Entrepreneurship

ZTO Spurns Huge China Valuations For Benefits of U.S. Listing — Reuters

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

reuters–

–

headline

–

–

–

—

zto

By Elzio Barreto and Julie Zhu | HONG KONG

Chinese logistics company ZTO Express is turning up the chance of a much more lucrative share listing at home in favor of an overseas IPO that lets its founder retain control and its investors cash out more easily.

To steal a march on its rivals in the world’s largest express delivery market, it is taking the quicker U.S. route to raise $1.3 billion for new warehouses and long-haul trucks to ride breakneck growth fueled by China’s e-commerce boom.

Its competitors SF Express, YTO Express, STO Express and Yunda Express all unveiled plans several months ago for backdoor listings in Shenzhen and Shanghai, but ZTO’s head start could prove crucial, analysts and investors said.

“ZTO will have a clear, certain route to raise additional capital via U.S. markets, which their competitors, assuming they all end up quoted in China, will not,” said Peter Fuhrman, CEO of China-focused investment bank China First Capital.

With a backlog of about 800 companies waiting for approval to go public in China and frequent changes to the listing rules by regulators, a New York listing is generally a quicker and more predictable way of raising funds and taps a broader mix of investors, bankers and investors said.

“ZTO will have a built-in long-term competitive advantage – more reliable access to equity capital,” Fuhrman added.

U.S. rules that allow founder Meisong Lai to retain control over the company and make it easier for ZTO’s private equity investors to sell their shares were some of the main reasons to go for an overseas listing, according to four people close to the company. U.S. markets allow a dual-class share structure that will give Lai 80 percent voting power in the company, even though he will only hold 28 percent of the stock after the IPO.

Most of Lai’s shares are Class B ordinary shares carrying 10 votes, while Class A shares, including the new U.S. shares, have one vote. China’s markets do not allow shares with different voting power.

ZTO’s existing shareholders, including private equity firms Warburg Pincus, Hillhouse Capital and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital will also get much more leeway and flexibility to exit their investment under U.S. market rules. In China, they would be locked in for one to three years after the IPO.

As concerns grow about a weakening Chinese currency, the New York IPO also gives it more stable dollar-denominated shares it can use for international acquisitions, the people close to the company said.

IN DEMAND

Demand for the IPO, the biggest by a Chinese company in the United States since e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s $25 billion record in 2014, already exceeds the shares on offer multiple times, two of the people said.

That underscores the appeal of the fast-growing company to global investors, despite a valuation that places it above household names United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp.

The shares will be priced on Oct. 26 and start trading the following day.

ZTO is selling 72.1 million new American Depositary Shares (ADS), equivalent to about 10 percent of its outstanding stock, in the range $16.50 to $18.50 each. The range is equal to 23.4-26.3 times its expected 2017 earnings per share, according to people familiar with the matter.

By comparison, Chinese rivals SF Express, YTO Express, STO Express and Yunda shares trade between 43 and 106 times earnings, according to Haitong Securities estimates.

UPS and FedEx, which are growing at a much slower pace, trade at multiples of 17.8 and 13.4 times.

“The A-share market (in China) does give you a higher valuation, but the U.S. market can help improve your transparency and corporate governance,” said one of the people close to ZTO. “Becoming a New York-listed company will also benefit the company in the long-term if it plans to conduct M&A overseas and seek more capital from the international market.”

China’s express delivery firms handled 20.7 billion parcels in 2015, shifting 1.5 times the volume in the United States, according to consulting firm iResearch data cited in the ZTO prospectus.

The market will grow an average 23.7 percent a year through 2020 and reach 60 billion parcels, iResearch forecasts.

Domestic rivals STO Express and YTO Express have unveiled plans to go public with reverse takeovers worth $2.5 billion and $2.6 billion, while the country’s biggest player, SF Express, is working on a $6.4 billion deal and Yunda Express on a $2.7 billion listing.

ZTO plans to use $720 million of the IPO proceeds to purchase land and invest in new facilities to expand its packaged sorting capacity, according to the listing prospectus.

The rest will be used to expand its truck fleet, invest in new technology and for potential acquisitions.

“It’s a competitive industry and you do need fresh capital for your expansion, in particular when all your rivals are doing so or plan to do so,” said one of the people close to the company.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-zto-express-ipo-idUSKCN12L0QH

–

Can Xiaomi Reverse Its Slide in China? — CNBC Interview

Leave a Comment / September 28, 2016

 

cnbc-logo–

–

cnbc-4

–

From King-of-Mobile to possible also-ran in two short years, China’s Xiaomi is struggling to reclaim its spot at the top of China’s domestic phone market. Here’s my interview on CNBC on the tough challenges Xiaomi faces. Nerves are starting to fray among investors who put money into the company less than two years ago at a $45 billion valuation.

To watch the interview, please click here.

–

 

Fresh Ideas For Making Money in China Private Equity and Venture Capital

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

–money-tree2

2016 is looking like it may be another year to forget for PE and VC in China.  The problem, as always, is with exits. For years, IPOs in China for PE-backed deals have been too few and far between.  There was initially a lot of  hope for improvement this year. But, prospects unexpectedly turned bleak when the Chinese securities regulator, the CSRC, suddenly reversed course. Not only did they put on hold previously-announced plans to liberalize IPOs by opening a new “strategic board” in Shanghai and to shift to a registration-based IPO system, they also began clamping down hard on the two main exit alternatives, backdoor shell listings and trade sales to Chinese listed companies.

IPO multiples remain sky-high in China. The IPO queue sits at 830 companies, with at least another 700 now lined up to get provincial approval to join the main waiting list. The CSRC did finally announce one liberalization of the IPO regime in China, but it will likely be of little help to the hundreds of PE and VC firms with thousands of unexited deals. Companies based in China’s poorest, most backward areas, the CSRC announced earlier this month, will now get to jump to the head of the queue.

Not for the first time, it looks like PE and VC portfolios may be mismatched with IPO regulatory policy in China. PE and VC firms have of late invested overwhelmingly in two areas. First is healthcare. The industry in China is growing and reforming. But, entry valuations have been bid up to astronomical levels.

In terms of number of deals closed, Chinese tech startups are getting the lion’s share of the attention. China’s online and smartphone population as well as e-commerce industry, after all, are the world’s largest. What’s missing at most of the funded startups are profits or a high-probability path to making money one day soon. Many are using PE money as part of a “last man standing” strategy to win customers by subsidizing purchases. Loss-making companies are still barred from having an IPO in China.

The main building blocks of China’s corporate sector, manufacturing companies and bricks-and-mortar businesses, are both highly out of favor with PE firms.

Amid so much misfortune, where should the PE and VC industry look next to invest profitably in China? What seems most clear is that any strategy linked to short-term IPO exit-chasing, or seeking to intuit the next flux in CSRC policy, has proved fundamentally risky. Some fresh approaches may be in order.

One priority should be on backing companies that can deliver sustainably high margins and positive cash flow over time to support regular dividend payments. Invest more for yield and less for capital gains.

There are such investment opportunities in China. I want to share six here. There are certainly many others. Looking outside the current China PE investment mainstream has other pluses. A troubling term has entered the Chinese financial vocabulary in the last two years, called “2VC”. It means a Chinese company started and run primarily for the purpose of attracting PE and VC money and less about making money from customers. 2VC deserves a detailed analysis of its own, how much it may be warping the investment landscape in China.

GPs and LPs looking for durable margins, scaleability, and a dearth of competition in China could start their search here:

  1. Robotics gearbox. China’s robot industry is hot. By now, about everyone has read the stories suggesting China’s robotics market, already the largest in the world, will boom for decades to come. For now, the investment money in China has gone overwhelmingly into companies that are making simple robots, rather than the robot industry supply chain. This overlooks perhaps the best opportunity of all. Robots rely on sophisticated gearboxes to make parts move. Making and selling gearboxes, rather than the final robot, is where the big margins and demand are. The technology has been around for a while, but the industry is dominated by two big foreign manufacturers, ABB of Switzerland and Rexnord of the US. They make a ton doing it. A Chinese robotics gearbox maker, assuming they get the product right, could immediately roll up sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars, both to Chinese robot makers as well as US, European and Japanese ones. From conversations I’ve had with C Level execs at both ABB and Rexnord, this is the Chinese competition they fear most, but which to their surprise has yet to materialize.  —————————————————————————–
  2. Hospice and specialized late stage care. PE investment in healthcare, especially into biosimilar pharma companies, hospitals and clinics for plastic surgery and dental care has been abundant, averaging well over a billion dollars a year in China. Competition is rampant in all these areas. Late stage critical care, however, has largely gone unfunded. The unmet need in China is almost unfathomably large. There are basically no hospices in China, though some 10 million Chinese die every year, including a surging number from cancers and long-term chronic diseases. There are also 30 million Chinese with Alzheimers and virtually no places offering specialized care. The number of Alzheimers sufferers is rising fast as Chinese longevity surges. Make no mistake, it’s harder to provide this kind of medical care than to do Botox injections. But, anywhere money is easily made in China, it’s getting harder to make any money at all. The biggest provider of specialized high-end late stage care in China is the French company, Orpea. They are doing a great job. I’ve had a close look at their business in China. They too are awed by the scale of the untapped market in China. A big plus: pricing freedom. The business doesn’t rely, as most conventional hospitals and drug companies in China do, on state reimbursement. —————————————————————————————————————————
  3. Dog food and other pet items. When I first came to China in 1981, it was basically illegal to keep a dog or cat as a pet. There was barely enough food to feed the human population and food was rationed. To say the growth in pet ownership since then has been explosive would risk understating things. China is now the third largest dog-owning market globally, with 27.4 million dogs (behind the US with 55.3 million dogs and Brazil with 35.7 million), and the second largest cat-owning country with 58.1 million cats, behind only the US with 80.6 million. China’s pet market will soon blow past that of the US. Everywhere this is presenting great opportunities in pet care, pet food, pet hotels. The US pet food giant Mars has a large chunk of the dog food market here. But, there are still many opportunities to carve out a niche in pet food, both via sales at veterinary clinics and online. The other vast uncharted market: pet insurance.   ——————————————————————————————–
  4. Server storage. Chinese law mandates that the country now has and will continue to have the largest ongoing demand for high-end servers, as well as the software that powers them. The reason: all the major sources of online traffic — Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Baidu — must permanently store virtually everything that runs across their network. In the case of Tencent’s Wechat business, that means keeping billions of text, audio, video and photo messages generated every day by its 600 million users. Tencent’s ongoing investment in servers is almost certainly larger than any other company in the world, with the other big Chinese internet companies following closely behind. The growth rate is dizzying. This has created a wonderful profit-center for otherwise troubled chip giant Intel. Its Xeon chips power virtually all high-end servers. No single domestic company has yet emerged to build a sizeable business in storage software, maintenance and integration tailored to the regulatory needs in China. In parallel, there’s also a large market for similar made-at-home software solutions to sell to the Chinese government. They are the reason all this server storage demand exists.   ————————————————————————————————————————————————
  5. Mall-based attractions. Shopping malls in China are in a fight for survival. Clothing retailers, which just two to three years ago took at least half the floor space in Chinese malls, are disappearing. They can’t compete with online merchants offering the same products for one-third to one-half less. The going has proved especially hard for Chinese domestic retail brands, quite a few got PE money back when this sector was hot. Chinese malls need to change, and fast. Their main strategy so far is increasing the floor space allocated to restaurants and movie theaters. Another area with huge potential, but so far little concrete activity, is “edu-tainment” attractions. A prime example is a mall-based aquarium. I was recently shown around one-such mall aquarium in a major Chinese city by its owners, a large Chinese real estate developer. Though they initially knew nothing about aquariums, their design and selection of fish are mediocre, the owner is coining money with over 45% margins. Tickets sell days in advance, not just on weekends, for average of $15 for adults and less for kids. It’s been open and thriving for three years. Every mall they are building now will have a similar attraction. A better operator should be able to push margins higher and roll out nationwide. On average, 55 million Chinese go to the mall each week. —————————————————————————–
  6. Indoor LED vegetable growing.  China has a big appetite for vegetables, about 100 kilos per person per year, or seventy billion tons. Many Chinese, especially the 55% living in cities, have concerns about where and how the vegetables are grown and how they get to market. The worry rises in lock step with per capita income.  Catering to worried Chinese consumers could keep a company in profit for decades. One good idea that’s not yet in China but should be: growing vegetables indoors, using LED lights.The cost of LED lighting has fallen by over 90% since 2010 and will continue to decline, thanks in large part to over-investment in this sector in China. LED efficiency has also nearly doubled over that time. It now costs about the same to grow vegetables indoors with LEDs as it does in well-irrigated farmland. Supplying vegetables to urban China this way has a lot of other advantages, including the ability to provide a secure chain of custody, from the place where the food is picked all the way to the customer’s hands. Lots of models would work in China — large growing areas inside abandoned urban factories to supply better Chinese supermarket chains like Walmart, Carrefour and China Resources, or smaller-scale packages home-delivered or sold through vending machines placed inside high-end residential complexes in China. Organic or non-organic, catering to Chinese picky consumers could keep a company in profit for decades.

Since PE first took off in China in 2005,  China’s economy has grown by almost four-fold. Few GPs in China have done as well in DPI terms. It’s likely not going to get any easier to make or raise money, nor to rack up IPO exits. More than ever, PE firms need to back or incubate ideas to catch and hold some of the new wealth that’s getting created every day in China.

–

As published by SuperReturn

–

Quietly But Successfully, US Companies Are Buying Chinese Businesses

1 Comment / August 12, 2020

–

--FILE--RMB (renminbi) yuan and US dollar bills are pictured at a bank in Huaibei city, east Chinas Anhui province, 16 September 2011. Chinas yuan edged down versus the dollar on Tuesday (11 October 2011), consolidating its biggest single-day gain a day earlier, brushing aside a record central bank mid-point as US lawmakers prepare to vote on a bill aimed at punishing Beijing for alleged currency manipulation. The Peoples Bank of China, the countrys central bank, set the yuan central parity rate at 6.3483 against the dollar, compared with 6.3586 on Monday.

–

Is China really buying up America? Or is it the opposite?

Chinese investments in the US draw lots of headlines and occasional handwringing about China’s growing influence and ownership. It is true that Chinese investors, especially SOE, have been throwing billions of dollars around, mostly for US real estate.

Far more quietly, and perhaps with better overall results, US investors have been buying businesses in China. The US acquirers do their utmost to stay out of the headlines. They prefer to shop quietly, without competitors finding out. This does a lot to keep prices down and give these US buyers maximum negotiating leverage. A lot of these US acquisitions in China stay secret long after they close.

Contrast this style with that of Chinese investors in the US. Most end up bidding against one another for the same assets. Overpaying has become a hallmark of Chinese purchases in the US.

Compared to the huge number of Chinese companies shopping for assets in the US, not nearly as many US companies are sizing up deals and kicking tires in China. Partly this stems from some misunderstandings among less-experienced US acquirers about what kinds of Chinese businesses can be targeted. Topping the list of sweeping generalizations: Chinese companies, especially privately-owned ones, are said to have owners who rarely wish to sell. Those that do, want to sell their deeply troubled companies at Neiman Marcus prices.

There is some truth to this arm-chair analysis. But, equally, there are good deals being done. I’ve written before about the most successful US acquisition in China, by food giant General Mills. (Click here to read.) It’s a textbook case of how to do M&A in China and also how to build a billion dollar business there without anyone really noticing.

Why buy rather than build in China? For one thing, China has huge and fast-growing markets in almost all industries except the smoke-stack ones. For buyers that choose and execute well, the China market is proving lucrative ground to do M&A. It’s a truth that remains a known to a select group of smart buyers.

Lifting the veil a bit, here are some of the largely-unpublicized acquisitions done by smart American buyers in China.

3d

In April 2015, 3D Systems, a New York Stock Exchange-quoted manufacturer of 3D printers, purchased 65% of a Chinese 3D printing sales and service company Wuxi Easyway. The Chinese company’s customers in China include VW, Nissan, Philips, Omron, Black & Decker, Panasonic and Honeywell. 3D Systems has an option to purchase the remainder of the business within five years.

Along with acquiring a developed sales network and increased distribution in China, another key aspect of the deal was to make the founder of Easyway, a Western-educated Chinese, the CEO of a newly-formed subsidiary,  3D Systems China.  The plan is to make the Chinese founder the king of a larger kingdom, a carrot frequently dangled by American companies to persuade Chinese founders to sell to them.

Since the deal closed, 3D Systems also accelerated the build-out of its operational infrastructure in China. What lies behind the deal? 3D Systems acquired a local management team as well sales channels, customer relationships.  It did not acquire manufacturing capability.

3D Systems manufactures high-quality 3D printers that sells at significantly higher prices than Chinese domestic competitors. Owning a Chinese business with established customer relationships in China will make it easier for 3D Systems to penetrate more deeply what should become the world’s largest market for 3D printers. The shift is particularly strong among Chinese private sector manufacturing companies making products for China’s consumer market.

Prior to the acquisition, Easyway was not a major client or partner of 3D Systems. As the integration moves forward, Easyway will likely expand its product offerings in China beyond relatively commoditized business of producing 3D prototypes. 3D Systems’ printers have broader capabilities, including the production of end-use parts, molds for advanced tool production, medical and surgical supplies.

The dual-track strategy is for Easyway to maintain its existing comparatively low-end service business in China while adding two new sources of revenue: the sale of 3D Systems’ 3D printers in China and an enhanced/upgraded service business of using 3D Systems printers to produce higher-quality and more complex parts to order for Chinese customers.  Both should positively impact 3D Systems’ P&L.

3D Systems used a deal structure that often works well in China. They bought a majority of Easyway, while leaving the target company founder/owner with a 35% minority stake in an illiquid subsidiary of 3D Systems. 3D Systems has the option to buy out the remaining shares and assume 100% control. But, the option may never be exercised. 3D Systems now enjoys the benefits of holding corporate control, including consolidation, while also keeping the previous owner aligned and incentivized.

The deal isn’t without its risks, of course. 3D Systems previously had no corporate presence in China. It therefore did not have its own management team in place and on-the-ground in China to manage the integration of Easyway and monitor the business going forward.

illinois

In July 2013, Illinois Tool Works (“ITW”), a huge and hugely-successful US industrial conglomerate, purchased 100% of a Chinese kitchen supply manufacturer Gold Pattern Holdings, based in Guangzhou, from global private equity firm Actis.

The acquisition fits well with the expansion strategy of ITW of looking to make tuck-in acquisitions in their core business segments. ITW has a large food equipment business with over $2 billion in annual revenue, 15% of ITW’s total.  Gold Pattern’s business is selling Western-style kitchen equipment to restaurants and hotels in China.

From discussions we’ve had with ITW since the acquisition, the deal is considered a solid success within ITW. The company says it has a strengthened appetite to make more such acquisitions in China, a key market for the company going forward.

ITW owns some of the most well-known brands in the food equipment industry, including Hobart mixers and Vulcan ranges. Buying Gold Pattern was part of a strategy to increase sales and distribution of these ITW brands in the fast-growing China market. Gold Pattern’s own commercial kitchen equipment is lower-priced and generally considered lower-quality.  But, the domestic sales channels used to sell Gold Pattern’s equipment is also suitable to distribute ITW’s US brands.

ITW expects that as China continues to grow more affluent, the demand among the Chinese middle class for European and American food will expand significantly. This will create a long-term market opportunity for ITW to sell Western style commercial kitchen equipment. More and more four-and-five star hotels in China are being equipped with Western kitchens as well as Chinese ones.

ITW mitigated its deal risk by buying Gold Pattern from a well-regarded international PE fund. As a result, Gold Pattern already had fully-compliant GAAP accounting, established corporate governance structures, and a professional management team. No less important, ITW knew from the outset that Gold Pattern had already successfully undergone the forensic due diligence process that preceded Actis buying control of the company. This significantly lower due diligence risk, a prime reason many deals in China – both minority and control – fail to close.

ITW has significant experience buying and integrating businesses globally. They had operations in China for twenty years prior to this acquisition.  ITW and another diversified Midwestern industrial company, Dover Corporation, are both actively, but ever-so-quietly seeking more acquisitions in China, aimed primarily at expanding their sales and distribution in China’s growing domestic market.

 amazon

This deal happened a long time ago, but continues to pay dividends for Amazon. In August 2004, they bought 100% of Chinese e-commerce company Joyo, paying a total of $75mn including an earn-out.  At the time, e-commerce in China was in its infancy, while Amazon was less than one-tenth its current size. The purchase of Joyo was a calculated gamble that China’s online shopping industry, despite huge impediments at the time including no established online payment systems would eventually achieve meaningful scale.

The gamble has paid off handsomely for Amazon. The e-commerce industry in China is now at least 50X larger than in 2004, with revenues last year of over $700bn. E-commerce revenues are projected to double in China by 2020. Amazon is the only non-Chinese company with meaningful market share and revenues in this hot sector. That said, Amazon is dwarfed by Alibaba’s Taobao, which has a market share in China estimated at 75%.

But, Amazon in 2012 spotted an opportunity to use its China-based business to establish a highly-lucrative cross-border business facilitating direct export sales by Chinese manufacturers and individual traders on Amazon’s main US and UK websites.  This is a business Alibaba has tried and so far failed to enter.  As a result, Amazon’s senior management, if they know no one is listening, will tell you the Joyo acquisition is a big success. It generates meaningful revenue in China (approx. $3bn), while supporting the infrastructure to build out the cross-border exports.  Amazon continues to invest aggressively in China, with enormous warehouse facilities (800,000 total sqm) and wholly-owned logistics business.

When Amazon bought Joyo, it knew full well that Chinese law, as written, forbids foreign companies from owning a domestic internet company. The Chinese government views the internet and e-commerce as “strategic national industries”. At the time, Amazon got around this by using an ownership structure for its China business called a “Variable Interest Entity” (“VIE”) also used by some domestic Chinese e-commerce companies that listed on the US stock market. The Chinese government, if they chose to, could probably shut Amazon down in China, because it’s using this loophole to operate in China. That could leave Amazon scrambling to find a way to stay in business in a country in which it now has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

The boards of many other large US companies would blanch at approving a deal where the assets are owned indirectly and control could be so easily forfeited by Chinese regulatory action. But, Amazon, with founder Jeff Bezos firmly in control, has shown itself time and again to be comfortable with making rather bold bets. Success in China often requires that mindset.

negative

Of course, US buyers have also slipped on their share of Chinese banana peels. Three well-known Silicon Valley technology companies tried and mainly failed to do M&A successfully in China. All three followed a similar strategy to acquire domestic Chinese technology companies started and owned by Chinese who had previously studied and worked in the tech field in the US. The acquisitions followed the general strategic logic of most tech M&A within the US: to identify and acquire companies with complimentary proprietary IP. But, the results in China fell well short of expectations.

The three deals were:

  1. Cirrus Logic acquired Caretta Integrated Circuits in 2007. By 2008, the acquired company was shut down and Cirrus recorded a $12mn loss.
  2. Netgear acquired CP Secure in 2008. There is now no trace of the original CP Secure business, nor any indication it is ongoing concern.
  3. Aruba Networks acquired Azalea Networks in 2010, a Chinese wireless LAN provider.

Over the last five years, no similar M&A deals in China were announced by larger Silicon Valley companies. The strategy has shifted from acquiring companies for their IP to targeting companies for their domestic Chinese distribution and sales channels.  This reflects the fact that indigenous innovation in China has not made much of a global impact. IP protection in China is still inadequate by US standards. China is also a late adopter market, which further impedes the development of globally-competitive domestic technology companies.

The successful US acquisitions in China were all rooted in a different, more viable strategy: to buy one’s way directly or indirectly into China’s burgeoning consumer market.

chart–

Abridged version as published in Nikkei Asian Review

–

–

What Alibaba Can Teach G20 Leaders — China Daily OpEd Commentary

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

China Daily

Rural Taobao

It’s been 740 years since Hangzhou could rightly claim to be the most important city on earth. Back then, it was the capital of the world’s wealthiest and most developed nation, China during the Southern Song Dynasty. This week Hangzhou will briefly again be the center of the world’s attention and admiration, as the leaders of twenty of the world’s most developed countries arrive in the city to participate in the two-day G20 Summit.

The world’s spotlight will fall both on Hangzhou’s most famous historical landmark, West Lake, as well as its most famous local company, Alibaba, which also happens to be the world’s largest e-commerce company. Alibaba’s founder and chairman Jack Ma, is a Hangzhou native. He has spoken often of his pride that the G20 will be held in his hometown, boasting “Hangzhou has become the driving force of China’s new economy.” He suggests G20 visitors might want to rise one morning at 5am to walk about West Lake, to see Hangzhou scenery ancient and modern.

Alibaba has changed Hangzhou and changed China. But, to really grasp the full and positive extent of that change, world leaders would need to venture out from Hangzhou and visit some of China’s smallest, poorest and most remote rural villages. Here Alibaba’s impact is perhaps the most transformational. That’s because Alibaba has made a special effort to bring the benefits and convenience of online shopping to China’s rural families, the 45% of China’s population that still live on the land.

Since Alibaba listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, the company announced plans to spend RMB 10 billion on rural e-commerce infrastructure, to make it possible for people in over 100,000 Chinese rural villages for the first time to buy and sell on Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this effort. E-commerce now offers the fastest and most durable way to improve living standards among China’s traditional peasants. By getting online they can shop more widely and buy more cheaply a vast range of products never before available in village China. In addition, also for the first time, they can sell directly their farm products, both fresh and packaged, to tens of millions of customers living in cities across China.

I’m one of those urban dwellers in China who now does some of his food shopping from tiny rural family businesses on Taobao. In the last week I bought dried chili peppers from Sichuan, apple vinegar from Shanxi, goji berries from Qinghai and dried sweet potato chips from Shandong. Everything I buy from rural folks is great. But, for me and probably many others, the real enjoyment comes from knowing that, thanks to Alibaba, my money can go directly to the people working hard to build a better life for themselves and their families in rural China. This, in turn, helps narrow the income gap between rural and urban.

Unlike the two big US e-commerce companies, Amazon and eBay, Alibaba takes no commission on purchases made on Taobao. This is what economists call “frictionless trade”, where buyers and sellers can transact without any middlemen taking a cut. It’s a dream of farmers worldwide, to sell products directly to customers and so earn more for their hard work.

Online shopping in rural China is now growing far faster than in cities. And yet what’s most exciting, we’re still in the early days. In the future, farmers should be able to save significant money and improve harvests by buying seeds, fertilizer and tools on Taobao and other specialized online sales platforms.

To get there, Alibaba is paying for tens of thousands of “Village Taobao” centers across China. Here, farmers can get free help to buy and sell online. Nowhere else on the planet is e-commerce being as successfully introduced into the lives of small village farmers. The world should take note, and China should take pride.

This year marks the first time China has hosted a G20 summit. Looking at the agenda, the twenty world leaders will hold detailed discussion on trade, fostering innovation and eradicating poverty. Meantime, Alibaba is busy putting such talk into action. Its efforts to spread e-commerce in China’s countryside provide concrete proof of how tech innovation can be both inclusive and helpful to all of society.

By Peter Fuhrman

The author is chairman and CEO of China First Capital.

–

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2016-09/06/content_26709314.htm

–

–

Chinese Firms Are Reinventing Private Equity — Nikkei Asian Review

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

Nikkei logo

–

Pudong

–

–

July 26, 2016  Commentary

Chinese firms are reinventing private equity

–

Henry Kravis, his cousin George Roberts and his mentor Jerry Kohlberg are generally credited with having invented private equity buyouts after forming KKR 40 years ago. Even after other firms like Blackstone and Carlyle piled in and deals reached mammoth scale, the rules of the buyout game changed little: Select an underperforming company, buy it with lots of borrowed money, cut costs and kick it into shape, then sell out at a big markup, either in an initial public offering or to a strategic buyer.

This has proved a lucrative business that lots of small private equity firms worldwide have sought to copy. China’s domestic buyout funds, however, are trying to reinvent the PE buyout in ways that Kravis would barely recognize. Instead of using fancy financial engineering, leverage and tight operational efficiencies to earn a return, the Chinese firms are counting on Chinese consumers to turn their buyout deals into moneymakers.

Compared to KKR and other global giants, Chinese buyout firms are tiny, new to the game and little known inside China or out. Firms such as AGIC, Golden Brick, PAG, JAC and Hua Capital have billions of dollars at their disposal to buy international companies. Within the last year, these five have successfully led deals to acquire large technology and computer hardware companies in the U.S. and Europe, including the makers of Lexmark printers, OmniVision semiconductors and the Opera web browser.

So what’s up here? The Chinese government is urgently seeking to upgrade the country’s manufacturing and technology base. The goal is to sustain manufacturing profits as domestic costs rise and sales slow worldwide for made-in-China industrial products. The government is pouring money into supporting more research and development. It is also spreading its bets by providing encouragement and sometimes cash to Chinese investment companies to buy U.S. and European companies with global brands and valuable intellectual property.

While the hope is that acquired companies will help China move out of the basement of the global supply chain, the buyout funds have a more immediate goal in sight, namely a huge expansion of the acquired companies’ sales within China.

This is where the Chinese buyout firms differ so fundamentally from their global counterparts. They aren’t focusing much on streamlining acquired operations, shaving costs and improving margins. Instead, they plan to leave things more or less unchanged at each target company’s headquarters while seeking to bolt on a major new source of revenues that was either ignored or poorly managed.

So for example, now that the Lexmark printer business is Chinese-owned, the plan will be to push growth in China and capture market share from domestic manufacturers that lack a well-known global brand and proprietary technologies. With OmniVision Technologies, the plan will be to aggressively build sales to China’s domestic mobile phone producers such as Huawei Technologies, Oppo Electronics and Xiaomi.

The China Android phone market is the biggest in the world.  Omnivision used to be the main supplier of mobile phone camera sensor chips to the Apple iPhone, but lost much of the business to Sony.

In launching last year the $1.8bn takeover of then then Nasdaq-quoted Omnivision, Hua Capital took on significant and unhedgeable risk. The deal needed the approval of the US Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, also known as CFIUS. This somewhat-shadowy interagency body vets foreign takeovers of US companies to decide if US national security might be compromised. CFIUS has occasionally blocked deals by Chinese acquirers where the target had patents and other know-how that might potentially have non-civilian applications.

CFIUS also arrogates to itself approval rights over takeovers by Chinese companies of non-US businesses, if the target has some presence in the US. It used this justification to block the $2.8 billion takeover by Chinese buyout fund GO Scale Capital of 80% of the LED business of Netherlands-based Philips. CFIUS acted almost a year after GO Scale and Philips first agreed to the deal. All the time and money spent by GO Scale with US and Dutch lawyers, consultants and accountants to conclude the deal went down the drain. CFIUS rulings cannot be readily appealed.

Worrying about CFIUS approval isn’t something KKR or Blackstone need do, but it’s a core part of the workload at Chinese buyout funds. Hua Capital ultimately got the okay to buy Omnivision five months after announcing the deal to the US stock exchange.

The Chinese buyout firms see their role as encouraging and assisting acquired companies to build their business in China. This often boils down to business development and market access consulting. Global buyout firms say they also do some similar work on behalf of acquired companies, but it is never their primary strategy for making a buyout financially successful.

Chinese buyout funds count on two things happening to make a decent return on their overseas deals. First is a boost in revenues and profits from China. Second, the funds have to sell down their stake for a higher price than they paid. The favored route on paper has been to seek an IPO in China where valuations can be the highest in the world. This path always had its complications since it generally required a minimum three-year waiting period before submitting an application to join what is now a 900-company-long IPO waiting list.

The IPO route has gotten far more difficult this year. The Chinese government delivered a one-two punch, first scrapping its previous plan to open a new stock exchange board in Shanghai for Chinese-owned international companies, then moving to shut down backdoor market listings through reverse mergers.

The main hope for buyout funds seeking deal exits now is to sell to Chinese listed companies. In some cases, the buyout funds have enlisted such companies from the start as minority partners in their company takeovers. This isn’t a deal structure one commonly runs across outside China, but may prove a brilliant strategy to prepare for eventual exits.

There is one other important way in which the new Chinese buyout funds differ from their global peers. They don’t know the meaning of the term “hostile takeover.” Chinese buyout funds seek to position themselves as loyal friends and generous partners of a business’s current owners. A lot of sellers, especially among family-controlled companies in Europe, say they prefer to sell to a gentle pair of hands — someone who promises to build on rather than gut what they have put together. Chinese buyout funds sing precisely this soothing tune, opening up some deal-making opportunities that may be closed to KKR, Blackstone, Carlyle and other global buyout giants.

The global firms are also finding it harder to compete with Chinese buyout funds for deals within China, even though they have raised more than $10 billion in new funds over the last six years to put into investments in the country. They have basically been shut out of the game lately because they can’t and won’t bid up valuations to the levels to which domestic funds are willing to go.

The global buyout giants won’t be too concerned that they face an existential threat from their new Chinese competitors. It is also unlikely that they will adopt similar deal strategies. Instead, they are getting busy now prettying up companies they have previously bought in the U.S. and Europe. They will hope to sell some to Chinese buyers. Along with offering genial negotiations and a big potential market in China, the Chinese buyout funds are also gaining renown for paying large premiums on every deal. No one ever said that about Henry Kravis.

–

Peter Fuhrman is the founder, chairman and CEO of China First Capital, an investment bank based in Shenzhen.

–

Abridged version as published in Nikkei Asian Review

–

Chinese Private Equity Funds Are Taking on the World’s Giants — Bloomberg

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

Bloomberg logo–

Bloomberg headline

Cathy Chan 

July 21, 2016 — 12:00 AM HKT

  • PE firms from China pursue overseas deals at record pace
  • One Italian target says China links are what matter most

Giuseppe Bellandi never imagined that his company, a 30-year-old maker of industrial automation components in the foothills of the Italian Alps, would end up in the hands of a private-equity fund from China.

But when the chief executive officer of Gimatic Srl realized that Asia’s largest economy was key to his firm’s future, and that Chinese PE executives had the expertise to help him grow there, Bellandi jumped at the chance to partner up. Last month, Gimatic turned down bids from Europe and the U.S. in favor of selling a majority stake to AGIC Capital, the PE firm founded by Chinese banker Henry Cai with backing from the nation’s sovereign wealth fund.

“I was really surprised when I realized how strong Chinese private equity firms are,” Bellandi said by e-mail.

China’s PE industry is expanding globally at an unprecedented pace, putting firms like AGIC, Legend Capital and Golden Brick Capital in competition with European and U.S. counterparts like never before. Fueled by China’s growing wealth, investor sophistication and desire to gain exposure to overseas assets, homegrown funds have taken part in at least $16.4 billion of cross-border deals so far this year, exceeding the previous annual record of $11 billion in 2012, according to Asian Venture Capital Journal.

The overseas push marks a coming of age for an industry that just a few years ago was better known for “buy-and-flip” investments in local companies already primed to go public. The approach was so pervasive that Chinese regulators asked KKR & Co.’s Henry Kravis, a private equity pioneer, to lecture domestic players on how to add more value.

This year, Chinese PE firms have participated in the $3.6 billion takeover of U.S. printer company Lexmark International Inc., the $2.75 billion purchase of Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV’s standard products unit and the $600 million acquisition of Oslo-based Opera Software ASA’s web browser business. The sum of overseas transactions so far in 2016 is higher than Asian deals by foreign PE firms for the first time, according to AVCJ.

“These Chinese funds are already beginning to alter the calculus for buyout deals worldwide,” said Peter Fuhrman, the chairman and CEO of China First Capital, a Shenzhen-based investment banking and advisory firm. “It’s about buying companies that, once they have Chinese owners, can start making really big money selling products in China.”

For a QuickTake explainer China’s outbound M&A, click here.

The firepower to pull off such deals comes in part from China’s growing army of high-net worth individuals, whose ranks expanded at the fastest pace worldwide last year despite the country’s weakest economic growth in a quarter century, according to Capgemini SA. Rich Chinese investors are increasingly keen to diversify overseas after last year’s devaluation of the yuan spurred concern of more weakness to come.

“There’s a lot of domestic capital available, obviously looking for a home, and that’s fueling the emergence of these funds,” said Michael Thorneman, a partner at Bain & Co., a Boston-based consulting firm.

It’s no coincidence that the increased focus on international deals comes amid a record overseas shopping spree by Chinese companies, who have announced about $149 billion of outbound acquisitions so far this year. In some cases, PE funds are working with Chinese corporates and financial firms to help structure the deals and amplify their buying power.

For the Lexmark purchase, Legend Capital partnered with PAG Asia Capital and Apex Technology Co., a Chinese maker of ink cartridge chips. On the $9.3 billion takeover of U.S.-listed Qihoo 360 Technology Co., Golden Brick Capital teamed up with Chinese investors including Ping An Insurance (Group) Co.

Domestic Players

“PE funds like us have very experienced teams, who can do the whole thing from deal sourcing to negotiation to due diligence to deal structure,” said Parker Wang, the CEO of Beijing-based Golden Brick, which has invested about $2 billion since it opened in 2014 and also led the purchase of Opera Software’s browser unit.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. The Opera Software deal, for example, was originally supposed to be a takeover of the entire company, but suitors including Golden Brick failed to secure government approval.

Chinese funds are also becoming more active in their home market. They’ve been helped by a regulatory bottleneck for initial public offerings — which encouraged companies to turn to PE firms for financing — and the rise of China’s Internet industry, a business that the government shields from foreign ownership.

Local funds participated in domestic investments worth $48 billion last year, exceeding Chinese deals by foreign PE firms by a record margin, according to AVCJ. The number of active Chinese funds, at 672 during 2013-2015, was the highest in at least five years, according to data compiled by Bain & Co.

For more on one of the latest China PE investments, click here.

Among the most high-profile firms doing domestic deals is Yunfeng Capital, founded by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Jack Ma. The firm has purchased stakes in Citic Securities Co. and smartphone maker Xiaomi, while also participating in offers for U.S.-listed Chinese companies such as iKang Healthcare Group Inc. and WuXi PharmaTech.

Domestic funds typically have a home-field advantage over foreign firms in identifying promising investment targets, according to William Sun, general manager of Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co., a PE firm that focuses on the technology industry.

“We’re all optimistic about China opportunities, but we probably have a better grasp of them than foreign funds,” Sun said.

To be sure, overseas players aren’t walking away from China. Some have partnered with domestic PE firms on consortium deals, as California-based Sequoia Capital did with Yunfeng on the WuXi PharmaTech takeover.

Growing Competition

Others have identified niches. KKR has spent about $1 billion on five food-related investments in China since 2008, betting that its global track record in the industry will help it thrive in a country that’s faced several food-safety scandals in recent years.

More broadly, foreign firms may be concerned about rising valuations in China, according to Bain & Co.’s Thorneman. The average PE-backed Chinese acquisition target in 2015 had an enterprise value of about 18 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, up from about 11 in 2013, according to data compiled by Bain.

“There’s just more competition out there,” Thorneman said. “That translates typically into higher valuations, more competitive deals, and more players pushing prices up.”

Most signs point toward a bigger role for Chinese PE firms both at home and abroad. They controlled the largest portion of an estimated $128 billion cash pile in Asia-focused PE funds at the end of 2015, data compiled by Bain show.

Given that China is still growing faster than most major countries, any PE firm with the ability to help companies thrive there will have a leg up on international competitors, said Cai, the former Deutsche Bank AG investment banker who started AGIC last year and calls it an “Asian-European” PE firm. The fund, which counted Chinese insurance companies among its early investors, has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Munich.

“Few companies nowadays would care about the money or how much you pay them,” Cai said. “They care if the investor can help them break into the Greater China market.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/chinese-funds-that-kravis-urged-to-grow-up-are-now-kkr-rivals

The Secret to Alibaba’s Success: Dirt Cheap Third-Party Shipping — Nikkei Asian Review

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

Nikkei 1

ZTO–

–

Procter & Gamble’s staple brands – Crest, Tide, Head & Shoulders, Pantene, Pampers — dominate the mass-market premium segment in China just as they do in the US. Buy them at the local Walmart supermarket in China, and just about everything costs more, in dollar terms, than it does at Walmart in the US. Shop online, though, and China wins hands down the P&G low-price battle.

Alibaba‘s Taobao marketplace deserves part of the credit. Its 10 million merchants, most of whom are small traders with their own limited inventory, offer things at prices well-below those at brick-and-mortar shops. But, the biggest savings comes from ridiculously low overnight shipping costs in China. Alibaba doesn’t directly arrange shipping for Taobao merchants. It’s up to each seller to sort things out with one of the country’s big nationwide private courier companies.

There are four giants, market leader Shunfeng and three almost identically named firms, YTO, STO and ZTO. Those three were started and are owned by entrepreneurs from the same small county in Zhejiang, called Tonglu, about 50 miles from. Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou.

So, just how cheap is online shopping for P&G products in China? I ran out of detergent and for the first time decided to buy it on Taobao. I was thinking I might save some money. But, the bigger benefit is not having to shlep the three kilo sack of Tide powder from the supermarket, where it sells for around Rmb 50.

On Taobao, I paid Rmb 20.90, or $3.18, for three kilos of Tide and two-day express ground shipping from Shijiazhuang, a city 1,200 miles away from me in Shenzhen. The same weight of Tide bought online in the US from the cheapest eBay seller and ground-shipped the same distance and time by Fedex would cost $53, at a minimum. Of that, at least $35 goes to shipping.

Yes, Chinese labor costs are much less. But, gasoline costs twice as much in China as the US and highway tolls are exorbitant in China, as much as 60 cents for every mile a truck travels. I bought the bag of Tide on Taobao half-thinking I’d never receive anything. But, the parcel showed up intact and on time. Who, if anyone, made any money on this?

Even if the Tide detergent is completely phony — Taobao does have a reputation for selling lots of counterfeit merchandise — the shipping costs can’t be faked. My detergent was shipped and delivered by ZTO. By some counts, it is now moved ahead of Shunfeng in volume, if not revenue. At year-end last year ZTO was said to be delivering 10 million parcels a day. ZTO is mainly a network of independent local franchisees, with the ZTO parent owning and operating the main warehouses. ZTO is planning to IPO sometime soon in Hong Kong. Warburg Pincus and Sequoia Capital are both investors.

The other three big courier companies are also well along in their IPO planning. Each is saying they need billions in new capital. They can’t be earning much if anything and continue to plow money into infrastructure. Parcel shipping is still growing by about 30% a year. Every week, courier companies deliver about 500 million packages in China.

All four big courier companies are saying they want to buy or lease jets to move things around, to save on gasoline and tolls. They’re also all looking to use drones for the last mile. As of now, parcels in China are delivered by an army, perhaps as many as one million strong, of electric-scooter riding delivery guys. Contrary to what you may think, this isn’t low-paid work in China. You can earn at least double what you’d be paid for factory work. A lot of recent college graduates are taking their first job delivering packages. The career ladder for many is to move up from YTO, STO and ZTO, who get most of their business through Taobao, to work for either JD.com or Amazon in China. Both have their own in-house courier staff, with better pay, hours, equipment and genuine uniforms.

Alibaba doesn’t directly own or control a courier company. So far, that strategy has worked out splendidly. As long as the courier companies are competing furiously, things on Taobao will remain dramatically cheaper than in stores. If the couriers ever decided to seek profits rather than market share, it would certainly put a dent in Taobao’s growth. An Alibaba-backed logistics company called Cainiao just raised $1.5bn, at a $7bn valuation, to better coordinate the deliveries made by ZTO and the other Tonglu firms.

Ecommerce in China works like nowhere else in the world. Sales are still growing at breakneck speed and are on course by 2017 to reach $1 trillion annually, far higher than anywhere else. Cheap delivery makes it a bargain not only to buy P&G products, but even the lowest-priced goods on Taobao.

For years, Chinese law made it illegal for Fedex and UPS to enter the domestic delivery business in China. The Chinese government finally rescinded the law two years ago. The two American giants took one look at the cutthroat competition and ridiculously low prices charged by their Chinese counterparts and chose to stay out of the fray.  In the US, they get paid $15.50 a kilo to move goods by ground in two days between two far-off cities. In China, the going rate is about four Renminbi, or 60 cents.

We’ll likely know soon, once IPO prospectuses appear, if ZTO and the others are making any money at all. An IPO requires a GAAP audit and full compliance with China’s burdensome tax code. This often extinguishes all profit.

Ecommerce in China has so far created only two big beneficiaries. Taobao is one. It earns billions a year in ad fees paid by merchants trying to get noticed. The other is China’s 500 million online shoppers. We save big, and enjoy the luxury of cheap home delivery, on just about everything we care to buy.

As published in Nikkei Asian Review

Investors rush to fund China tech start-ups — Singapore Straits Times

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

 Straits Times–

–

 Investors rush to fund China tech start-ups

Staff at Beijing-based tech start-up ABD Entertainment. Many such firms have been drawing substantial investments from the government and venture capitalists, even amid China's slowing economy.
Staff at Beijing-based tech start-up ABD Entertainment. Many such firms have been drawing substantial investments from the government and venture capitalists, even amid China’s slowing economy.
Published  Jun 27, 2016, 5:00 am SGT

Amid flow of money, hopeful entrepreneurs warned that innovation is crucial to success

Chong Koh Ping  China Correspondent In Beijing

–

Former media man Lei Ming has programmers, budding actresses and even an Internet celebrity on staff at his data-driven start-up in Beijing.

His two-year-old firm focuses on using big data and analytics – a relatively new tech sector worldwide – to help consumer brands figure out how to get the best bang for their marketing buck.

“There’s an immense amount of data we can glean from weibo accounts,” said Mr Lei, referring to the Chinese version of Twitter, which now has 261 million monthly active users.

Through data analysis, he aims to help clients find the most cost-effective ways to sell their products – through celebrity endorsement, product placement or other innovative means, especially on online platforms.

Valued at about 100 million yuan (S$20 million), the start-up received nearly 10 million yuan in funding last year.

While Mr Lei, 34, is not anxious about revenue for now, he is very clear that he must focus on making his start-up profitable. “It is important that we must be able to make money on our own instead of relying on investors’ money,” he said.

The next step is to become a major player in entertainment advertising – a market he estimates is worth 100 billion yuan. In three years, he aims to get the firm listed on a stock exchange. Mr Lei’s start-up is one of millions that have sprung up in China in recent years amid a tech startup boom. According to a report on the China.org.cn government website, some 4.9 million new companies were set up between March 2014 and May last year, with more than half being Internet firms.

Despite a slowing economy, tech start-ups of all sizes are attracting billions of dollars in investment funds from the government and venture capitalists.

According to research firm Preqin, private investors had poured around US$26.2 billion (S$35 billion) into 796 Chinese tech firms as of the middle of this month.

And last year, government-backed venture funds targeted at tech start-ups raised about 1.5 trillion yuan, increasing the amount under management to 2.2 trillion yuan, according to a Bloomberg report. However, regulations and market practices have yet to be finalised, and it is unclear how quickly the funds will be deployed, said the report.

Even though many of these 780 government guidance funds have been around for more than 10 years, the tech investment boom started after Chinese Premier Li Keqiang rolled out his “Internet Plus” initiative in 2014, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship. This comes as China seeks to move away from a reliance on low-end manufacturing and heavy industries.

With labour and living costs on the rise, China can no longer rely on labour-intensive industries to keep its economy humming, said Ms Jenny Lee, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist who has been investing in Chinese tech firms for the past 15 years. “The old way of throwing labour at tasks is over,” she said. “China must change.”

It must adopt firms that leverage on technology, for these will help increase efficiency and sometimes replace labour, she added.

But while there is no shortage of money out there, with billions of dollars being poured into thousands of tech start-ups each year, just as many are going belly-up for shortage of funds or failure to commercialise their products.

This is because investors and consumers are becoming more discerning, and it is no longer enough for entrepreneurial hopefuls to just go and copy someone else’s idea and hope to thrive, investors and entrepreneurs told The Straits Times.

“These firms need to innovate to compete,” said Ms Lee. And innovation can be in terms of the business model, product or technology.

Some venture capitalists, such as Beijing-based James Tan, find Chinese tech firms to be very good at localising new ideas from Silicon Valley and achieving superior results on the mainland.

Still, Mr Peter Fuhrman, the chairman of China First Capital, a Shenzhen-based investment bank and advisory firm, pointed out that while this strategy has helped some of the home-grown tech giants to grow, it is not sustainable.

Successful tech players like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent benefited greatly from an intellectual property and legal regime that allowed them to copy American business models and intellectual property without punishment, he said.

China’s market is also closed to foreign competitors, so that domestic firms can grow and thrive within a walled garden free from outside competition, he added.

However, he noted, it is harder now for China to shield its domestic firms from competition than in the late 1990s, when the tech giants got started, as China has since become a World Trade Organisation member.

“Walled gardens are basically illegal under WTO,” he said.

Another problem that could make it hard for China to grow the tech sector is the unique and “occasionally dysfunctional” capital market and initial public offering (IPO) regime, he said.

“This has now made it between difficult and impossible for Chinese tech companies to IPO within China,” he said.

Despite the problems, the push towards innovation and entrepreneurship looks set to continue, with more than 1,600 high-tech incubators nurturing start-ups across the nation.

Ms Mao Donghui, the executive director of Tsinghua x-lab, a university-based education platform for start-ups, said China is just beginning to wake up to the need for innovation. For start-ups to succeed, however, being innovative is not good enough – young people also need to know how to do business. For them to have the right combination of innovation and entrepreneurship would “require years of effort, right methods and experience”, said Ms Mao.

“It’s not that easy to just shout about innovation and entrepreneurship for a year or two, and expect to see results blossom, and affect economic growth. There is still a long way to go,” she said.

–

http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/investors-rush-to-fund-china-tech-start-ups

–

Why Taiwan Is Far Ahead of Mainland China in High-Tech — Financial Times commentary

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

FT logo–

–

Largan–

–

Every country is touchy about some topics, especially when raised by foreigner. Living in China for almost seven years now, and having been a student of the place for the last forty, I thought I knew the hot buttons not to press. Apparently not.

The topic at hand: high-tech innovation in the PRC and why it seems to lag so far behind that of neighboring Taiwan. A recent issue of one of China’s leading business publications, Caijing Magazine, published a Chinese-language article I wrote together with China First Capital’s COO, Dr. Yansong Wang, about Taiwan’s high-flying optical lens company Largan Precision.

Soon after the magazine was published, it began circulating rather widely. Howls of national outrage began to reach me almost immediately. Mainly we were accused of not understanding the topic and having ignored China’s many tech companies that are at least the equal, if not superior, to Largan.

I didn’t think the article would be all that contentious, at least not the facts. Largan last year had revenues in excess of $1 billion and net profit margins above 40%, more than double those of its main customer, Apple, no slouch at making money. China has many companies which supply components to Apple, either directly or as a subcontractor. None of these PRC companies can approach the scale and profitability of Largan. In fact, there are few whose net margins are higher than 10%, or one-quarter Largan’s. Case in point: Huawei, widely praised within China as the country’s most successful technology company, has net margins of 9.5%.

Taiwan inaugurated its new president last month, Tsai Ing-wen, who represents the pro-Taiwan independence party. Few in the PRC seem to be in a mood to hear anything good about Taiwan. In one Wechat forum for senior executives, the language turned sharp. “China has many such companies, you as a foreigner just don’t know about them.” Or, “Largan is only successful because like Taiwan itself, it is protected by the American government” and “Apple buys from Largan because it wants to hold back China’s development”.

Not a single comment I’ve seen focused on perhaps more obvious reasons China’s tech ambitions are proving so hard to realize: a weak system of patent protection, widespread online censoring and restrictions on free flow of information, a venture capital industry which, though now large, has an aversion to backing new directions in R&D.  In Taiwan, none of this is true.

Largan is doing so well because the optical-quality plastic lenses it makes for mobile phone cameras are unrivalled in their price and performance. Any higher-end mobile phone, be it an iPhone or an Android phone selling for above $400, relies on Largan lenses.

Many companies in the PRC have tried to get into this business. So far none have succeeded. Largan, of course, wants to keep it that way. It has factories in China, but key parts of Largan’s valuable, confidential manufacturing processes take place in Taiwan. High precision, high megapixel plastic camera lenses are basically impossible to reverse-engineer. You can’t simply buy a machine, feed in some plastic pellets and out comes a perfect, spherical, lightweight 16-megapixel lens. Largan has been in the plastic lens business for almost twenty years. Today’s success is the product of many long years of fruitless experimentation and struggle. Largan had to wait a long time for the market demand to arrive. Great companies, ones with high margins and unique products, generally emerge in this way.

We wrote the article in part because Largan is not widely-known in China. It should be. The PRC is, as most people know, engaged in a massive, well-publicized multi-pronged effort to stimulate high-tech innovation and upgrade the country’s manufacturing base. A huge rhetorical push from China’s central government leadership is backed up with tens of billions of dollars in annual state subsidies. Largan is a good example close to home of what China stands to gain if it is able to succeed in this effort. It’s not only about fat profits and high-paying jobs. Largan is also helping to create a lager network of suppliers, customers and business opportunities outside mobile phones. High precision low-cost and lightweight lenses are also finding their way into more and more IOT devices. There are also, of course, potential military applications.

So why is it, the article asks but doesn’t answer, the PRC does not have companies like Largan? Is it perhaps too early? From the comments I’ve seen, that is one main explanation. Give China another few years, some argued, and it will certainly have dozens of companies every bit as dominant globally and profitable as Largan. After all, both are populated by Chinese, but the PRC has 1.35 billion of them compared to 23 million on Taiwan.

A related strand, linked even more directly to notions of national destiny and pride: China has 5,000 years of glorious history during which it created such technology breakthroughs as paper, gunpowder, porcelain and the pump. New products now being developed in China that will achieve breakthroughs of similar world-altering amplitude.

Absent from all the comments is any mention of fundamental factors that almost certainly inhibit innovation in China. Start with the most basic of all: intellectual property protection, and the serious lack thereof in China. While things have improved a bit of late, it is still far too easy to copycat ideas and products and get away with it. There are specialist patent courts now to enforce China’s domestic patent regime. But, the whole system is still weakly administered. Chinese courts are not fully independent of political influence. And anyway, even if one does win a patent case and get a judgment against a Chinese infringer, it’s usually all but impossible to collect on any monetary compensation or prevent the loser from starting up again under another name in a different province.

Another troubling component of China’s patent system: it awards so-called “use patents” along with “invention patents”. This allows for a high degree of mischief. A company can seek patent protection for putting someone else’s technology to a different use, or making it in a different way.

It’s axiomatic that countries without a reliable way to protect valuable inventions and proprietary technology will always end up with less of both. Compounding the problem in China, non-compete and non-disclosure agreements are usually unenforceable. Employees and subcontractors pilfer confidential information and start up in business with impunity.

Why else is China, at least for now, starved of domestic companies with globally-important technology? Information of all kinds does not flow freely, thanks to state control over the internet. A lot of the coolest new ideas in business these days are first showcased on Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. All of these, of course, are blocked by the Great Firewall of China, along with all kinds of traditional business media. Closed societies have never been good at developing cutting edge technologies.

There’s certainly a lot of brilliant software and data-packaging engineering involved in maintaining the Great Firewall. Problem is, there’s no real paying market for online state surveillance tools outside China. All this indigenous R&D and manpower, if viewed purely on commercial terms, is wasted.

The venture capital industry in China, though statistically the second-largest in the world, has shunned investments in early-stage and experimental R&D. Instead, VCs pour money into so-called “C2C” businesses. These “Copied To China” companies look for an established or emerging business model elsewhere, usually in the US, then create a local Chinese version, safe in the knowledge the foreign innovator will probably never be able to shut-down this “China only” version. It’s how China’s three most successful tech companies – Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu – got their start. They’ve moved on since then, but “C2C” remains the most common strategy for getting into business and getting funded as a tech company in China.

Another factor unbroached in any of the comments and criticisms I read about the Largan article: universities in China, especially the best ones, are extremely difficult to get into. But, their professors do little important breakthrough research. Professorial rank is determined by seniority and connections, less so by academic caliber. Also, Chinese universities don’t offer, as American ones do, an attractive fee-sharing system for professors who do come up with something new that could be licensed.

Tech companies outside China finance innovation and growth by going public. Largan did so in Taiwan, very early on in 2002, when the company was a fraction of its current size. Tech IPOs of this kind are all but impossible in China. IPOs are tightly managed by government regulators. Companies without three years of past profits will never even be admitted to the now years-long queue of companies waiting to go public.

Taiwan is, at its closest point, only a little more than a mile from the Chinese mainland. But, the two are planets apart in nurturing and rewarding high-margin innovation. Taiwan is strong in the fundamental areas where the PRC is weak. While Largan may now be the best performing Taiwanese high-tech company, there are many others that similarly can run circles around PRC competitors. For all the recent non-stop talk in the PRC about building an innovation-led economy, one hears infrequently about Taiwan’s technological successes, and even less about ways the PRC might learn from Taiwan.

That said, I did get a lot of queries about how PRC nationals could buy Largan shares. Since the article appeared, Largan’s shares shot up 10%, while the overall Taiwan market barely budged.

Our Largan article clearly touched a raw nerve, at least for some. If it is to succeed in transforming itself into a technology powerhouse, one innovation required in China may be a willingness to look more closely and assess more honestly why high-tech does so much better in Taiwan.

(An English-language version of the Largan article can be read by clicking here. )

(财经杂志 Caijing Magazine’s Chinese-language article can be read by clicking here.)

http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2016/06/07/why-taiwan-is-far-ahead-of-mainland-china-in-high-tech/

–

Leapfrogging the IPO gridlock: Chinese companies get a taste for reverse takeovers — Reuters

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

Reuters–

Leapfrogging the IPO gridlock: Chinese companies get a taste for reverse takeovers

–

HONG KONG | By Elzio Barreto
–
 China reverse takeover–

Chinese firms looking to jump a massive queue of companies seeking to do initial public offerings (IPOs) and start trading their shares on the Shanghai or Shenzhen markets are increasingly going through the backdoor by taking control of companies that already have coveted listing status.

The fashion for so-called reverse takeovers is seeing some unlikely combinations, such as a mobile game developer getting listed through a shoe company and a pharmaceutical distributor tying up with a brewer. In such deals, a listed company buys a bigger privately-held company through a share exchange that gives the private company’s shareholders control of the merged entity.

Companies in the IPO queue, and those advising them, had hoped China would shift to a faster registration-based system for stock market flotations from the current approval regime this March. But the new securities regulator said it would take time to draft the new rules, leaving 762 companies lined up seeking to do IPOs and many of them concerned that the process could take years.

This is prompting companies to consider acquiring listed entities whose businesses are often very modest or deteriorating in a bid to gain quick market access.

“It’s a sign of companies’ complete lack of confidence in their ability to calculate how long they would have to wait to get a primary IPO listing in China. It’s absolutely unknowable at this stage,” said Peter Fuhrman, CEO of China-focused investment bank China First Capital.

BIG PREMIUMS

These deals are proving lucrative for investors in the companies being acquired – often at sizable premiums to their stock market value – but they also raise governance concerns as those getting backdoor listings do not get the same scrutiny they would face in a formal IPO.

Reverse takeovers also bring back memories of a series of accounting scandals in 2011-2012 involving Chinese firms that gained access to U.S. markets through those transactions. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading and revoked the registration of some companies, with more than 100 of them delisted or suspended from trading at the New York Stock Exchange over the two-year period because of fraud and accounting issues, according to a McKinsey & Co report.

In a public bulletin in June 2011, the SEC warned investors that “many companies either fail or struggle to remain viable following a reverse merger,” and noted there had been “instances of fraud and other abuses involving reverse merger companies.”

The regulator later approved tougher standards for reverse mergers at both the NYSE and Nasdaq exchanges.

Some other markets, including Hong Kong and Australia, also tightened and clarified rules on backdoor listings to prevent similar problems.

“The main concern with backdoor listings is…that they are often easier than IPOs and companies do not have to go through the IPO application process and accompanying scrutiny,” said Jamie Allen, secretary general of the Asian Corporate Governance Association.

An average of 10 companies a month were granted approval to list on the two Chinese exchanges this year and at that rate the backlog will take nearly six-and-a-half years to clear.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), the markets’ regulator, did not respond to a request for comment. Chinese companies have carried out $20.6 billion worth of reverse mergers so far this year, including a $2.7 billion deal by Alibaba-backed logistics company YTO Express in late March to merge with a Shanghai-listed clothing maker.

That’s higher than the $19 billion of deals over the same period last year and comes after a record $66.9 billion of backdoor listing activity in all of 2015, which was also spurred by a temporary shutdown of the IPO market in China, Thomson Reuters data showed. By comparison, volumes were $46.5 billion in 2014 and $27.4 billion in 2013.

Digital advertising company Focus Media, which delisted from the Nasdaq in 2013, relisted in Shenzhen in a $7.2 billion backdoor listing in December, the biggest ever such deal.

Chinese tycoon Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties may also seek a backdoor listing on the Shanghai stock exchange if it does not get regulatory approval to launch a planned IPO there soon, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Most of the deals have happened with concurrent secondary offerings to raise new funds for the merged companies.

WILLING TO WAIT

A China listing can come with a big bump in valuation. Companies listed on Shenzhen’s ChiNext board for high-tech and fast growing companies trade at an average price-to-earnings ratio of 70 times, compared with 13.4 times in Shanghai, where China’s largest state-owned firms are listed, 9.3 times in Hong Kong and 20.3 at the Nasdaq.

The price in shares of Focus Media’s ‘shell’ target Hedy Holdings have nearly doubled in value since the companies announced in August the reverse merger that allowed Focus Media to list in Shenzhen. Shares in Kingnet Network Co Ltd have soared 154 percent since April 2015, when Taiya Shoes made a bid for the mobile game developer.

Still, some companies that only recently entered the China IPO queue are willing to wait.

“We are not sure how long (until) we can get listed, but we understand that a lot of companies are applying for IPO and may need to wait for a long time,” said an investor relations officer at Jiangsu Heshili New Material, which produces materials used for fiber optic cables and filed to go public in Shenzhen in March.

MAY NOT BE CHEAPER

Reverse takeovers can sometimes be more expensive than IPOs. An IPO can cost a lot in advisory fees and work with lawyers and auditors to get a company’s accounts and controls in shape to pass muster with regulators and exchanges. But with a takeover, there are also advisory fees and a lot of those same auditor and legal fees once the deal is completed – plus there is the cost of taking control of the listed company at a premium to its share price.

Indeed, the flurry of deals is pushing the price of shell companies in China through the roof, making reverse mergers only practical for sizeable companies. There were 33 reverse mergers involving Chinese companies in 2015, putting the average deal size at about $2 billion, with the average price more than doubling to $4.1 billion so far in 2016, according to Thomson Reuters data.

“If you’re the nervous investors that took Focus Media private for a couple of billion in the U.S., if you’re a delivery company and you need money to buy airplanes, you can’t wait for two, three or five years,” Fuhrman said, in reference to the way in which being listed allows companies to raise funds more easily – whether for investments or to let shareholders cash out.

“You gotta suck it up and pay the money.”

(Additional reporting by Tris Pan; Editing by Martin Howell)

–

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-ipo-idUSKCN0XW2HV

Qianhai investors fret over soaring property prices — China Daily

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

 China Daily logo

–

Qianhai investors fret over soaring property prices

By Zhou Mo

–

–

Qianhai

–

Shenzhen – Hong Kong and foreign enterprises operating in the Qianhai special economic zone have expressed concern over Shenzhen’s high property prices and entrepreneurs’ ability to integrate with the mainland market.

But, they acknowledge that Qianhai’s preferential policies and open environment have made the zone an ideal place for businesses from Hong Kong and abroad to tap into the mainland market.

“From the aspect of government administration and environment, Shenzhen, I believe, is the best place to set up business in the country, and Qianhai is the best area in Shenzhen,” said Peter Fuhrman, chairman and chief executive officer of China First Capital, an investment bank.

“However, from the aspect of cost, it’s not the best. Soaring property prices in the city have increased costs for businesses, and there needs to be a solution,” the US entrepreneur said.

Wednesday marked the first anniversary of Shenzhen’s Qianhai and Shekou zones coming into operation as part of the China (Guangdong) Pilot Free Trade Zone, which also includes Zhuhai’s Hengqin and Guangzhou’s Nansha districts.

As of April 15, more than 91,000 enterprises had been registered in the zone, with registered capital amounting to 4 trillion yuan ($616 billion). Among them, over 3,100 were Hong Kong-funded enterprises, which contributed nearly one-third of the zone’s tax revenue.

“Qianhai will continue to focus on cross-border cooperation between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, and strive to create a platform to support Hong Kong’s stability and prosperity,” Tian Fu, director of the administrative committee of Qianhai and Shekou, said at a ceremony marking the first anniversary on Wednesday.

Innovation and entrepreneurship are among the key areas of cross-border cooperation. To attract Hong Kong entrepreneurs to set up business across the border, the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Youth Innovation and Entrepreneur Hub (E Hub) was launched, providing tax incentives, funding opportunities and free accommodation to Hong Kong entrepreneurs. As a result, more and more startups from the SAR are setting up offices in the E Hub.

“The opportunity cost in Hong Kong for entrepreneurs is relatively high, with high rents and labor costs, and the Hong Kong market is small,” said Amy Fung Dun-mi, deputy executive director of the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups. “Therefore, it’s wise for them to tap into the mainland market.”

Many of the companies have been doing well, Fung said, while noting that some have not made much progress so far.

Fung said when Hong Kong entrepreneurs start operating on the mainland, it’s necessary that mentors are provided to help them, as environment, laws and policies between Shenzhen and Hong Kong are different.

She also urged the authorities to provide more support to help Hong Kong startups find investors.

–

http://www.chinadailyasia.com/business/2016-04/28/content_15424101.html

–

Reworking a formula for economic success — China Daily Commentary

Leave a Comment / August 12, 2020

China Daily logo–

Reworking a formula for economic success

–

By PETER FUHRMAN (China Daily) Updated: 2016-04-08

–
Reworking a formula for economic success
An assembly line of a Daimler AG venture in Minhou, Fujian province.

–

My on-the-ground experience in China stretches back to the beginnings of the reform era in 1981. Yet I cannot recall a time when so much pessimism, especially in English-language media, has surrounded the Chinese economy. Yes, it is a time of large, perhaps unprecedented transition and challenge.

But the negative outlook is overdone, and starts from a false premise. China does not need to search for a new economic model to generate further prosperity. Instead, what is happening now is a return to a simple formula that has previously worked extraordinarily well: applying pressure on China’s State-owned enterprises to improve their efficiency and profitability, while also doing more to tap China’s most abundant and valuable “natural resource”－the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese people, the talent to start a company, provide new jobs and build a successful new business.

These two together provided the impetus for the economic growth since the 1990s. In the 1990s, SOEs accounted for perhaps as much as 90 percent of China’s total economic output. Today, the SOEs’ share has fallen to below 40 percent by most counts. Once the main engine of growth, SOEs are now more like an anchor. Profits across the SOEs have been sinking, while their debt has risen sharply.

Arresting that slide of SOEs is now vital. SOE reform has long been on the agenda of the Chinese government. But such a reform has become more urgent than ever, as well as more difficult. There are fewer SOEs today than in 1991 when serious SOE reform was first undertaken. Among those that remain, many are now extremely big and rank among the biggest companies in the world. The restructuring of any such large company is always difficult.

China, however, has taken some key first steps in that direction. The Chinese government has divided SOEs into those that will operate entirely based on market principles and those that perform a social function. It is downsizing the coal and steel industries, two of the largest red-ink sectors. Senior managers of some large SOEs have been dismissed or are under investigation for corruption, and experiments linking SOEs’ salaries more directly with profitability are underway.

Less noticed, but in my opinion, as important is a strong push now at some SOEs and SOE-affiliated companies to become not better but among the best in the world at what they do. Tsinghua Unigroup in semiconductors, China National Nuclear Corporation and China General Nuclear Power in building and operating nuclear power plants, and CITIC Group in eldercare are seeking global glory. They are trying to sprint while most other SOEs are limping.

Luckily for China, the overall situation in the entrepreneurial sector is far rosier. All it needs is a more level playing field. Important steps to further free up the private sector are now underway－taxes are being cut, banks pushed to lend more, and markets long closed to protect SOE monopolies are being pried open. Healthcare is a good example in this regard.

All these moves are part of what the government calls its new “supply side” policy. The aim is to demolish barriers to competition and efficiency. Chinese entrepreneurs have shown time and again they have world-class aptitude to spot and seize opportunities. They are leading the charge now into China’s underdeveloped service sector. This, more than manufacturing or exports, is where new jobs, profits and growth will come from.

Opportunities also await smart entrepreneurs in less efficient industries like agriculture, in getting food products to market quickly, cheaply and safely. In cities, traditional retail has been hit hard by online shopping. Struggling shopping malls are becoming giant laboratories where entrepreneurs are incubating new ideas on how Chinese consumers will shop, play, eat and be entertained.

China’s economy is now 30 times larger than what it was in 1991, and far more complex. The private sector 25 years ago was then truly in its infancy. But, there is still huge scope today for China to gain from its original policy prescription: prodding SOEs to get in line for reform while letting entrepreneurs meet the needs of Chinese consumers.

–

The author is chairman and CEO of China First Capital.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2016-04/08/content_24364851.htm

–

How Renminbi funds took over Chinese private equity (Part 2) — SuperReturn Commentary

1 Comment / August 12, 2020

Superretrun logo

–

How Renminbi funds took over Chinese private equity

(Part 2)

By Peter Fuhrman –
 
Large and small ships traverse the Huangpu River 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.

–

Part two of a series. Read part one.

–

Gresham’s Law, as many of us were taught a while back, stipulates that bad money drives out good. There’s something analogous at work in China’s private equity and venture capital industry. Only here it’s not a debased currency that’s dominating transactions. Instead, it’s Renminbi private equity (PE) firms. Flush with cash and often insensitive to valuation and without any clear imperative to make money for their investors, they are changing the PE industry in China beyond recognition and making life miserable for many dollar-based PE and venture capital (VC) firms.

–

Outbid, outspent and outhustled

From a tiny speck on the PE horizon five years ago, Reminbi (RMB) funds have quickly grown into a hulking presence in China. In many ways, they now run the show, eclipsing global dollar funds in every meaningful category – number of active funds, deals closed and capital raised. RMB funds have proliferated irrespective of the fact there have so far been few successful exits with cash distributions.

The RMB fund industry works by a logic all its own. Valuations are often double, triple or even higher than those offered by dollar funds. Term sheets come in faster, with fewer of the investor preferences dollar funds insist on. Due diligence can often seem perfunctory.  Post-deal monitoring? Often lax, by global standards. From the perspective of many Chinese company owners, dollar PE firms look stingy, slow and troublesome.

The RMB fund industry’s greatest success so far was not the IPO of a portfolio company, but of one of the larger RMB general partners, Jiuding Capital. It listed its shares in 2015 on a largely-unregulated over-the-counter market called The New Third Board. For a time earlier this year, Jiuding had a market cap on par with Blackstone, although its assets under management, profits, and successful deal record are a fraction of the American firm’s.

The main investment thesis of RMB funds has shifted in recent years. Originally, it was to invest in traditional manufacturing companies just ahead of their China IPO. The emphasis has now shifted towards investing in earlier-stage Chinese technology companies. This is in line with China’s central government policy to foster more domestic innovation as a way to sustain long-term GDP growth.

The Shanghai government, which through different agencies and localities has become a major sponsor of new funds, has recently announced a policy to rebate a percentage of failed investments made by RMB funds in Shanghai-based tech companies. Moral hazard isn’t, evidently, as high on their list of priorities as taking some of the risk out of risk-capital investing in start-ups.

Dollar funds, in the main, have mainly been observing all this with sullen expressions. Making matters worse, they are often sitting on portfolios of unexited deals dating back five years or more. The US and Hong Kong stock markets have mainly lost their taste for PE-backed Chinese companies. While RMB funds seem to draw from a bottomless well of available capital, for most dollar funds, raising new money for China investing has never been more difficult.

RMB funds seldom explain themselves, seldom appear at industry forums like SuperReturn. One reason: few of the senior people speak English. Another: they have no interest or need to raise money from global limited partners. They have no real pretensions to expand outside China. They are adapted only and perhaps ideally to their native environment. Dollar funds have come to look a bit like dinosaurs after the asteroid strike.

Can dollar-denominated firms strike back?

Can dollar funds find a way to regain their central role in Chinese alternative investing? It won’t be easy. Start with the fact the dollar funds are all generally the slow movers in a big pack chasing the same sort of deals as their RMB brethren. At the moment, that means companies engaged in online shopping, games, healthcare and mobile services.

A wiser and differentiated approach would probably be to look for opportunities elsewhere. There are plenty of possibilities, not only in traditional manufacturing industry, but in control deals and roll-ups. So far, with few exceptions, there’s little sign of differentiation taking place. Read the fund-raising pitch for dollar and RMB funds and, apart from the difference in language, the two are eerily similar. They sport the same statistics on internet, mobile, online shopping penetration: the same plan to pluck future winners from a crop of look-alike money-losing start-ups.

There is one investment thesis the dollar PE funds have pretty much all to themselves. It’s so-called “delist-relist” deals, where US-quoted Chinese companies are acquired by a PE fund together with the company’s own management, delisted from the US market with the plan to one day IPO on China’s domestic stock exchange. There have been a few successes, such as the relisting last year of Focus Media, a deal partly financed by Carlyle. But, there are at least another forty such deals with over $20bn in equity and debt sunk into them waiting for their chance to relist. These plans suffered a rather sizeable setback recently when the Chinese central government abruptly shelved plans to open a new “strategic stock market” that was meant to be specially suited to these returnee companies. The choice is now between prolonged limbo, or buying a Chinese-listed shell to reverse into, a highly expensive endeavor that sucks out a lot of the profit PE firms hoped to make.

Outspent, outbid and outhustled by the RMB funds, dollar PE funds are on the defensive, struggling just to stay relevant in a market they once dominated. Some are trying to go with the flow and raise RMB funds of their own. Most others are simply waiting and hoping for RMB funds to implode.

So much has lately gone so wrong for many dollar PE and VC in China. Complicating things still further, China’s economy has turned sour of late. But, there’s still a game worth playing. Globally, most institutional investors are under-allocated to China.  A new approach and some new strategies at dollar funds are overdue.

–

Peter Fuhrman moderates our SuperReturn China 2016 Big Debate: ‘How Do You Best Manage Your Exposure To China?’. Discussants include:

  • John Lin, Managing Partner, NDE Capital (GP)
  • Xisheng Zhang, Founding Partner & President, Hua Capital (GP)
  • Bo Liu, Chief Investment Officer, Wanda Investment (LP)
The Big Debate takes place on Tuesday 19 April 2016 at 11:55 – 12:25 at SuperReturn China in Beijing. Can’t make it? Follow the action on Twitter.
–
–