Beijing have simply drawn from and synthesized older urbanization plans to form the new one.

At the pace marked out by the government, Chan says comprehensive reform to the hukou system could take up to 50 years. Many migrants might as well consider their outsider status permanent.

E CO N O M I C S & P O L I C Y: P R O P E R T Y C R A S H

THEY WILL DROP: Property price growth is turning negative in more and more cities and is unlikely to reverse anytime soon

Fear of heights China’s housing market: Worrying about the possibility that it will all come crashing down

R

esidents in Tangshan are very familiar with the concept of oversupply. A severe glut in the steel industry has put many jobs at risk in the northeastern Chinese city that counts the metal as one of its primary exports.

But the oversupply garnering attention today in Tangshan is in its property sector. Years of frenzied construction have crowded the city’s skyline and, as demand slows, prices for apartments are falling rapidly.

In the past year, the price of new housing in some developments has fallen from around US$1,603 (RMB10,000) per square meter to about US$961.8 (RMB6,000), according to Chinese media reports.

For anyone who bought at the

height of the market, such a sharp drop in prices is the equivalent of the floor falling from beneath their feet.

Tangshan has vast housing stock, much of which could sit empty for years. Between 2009 and 2012, the city was building about 17.4 million square meters of housing space.

Yet at the local rate of consumption, some 1.46 million square meters per year, it would take more than a decade to exhaust this supply.

The problems in Tangshan are extreme; few large cities have experienced such a precipitous drop in prices. However, the challenges facing the city are emblematic of a rapidly shifting national real estate market, one that is feeling the first of many jolts as it transitions away from

central control.

As housing stock builds and empty flats begin to weigh on developers’ balance sheets, investment into real estate has naturally tapered off. Property investment figures from northeastern China show that home builders have taken provinces on a roller coaster ride of construction in recent years.

In the first quarter of 2012, property investment in Heilongjiang province jumped 157% year-on-year to US$432.7 billion (RMB2.7 trillion).

It’s as if developers were expecting an influx of people from the surrounding provinces to Heilongjiang to fill the mass of apartments under construction. But at the same time, the neighboring provinces were building just China Economic Review | June 2014

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as fast, adding huge numbers of units. Investment in real estate in Jilin province hit 304% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2012.

Talking to journalists in Shanghai in May, independent economist and renown China bear Andy Xie told of trips he’d made to small cities filling with empty apartment buildings.

Party bosses would point to nearby cities and say that the residents there all planned to move in to the growing supply of housing. But upon visiting those nearby cities, Xie said he found a similar buildout in homes and the same attitude.

“I go to the next city and the party boss tells me exactly the same story: The people over there are going to come,” he said, drawing laughs from the crowd.

Reality check This is no joke for developers that need to sell flats to stay solvent. Nor is it a surprise that, as the market cools across the country, spots such as Heilongjiang have been hit painfully hard. After rapid growth in the first half of last year, investment in the province crashed to -4% year-on-year growth in the third quarter. That was a mere taste of things to come. In the first quarter of this year, investment plummeted to about -25%.

These are hard numbers to bear for developers who have for decades relied on the “build-it-andthey-will-come” model. “After all, property investment has grown at around 20% for many years – the worst [China] has been through in the past decade was 16.3% growth in 2012. An outright contraction in this sector is, for some, hard to imagine,” Nomura said in a May report.

Home builders are not the only ones getting jitters. There is a chain of sectors from steel and cement to appliances and furniture that will be hit hard as investment into property slows.

This is the turning point that people have talked about for years.

And, unlike the slight downturns in the market in 2008 and 2011, this one isn’t the result of central government housing policy.

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“China’s middle class is just coming out.

College grads with five years’ experience and a relatively high salary still can’t afford property,” - Andy Xie, independent China economist During the past 10 years, China has issued no less than 43 policies and 179 ministry-level documents aimed at controlling the housing market. Since 2009, the central government has sought to cool the rapid rise in property prices with restrictions on mortgages. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier at the time, used to talk of bringing house prices to a “reasonable level." The final such policy was issued in February 2013.

Policymakers aren’t leading the slowdown in the market this time. In April, out of the 70 cities routinely surveyed by the National Bureau of Statistics, the prices of new homes in eight cities fell while prices in 18 cities plateaued, adding in the span of just one month 12 new cities where price growth has stopped.

The shift is perhaps the first real market correction the industry has experienced.

Call it a bubble ready to pop, the slow end to a decade of incredible growth or simply a small correction in an otherwise stable market, but it’s clear that China has spent too much for too long on residential real estate. Last year, sales of new homes were equal to nearly 12% of China’s GDP, according to data compiled by brokerage CLSA, an unprecedented scale of spending in a major economy. That ratio has stood above 10% since 2009.

The closest comparison to this level of spending takes analysts back to the US in 1951. Troops that had

recently returned home from World War II flooded the housing market and pushed new residential sales to just under 6% of GDP for one year. The US housing boom in 2005 drove the ratio to about 3.3%. That bubble popped two years later, leading to the global financial crisis.

China hit its peak last year, says CLSA analyst Nicole Wong. By her count, new housing sales’ contribution to GDP will slow to 11% this year and housing sales will decline by 36% through 2020 from 2013 levels.

Market-bottom prices The free market is a scary place for those accustomed to a government hand in just about everything.

Governments central and local are now backtracking over years’ worth of policy updates, trying to figure out which ones to unwind. It’s unlikely the policymakers in Beijing will idly sit by and watch the country’s cornerstone market crumble.

On May 13, the People’s Bank of China met with many of the country’s top banks to promote lending to the people looking to buy – and live in – their first homes. This cohort of buyers represents true, healthy demand for housing as opposed to those who purchase homes as investments. Speculative buying has warped demand and driven the price of housing sky high during the past 10 years, hence Beijing’s effort to slow lending to people in the market for a second or third home. The central bank’s latest message is that it hopes major lenders will speed up the mortgage approval process for people who intend to use their homes.

If the central government is worried about a slowing property market, local officials must be pale with dread. After all, some analysts think up to 60% of local government revenues come from the one-time fees levied on land transactions. A drop in prices or a slowdown in buying could leave already cash-strapped cadres high and dry.

That’s why local governments are also trying to make it easier for buyers to get loans – some with more foresight than others.

E CO N O M I C S & P O L I C Y: P R O P E R T Y C R A S H

Credit: Francois Colombani

For example, as of May 1, the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu province has granted hukous to migrant workers that buy apartments of at least 60 square meters. The original threshold was 70 square meters. A hukou, China’s household registration system, gives rural migrants the same social benefits as urbanites, such as health care and schooling for children. Zhengzhou, a major city in Henan province, may also promise hukous to more homebuyers. Nanning in Guangxi province plans to let more non-local residents buy homes in certain areas.

These are solid bets. While supporting grassroots demand for homes, these governments will also push along the process of urbanization, which in the long term should boost domestic consumption.

Other cities haven’t been so particular. One of Tianjin’s special economic zones plans to let people buy homes regardless of whether they

already own one elsewhere in the city, a pure play to speculators.

Developers are sending their own signals to buyers. Just like in Tangshan, developers around the country are already starting to offer substantial discounts to homebuyers. Even in cities where prices haven’t yet stalled, home builders are advertising “special prices.”

The average housing price in the coastal city of Qingdao grew by 0.1% between March and April yet developers there are reportedly offering discounts of up to US$50,000, a substantial reduction in price for homes that sell for around US$170,000.

As developers offer more special deals, the monthly data from the National Bureau of Statistics won’t capture these discounts. “ … given that developers tend to keep headline prices stable while offering other discounts, price cuts might already be widespread,” Standard Chartered said in a report in May. Real average

FOR SALE: As prices weaken the glut in property supply in many smaller towns comes into focus

prices in some cities could be lower than many are led to believe.

Collapse never felt so good Is this the beginning of the end?

Most analysts say no.

The consensus view is that prices will moderate then stabilize, not implode. Demand in first-tier cities will remain buoyant while prices will decrease in some second- and third-tier cities. The smaller the city, the worse the outlook for developers. Accounting for housing stock in fourth-tier cities is challenging and many analysts suspect severe oversupply in some regions. Small developers in this area may go bankrupt.

The first in what is expected to be a chain of collapses among small home builders happened in late March this year without financial contagion spreading through the banking system.

If prices were to continue to drop, if bigger developers went under and China’s property sector collapsed, this isn’t necessarily the doomsday scenario many have feared, according to the independent analyst Andy Xie. Economists worry that a stall in property investment in China would ripple through the economy and leave millions unemployed as companies that cater to the industry feel the impact. Households would also curb their expenditures. Yet, the meteoric rise in prices during the last decade didn’t encourage Chinese homeowners to open up their wallets, Xie says. Why then, he asks, would a collapse cause a great contraction in consumer spending?

“China’s middle class is just coming out. College grads with five years’ experience and a relatively high salary still can’t afford property,” Xie said. Outrageously high prices have put normal Chinese under great pressure and have actually hurt consumption; rock-bottom prices caused by a housing collapse would stimulate buying by freeing up more of people’s incomes.

An implosion isn’t the preferable form of correction in the Chinese housing market. But one way or another, prices must come down.

China Economic Review | June 2014

25

Credit: Emma Louise Gallagher

ECONOMICS & POLICY: CHINA’S COMPETITIVENESS

SLIDING DOWN: The ongoing problems in China’s business environment are hurting its global competitiveness, says the IMD Yearbook 2014

Fading attraction If China wants to remain a top business destination it’s time for leaders to heed global competitiveness reports

F

or many observers China’s economic development is a one-way bet. But like those who bet on the renminbi to only appreciate in value, a surprise is sometimes in store.

On Thursday China slipped down the rankings of the World Competitiveness Yearbook. This influential report, produced by Swiss academic institute IMD, “analyzes and ranks the ability of nations to create and maintain an environment that sustains the competitiveness of enterprises.” In other words, it ranks how good countries are at creating prosperity from their resources.

The world’s second-largest economy fell to No. 23 out of 60 coun26

China Economic Review | June 2014

tries monitored, down two places from 2013 and its joint-lowest score since at least 2010, when it ranked No. 18. That puts it below nations such as Ireland and Malaysia – not exactly global economic giants.

While hardly a ringing endorsement of the Chinese business environment, it’s not really news. Foreign investors regularly complain of the difficulties in doing business in China. Policymakers in Beijing and local government tax collectors won’t be fretting about losing revenue.

First published in 1989, the yearbook is used by governments to figure out the standing of their country.

IMD compares the competitiveness of nations in terms of economic per-

formance, government efficiency, business efficiency and infrastructure. The ranking is based on over 300 criteria, two-thirds of which are based on statistical indicators and one-third on a survey.

IMD is one of three widely accepted global competiveness rankings published annually. The other two are the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Yearbook and the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report.

Each new release is pushed heavily in the media and governing politicians the world over use good reports to boast of their country’s successes.

So, they carry some weight. IMD attributed China’s decline this year

Credit: Wolfgang Staudt

ECONOMICS & POLICY: CHINA’S COMPETITIVENESS

SECOND THOUGHTS: China is a huge market for global corporations but as the the economy slows and business become more mature it might get harder for the country to attract investment

partly to concerns about its business environment. A deeper probe into the report data mirrors some of the wider unease over the current standing of the Chinese economy and its attractiveness as a place to do business.

In the business efficiency category that looks at the extent to which firms are “performing in an innovative, profitable and responsible manner,” issues commonly flagged by businesspeople were prominent.

China scored low for the role of large corporations, regulatory compliance and productivity. Shareholders’ rights and auditing and accounting practices fared poorly too.

A look at how government policy helps or hinders competitiveness also reflected long-standing problems. It takes longer to start a company and costs more to fire people and raise

capital in China than in most other countries on the list. Unsurprisingly, the nation’s disastrous capital markets, poor treatment of foreign investors and tariff barriers were all cited as weaknesses.

Yet none of this is actually likely to impact on foreign investment in China. For many experts, it’s unclear to what extent investors consider such rankings when making investment decisions. That’s because a country’s competitiveness is typically less attractive for a company than its growth potential. Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong ranked second, third and fourth respectively yet they don’t excite people nearly as much as the China market does.

Foreign investors find the size of a country’s population and their higher consumer spending an important reason to park capital there.

This does not necessarily factor into what most people would think of as being “competitiveness.” More than 50% of Swiss, European and American companies doing business on the mainland last year said China is a top three priority in their global investment plans, according to a survey by the Swiss Center Shanghai.

Between 2011 and 2015, China is projected to add more than US$5 trillion to its GDP, compared with US$4.7 trillion in the 20012010 period, according to Nicolas Musy, founder of China Integrated, a Shanghai-based consultancy.

“In terms of business opportunities and in dollar terms, this means that China is growing on average twice as fast today as it did in the previous decade,” Musy wrote in an article for China Economic Review in April.

But despite China’s allure as a market officials should not simply ignore what the IMD yearbook has to say. Its economic growth is now well into single-digit territory and that impacts on the business environment. In a note released with the report, the China Institute for Development Planning at Tsinghua University in Beijing highlighted several key challenges for the country this year. Among those are cleaning up the environment, the need to stimulate domestic consumption, financial risks and the relationship between government and market.

The government of Xi Jinping is taking steps in the right direction on some of those issues. Measures have been put forward to roll back state involvement in the economy and open up protected sectors to private investment. Red tape has been cut for small businesses. Still, much remains to be done.

Global competitiveness reports such as the IMD Yearbook have gained influence at top levels.

Whether that influence is deserved is the subject of fierce debate. A weak showing this year won’t hurt China’s attractiveness as a place to do business, but underlying and potentially damaging problems in the overall economy will eventually weaken its appeal unless fixed.

China Economic Review | June 2014

27

MARKETS & FINANCE: PAWN SHOPS

A craving for cash China’s SMEs head to pawnbrokers as credit tightens

ROLL ME OVER: Pawn shops are a small but growing part of the shadow financial system

C

hina’s tight credit environment has fostered some interesting financial innovation.

In some cities, stacks of wool can be traded for a home. Amid this desperate demand for capital, even pawnshops, a traditional lending channel, are changing how they operate.

Labelled as capitalist “bloodsuckers” by the Communist Party, pawnshops were banned in China from 1956 to 1987. Upon their return they were mostly frequented by people struggling to make ends meet who would pawn a family heirloom or other household item for a quick loan. In the past decade their role has expanded to provide capital to hardpressed small businesses.

Pawnshops are now firmly part of China’s shadow banking industry.

This is the murky world in which banks and other financial institutions come up with evermore creative ways of packaging loans and other forms of credit to companies. A report just released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a top statebacked think tank, puts the value of this industry at US$4.4 trillion – the 28

China Economic Review | June 2014

equivalent to nearly one-fifth of the domestic banking sector’s total assets.

That huge figure is the result of the difficulties small businesses face in raising money from banks. Almost two-thirds of small firms can’t get access to bank loans, according to a survey by the State Council’s Development Research Center last year.

In such an environment SMEs often turn to family financing, underground banks and loan sharks to fund their operations. They are forced to pay eye-watering interest rates well into double-digits. By contrast, the average rate at a retail pawnshop is usually much lower.

Step inside the retail unit of an upscale pawnbroker like Shanghai Hualian Pawn or Beijing’s Huaxia Pawnshop today and you’ll see the usual assortment of watches and jewellery that were common 20 years ago. But peer into an office behind the counter and you might well overhear negotiations for a loan in exchange for the keys to a luxury car or apartment deed. The average loan at a Chinese pawnbroker is about US$16,000 (RMB 100,000) versus

US$150 in the US. The industry is small compared to other shadow banking channels, but growing. China had 6,833 pawnshops at the end of September 2013 with a loan balance of US$11.83 billion, according to the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, citing statistics from the Ministry of Commerce. Industry revenue rose 5.1% year-on-year in 2013 while profits climbed 3.6%, according to state media reports. But with policymakers keeping a close grip on credit growth and mounting scrutiny of informal lending rising, pawnshops could see a jump in demand for their lending services from business owners finding it harder to get cash.

As this begins to happen it might push up the cost of borrowing. Interest rates at some pawnbrokers can already go as high as 35% for a six month loan. That could attract more investors to the market. Pawnshops are funded by a combination of bank loans, trust companies, individual investors, private firms and SOEs, and – illegally – by individual depositors. Yet this murky market also comes with inevitable risks. In January, a pawnbroker and former official in Hainan province was arrested for defrauding investors of some US$132.24 million.

For now pawnbrokers remain a small part of the credit system. There are opportunities to grow but those are limited by the fact that in order for borrowers to get a loan they need to have something to trade in. Many struggling firms pledged the family silver a long time ago.

A bigger role for pawnbrokers could be to serve as a canary in the coal mine to flag incoming risks in the shadow banking sector. The shortterm duration of the majority of pawn shop loans may provide some early warning signals of which high-risk borrowers can’t repay their debts.

M A R K E TS & F I N A N C E : I P O T R O U B L E S

LEFT ON THE COUNTER: A story of greed, incompetence and poor timing forced the delay of a major HK IPO as investors stayed away

Head to the trough How WH Group made a pig’s breakfast of its IPO

F

logging pork to the Chinese should be an easy sell.

Demand for the nation’s favorite meat is so strong that it has reshaped the global pork trade over the past decade. So why did investors in Hong Kong squeal when asked to buy into the IPO of the biggest pork producer in China?

In April, WH Group pulled the plug on its listing. Before it was canceled, the IPO had already been postponed and discounted over a disastrous period of a single month.

WH Group representatives were left to embarrassedly mumble of “deteriorating market conditions” and “excessive market volatility”.

The smokescreen of nebulous jargon could do little to hide that the

botched offering was largely of the company’s own making.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like that. When the predecessor to WH Group, Shuanghui International Holdings, bought US meat giant Smithfield Group last autumn the Chinese firm and its private equity backers were thrilled to be getting control of a big pork producer to fill Chinese bellies. So much so that they loaded Shuanghui International with huge debts to finance the US$5 billion deal, helping to push its debtto-equity ratio to 236.8% by the end of 2013 from 7.6% a year earlier.

Since then WH Group has been in a race to strengthen its finances.

The company came up with an initial goal of raising US$5.3 billion

in the offering. Unfortunately investors didn’t value the group anywhere near that. A few days before the scheduled debut amid tepid demand from investors the firm slashed the number of shares up for sale and lowered its target to US$1.9 billion.

Few people expressed an interest: Only one-third of the shares allocated to the public, or 5% of the firm, were taken up.

Fund managers and investors have said in interviews with various media that WH Group failed to listen to the market. A common complaint, aside from the levels of debt, was the price. The price range of HK$8 to HK$11.25 (US$1.03 to US$1.45) per share gave the firm a valuation of about 15-20 China Economic Review | June 2014

29

times forward earnings. By comparison the Shenzhen-listed stock of WH Group’s Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development unit is currently trading around 17 times earnings. Even at the very end, when management were preparing to reduce the number of shares on offer, they were unwilling to countenance lowering the price range.

Others felt the company had rushed the IPO and were unconvinced of the cost-saving benefits from the merger that management was touting. “It looked like the whole thing rested on a very shaky foundation was a reasonable conclusion for anyone who took the time to read the SEC filings,” said Peter Fuhrmann, CEO of China First Capital. WH Group’s management and its private equity partners did not have the experience or knowledge to turn Smithfield, a domestic US pork producer, into a pork exporter, Fuhrmann wrote in a post on his blog.

Signs of uncertainty built up as the debut came closer. In a rare vote of no confidence for a big Hong Kong listing, cornerstone investors did not sign on to the deal. A common feature, such investors agree to hold onto a firm’s stock for at least six months after a debut in exchange for preferential prices. Instead, some big foreign funds reportedly agreed to come on board as anchor investors that would be able to sell shares immediately after the IPO. The pork manufacturer also allowed too many underwriters to cut into the deal. Having the Who’s Who of finance as your book runners won’t necessarily secure orders.

The few investors interested in buying the WH Group’s shares were swamped by calls from the different underwriters. In the end many of them did not know which of the 29 investment banks (a record) to place an order from, putting them off altogether. With so many people selling, investment bankers may also have been less active in pushing the stock to investors.

Concerns over corporate governance didn’t help. This area is a huge red flag for investors in Chinese 30

China Economic Review | June 2014

PAYING THE PRICE: WH Group’s huge takeover of US food firm Smithfield last year forced it’s hand to rush to the market to raise financing

“It looked like the whole thing rested on a very shaky foundation,” Peter Fuhrmann, CEO of China First Capital stocks following a string of scandals in recent years. WH Group has been under fire for awarding two of its senior executives with a US$600 million payout in stock options for negotiating the acquisition of Smithfield.

In fairness, the company hasn’t been helped by external conditions.

US pork is typically cheaper than Chinese produce because of more efficient production methods and lower feed costs. WH Group had intended to use this price gap to sell imported pork at a premium to Chinese consumers willing to pay. But this trade has become less attractive as US pork prices have surged in light of an ongoing porcine epidemic in the US that has led to temporary restrictions of exports of live hogs to China.

There are also limits on how much more meat China will consume. As China Economic

Review reported previously, Chinese consumers will eventually reach a peak in terms of eating meat - the upward trend is not infinite and might plateau sooner than many are expecting.

Growth in pork consumption in China last year fell by nearly a half to 1.55 million metric tons from 2.81 million tons in 2012, WH Group said in its IPO prospectus, citing estimates from consultancy Frost & Sullivan. Sentiment on the sector is currently weak; shares in Chinese pork supplier Huisheng International have fallen about 29% since its debut in February.

Bearish feelings on the Hong Kong stock exchange did little to excite investors. The Hang Seng Index is down almost 6.5% from the start of the year.

The bourse missed out on Alibaba Group’s massive planned listing and saw Hong Kong Electric slash the size of its offering amid investor disinterest in January, hardly a bustling marketplace in which to offer a new stock.

WH Group’s failed IPO has left executives, bankers and stock market regulators cursing. But the company will need to come back and try again soon. It can’t afford to hold such debts indefinitely. Before it does, it should take into account what went wrong the first time around.

Credit: Smithfield Foods

M A R K E TS & F I N A N C E : I P O T R O U B L E S

2014ฤ6Ꮬఓ

电商上市潮 股权投资新机遇 打造云端生态圈

www.cerchinese.com

目录

ቤ਋‫ފ‬ 32 投资与人性

33 ௡ୡ ॖෂ৺ူ 34 电商上市潮

જᄌ 36 股权投资新机遇 38 打造云端生态圈 40 变革与融合 41 智造未来

ᓜ౺

34

ॖෂ৺ူ

42 财富攻略

࢟࿜࿟ှޭ

ఘᒦਪ 43 变则通

投资与人性

新观察

给技术分析注入基本的人文情怀 文 | 艺博

通

过历史数据形态来预测未来的市场

地发展，人们重新定义了交易与道德的关

丧的事实，那就是，市场可以用任何组合

价格行为，古已有之。人类自贸易

系，才使商人阶层改变地位，技术分析得

来表达自己。再加上市场操纵者反技术分

诞生之日就有技术分析。从古巴比伦到古

以蓬勃发展。而日本是走在最前列的，人

析，后者一时陷入困境。后来占星术和江

希腊，有史以来第一次出现的依靠市场生

们熟知并一直在使用K线即蜡烛图，就是

恩等非技术分析手段开始展露头角，终于 将科学的技术分析引入歧途。

存的群体—城市阶层的购买和出售都是

日本人发明的。第一次提出市场心理分析

为了生存。当时投机横行，囤积垄断谷物

的仍然是他们。他们当时的投机思想已经

而当代的自动交易系统等依靠电脑创

和金属的行为由于缺乏监管而自成体系，

非常接近十九世纪汉密尔顿的理论。而中

建的技术交易系统，对强度、周期和趋势

因此亚里士多德写成了《致富的艺术》。

国的《易经》和《土商类要》也为技术分

都进行了重新的诠释。已经出现了完全依

析提供了基本的人文情怀。

靠电脑自动交易的技术分析交易系统，更

古雅典人的技术分析就是根据价格

32

来评估市场预期的变化，和现代的技术分

新世界由华尔街统领一切。技术分析

不用说如雨后春笋般冒出来的各种基于技

析做的一样。后来的罗马帝国已经实现了

的发展如日中天，但是掠夺者和投机客也

术分析的方法，不一而足。股票软件的技

真正的市场经济。这里还有必要指出中世

大行其道，导致公众普遍把技术分析者与

术指标更是成千上万。唯一的依据就是，

纪人们对商人和放高利贷者的普遍认知，

他们混为一谈。等到道氏理论、相对强弱

已经做过的事情重复去做，以期得到相同

他们是比不上妓女和杀人犯的阶层。因此

理论、波浪理论和市场周期理论开始出现

的结果。因为人性数千年来都没有变，所

投机或者技术分析都不能蔚然成风便不奇

并迅速走红后，技术分析师才真正迎来了

以历史还会重演。而有限地依靠图形，更

怪。后来亚当斯密让竞争精神自由、蓬勃

黄金时代。但是人们很快发现一个令人沮

多地关注人性，也许才是关键。

China Economic Review | June 2014

聚焦

冷链物流业未来将保持高速增长

产业与市场

冷链物流货品的明星品类。冰冻食品、乳

购重组的鼓励，优化企业兼并重组市场环

B2C市场双超多强更明显

制品和肉类规模虽然较小，但将有极大的

境，将进一步推动企业重组大潮的到来，

易观智库分析认为，今年第一季度国内

增长潜力。蔬菜、禽蛋等其他品类的增速

而热点区域也不仅限于上海、京津冀、广

B2C市场已经形成“双超寡头”的格局，

则较低。此外，医药类产品将成为冷链物

东等几个区域。此外，从产业角度看，文

京东&腾讯与天猫的差距有望缩小。通过

流未来发展的一大重要类别。其中，疫苗

化、医疗健康等新产业将是重组整合重

京东&腾讯的合作，双方在移动入口、流

和血液制品将是短期内的主要增长点，而

点。在此背景下，在今年的兼并重组浪潮

量、支付等方面的合作，对双方的业务都

诊断试剂则将极具增长潜力。客户渠道方

中，部分企业出售意向将明显加强，从而

起到促进作用。一方面腾讯为京东提供微

面，传统的冷链物流B2B客户群体仍将在

为并购基金提供更多的投资标的，并购基

信和手机QQ客户端一级入口的位置，使

未来市场占据主要份额，但电商的兴起导

金在市场上的投资机会将明显增加。

京东在移动端获得更广泛的用户群，并提

致有冷链需求的商品获得越来越高的关注

高用户体验；另一方面双方的合作可以扩

度，从而使B2C业务成为未来新的增长热

在欧投资风险承受力增强

大腾讯在快速增长的实物电商领域的影响

点。目前已经有越来越多的冷链物流行业

高力国际第一季度欧洲资本流动报告表

力，能够更好地发展支付、公众账号和效

领军企业尝试整合供应链，向着综合性一

明，境外投资者对伦敦和巴黎等避险型市

果广告平台等电商服务业务，为腾讯平台

站式冷链物流服务供应商的方向发展。

场热情不减。伦敦是亚洲投资者的首选目 的地，尤其是刚进入市场的投资者，最受

上所有电商业务创造更繁荣的生态系统。 随着京东、苏宁、当当开放平台的深入，

私募基金加速布局并购

欢迎的物业类型是写字楼。中资保险公司

为自营渠道提供更强的品牌背书，获得更

清科研究中心并购基金报告指出，受益于

现在可以投资境外物业，也快速瞄准欧洲

开放的用户信任。但也面临如何权衡自营

产业转型升级和经济持续发展，国际上知

市场，第一站通常是伦敦。马来西亚和中

品类与开放品类利益关系的问题。

名的并购基金如KKR、黑石、凯雷等渐

国的一些投资者风险承受能力增强，有意

渐进入中国市场，但中国本土并购基金还

愿和当地实力雄厚的合作方共同投资英国

冷链物流将产生新增长点

处于萌芽阶段。清科研究中心分析师曹紫

的购物中心。现在的趋势就是，亚洲投资

受宏观政策和市场需求推动，罗兰贝格管

婷表示，中国目前的经济增长模式正在发

者与当地有实力的合作方共同投资大型物

理咨询公司预测，中国冷链物流行业未来

生历史性转变，新产业的成长也将进入收

业。投资门户城市的写字楼能提供相对平

将保持年均25%的高速增长，至2017年

尾阶段，存量资金将从中撤出，转而关注

稳的回报，但中国投资者将陆续拓宽资产

市场规模将达4700亿元。在冷链物流货品

企业间的并购重组机会。未来投资方向包

类别至住宅及综合体项目，从而让海外投

方面，农产品仍将是未来的主要品类。其

括军工、通讯设备、电网、铁路、城镇化

资组合更多元化及得到更好的回报。私募

中水产品和水果市场规模大，需求增长明

等，既有投资拉动效应，也存在新产业和

基金对风险的承受力开始变大，认为西班

显，冷链技术的成熟度持续提高，将会是

并购重组的潜力。监管部门对于市场化并

牙和意大利等市场已经触底反弹。

China Economic Review | June 2014

33

封面故事

电商上市潮 京东赴美上市标志着国内电商步入新时代

笑颜开的刘强东在美国纽约纳斯达

喜

势。而腾讯最大的资源就在用户入口上，

续。不仅是物流平台，京东集团在上市前

克敲响了开市钟。作为中国最大自

随着入口的逐一打通，对用户的影响能力

进行了结构调整，确立了京东商城、京东

营式电商的创始人和掌门人，伴随着京东

将会领先阿里。“阿里的江湖地位将在未

金融集团、拍拍网子公司和京东国际四大

商城的成功上市，他的身价暴涨到了6亿美

来受到巨大挑战。”他如是预言。

事业群，从战略上确定了集团网上零售 （B2C+C2C）、跨境电商、电商服务、

元。作为综合类电子商务平台，京东商城 在国内稳居B2C电商市场第二把交椅。而

两强竞争必将愈加激烈

此前，阿里巴巴已确定将赴美上市。除两

京东上市，易观智库分析师王小星

向，这对京东提出了更高的资金需求。上

大巨头外，国内电商企业近期出现一股赴

分析认为无论对自身，对竞争对手，还是

市融资能够保障发展战略的执行，使企业

美IPO潮：唯品会3月23日在美国纽交所上

整个电商市场，都会产生深远的影响。首

在未来竞争中处于相对有利的位置。

市交易，聚美优品4月12日向美国证券交

先，京东上市，预计融资规模为16.9亿

易观监测数据显示，去年天猫商城的

易委员会递交招股书，4月17日房地产电

美元，这笔融资给京东未来的发展提供了

市场份额为49.1%，京东占比为18.2%，

商新浪乐居在美上市，途牛旅游网5月10

有力保障。自建物流是京东未来发展的基

排名第三的腾讯B2C（包括QQ网购和易

日在纳斯达克挂牌上市。

石，京东的整个服务体系依赖于物流基础

迅）占比为5.8%。京东上市之前，成功

京东捷足先登后，对阿里融资会产

设施的建设，是京东为用户提供优质服务

牵手腾讯，腾讯旗下QQ网购和拍拍网并

生哪些影响？两虎相争是否必有一伤？易

的保障。物流建设对京东的资金提出了较

入京东，京东同时获得了易迅网的部分股

观智库分析师林文斌认为，京东、阿里这

高的要求，目前京东物流已实现商业化运

份。通过此次战略合作，京东得到了腾讯

两家中国最大网上零售企业的上市和提交

营。但京东物流在二三线城市的布局仍不

的优质资产，市场占有率提升至24%，缩

IPO申请，会引起美国资本市场对中国网

够完善，重点工程“亚洲一号”仍需大量

小了与阿里的差距。在移动端方面，虽然

上零售和零售业的关注。但是，京东在第

资金支持，物流建设对资金的需求仍将持

阿里移动端的份额占有绝对优势，但是，

二季度上市，阿里预计会在第三季度上 市，两者有一定时间差，京东早于阿里上 市对资本市场的分流并不明显，对阿里融 资影响不大。 阿里巴巴电商在中国占压倒性优势， 其地位是否有被撼动的危险？易观智库高 级分析师卓塞君表示，目前来看，阿里上 市更多是在对海外资本市场描述关于中国 电商整体发展的故事。阿里最大的缺陷在 于，产业与产品都基于虚拟平台，在核心 资源上所拥有的更多是品牌优势与信息资 源优势以及在此基础上衍生的用户资源， 真正影响产业链的能力有限，发展到一定 阶段，无法对用户或供应商产生更强控制 与影响。而且，阿里掌握的资源是次要资 源。相比之下，京东对产品源的控制力要 强于阿里，还控制了物流服务环节。 卓塞君分析，腾讯电商并入京东， 对京东的体系与品类缺陷进行补充，京东 在产品资源与用户资源上会进一步扩大优

34

互联网金融等相结合的全产业链发展方

China Economic Review | June 2014

京东上市后的马太效应加剧

电商上市潮

腾讯入股京东和京东上市后，京东将享有

2012Q1-2014Q1天猫与京东占中国B2C网上零售份额

微信的一级入口，同时QQ也会提供流量 支持，腾讯QQ与微信的资源倾斜将给京

天猫 天

60%

东移动端带来无限想象空间。“未来中国 移动电商的竞争充满了不确定性，但就目 前的市场格局来看，主角依然是阿里与 京东+腾讯，两强之间的竞争必将愈加激 烈。”王小星表示。

50%

45.8%

49.5%

京 京东 48.5%

49.2%

49.7%

18.0% 18.4%

19.0%

48.9%

48.4%

40.4% 40%

36.1%

30%

易观智库高级分析师林文斌认为，京 东成功的核心优势是拥有广泛的用户群、

20%

高知名度、完善的物流体系、完备的资金 通路、强劲的移动端实力。自营物流和仓

14.1% 15.7%

16.6%

17.2% 17.3%

20.1%

10%

储配送体系，实现物流全程可控，客户体 验佳，增加用户粘性。借助自身流量大力 发展第三方平台，增加佣金收入，提升盈 利水平。在立足3C优势品类的基础上， 通过改善品类结构提升毛利。打造金融平

0% 2012Q1 2012Q2 2012Q3 2012Q4 2013Q1 2013Q2 2013Q3 2013Q4 2014Q1 来源：易观国际 · 易观智库 · 中国互联网商情 Source: Enfodesk © Analysys International

台，实现公司、商户与用户之间的融合， 既可以增强供应商及用户黏性，又能增加

面、厂家、代理商等库存资源利用起来，

争对手压力，纵深产业链资源。淘宝系价

收入来源。

提升O2O配送效率。

值逸散（用户群分散、可支持品牌与分店

林文斌提醒，京东未来还需要注意几 点：一是与腾讯的关系与对腾讯资源的利

铺发展资源分散），为聚美创造了较好的

争相上市突破巨头封锁

市场发展时机。通过上市加强自身资金通

用并不明朗。二是京东在三四线城市知名

京东上市的马太效应加剧，中小型

路，为与天猫等综合平台在化妆品甚至女

度并不高，要加强渠道的下沉。三是要注

和垂直类电商另辟蹊径寻求突破目前的电

性购物市场形成差异化竞争做资金储备，

意整合线下库存资源，将线下大量传统店

商市场，大型综合类电商凭借市场优势地

对于聚美无疑是比较明智的选择。

位，不断挤压中小型电商和垂直类电商的

途牛IPO计划融资1.2亿美元，其中

市场空间，腾讯入股京东之后，天猫、京

携程认购1500万美元，红杉资本也明确要

东+腾讯的市场份额合计已达73.1%。

认购。易观智库分析师孙梦子分析认为，

截至去年底，聚美优品已实现连续

这是同行巨头和资本对途牛“在线休闲旅

7个季度盈利。易观智库分析师王小星认

游模式”跟团游业务的高度认可。易观智

为，这给聚美上市融资提供了足够的底

库数据显示，去年市场收入中，大部分

气，但能否取得预期市场估值还存在疑

是“线下商旅客户转线上部分”，而极具

问。聚美优品上市的动力是什么？王小星

含金量的“线上休闲旅游”微乎其微。同

分析认为，首先，背后资本推动成主因。

期，休闲旅游度假市场4000亿的大盘中，

其次，挖掘优质客户群购买力，打破单品

在线收入不到1成，发展空间广阔。在线休

发展局限。聚美优品依靠化妆品奠定了其

闲旅游代表着在线旅游的未来。

在中国垂直电商领域的相对稳固地位。但

京东和阿里的上市，拉大了与其他竞

是一如B2C品牌折扣网站唯品会上市后寻

争对手的差距，但中小型和垂直类电商仍

求品牌资源的衍生覆盖与品类资源的扩充

有生存空间。想要立足市场，王小星的建

一样，单一的化妆品品类并没有完全挖掘

议是，一方面要加强与大型B2C电商的合

聚美用户群的核心价值，其建立在三四线

作，另一方面需要提升自身的专业性，或

城市女性强购买力用户基础的核心用户群

围绕特定用户群体选择性进行品类扩张，

有更大的可变现空间等待聚美挖掘。上市

或在闪购、特卖等细分领域精耕细作。在

无疑是为寻求品类扩充、运营转型、市场

巨头的夹缝中求生存，中小型和垂直类电

竞争，谋求稳定资金通路。其三，抵消竞

商的道路并不好走。

China Economic Review | June 2014

35

话题

股权投资新机遇 在经济转型和深化改革中捕捉商机

长江经济带区域规划有利于带动中西部省份优势产业的发展

中

国经济感受到了转型中的阵痛。

消费动力不足、人口红利消退、出口萎

市公司或者行业龙头企业联合股权投资机

今年第一季度全国GDP同比增长

缩、地方债务规模庞大等一系列问题。从

构，设立产业整合基金或者产业并购基金

7.4%，增速比上季度回落0.3个百分点。

新一届领导层上任后出台的一系列经济政

提供了政策条件。

其中，第二产业增速明显放缓制造业景气

策和发展规划来看，基本都是围绕“稳增

国务院去年下半年至今相继出台《大

指标下行，但第三产业贡献GDP增加值

长，调结构”展开。在此大的经济发展背

气污染防治行动计划》《土壤污染防治行

接近50%。另外，根据国家能源局公布数

景下股权投资的市场机会在哪里？

动计划》，《水污染防治行动计划》也即 将出台，相关立法也在稳步推进。去年7月

据，全国社会用电量同比增长4.6%增速较 一季度增速放缓，再显经济下行压力。

环保部部长周生贤向媒体通报称未来五年

徐宇明认为，在改革进程中，调结

将投资1.7万亿治理京津冀雾霾问题，各地

前制造业景气指标下行是传统产业去产能

构控产能、棚户区改造、消费需求潜力展

方政府也相继出台了促进环保产业发展和

的一种反映，在结构调整的大背景下，制

现、土地改革、新经济带建设等方面，可

治理环境污染的政策和指导意见。在此背

造业的走弱、社会用电量增速放缓不等于

能会蕴藏股权投资市场发展的新机遇。

景下，徐宇明认为，对于环保产业的投资

宏观经济的疲软。经济处在速度换档期、

调整经济结构控制产能过剩已成为

不仅能够缓冲控制粗放经营模式对GDP增

结构调整阵痛期、前期刺激政策消化期，

经济改革的重点突破方向，有关部门连续

长放缓的影响，同时也对环保产业快速繁

转型发展的“三期叠加”阶段，加上采取

出台了一系列关于加快推进钢铁、水泥、

荣发展具有较大推进作用，因此股权投资

化解过剩产能、加大治污等主动调控政策

船舶、电解铝等重点行业企业兼并重组的

机构介入该行业的大好时机已经到来。

的特殊时期。但整体经济发展处于平稳发

指导意见和支持政策。相关政策的出台，

4月2日国务院常务会议，强调了发挥

展合理状态。

为推动结构性问题严重的行业实现兼并重

开发性金融对棚户区改造的支持作用。会

组，打好了良好的政策环境基础，也为上

议确定，今年要更大规模推进棚改，由国

目前经济发展面临结构性问题严重、

36

稳增长与调结构

清科研究中心分析师徐宇明认为，目

China Economic Review | June 2014

话题

家开发银行成立专门机构，保障棚户区改

出台。这种方式成为国家规划区域经济发

清科研究中心分析师苗旺春认为，新一轮

造资金需要。采取市场化方式发行住宅金

展，促进东部省份和中西部省份经济合作

国企改革的重中之重是国企的混合所有制

融专项债券，向邮储等金融机构和其他投

发展的创新形式。通过区域内经济发展调

改革，即对一些没必要国资独资控股、绝

资者筹资，鼓励商业银行、社保基金、保

整产业布局，加大东部省份与中西部省份

对控股的行业或产业链环节的国企，在改

险机构等积极参与，重点用于支持棚改及

的经济合作，有利于中西部省份完善产业

革中逐步引入非公有制资本，在实现此类

城市基础设施等相关工程建设。徐宇明认

结构，实现经济繁荣。而中西部产业结构

国企股份制改革的同时，完善其现代企业

为，资金来源多渠道，利用财政杠杆撬动

发展不完善正是影响股权投资机构深入挖

制度建设，实现国企更深层次市场化改革

更多社会资本参与，成为未来棚户区改造

掘项目的最大因素。目前股权投资主要集

的同时，最终实现国有资产的保值增值目

的融资策略。同时也是政府在公共事业领

中在东部省份，中西部地区投资相对较

的；此外，引入非公有制资本也可以激发

域逐渐向民资开放的信号，未来股权投资

少。东部和中西部省份这种创新合作形式

社会资本的投资活力，促进经济的进一步

机构可能存在投资公共事业项目的机会。

的推行，有利于带动中西部省份优势产业

发展。新一轮国企改革比较新的改革方向

迅速发展，从而吸引更多股权投资机构深

为国资监管管理方式的改革，明确提出要

入中西部省份挖掘投资机会。

从之前的“管国企”向“管国资”的方向

今年两会工作报告指出，今后将着重 解决好现有“三个1亿人”问题：促进约1 亿农业转移人口落户城镇，改造约1亿人 居住的城镇棚户区和城中村，引导约1亿

转换。

国资改革重启幕

顺着新一轮国企改革的这些内

人在中西部地区就近城镇化。同时再次提

去年新一轮国企改革逐步在政府及国

容，PE机构可以确定三个寻求参与国企改

及农村改革，明确了以土地确权、土地流

资监管层面确立。十八届三中全会明确混

革的投资机会的线索，即国企的混合所有

转、丰富农村土地经营形式等为主要改革

合所有制作为基本经济制度的重要实现形

制改革、国企的兼并重组及新一轮国企改

方向。

式。国务院发布的《决定》也要求“积极

革确立的分类改革原则。国企的混合所有

徐宇明认为，城镇化建设和农村改革

发展混合所有制”、“国有资本项目允许

制改革一直是PE参与机会最多的改革方

将会带动消费需求的增长，对大消费业发

非国有资本参股”。今年3月份的政府工作

向。具体而言，按照实施改革的标的企业

展具有推动作用，因此大消费业蕴藏着更

报告则首次明确提出7大类具体行业国企的

是否上市为依据，又可分为参与未上市国

大潜在投资机会；另外，农村改革有利于

改革要求。

企的混合所有制改革，辅助该类国企实现

农业现代化发展，为金融资本介入农业和

基于私募股权投资机构对新一轮国

资产证券化；参与已上市国企的混合所有

农业相关产业带来条件，从而会推动更多

企改革的高度关注，清科研究中心推出

制，在解决国资一股独大的同时提升国企

股权投资机构挖掘农业方面的投资机会。

《2014年国企改革PE投资机会研究报

的经营效率。基本思路如图所示。

近期，京津冀一体、长江经济带、

告》。纵观国企36年的改革历史，大致

另一个投资思路是参与国企处于资源

淮河经济带等一系列区域化经济规划相继

分为五个阶段。去年至今是第五阶段。

整合、战略布局及市场拓展等目的的并购 重组改革。苗旺春表示，此类合作按照并

国企改革过程中PE直接股权投资分类示意图

购基金的构建方式可以分为三类： 第一类即国企外部独立PE机构成立 并购基金参与国企改革，如弘毅的弘毅投

直接股权投资

资产业基金一期；第二类是国企或者国企 监管层面通过与外部独立PE机构合作成立

上市国企

非上市国企

PE并购基金，参与监管范围内或者相应 国企的并购投资，比如深圳市东方富海投 资管理有限公司与发改委下属的深圳市远 致投资有限公司合作设立的远致富海并购

辅助国企实现增资扩股， 实现混合所有制改革； 改善或重构国企管理结 构，提升企业管理经营 水平

辅助国企完成资产证券 化过程；实现股权多元 化改革：构建现代企业 管理制度，完善管理人 员及员工激励机制

基金。第三类合作模式则完全限于国企内 部，即有资金实力的国企在内部构建独立 并购基金，支持自身及其他企业的并购投 资，典型的如中电信息产业集团去年设立 的中电鑫安投资管理有限责任公司。 PE可借此东风，适时地介入国企改

来源：清科研究中心 2014.05

制，以图获得双赢。

China Economic Review | June 2014

37

话题

打造云端生态圈 开放云平台推动更多创业者投身移动互联大潮

于移动互联网和大数据的云时代已

基

量最大的公司，也是使用带宽量最大的公

佳欣补充道，云是基础性服务，腾讯的基

然降临。最新统计数据显示，目前

司，成本上有相当大的优势。腾讯云希望

础性服务不是拿来盈利的。

中国移动互联网使用者已接近PC网民规

让价格因素彻底地打破平衡，让云更快地

模，有望在今年从数量上整体超越。与之

在这个行业里得到采用。

阿里和亚马逊云之间展开竞争。腾讯云采

相随的移动互联网经济的爆发式增长，更

据介绍，腾讯云自推出以来，一直不

取了三个策略，一个是降价，一个争夺优

刺激了移动创业热情。各个细分领域都有

停追求更为先进的技术和合理的配置，随

质的创业者，另一个是拼集团其他的资

大量创业者涌现，对于他们而言，构造成

着相关云计算技术的不断进步和优化，腾

源，如阿里的贸易资源更丰富，而腾讯的

熟有序的云端生态圈至关重要。

讯云服务成本得到显著下降，本轮降价就

社交和游戏更强。

“从创业角度来看，新的创业者中有

是基于这种成本下调的让利行为。腾讯云

陈磊表示，云服务的竞争格局，最

51%在使用云服务。” 腾讯云平台部总经

希望，能够通过这一举措更好地服务创业

终与其他产品是相同的，就是谁能体现出

理陈磊透露。近期在北京召开的第九届中

用户。

最大的用户价值，谁就能够取得最终的胜

国创业者大会将主题定为“共建移动创业

这种降价是不是一种持久性策略？

利，互联网竞争就秉承这一原则。腾讯云

生态圈”，显示其旨在构建和完善移动创

腾讯社交平台部、云平台部市场总经理曾

具备很强的竞争优势，用户所需要的主要

业生态圈，推动互联网行业创新力量的崛

佳欣表示，降价是持久性的，不是只降几

价值，一个就是要高质量、高水平的稳定

起。作为中国互联网市值最高的公司，腾

天。但不会一降再降，而是会在这个价格

服务，这需要很强的运营，不仅是技术问

讯坚持开放理念，无论是开放平台还是腾

上保持一段时间。

题，更重要的是产品的运营。“从产品运

讯云服务，始终愿与创业者分享自身的资

降价会不会影响到腾讯云的营收？

营角度讲，腾讯在过往所有产品的运营方

源和优势，帮助他们创业助跑起航。作为

陈磊说道：“收入不是腾讯云的核心目

面体现出来的优势常非常大。我们就是运

大会主办方的腾讯云还公布了价格下调、

标。”看整个全球云端的发展，云端从来

营产品，能把产品做到极致，是运营最强

创业扶持计划等重大政策。

不是盈利的机器，利润率相对比较低，属

的公司。” 陈磊说道。

大幅度降价策略

于低利润率的行业，如果做云端的目标是

云服务是需要长期积累的行业，不

提升公司利润率，这是不可能实现的。曾

是在几年里就能够将水平做到很高。腾讯

腾讯云公布降价计划，对旗下多种服 务的价格实施全面下调。价格调整覆盖了 腾讯云旗下核心产品，如云服务器、云数 据库、云硬盘、本地磁盘、公网带宽，其 中云服务器降幅甚至高达53%。这一价格 从5月9日开始执行。同时腾讯云还宣布， 长期客户在此基础上还有折扣，如果按年 购买的话，只需支付10个月的费用。而如 果用户是在降价前购买的云服务器或云数 据库，且降价后未到期，腾讯云将根据具 体剩余服务种类和数量，按降价幅度计算 差价，返还到用户的赠送账户中。购买不 超过5天的用户，甚至可以退款后再重新购 买。 腾讯云平台部总经理陈磊表示，降价 是对市场发展经济规律的一种认同，云服 务在成本上有非常大的优势。腾讯是采购

38

目前国内的云平台，主要在腾讯云、

China Economic Review | June 2014

腾讯云希望通过降价更好地服务于创业者

话题

云的积累非常深厚。原因是业务激励，特 别是移动网络性能最好。就是将微信做 好，手机游戏要让用户有好的体验，因为 自身业务驱动必必须做好网络服务。腾讯 云的积累还包括大量资金和长期技术的投 入，陈磊认为这样的长期积累才是核心竞 争力。

争夺优质创业者 腾讯云还宣布将推出一系列针对创业 者的扶持计划。计划包括3个部分，分别针 对不同时期的创业者，涵盖创业全程。 首先是腾讯云联合了30多家投资机 构，针对早期创业者进行创业扶持。这一 消息对于创业者来说堪称福利，特别是移 动互联网的早期创业者，可以通过腾讯云 直接进入天使投资人的视野，不用再劳心 劳力地寻找投资。 而对于已经初具规模的创业项目， 腾讯云将提供成长孵化帮助。据悉，腾 讯云将向创业者全面开放自己的资源平 台，得到认可项目将能够获得腾讯云的诸 多能力帮助。具体来说依托广点通商业 变现模式，应用宝移动分发能力，腾讯 云、Discuz!等基础服务及多场景触达用户 的流量入口，满足创业者需求。这些帮助 中还包括市场及营销渠道，目前36氪和i黑 马均已同腾讯云达成合作，将共同为创业 人群提供支持。

腾讯云将向创业者全面开放自己的资源平台

成熟项目甚至将获得腾讯云的基金扶 持，并分享腾讯所具有的云端生态圈。目

质量非常高的创业圈，与他们合作的创作

平台，带动更多创业者加入移动互联网大

前腾讯云已在这方面投入1.5亿资金，用以

者，实际上也有相当水平。其三是向已经

潮，帮助创业者成长。另一方面，将坚持

扶持那些已步入成熟阶段的创业项目。此

成功的创业者提供服务。

致力于构建和完善移动创业生态圈，推动

前腾讯云平台部总经理陈磊曾表示，腾讯 云会大力给予各种资源和平台的支持，用 来孵化、帮助正在互联网中努力挣扎的创 业项目。

互联网行业创新力量的崛起，引导并建立

推动创新力量崛起

诚信、健康、积极的互联网环境。

据悉，自推出之日起，腾讯云服务就

陈磊表示：“中国互联网创业的黄金

以构建云端生态圈为核心目标。腾讯的基

期才刚刚开始，现状是非常乐观的。”腾

各家云平台对优质创业者包括孵化

础业务QQ、QQ空间，本身就就是基于云

讯云开放平台分给创业者的收入将高达50

的竞争也很激烈。陈磊表示，云平台对创

服务的业务形态，而在2010年后，腾讯

亿，未来一两年可能达到百亿，腾讯云大

业者的支持要有方法，方法非常重要。腾

云更是相继迁入QQ游戏、开放平台、甚

力度扶持创业者就像在给土壤施肥。相信

讯云的方法是：首先是借助投资、投行，

至微信等云业务，并以此为基础构建了今

未来的创业环境会越来越好。

投行选择项目的时候，他们会精打细算、

日的云端生态圈。目前腾讯云服务能为用

互联网精神在于“开放和互联”，移

精心挑选，所以让这些投资方去帮助挑选

户提供从最基础的云计算服务，到产品推

动互联和云端也不例外。只有深刻领会并

很好的投资项目，腾讯云的扶植是与投行

广、流量导入、收入结算的一揽子服务。

实践这一精神的创业者和创业生态圈，才

和投资人挂钩。其次就是有很多已经形成

未来，腾讯一方面将继续分享自身优势

能在云时代赢得成功。

China Economic Review | June 2014

39

话题

变革与融合 关注服务业与移动互联的融合以赢得未来

大

变革时代，企业应如何在颠覆中掌 握变革的节奏？如何为服务注入创

新的活力？如何在快速变革的新趋势下整 合资源、携手并进？ “在这个变革之中，有些企业会有一 些焦虑，因为跟不上变化的节奏，你可能 就会落伍，就会失败。有些企业在变革过 程当中，能抓住机会，弯道超车，能够取 得新的胜利。” 飞马旅联合创始人、飞马 资本执行合伙人杨振宇说道。 对“互联网服务全面改造颠覆传统服 务”的趋势，企业家是怎么看的？1号店董 事长兼联合创始人于刚说道：“我们都非 常有幸生长在互联网改变世界的时代…… 我们是历史的弄潮儿，历史的创造者。” 他预测，中国电子商务在未来五年，还会 以20%以上速度增长。于刚接着展望了电 子商务未来几年的趋势：第一是移动购物

秉承变革精神 奉行改变力量

化，电子商务将来的主战场不是在PC， 而是在移动设备上。第二个趋势是大电商

现代服务业是一体化服务业。包括了三个

的平台化。第三个趋势是电商将向三四五

一体化：第一个是线上线下一体化，也就

时代在变革，新一代企业家在崛起，

线城市渗透。第四是物联网的应用。第五

是O2O，线上互联网、线下有实体店，

在继承上一代企业领袖思维的过程中，是

是社交购物。第六是O2O，线上线下的融

其实这两个都不是关键，关键在于消费

否也有新突破和思考，是否在等待机会去

合。第七是云服务和电子商务解决方案。

者，O2O的本质实际上是消费者发生了

颠覆过去的成绩并翻越新的高峰？

第八是大数据的应用。第九是精准化营销

变化。另外很重要的变化原因，过去企业

杨振宇表示，面对变革，一定要有积

和个性化服务。第十是互联网金融。“移

排列部门是研发部门、生产部门、销售部

极的心态，一定要拥抱变革。只有这样，

动互联网的时代将会让大众的生活和世界

门和售后服务部门，排列顺序是越在后台

才会取得更多的成功机会。

走向新时代。”他说道。

越优先，越在前台通常越靠后。但今天消

以上是近期举行的第十二届华人企业

当今时代，服务行业会发生怎样的

费者不一样了，因此离消费者最近的服务

领袖（上海）峰会暨大中华服务业大会，

变革？如何更好地与移动互联网融合？携

端变得更重要。第二个是云地一体化。互

以“变革的节奏”为主题，围绕“继承与

程旅行网副董事长兼总裁范敏认为，在当

联网时代带来很重要的变化，拒绝人情，

颠覆，传统服务与无线融合”等焦点问题

今整个社会进化换代的过程当中，服务业

然后交易就会最大化。拒绝人情的创业或

展开的讨论。大会由飞马旅创业项目支持

非常重要的的变化，应该从满足需求，变

者模式叫做人的云端，交易那部分称作地

机构等主办。企业领袖探讨了未来可持续

化成为创造需求。而服务业应该在升级换

端。第三个是前后一体化。小米是目标群

发展的经济增长新战略、新思路，发掘、

代、产业转型中起非常重要的作用。移动

体作为生产经营活动最重要的信息来源。

关注更多和更深的创造性服务领域，关注

互联的革命已让中国很多企业的估值和市

而且借助于互联网，把它变成了全程信息

服务赢得未来。他们的共识是：只有秉承

场地位发生了巨大的变化。关键是要在移

交互管理的模式。这决定了产品是不是服

变革精神，拿出实际行动，奉行改变力

动互联网的新技术格局创出独有的特色。

务性产品的关键，交互程度越高，产品中

量，才能有效地应对挑战，从而将愿景和

的服务含量越高；交互程度越低，服务含

蓝图变为现实。

零点研究咨询集团董事长袁岳认为，

40

量就会越低。

China Economic Review | June 2014

话题

智造未来 制造业引入物联网标志着第四次工业革命的到来

工业自动化、电子化以及数字化之

在

说是欧洲社会经济发展的引擎。但是，随

（Thomas Rinn）解释道，“灵活地将数

后，制造业引入物联网标志着第四

着近些年参与市场竞争的企业，尤其是亚

字世界的最新成果应用到生产流程中才能

次工业革命的到来。美国辛辛那提大学讲

洲企业越来越多，欧洲制造业的竞争力不

遏制这一下降趋势。此举将提高工业效率

座教授李杰认为，未来十几年，工业4.0的

断下降，面临的压力也与日俱增。英、

与竞争力，增加欧洲在全球工业生产中的

目的是希望制造业能够在设计甚至产品制

法、德等成熟市场过去10年的工作岗位数

比重。”

造都能实现自动化和协调化，让人的忧虑

量分别下降了为29%、20%和8%。

降到最低。

未来15年，在投资支持下，欧洲完全

各国发展情况也不尽相同。虽然德

可以成为新工业世界的开拓者。首先要做

李杰表示，当制造没有意外，是对人

国与东欧国家在工业市场的份额一直在增

的就是制定通用的法律框架。“只要推动

的尊重。当制造没有废物，是对环境的尊

加，但其他欧盟国家却面临去工业化的问

工业数字化的通用框架到位，各国企业就

重。对制造没有质量担心，是对顾客的尊

题。这种趋势将会削弱欧洲的整体实力，

会更加乐意投资。”莱恩说道。

重。制造的转型绝对不是靠一个分析就出

因为工业领域会失去更多的工作岗位与专

来的，也不是靠制造很多产品，而是靠制

业知识。

造的深入、技术的深入。

这还需要更加完善的IT基础设施、持 续的融资计划及软件编程或收集评估数据

过去20年间，西欧传统制造业强势的

领域的培训机构。随着工业4.0的到来，很

罗兰贝格管理咨询近期出版的研究报

国家失去的市场份额超过10%，这部分市

多工业领域都需要能够理解联网工业流程

告诠释了欧洲企业与政府应如何应对工业

场被亚洲、俄罗斯、南美以及非洲等新兴

的新型专家。罗兰贝格预测，涉及多个国

4.0时代的到来，并从中受益。

地区抢占，后者的工业市场份额因此提升

家的行业间定向合作，将在如何更高效地

至40%。

利用数字化技术方面发挥重要作用。

工业在欧洲经济中发挥核心作用，创 造的价值占总附加值的15%。同时，80%

“这一发展，以及物流、维护、其他

促进创新也是必要行动之一。现在，

的创新以及75%的出口都来自工业领域。

服务等活动的持续外包，都使就业率进一

产品的生命周期越来越短，工业以前所未

如果再将工业相关服务计入内，工业可以

步降低。”罗兰贝格合伙人托马斯·莱恩

有的速度革新换代才能保持竞争优势。政 府应出面推动跨国研发项目的合作，来促 进长期研究与创新的发展。 为工业4.0时代的来临铺平道路，还 需要每家企业重新审视其生产战略，以更 好地抓住互联性带来的新数字机遇。莱恩 建议道：“企业可采取不同方式，现代化 已有工厂，或者投资新生产设施与创新IT 系统，这些都可以帮助企业提高在欧洲的 生产率，为再工业化做出贡献。” 工业4.0对中国的意义何在？李杰认 为，工业4.0谈的是价值，并不是制造业， 是从价值到创造。工业4.0的意义，对中国 来说，就是重新回归到为什么要做制造， 如何让它更有意义，当中国制造做到影响 世界的时候，就是别人跟着学习的时候。 李杰表示，一个很重要的观念，看 得到的地方并不是竞争力，空间和想象力 才是真正的竞争力。企业制造产品是有限

实现生产制造的自动化和协调化

的，但价值是无限的。

China Economic Review | June 2014

41

专栏

财富攻略 必须在财富思维上发生根本性的转变 文 | 博猷

语

不惊人誓不休用来形容《中国富人 为何变穷》是再恰当不过了。

该书提出未来3年80%的中国富人将 因遭遇金融危机而变穷。在该书作者张庭 宾所写的导读中，令人触目惊心的警句比 比皆是，如“过去30年中国掀起人类历史 上前所未有的疯狂造富运动，未来3年， 中国将爆发前所未有的富人悲惨返贫的雪 崩”，再如“未来地产富豪会比房奴更 惨”，又如：“在不远的将来，曾风光无 限，几乎占据中国亿万富豪半壁江山的地 产商们将会苦涩体味一句千古成语：成也 萧何败萧何”。 富人的财富是不是正处在危险之中 尚无定论，但是单就富人们大量移民海外 这一现象，足以说明富人正面临着危机。 随着世界工厂的转移，在中国看不到可以 持续发展的行业。技术研发能力的严重

什么才是真正的财富

滞后，很多领域，赚钱效应正在逐步消 失。当富人的财富没有更好的行业作支

财富思维上发生根本性的转变：由“单边

况且美国的房地产也在积极上涨周期。其

撑，面临拐点就并非耸人听闻。张庭宾预

做多”转向“做多”和“做空”两手都要

实大量的富豪已经在美国安家立业，至少

言，2015-2016年将会是中国经济的最低

硬的双边操作；由“鸡蛋都放在人民币一

投资了美国的房地产业。此外，英国也是

谷，严重程度堪比2008年全球经济危机。

个篮子”中，转向资产的全球、全品种配

不错的投资之地。除此之外，做空中国的

大宗商品、股票甚至房价等都会大跌。因

置；由过去主要依赖政府配置资源获得财

工具已经基本到位。股市新的融资融券，

此，必须转换思维模式，升级金融能力，

富，转向依靠真正具有财富创造力的技术

债市也有国债期货，利率市场也是风起云

才能避免财富缩水。

专家和具有全球财富洞察力的宏观智者。

涌，将来不排除银行出现挤兑破产的可能

对于民营企业，作者提出三招应对之

美国经济已启动世界工厂和新兴科技

性。还有货币双发，房地产的硬泡沫，再

策略：退出或收缩，以现金为王；利用信

革命第二季，每年仅2%的经济增速，就能

加上石油和能源、粮食等问题。所以做多

息化，缩短供应链，强化市场响应能力；

让故事牛20年。而中国高速发展的30年，

农产品就势在必行。黄金进入震荡周期，

升级金融能力，利用期货市场对冲金融危

股市却还在一路下探。作为整体经济晴雨

多空都可以赚钱。还有新技术天才的特斯

机风险。

表的股市不会撒谎，无论指数规范有多么

拉、新能源、互联网和环保都将是财富的

单边做多是什么样的时代？作者认

不合理，市场体制有多么不健全，其预测

增长点。就看以什么方式具体操作。

为，机械制造、房地产、矿产等都属于唯

经济的能力依然故我。在经济周期面前，

有做多才能赚钱的行业。低买高卖，单

任何逆流都将被摧毁。股市不可能挣钱。 作者建议，未来3到5年，做多美国。

这个变动不羁的时代，该书真正的价值，

不管是美元的复苏，人民币的贬值，制造

倒是启迪人们去深思什么才是真正的财

张庭宾以为，中国人要想保住自己

业的回归，还是页岩气等新能源的霸主地

富？人们究竟是为了什么如此不择手段地

过去30年来辛苦积累起来的财富，必须在

位，美国无疑都是值得投资的好去处。

去追逐财富？

纯地依靠商品价格的上涨而推动的致富时 代，已经过去。

42

作者的预言是否有理，那是仁者见仁 智者见智；会否成真，可以拭目以待。在

China Economic Review | June 2014

看中国

变则通 变化是生活常态，而转型则有益于民众和国家 文 | 晏格文 (Graham Earnshaw)

长

达三十余年的发展模式正在终

的方向推进，诸如经济增长的减缓、环境

结。1978年邓小平拨乱反正，扭

问题、银行系统和房地产市场的问题、贪

无论期望如何，中

转了毛泽东时代意识形态所遗留下来的路

污腐败、法治基础和规则的不确定性。倘

国的发展速度将继续赶超

线，选择了另一条发展道路，这为中国人

若有突发事件能如同催化剂般进一步推动

其他国家，这仍是一种共

民带来了意想不到的非凡成果。然而，如

中国社会向转型靠近，它们可能会是食品

识。对此我是认可的。然

今中国社会又开始向新的模式转变，对于

安全或者污染问题，贯穿其中的，则是中

而，维持足够的增长速度

这种转变将会带来的后果和所持续的时

国历史进程中两个不同寻常的新因素：中

果真能够确保“稳定”

间，尚不得而知。

产阶级（无论数量多少或如何定义）和互

么？这还有待商榷，我无

联网带来的信息透明。

法下结论。同时我也怀疑

我认为关键在于，当今中国许多群体

观点已不再被普遍认可。

晏格文

在面对改革需求时感到勉为其难。位居上

有待解决的问题还包括普遍存在的泡

层的利益集团和数十年来“小康”政策的

沫现象，诸如对高价商品的盲目追捧，教

社会转型包含了不确定因素和无法预

受益者，可以说是数以千百万计，他们更

育体系、人文素养、社会公德、信任度方

料的变化。既然其他国家能够坦然面对，

偏向维持现状。

面的缺失，物欲横流，各种假冒伪劣—

想必中国也能。包括美国在内的大多数国

尤以虚假言辞为甚。

家，对于未来两三年内将由谁来领导自己

诚然，对于中国人，甚至世界其他各

可能连许多领导人都无法回答这个问题。

地的人们而言，都希望中国能够更为繁荣

当今中国和世界都在经历观念的转

的国家往往是无法预知的，这似乎是被大

和富强，同时也能更国际化、更为透明，

变，一些持续了几十年的陈旧观念正在受

多数人所接受的一种普世价值。而在我看

也许长期以来的关键所在便是—更多的

到质疑。中国经济尤其在近期仍会持续繁

来，如果在中国推行应该也能够见效。相

荣—得益于有待开发的内陆地区仍广袤

信中国无需冒太大的风险，也能在这种不

无垠，从而为经济升级提供了支持。这种

确定性中向着更高层次前行。

中产阶级。 一系列问题正在不断将中国向着转型

改革开放30多年来的发展模式正在发生转变

China Economic Review | June 2014

43

LISTING Accounting Firms

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44

Harrow International School

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China Economic Review | June 2014

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45

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