China entrepreneur

Reworking a formula for economic success — China Daily Commentary

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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

The ‘children’ of Deng Xiaoping — Toronto Globe and Mail

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The ‘children’ of Deng Xiaoping

From left: Yang Hongchang, Hung Huang, Zhuo Wei, Grace Huang, Wu Hai, He Yongzhi.

The other Chinese revolution: Meet the people who took Deng’s economic great leap forward

 

Deng Xiaoping was no Winston Churchill. He possessed a thick southern accent most people found nearly impenetrable, and was anything but garrulous. In fact, little of what he said was memorable or even original. His most-cited aphorism – “To get rich is glorious” – did not actually spill from his mouth; historians suspect its provenance can be traced to the West.

But in deed more than word, Mr. Deng was the linchpin in redirecting China’s economy away from the backward, centrally planned beast it had become under Mao Zedong. He set it on a path that would see decades of unrelenting growth and the creation of credulity-defying prosperity.

What he wanted to do, he said in 1978, was to “light a spark” for change:

Deng Xiaoping

“If we can’t grow faster than the capitalist countries, then we can’t show the superiority of our system.”

– Deng, 1978

And on many indicators, grow they did – more than the U.S

 

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He succeeded in spurring growth, and wildly so, marshalling the power of the world’s most populous nation. Now, 110 years after his birth – an occasion that its leadership has sought to celebrate with lengthy TV biopics and other remembrances – China is filled with millionaires.

But has the sudden influx of wealth made it happy?

Where chasing profit was once grounds for harsh re-education, the country’s heroes and superstars – Jack Ma and an entire generation of tuhao, or nouveau riche – are now, in ways both spiritual and economic, the children of Deng.

President Xi Jinping has consciously sought to present himself as the current generation’s version of Deng. But for many of Deng’s figurative progeny, wealth and happiness haven’t always come together. In a recent survey published in the People’s Tribune magazine, worries about a moral vacuum, personal selfishness and anxiety over individual and professional status were high on the list of top concerns about the country today. The poll reflected a pervasive cultural disquiet that has reached even into the ranks of those most richly rewarded by the Deng-led opening up.

“On the social level, money became the only currency in terms of personal relationships, and that’s a really sad reality,” says Yang Lan, one of the country’s top television hosts.

She points to “the lack of a value system” that she sees when she hears young girls “discussing how they would love to be a mistress so they can live a wealthy life before they are too old. And you see girls discussing these things very openly.” China, she says, needs “a new social contract.”

There is little doubt that those who no longer need to worry about making money are more free to criticize others, raising the spectre of hypocrisy. But pained reflection has been among the less-anticipated products of the wealth China has amassed. The comforts of financial security have provided a new space to rethink the path the country has taken and ways it has fallen short.

And as China’s economy slows to a pace not seen in decades, it also faces a moment to consider the sweep of its modern history – decades marked by the vicious turbulence of the Mao years, followed by the full-throttle race away from it inspired by Mr. Deng.

From 1978, the first year of the Deng-led reforms, China has been so thoroughly reshaped that even numbers struggle to do it justice. Gross domestic product has expanded 156-fold, the value of imports and exports is 727 times higher, and savings are up by a factor of 2,131.

The growth has been driven by an extraordinary – and massive – cohort of people who have turned personal quests for profit into a national obsession. “China has, in absolute numbers as well as percentage of populace, the most successful entrepreneurs anywhere in the world,” says Peter Fuhrman, chairman and founder of China First Capital, a specialist investment bank based in Shenzhen.

But even those who most warmly embraced the Deng mandate are now pausing for a second look at a country whose vast financial progress has become marred by other problems.

 

Read complete article by clicking here.

China’s Newest Billionaire, My Buddy Laowu — Bloomberg

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Bloomberg story

It took my friend and client Laowu 20 years to build his business, but less than four months from the IPO in Hong Kong to reach dollar billionaire status. While I hardly doubted he’d someday make it, it certainly happened quicker than I would have hoped or guessed. You can read my account of this remarkable businessman, his humble beginnings and his high-flying real estate development company, by clicking here.

Laowu’s company, Hydoo, has had a torrid run on the Hong Kong exchange. The share price is up over 70% since the listing on the last day of October 2013. That’s lifted the value of his family’s shares to north of $1 billion. I hadn’t kept track of the stock price, so didn’t know my friend had reached the milestone. Bloomberg’s China Billionaires reporter called today to ask if I would comment for the story he’s doing.

That article can be found here and can be downloaded in PDF here.

 

 

Hong Kong IPO Today for China First Capital Client Hydoo

Hydoo Prospectus

Welcome good news today from Hong Kong’s capital markets. The Chinese commercial real estate developer Hydoo (Chinese name 毅德) successfully IPOs on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, raising over USD$200mn in new capital. With IPO channels for Chinese companies mainly blockaded, it’s especially welcome to see a Chinese private sector company raising so much from the stock market.  In this case, the delight is greater because Hydoo is a client of China First Capital. We acted as Hydoo’s investment bankers raising USD$80mn from Chinese private equity firm Hony Capital.  Hony’s 2011 investment, based on today’s IPO price, is now worth USD$150mn.

In addition to Hony, China’s giant financial services group Ping An also invested before IPO.  In total, Hydoo raised USD$140mn (Rmb 860mn) of institutional capital before IPO. Over 60% of the IPO shares (worth over $120mn) were sold by underwriters ahead of time to so-called “cornerstone investors“, including two large Chinese SOEs, Huarong and China Taiping Insurance, as well as retailer Suning (in which Hony owns a share).

I’m happy for Hony and the other investors, but happier still for Hydoo founders, particularly its chairman, Wang Zaixing, known to friends and family  as “Laowu”, literally “Venerable Fifth”. He is the fifth-born of ten children all of whom played a part in building Hydoo. The family is originally from Chaozhou in Guangdong, and speak the distinctive Chaozhou dialect. But, they ended up after 1949 in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province.

The business Laowu started 18 years ago is now worth over $1 billion. The first time I met him, I told Laowu my goal as his investment banker, and my emphatic expectation,  was that his company would be worth at least that much at the time of its IPO. Another priority of mine was that he and his family members would still hold majority control after IPO.  That too has been achieved.  They hold almost 60% of the now publicly-traded business.

For me, Laowu personifies in many ways the large economic changes China has undergone in the last 30 years. He started life as a long-distance truck driver and from that humble start saw and grasped an opportunity to build wholesale trading centers for the emerging army of small businesspeople in China.

I first met Laowu and his company in 2009. The business was then called Haode (豪德). It was then still an old-school Chinese family business. There was no corporate structure in the traditional sense. Laowu and his brothers, sister and nephews would pair up, or act independently, to do individual large wholesale trading centers around China. When I met them, the family had already done 19 such projects. All had done very well. At the time, I’d never met a Chinese private company as profitable over as many years as Haode.

Over the last three years, the company has been transformed into a more professional enterprise. Hydoo provides a useful excellent template for how a Chinese family-owned business can make this transition to a publicly-traded company. Part of that process was splitting up the family’s existing business between a group that would follow Laowu and become shareholders of Hydoo, and five other siblings who chose not to participate, but remain active in some cases building their own wholesale trading centers.

As the IPO prospectus puts it,  this division was “a complex, delicate process involving the allocation of assets or interests in the existing businesses among a group of closely connected family members, who decided to split up into two independent groups with diverging goals going forward. Under the special circumstances, no written agreements were entered into in respect of the Family Allocation and no valuation appraised by independent valuers was undertaken when negotiating the Family Allocation. Instead, the Wang Family Group placed their focus on more subjective, personal factors.”

Me and my firm played a small part by advising Laowu and his siblings on the pros and cons of being part of a company planning for an IPO. But, as you’d expect, most of this was done within the private confines of a large, closely-knit family.  Along the way, though, I gained a deeper appreciation of the unique ways Chaozhou people do business.

Chaozhou natives are rightly famous both in China and throughout much of Southeast Asia for their business acumen. They are often described by other Chinese as “the Jews of China”.  As a Jew in China, I tend to think the description flatters my people. Chaozhou people seem to have an instinctive and unsurpassed talent for making money and entrepreneurship. Look around the world at the most successful Chinese business people, including the leading business families in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, and a large percentage, including Asia’s richest magnate, Li Ka-shing, Thailand’s richest businessman Dhanin Chearavanont  and Indonesia’s top tycoon, Mochtar Riady, are either from Chaozhou or are descended from people who immigrated from there.

As this suggests, Chaozhou people are able and willing to uproot themselves and chase opportunities. Laowu didn’t leave China, but in building Hydoo, he did venture far afield from where he and his family were raised. He saw very early and profited richly from an economic shift within China that few others noticed 15 years ago. At the time, much of China’s economic growth was centered in southern China, and large coastal cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen, Xiamen. Laowu looked inland, especially in Shandong Province, one thousand miles north of Chaozhou.

As the economies of Shanghai and big southern coastal cities began to cool, inland areas, led by Shandong, began to boom. Shandong’s GDP growth, over the last ten years, has been among the highest of any part of China. Shandong is a huge market to itself (population 95mn) as well as a vital crossroads for commerce between north and south, east and west in China. Laowu built large wholesale parks to accommodate thousands of small traders, creating new clusters of small-scale commerce and entrepreneurship.

When you visit one of these centers, you get the impression that half of Shandong’s gdp is going in and out the doors. It’s crowded and vibrant. Even the smallest traders own their own small shop inside the Hydoo centers. That’s Hydoo’s model: they build the buildings, and as they do, sell off most of the units to thousands of individual small traders. Hydoo helps them get mortgages and often acts as guarantor on the loans. This lets thousands of small businesspeople become property-owners. As the Hydoo centers thrive (and they all do, as far as I know) the value of the real estate rises.

I know of no other businessman in China that has done as much as Laowu to build wealth and provide an entrepreneurial hub for such a large number of people in China. Hydoo is now spreading across more areas of China. It’s is building huge new wholesale parks in Sichuan, Hunan, Guangxi, Gansu.

I see Laowu infrequently these days. But, I’m as impressed now as I was when I first met him by his accomplishments. He and his family founded a business back when China was a different and less developed place. They stuck with it, kept reinvesting and now, through today’s IPO,  own shares worth more money than I can imagine. But, more important for me is that they still own the business, still own the majority and so answer to no one else. As an entrepreneur who helped create and sustain so many other entrepreneurs, Laowu deserves nothing less.

 

M&A Policy & Policy-making in China — A Visit to China’s Ministry of Commerce

(Me in borrowed suit* alongside Deputy Director General of the Policy Research Department, China Ministry of Commerce)

China’s Ministry of Commerce invited me last week to give a private talk at their Beijing headquarters. The subject was the changing landscape for M&A in China. It was a great honor to be asked, and a thoroughly enjoyable experience to share my views with a team from the Policy Research Department at the Ministry.

For those whose Chinese is up to it, you can have a look at the PPT by clicking here.  The title translates as “China’s M&A Market: A New Strategy Targeting Unexited PE Deals”.

My China First Capital colleague, and our company’s COO, Dr. Yansong Wang offered our firm’s view that the current crisis of unexited private equity deals is creating an important opportunity for M&A in China to help strengthen, consolidate and restructure the private sector. Buyout firms and strategic acquirers, both China domestic and offshore, will all likely step up their acquisition activity in coming years, targeting China’s stronger private sector companies.

Potentially, this represents a highly significant shift for M&A in China, and so a shift in the workload and travel schedule of the Ministry of Commerce officials. M&A within China, measured both in number and size of deals,  has historically been a fraction of cross-border transactions like the acquisition of Volvo or Nexen. 

The Ministry of Commerce occupies the most prominent location of any government department in China, with the exception of the Public Security Ministry. Both are on Chang’an Avenue (aka “Eternal Peace Street” on 长安街)a short distance from Tiananmen Square. 

The Ministry of Commerce plays an active and central role in economic policy-making. Many of the key reforms and policy changes that have guided China’s remarkable economic progress over the last thirty years got their start there. The Ministry of Commerce is also the primary regulator for most M&A deals in China, both domestic and cross-border.

The key sources of growth for China’s economy have shifted from SOEs to private sector companies, from exports to satisfying the demands of China’s huge and fast-growing domestic market. In the future, M&A in China will follow a similar path. That was the main theme of our talk. More M&A deals will involve Chinese private sector companies combining either with each other, or being acquired by larger international companies eager to expand in China.

Ministry officials were quick to grasp the importance of this shift. They asked if policy changes were required or new administrative practices. We shared some ideas. China’s FDI has slowed recently. That is an issue of substantial concern to the Ministry of Commerce. M&A targeting China’s private sector companies represents a potentially useful new channel for productive foreign capital to enter China.

M&A, as the Ministry officials quickly understood, also can help ease some of the pain caused to private companies by the block in IPOs and steep decline in new private equity funding. In particular, they focused their questions on the impact on Chinese larger-scale private sector manufacturing industries.

I found the officials and staff I met with to be practical, knowledgeable and inquisitive. Market forces, and the exit crisis in China’s private equity industry, are driving this change in the direction of M&A in China. But, policies and regulatory guidance issued from the Ministry of Commerce headquarters can – and I believe will — also play a constructive role.

* Three days before my visit,  the Ministry of Commerce suggested I should probably wear a suit, as senior officials there do.  By that time, I’d already arrived in Beijing, so needed to borrow one from a friend. The suit was tailored for someone 40 pounds heavier. As a result, as the above photo displays, I managed to be overdressed and poorly-dressed at the same time.

 

 

China: The World’s Best Risk Adjusted Investment Opportunity

Seoul, Korea. At the Harvard Project for Asia and International Relations’ annual conference, I gave a talk today titled “China, The World’s Best Risk-Adjusted Investment Opportunity”. A copy of the PPT can be downloaded by clicking here. 

The slides are mainly just talking points, rather than fully fleshed-out contents. The idea was to work backwards from the conclusion, as propounded in the title, to the reasons why. My argument is that a confluence of factors are at work here, to create this agreeable situation where investing in Chinese private companies offers the highest returns relative to risk.

Those factors are:

  1. China’s current stage of six-pronged development (Slide 2)  
  2. A large group of talented entrepreneurs tested and tempered by the difficulties of starting and managing a private business in China (Slide 5)
  3. Plentiful equity capital (from private equity and venture capital firms) with clearly-articulated investment criteria (Slide 6)
  4. An investment strategy that offers multiple ways for capital to impact positively the performance of a private company,  lowering the already-minimal risk an investment will tank (Slide 7)
  5. The returns calculus (Slide 8 ) – the formula here is profits (in USD millions) multiplied by a p/e multiple, producing enterprise valuation. The first equation is an example of investor entry price, pre-IPO, and the second is investor exit price, after a round PE investment and an IPO. The gain is twenty-fold.  Thus do nickels turn into dollars
  6. Downsides – best risk-adjusted returns does not mean risk-free returns. Here are some of the ways that a pre-IPO investment can go bad (Slide 9) 

Since the audience in Seoul was largely non-Chinese, I also included two slides with the same map of China, illustrating the progression of economic development in China, from a few favored areas on China’s eastern seaboard during the early phases, to the current situation where economic growth, and entrepreneurial talent, is far more broadly-spread across the country.

As a proxy to illustrate this diffusion of economic dynamism across China, slide 4 shows, in gold, the areas of China where CFC has added clients and projects in the last 18 months. Slide 3 shows the original nucleus of economic success in China – Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Beijing. We also have clients in these places. 

On seeing Slide 4, I realized it also displays my travel patterns over the last year.  I’ve been everywhere in red or gold, except Gansu, but adding in Yunnan, during that time. That’s a big bite out of a big country. This trip to Korea is my first flight outside China in two years, excepting a couple of short trips back to the US to see family. 

In the next two weeks, after returning from Korea, I’ll make three separate trips, to Henan, Jiangsu and Beijing, to visit existing clients and meet several potential new ones. While Chinese private SME provide the best risk-adjusted investment returns anywhere, you can’t do much from behind a desk. Opportunity is both widespread and widely-spread.