China First Capital

China’s Incendiary Market Is Fanned by Borrowers and Manipulation — The New York Times

Leave a Comment / December 8, 2015

NYT–

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China’s Incendiary Market Is Fanned by Borrowers and Manipulation

By   

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SHANGHAI — At the height of the frenzy for Chinese stocks, just about every company was a winner.

An online gaming start-up was valued at $7 billion. Shares in a fireworks company that had moved into finance shot up 300 percent. A struggling property developer was transformed into a stock market darling, just by changing its name to suggest it was an Internet company.

Then there was the case of Beijing Baofeng Technology, an online video company whose stock price soared 4,200 percent in the three months after it went public early this year. The company’s shares climbed by 10 percent — the maximum amount allowable under exchange rules — nearly every day for more than 30 days.

Before things fell apart a few weeks ago, China’s remarkable bull run was reminiscent of the Internet bubble that gripped the Nasdaq stock market between 1998 and 2000, when companies like Pets.com and Webvan that had no profit quickly became more valuable than some industrial stalwarts. At the time, everyone talked about how technologies and industries would transform society, justifying eye-popping valuations. They were right about the future, just not necessarily about specific companies and the high stock prices.

To read complete article, click here.

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Focus Media Reaches $7.4 Billion Deal to List in Shenzhen — New York Times

Leave a Comment / June 24, 2016

NYT

–NYT2

 

Focus Media Reaches $7.4 Billion Deal to List in Shenzhen

By

HONG KONG — Years after delisting in the United States after a short-selling attack, one of China’s biggest advertising companies is hoping to cash in on a market rally on its home turf.

Focus Media, a company based in Shanghai that was privatized and delisted from the Nasdaq two years ago after being targeted by short-sellers, on Wednesday reached a 45.7 billion renminbi, or about $7.4 billion, deal for a listing on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The transaction values Focus at about twice the $3.7 billion that its management and private equity backers — led by the Carlyle Group — paid to take the company private in 2013.

Focus and its investors, which also include the Chinese companies FountainVest Partners, Citic Capital Partners, CDH Investments and China Everbright, are trying to tap into China’s surging domestic stock markets. The main Shanghai share index has risen 51 percent this year, while the Shenzhen index, where Focus will be listed, has more than doubled, increasing by 114 percent.

Other Chinese companies that retreated from American markets, as well as their private equity backers, are likely to be watching the Focus deal closely. If it goes through and the new shares rise sharply, it could offer an incentive for others to follow suit — and give private equity firms an easier way to sell their stakes.

Some other big Chinese companies that delisted from the United States market in recent years include Shanda Interactive Entertainment, which was valued at $2.3 billion when it was privatized by its main shareholders in 2012; and Giant Interactive, which was privatized last year in a $3 billion deal.

Focus is coming back to the market through a so-called backdoor listing, in which its main assets are sold to a company already listed in exchange for a controlling stake in the listed firm. Such an approach can offer a more direct path to the market than an initial public offering — especially in mainland China, where hundreds of companies are waiting for regulatory approval for their I.P.O.s.

But such deals can also be complex. In mainland China, they often subject shareholders to lengthy periods during which they are prohibited from selling or transferring shares. Also, unlike an I.P.O., the moves tend not to help the companies involved raise cash.

“All backdoor listings are convoluted exercises, not capital-raising events,” said Peter Fuhrman, the chairman of China First Capital, an investment bank based in Shenzhen, which is in southern China. “When you do them domestically in China, they become even more hair-raising.”

Dozens of Chinese companies retreated from American exchanges in the last five years after a wave of accounting scandals and attacks by short-sellers. Some of those companies were forcibly delisted by the Securities and Exchange Commission; others were taken private by management after their share prices slumped.

Focus was the biggest of those privatizations. In November 2011, the company was targeted by Muddy Waters Research, a short-selling firm founded by Carson C. Block. Muddy Waters accused Focus of overstating the number of digital advertising display screens it operated in China, and of overpaying for acquisitions.

Focus rejected the accusations, but its shares fell 40 percent on publication of the initial report by Muddy Waters. In summer 2012, the company’s chairman, Jason Jiang, and a group of Chinese and foreign private equity firms announced plans to delist Focus and take it private, a deal that was completed in early 2013.

On Wednesday, Jiangsu Hongda New Material, a Shenzhen-listed manufacturer of silicone rubber products, said it would pay 45.7 billion renminbi, mostly by issuing new stock, to acquire control of Focus. Shares in Jiangsu Hongda have been suspended from trading since December, when it first announced plans for a restructuring that did not mention Focus. The shares remain suspended pending further approvals of the Focus deal, including from shareholders and regulators in China.

If completed, the deal would leave Mr. Jiang, the Focus chairman, as the biggest single shareholder of Jiangsu Hongda, with a 25 percent stake.

The mainland China brokerages Huatai United Securities and Southwest Securities are acting as financial advisers on the deal.

Just a few of the Chinese companies delisted from stock exchanges in the United States in recent years have attempted a new listing elsewhere.

Last year, China Metal Resources Utilization, a small metal recycling company, successfully listed in Hong Kong. It had been listed on the New York Stock Exchange, under the name Gushan Environmental Energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/business/dealbook/focus-media-in-shenzhen-listing-deal.html?_r=0

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China First Capital Interview: Cashing in and cashing out — China Law & Practice

1 Comment / May 7, 2015

 

China Law & Practice

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Peter Fuhrman, CEO of China First Capital, explains how the country’s private equity market has struggled with profit returns and the importance of diversified exit strategies. He also predicts the rise of new funds to execute high-yield deals

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Date: 05 May 2015

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What is China First Capital?

China First Capital is an investment bank and advisory firm with a focus on Greater China. Our business is helping larger Chinese companies, along with a select group of Fortune 500 companies, sustain and enlarge market leadership in the country, by raising capital and advising on strategic M&A. Like our clients, we operate in an opportunity-rich environment. Though realistic about the many challenges China faces as its economy and society evolve, we are as a firm fully convinced there is no better market than China to build businesses of enduring value. China still has so much going for it, with so much more growth and positive change ahead. As someone who first came to China in 1981 as a graduate student, my optimism is perhaps understandable. The positive changes this country has undergone during those years have surpassed by orders of magnitude anything I might have imagined possible.

After a rather long career in the US and Europe, including a stint as CEO of a California venture capital company as well as a venture-backed enterprise software company, I came back to China in 2008 and established China First Capital with a headquarters in Shenzhen, a place I like to think of as the California of China. It has the same mainly immigrant population and, like the Silicon Valley, is home to many leading private sector high-tech companies.

What is happening in China’s private equity (PE) market?

Back in 2008, China’s financial markets, the domestic PE industry, were far less developed. It was, we now can see, a honeymoon period. Hundreds of new PE firms were formed, while the big global players like Blackstone, Carlyle, TPG and KKR all built big new operations in China and raised tons of new money to invest there. From a standing start a decade ago, China PE grew into a colossus, the second-largest PE market in the world. But, it also, almost as quickly, became one of the more troubled. The plans to make quick money investing in Chinese companies right ahead of their planned IPO worked brilliantly for a brief time, then fell apart, as first the US, then Hong Kong and finally China’s own domestic stock exchanges shut the doors to Chinese companies. Things have since improved. IPOs for Chinese companies are back in all three markets. But PE firms are still sitting on thousands of unexited investments. The inevitable result, PE in China has had a disappointing record in the category that ultimately matters most: returning profits to limited partners (LPs).

Read complete interview

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Foreign Investors Unfazed by Kaisa’s Default –South China Morning Post

Leave a Comment / December 15, 2015

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SCMP

Foreign investors unfazed by Kaisa’s default

No increase in costs as mainland developers Jingrui and Landsea tap bond market
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 25 April, 2015, 12:38am

Langi Chiang langi.chiang@scmp.com

PE challenges and opportunities in 2015 — Financier Magazine

Leave a Comment / April 25, 2015
Financier  
May 2015 Issue

PE challenges and opportunities in 2015

May 2015  |  COVER STORY  |  PRIVATE EQUITY

Financier Worldwide Magazine

May 2015 Issue

Like many other facets of the financial services industry, the private equity (PE) asset class has endured a turbulent and difficult period since the onset of the financial crisis. Critics of the industry were quick to colour the PE space as a den of iniquity, a place for vultures and destroyers of jobs. In recent years, the sector has been required to comply with an increasingly tight set of regulatory requirements.

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Chinese PE activity, by contrast, was rather more subdued. “In 2014, the gap between the performance of the private equity industry in China and the US opened wide,” says Peter Fuhrman, chairman and founder of China First Capital, a China-focused global investment bank. “The US had a record-breaking year, with 10-year net annualised return hitting 14.6 percent. Final data is still coming in, but it appears certain US PE raised more capital more quickly and returned more profits to LPs than any year previously. China, on the other hand, had another so-so year. Exits picked up over 2013, but still remain significantly below highs reached in 2011. As a result, profit distributions to LPs and closing of new China-focused funds are also well down on previous highs. While IPO exits for Chinese companies in the US, Hong Kong and China reached 221, compared to only 66 in 2013, the ultimate measure of success in PE investing is not the number of IPOs; it’s the amount of capital and profits paid back to LP investors. This is China PE’s greatest weakness.”

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Treating the Cancer of High Interest Rates in China — Caijing Magazine commentary

Leave a Comment / March 31, 2015

caijing

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The cost of borrowing money is a huge and growing burden for most companies and municipal governments in China. But, it is also the most attractive untapped large investment opportunity in China for foreign institutional investors. This is the broad outline of the Chinese-language essay published in this week’s Caijing Magazine, among China’s most well-read business publications. The authors are me and Dr. Yansong Wang, China First Capital’s Chief Operating Officer.

Foreign investors and asset managers have mainly been kept out of China’s lucrative lending market, one reason why interest rates are so high here. But, the foreign capital is now trying to find ways to lend directly to Chinese companies and municipalities, offering Chinese borrowers lower interest rates, longer-terms and less onerous collateral than in the Rmb15 trillion (USD $2.5 trillion) shadow banking market. Foreign debt investment should be welcomed rather than shunned, our commentary argues.

If Chinese rules are one day liberalized, a waterfall of foreign capital will likely pour into China, attracted by the fact that interest rates on securitized loans here are often 2-3 times higher than on loans to similar-size and credit-worthy companies and municipalities in US, Europe, Japan, Korea and other major economies. The likely long-term result: lower interest rates for company and municipal borrowers in China and more profitable fixed-income returns for investors worldwide.

I’ve written in English on the problem of stubbornly high borrowing costs in China, including here and here. But, this is the first time I tried to evaluate the problem for a Chinese audience — in this case, for one of the more influential readerships (political and business leaders) in the country.

The Chinese article can be downloaded by clicking here.

For those who prefer English, here’s a summary: high lending rates exist in China in large part because the country is closed to the free flow of international capital. The two pillars are a non-exchangeable currency and a case-by-case government approval system, managed by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) to let financial investment enter, convert to Renminbi and then leave again. This makes it all but impossible to arbitrage the 1,000 basis point interest rate differential between China domestic corporate borrowers and similar Chinese companies borrowing in Hong Kong.

Foreign financial investment in China is 180-degrees different than in other major economies. In China, almost all foreign investment is in equities, either through buying quoted shares or through giving money to any of the hundreds of private equity and venture capital firms active in China. Outside China, most of the world’s institutional investment – the capital invested by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, charities, university endowments — is invested in fixed-income debt.

The total size of institutional investment assets outside China is estimated to be about $50 trillion. There is a simple reason why institutional investors prefer to invest more in debt rather than equity. Debt offers a fixed annual return and equities do not. Institutional investors, especially the two largest types, insurance companies and pension funds, need to match their future liabilities by owning assets with a known future income stream. Debt is also higher up the capital structure, providing more risk protection.

Direct loans — where an asset manager lends money directly to a company rather than buying bonds on the secondary market — is a large business outside China, but still a small business here. Direct lending is among the fastest-growing areas for institutional and PE investors now worldwide. Get it right, and there’s no better place in the world to do direct corporate lending than in China.

For now, direct lending to Chinese companies is being done mainly by a few large US hedge funds. They operate in a gray area legally in China, and have so far mainly kept the deals secret. The hedge fund lending deals I’ve seen have mainly been short-term lending to Chinese property developers, at monthly interest rates of 2%-3%.

I see no benefit to China from such deals, nor would I risk a dollar of my own money. A good rule in all debt investing is whenever interest rates go above 20% a year, the lender is effectively taking on “equity risk”. In other words, there are no borrowers anywhere that can easily afford to pay such high interest rates. Anyone who will take money at that price is probably unfit to hold it. At 20% and above, the investor is basically gambling that the desperate borrower will not run out of cash while the loan is still outstanding.

Interest rates are only one component of the total cost of borrowing for companies and municipalities in China’s shadow banking system. Fees paid to lawyers, accountants, credit-rating agencies, brokerage firms can easily add another 2% to the cost of borrowing. But, the biggest hidden cost, as well as inefficiency of China’s shadow banking loan market is that most loans from this channel are one-year term, without an automatic rollover.

Though they pay interest for 12 months, borrowers only have use of the money for eight or nine months. The rest of the time, they need to accumulate capital to pay back principal at the end of one year. China is the only major economy in the world where such a small percentage of company borrowing is of over one-year maturity. China’s economy is guided by a Five Year Plan, but it’s domestic lenders operate on the shortest of all time-frames.

If more global institutional capital were allowed into China for lending, I would expect these investors to want to do their own deals here in China, negotiate directly with the borrower, rather than buying existing securitized shadow banking debt. These investors would want to do more of their own due diligence, and also tailor each deal, in a way that China’s domestic shadow banking system cannot, so that the maturity, terms, covenants, collateral are all set in ways that correspond to each borrowers’ cash flow and assets.

China does not need one more dollar of “hot money” in its economy. It does need more stable long-term investment capital as direct lending to companies, priced more closely to levels outside China. Foreign institutional capital and large global investment funds could perform a useful role. They are knocking on the door.

http://magazine.caijing.com.cn/20150330/3851367.shtml

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China’s loan shark economy — Nikkei Asian Review

Leave a Comment / June 25, 2016

Nikkei2

China loan sharking

China’s loan shark economy

PF

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What’s ailing China? Explanations aren’t hard to come by: slowing growth, bloated and inefficient state-owned enterprises, and a ferocious anti-corruption campaign that seems to take precedence over needed economic reforms.

Yet for all that, there is probably no bigger, more detrimental, disruptive or overlooked problem in China’s economy than the high cost of borrowing money. Real interest rates on collateralized loans for most companies, especially in the private sector where most of the best Chinese companies can be found, are rarely below 10%. They are usually at least 15% and are not uncommonly over 20%. Nowhere else are so many good companies diced up for chum and fed to the loan sharks.

Logic would suggest that the high rates price in some of the world’s highest loan default rates. This is not the case. The official percentage of bad loans in the Chinese banking sector is 1%, less than half the rate in the U.S., Japan or Germany, all countries incidentally where companies can borrow money for 2-4% a year.

You could be forgiven for thinking that China is a place where lenders are drowning in a sea of bad credit. After all, major English-language business publications are replete with articles suggesting that the banking system in China is in the early days of a bad-loan crisis of earth-shattering proportions. A few Chinese companies borrowing money overseas, including Hong Kong-listed property developer Kaisa Group, have come near default or restructured their debts. But overall, Chinese borrowers pay back loans in full and on time.

Combine sky-high real interest rates with near-zero defaults and what you get in China is now probably the single most profitable place on a risk-adjusted basis to lend money in the world. Also one of the most exclusive: the lending and the sometimes obscene profits earned from it all pretty much stay on the mainland. Foreign investors are effectively shut out.

The big-time pools of investment capital — American university endowments, insurance companies, and pension and sovereign wealth funds — must salivate at the interest rates being paid in China by credit-worthy borrowers. They would consider it a triumph to put some of their billions to work lending to earn a 7% return. They are kept out of China’s lucrative lending market through a web of regulations, including controls on exchanging dollars for yuan, as well as licensing procedures.

This is starting to change. But it takes clever structuring to get around a thicket of regulations originally put in place to protect the interests of China’s state-owned banking system. As an investment banker in China with a niche in this area, I spend more of my time on debt deals than just about anything else. The aim is to give Chinese borrowers lower rates and better terms while giving lenders outside China access to the high yields best found there.

China’s high-yield debt market is enormous. The country’s big banks, trust companies and securities houses have packaged over $2.5 trillion in corporate and municipal debt, securitized it, and sold it to institutional and retail investors in China. These so-called shadow-banking loans have become the favorite low-risk and high fixed-return investment in China.

Overpriced loans waste capital in epic proportions. Total loans outstanding in China, both from banks and the so-called shadow-banking sector, are now in excess of 100 trillion yuan ($15.9 trillion) or about double total outstanding commercial loans in the U.S. The high price of much of that lending amounts to a colossal tax on Chinese business, reducing profitability and distorting investment and rational long-term planning.

A Chinese company with its assets in China but a parent company based in Hong Kong or the Cayman Islands can borrow for 5% or less, as Alibaba Group Holding recently has done. The same company with the same assets, but without that offshore shell at the top, may pay triple that rate. So why don’t all Chinese companies set up an offshore parent? Because this was made illegal by Chinese regulators in 2008.

Chinese loans are not only expensive, they are just about all short-term in duration — one year or less in the overwhelming majority of cases. Banks and the shadow-lending system won’t lend for longer.

The loans get called every year, meaning borrowers really only have the use of the money for eight to nine months. The remainder is spent hoarding money to pay back principal. The remarkable thing is that China still has such a dynamic, fast-growing economy, shackled as it is to one of the world’s most overpriced and rigid credit systems.

It is now taking longer and longer to renew the one-year loans. It used to take a few days to process the paperwork. Now, two months or more is not uncommon. As a result, many Chinese companies have nowhere else to turn except illegal money-lenders to tide them over after repaying last year’s loan while waiting for this year’s to be dispersed. The cost for this so-called “bridge lending” in China? Anywhere from 3% a month and up.

Again, we’re talking here not only about small, poorly capitalized and struggling borrowers, but also some of the titans of Chinese business, private-sector companies with revenues well in excess of 1 billion yuan, with solid cash flows and net income. Chinese policymakers are now beginning to wake up to the problem that you can’t build long-term prosperity where long-term lending is unavailable.

Same goes for a banking system that wants to lend only against fixed assets, not cash flow or receivables. China says it wants to build a sleek new economy based on services, but nobody seems to have told the banks. They won’t go near services companies, unless of course, they own and can pledge as collateral a large tract of land and a few thousand square feet of factory space.

Chinese companies used to find it easier to absorb the cost of their high-yield debt. No longer. Companies, along with the overall Chinese economy, are no longer growing at such a furious pace. Margins are squeezed. Interest costs are now swallowing up a dangerously high percentage of profits at many companies.

Not surprisingly, in China there is probably no better business to be in than banking. Chinese banks, almost all of which are state-owned, earned one-third of all profits of the entire global banking industry, amounting to $292 billion in 2013. The government is trying to force a little more competition into the market, and has licensed several new private banks. Tencent Holdings and Alibaba, China’s two Internet giants, both own pieces of new private banks.

Lending in China is a market rigged to transfer an ever-larger chunk of corporate profits to a domestic rentier class. High interest rates sap China’s economy of dynamism and make entrepreneurial risk-taking far less attractive. Those looking for signs China’s economy is moving more in the direction of the market should look to a single touchstone: is foreign capital being more warmly welcomed in China as a way to help lower the usurious cost of borrowing?

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

 

http://asia.nikkei.com/Viewpoints/Perspectives/Chinas-loan-shark-economy

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

Leave a Comment / December 13, 2014

Globe and Mail

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

By Nathan Vanderklippe

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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

 

Globemail

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.

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China’s central government gets serious about changing IPO rules and helping SMEs raise capital, Global Times article

Leave a Comment / December 5, 2014

globatimes

 

Govt calls for progress in IPO reform to help small firms

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By Wang Xinyuan Source:Global Times Published: 2014-11-24

 

Amid a slowing economy, the Chinese government is considering strategies to help the country’s cash-starved micro and small companies. Upcoming IPO reform is expected to offer easier access to stock market funding, but investors are concerned it could divert funds from existing stocks.

 

While China’s economy has been affected by a weakening property sector, erratic foreign demand and sagging domestic investment growth, the authorities are hoping that the country’s millions of micro and small enterprises (MSEs) can offer a source of economic energy.

The State Council, the country’s cabinet, pledged on Wednesday to lower the cost of raising funds by giving banks more flexibility to lend and removing rigid profit requirements for a firm to get listed in stock markets, among other measures aimed at making it easier for small firms to grow.

At the meeting on Wednesday, Premier Li Keqiang urged the securities regulator to speed up plans to unveil simplified rules for new IPOs.

Two days after the cabinet’s meeting, the central bank cut interest rates for the first time in two years.

While the rate cut will be of particular benefit for large State-owned enterprises, simplified IPO access is expected to make it easier for cash-starved smaller firms to raise money directly in the markets.

Under the existing IPO scheme, applicants must meet certain conditions in order to get listed in Shanghai or Shenzhen, including having made a profit for at least two consecutive years and having net profit of at least 10 million yuan ($1.63 million).

Even if they meet these requirements, IPO applicants are also subject to the review and approval procedures of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), the securities watchdog.

The CSRC suspended its IPO reviews in late 2012 in a bid to enhance information disclosure and crack down on rampant financial fraud and insider trading.

The CSRC also wanted to lay solid foundations for a new round of IPO reform intended to diminish government intervention and establish a more efficient, market-based IPO filing system.

The regulator restarted IPO approvals in December 2013 after a 13-month hiatus.

However, the suspension had resulted in a long queue of IPO applicants. As of mid-November this year, 570 firms were waiting for their applications to be reviewed, according to media reports.

A plan for an IPO filing system with a focus on information disclosure is likely to be released by the end of 2014, the 21st Century Business Herald reported on Thursday, citing a source close to the CSRC.

Equal access

Under the new IPO registration system, the CSRC will no longer intervene in the listing process and will focus on supervision rather than review and approval, analysts said.

The system will provide access to market financing for all firms, not just those at the front of the queue for IPO approval, and the investment value shall be judged by investors, not the government, Dong Dengxin, director of the Finance and Securities Institute at Wuhan University of Science and Technology, wrote on his Weibo on Saturday.

The CSRC was not available for comment on the schedule of IPO registration reform when reached by the Global Times on Thursday.

As China tries to move up the value chain and restructure its economy, small firms have become increasingly important. They also account for more than 70 percent of the country’s jobs.

“While the IPO reforms are absolutely correct in their direction and implementation, the capital markets in China are still unable to provide the financing needed for most MSEs to continue to grow,” Peter Fuhrman, chairman and CEO of Shenzhen-based investment bank China First Capital, told the Global Times in an e-mail on Saturday.

Relatively slow approval of IPOs and the exceptionally long waiting list are seen as the major reasons for the difficult funding.

There are “thousands of Chinese MSEs with good size and profits” that are waiting to go public, said Fuhrman.

Read full article.

Alibaba grabs the IPO money but the future belongs to Jeff Bezos and Amazon China

4 Comments / October 3, 2014

Amazon China & Alibaba

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Alibaba Group should next week collect the big money from its NYSE IPO. But, Seattle’s Amazon owns the future of China’s $400 billion online shopping industry. Amazon’s China business is better in just about every crucial respect: customer service, delivery, product quality even price when compared to Alibaba’s towering Taobao business. Hand it to Jeff Bezos. While few have been watching, he is building in China what looks to me to be a better, more long-term sustainable business than Alibaba’s Jack Ma.

Amazon’s China business fits a familiar pattern. The company is often mocked for keeping too much secret, investing too much and earning too little. In China, far away from the Wall Street spotlight, Amazon has invested hugely, with a long-term aim perhaps to overtake Alibaba and become a dominant online retailer in the country. But, it has zero interest in letting its shareholders, competitors, or the world at large know what it’s doing in China. Open the company’s most recent SEC 10-K filing and there are three passing mentions of China, and nothing about the size of its business there, the strategy.

Amazon shareholders may well wake up one day and suddenly find Bezos has built for them one of the most valuable online businesses in the world’s largest e-commerce market, the only one not owned and managed by a Chinese corporation. No rickety and risky VIE structure, unlike Alibaba and virtually all the other Chinese online companies quoted in the US.  (Read damning report by US Congress investigators on these Chinese VIE companies here. )

Jeff Bezos has been in the online shopping business from its genesis, in 1994. He first got serious in China ten years later, by buying a small online shopping business called Joyo in 2004. Taobao was founded by Jack Ma a year earlier. Within three years Taobao had demolished eBay’s then-lucrative China online auction business, by making it free for sellers to list their products on Taobao. Buyers and sellers both pay Taobao zero commission. It earns most of its money from advertising. EBay China closed its doors in 2006. Since then, Alibaba has grown from about $170mn in revenues to over $6 billion in 2013. Approximately three out of every four dollars spent online shopping in China goes through Alibaba’s hands. Overall, online shopping transaction value is on track to exceed $1 trillion by the end of this decade.

online shopping China

The champagne and baijiu will flow at Alibaba next week. Meantime, Bezos will continue executing on his plan, begun in earnest around 2012, to first gain on Taobao, and one day outduel it in China. How? To buy from Amazon China is to see Bezos’s mind at work. He has clearly assessed Taobao’s pivotal weaknesses, and is targeting them with precision.

Taobao has done phenomenally well. But, it is much the same business today as a decade ago. It is mainly a raucous collection of individual sellers where counterfeit, used-sold-as-new or substandard goods are rife. Everything is ad hoc. Sellers can appear and disappear overnight. They charge whatever they like to ship you your merchandise. Try to return things and it can be anything from complicated to impossible. Most payments are processed by Alipay, a business with similar ownership to Alibaba, but not fully consolidated as part of the IPO. Alipay tries to act like an impartial escrow service between Chinese buyers and sellers who too often seem to be out to try to cheat one another.

Taobao is a product of its time, a China where getting stuff cheap, of whatever origin, authenticity and quality, was paramount. It’s also been a great way to create an army of small entrepreneurs in China, eight million in total, with their own shops selling merchandise to over 200 million different individual customers on Taobao. But, Chinese are much richer and more discriminating today than ten years ago. They are getting richer by the day. The larger trends all point in Amazon’s favor.

Here’s why. When you buy things on Amazon China, you mainly purchase direct from Amazon, not from individual sellers. As in the US, Amazon China sells a full range of merchandise not just books. While it has far fewer items for sale than Taobao, it does many things that Taobao cannot. First, it has its own nationwide delivery service. Where I am in Shenzhen, I get delivery the next morning from a guy in an Amazon shirt with his electric motorcycle parked on the sidewalk in front of my building. You can either pay online by credit card, or pay the delivery guy in cash, COD. Delivery is free and reliable. Parcels are professionally packaged in Amazon boxes and generally arrive in mint condition. It’s a limousine service compared to Taobao.

Stuff ordered on Taobao can take days to arrive, and is sent using any of a group of different independently-owned parcel delivery companies. They don’t accept returns, or cash, and often in my experience as a Taobao customer for the last five years the parcels arrive pretty badly roughed up. The Taobao sellers do their own packaging, sometimes good and sometimes no, usually with boxes rescued from the trash, then call whichever parcel company offers them the cheapest rate. The seller usually takes a mark-up since delivery on Taobao is generally not included.

Amazon China is putting its brand and reputation behind everything it sells. This provides a quality guarantee that no individual seller on Taobao can match. I’ve also found over the course of the last year that prices for similar items are often now cheaper on Amazon than on Taobao. How so? For one thing, unlike the Taobao army, Amazon can use its buying power to extract lower prices and better payment terms from its suppliers. Taobao has a subsidiary business called TMall, where major brands directly sell their products. Here at least there should be no worries about the quality and authenticity of what’s being sold. But since each brand manages its own store on TMall, the prices are often higher than on Amazon China. Delivery is also less efficient, in my experience.

What does Taobao still do better than Amazon China? Its website seems a bit easier for Chinese to navigate than Amazon China’s, which looks and acts a lot like the main Amazon website designed and managed in Seattle.

As Bezos’s shareholders know well and occasionally grumble about, he loves spending money on warehouses, shipping technology and other expensive infrastructure. The China business is a marvel of its kind, a kind of “Bezosian” tour de force. The scale and complexity of what Amazon China are doing is formidable. Bezos started and prospered originally with a no inventory business model, letting outside wholesalers hold and so finance the inventory of books he was selling online.

In China, Amazon must stock huge inventories to get products delivered to customers overnight. Where these facilities are and how much Amazon has spent is beyond knowing. Anything I buy on Amazon China — most recently three books, an electronic garlic-mincer and some ceramic carving knives — is delivered to me next day, within about 15 hours of when I ordered it. In a country China’s size, where moving things around long-distance by truck as UPS and Fedex do in the US is difficult and expensive, Amazon has apparently invested in a large nationwide distributed network of warehouses to hold all this inventory. Whether these are owned by Amazon or third parties is also not disclosed. But, it all works smoothly. I get what I order quickly and efficiently, direct from Amazon’s own liveried delivery team, at prices Taobao can’t match.

Every delivered package drives home the message how much faster, cheaper and more reliable Amazon China is compared to Taobao. Try us once, Bezos seems to be saying here in China, and you’ll try us again.

Amazon China delivery guyCan Amazon China be making any money here? My guess is No, that the current operation in China is a big money sink. How big? China’s other big online shopping business, JD.com, which went public earlier this year and has a business model more like Amazon China than Alibaba’s, is losing money every quarter. (Nonetheless, it has a current market cap of $40bn.)

Alibaba, by contrast, is making money hand-over-fist, Rmb8 billion ($1.3bn) in net income the last quarter of 2013. To get noticed, those eight million individual Taobao sellers, as well as TMall brands, need to pay more and more to Taobao for ads and preferential placement.

Longer term, though, the Taobao ad-supported model looks ill-adapted to where China is headed. Traditional store retailers in China are getting slaughtered by online competitors. Among those online players, it seems likely business will shift to those that can guarantee quality, authenticity, easy product returns and efficient next-day-delivery. That describes Amazon.

One reason it’s crazy to bet against Bezos is he has shown no compunction about using shareholder money to build a business that can only start to make real money in ten maybe fifteen years. Jack Ma has no such luxury, especially now that Alibaba will be quoted on the NYSE. Alibaba is not likely to attract the kind of patient shareholders drawn to Amazon.

This is perhaps one reason why Ma has been out spending a huge pile of Alibaba money buying into all kinds of businesses to tack onto Alibaba. These include US car service Lyft, messaging business Tango, and all sorts of domestic Chinese businesses, including a big slice of China’s Twitter, Weibo, the digital mapping company AutoNavi,  16.5% of China’s YouTube knockoff, NYSE-quoted Youku and a Hong Kong-quoted film studio that seems to have been cooking its books. He also bought control of a professional soccer team in China, hoping to upgrade the much-maligned image of the domestic game. Add it up and it looks like even Ma isn’t fully convinced Taobao will be able to keep spinning money for years to come.

His most successful recent venture begun last year is an online money management business called Yuebao that pays Chinese savers about 4% on deposits, compared to the less than 0.5% offered by local Chinese banks. As of early September, it had Rmb574 billion, nearly $100 billion, under management. This business is not included in the Alibaba entity going public in New York. That points up another worrying aspect of Jack Ma’s business style. He has shown a proclivity to put some of the more valuable assets into vehicles that only he, rather than the shareholder-owned company, controls. Yahoo! and Japan’s SoftBank have some bitter direct experience with this.

How far can Bezos go in China? After all, he doesn’t speak Chinese and doesn’t seem to visit China all that often. Can a kid from a Miami high school really build a better China business than scrappy Hangzhou-native Jack Ma? One pointer is that the most successful traditional retailers are now mainly foreign-owned and managed. Domestic retailers couldn’t adapt to this new era of rampant low-price online competition. But, Zara, H&M and Sephora are all thriving here. They, too, focused on details often overlooked here, like good customer service, no-questions-asked return policy, competitive prices and great merchandising.

Alibaba’s market cap next week, after its biggest-of-all-time IPO, may temporarily overtake Amazon’s, at $160 billion. But, make no mistake, Amazon will likely prove the more valuable business over time, both in China and globally.

 

Investment in China PIPEs grows on Alibaba’s coattails — The Deal

Leave a Comment / December 5, 2014

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Investment in China PIPEs grows on Alibaba’s coattails

By Bill Meagher    Updated 07:45 PM, Sep-09-2014 ET

 

Fueled by the anticipated initial public offering of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., a renewed wave of investor interest has swept into U.S.-registered Chinese companies.

Such companies have raised $4.43 billion in 35 private-investment-in-public-equity transactions this year, compared to $276.8 million in 13 PIPEs last year, according to PrivateRaise, The Deal’s data service that tracks the PIPE market. Those figures exclude transactions that raised less than $1 million.

“Everything ultimately comes back to Alibaba,” said Peter Fuhrman, CEO of China First Capital, an investment bank in Shenzhen, China.

Alibaba’s imminent IPO has increased investor awareness that all things related to Internet shopping in China could be a “money-spinner,” Fuhrman said in an e-mail.

“Pretty much all the China IPOs in US this past 12 months have been internet-related. Now comes the Daddy of them all,” he wrote. “This perception of a boom of titanic proportions in online shopping in China is well-founded. The challenge for US investors is whether the companies that have gone public, with exception of Alibaba and to a lesser extent Jingdong will be able to scale up and make real money over time in China.”

To read complete article, click here.

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China juices liquidity, and risk, at OTC exchange — Reuters

Leave a Comment / June 24, 2016

Reuters

China juices liquidity, and risk, at OTC exchange

By Pete Sweeney

SHANGHAI August 22 Thu Aug 21, 2014 5:10pm EDT

(Reuters) – Chinese brokerages will start making markets next week on China’s New Third Board, its leading over-the-counter (OTC) exchange but one long derided as a dead-end market populated by small little-known, opaquely managed firms.

The move has revitalized interest and trading volumes have exploded, but analysts warn of significant risk.

Most of the 66 Chinese brokerages so far approved to make markets – a business that requires deep cash reserves and sophisticated risk management skills – have little experience.

Market makers quote both a buy and sell price and guarantee share availability by holding shares themselves in inventory, which requires careful real-time management.

For brokerages it means extra profits, while China’s policymakers hope the liberalization will boost liquidity in an exchange that can provide capital for small innovative firms, needed for the next phase of economic expansion.

But, analysts fear that brokerages inexperience coupled with inadequate disclosure by listed companies could led to trouble for an exchange already saddled with image problems.

“Like all OTC markets – including… America’s Bulletin Board and Pink Sheets – China’s Third Board suffers from inherent fundamental flaws,” said Peter Fuhrman, chief executive at China First Capital.

“Liquidity and valuations are persistently low and disclosure is spotty. If it was designed to be a solution to the problem of erratic mainstream IPO policy and approvals on China’s main Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges, the Third Board must be judged a major disappointment.”

Regardless of critics, trading volumes on the exchange soared almost 700 percent in May when Chinese media first reported the advent of market-makers, ChinaScope Financial data shows. Foreign investors are unable to trade on the exchange.

A Reuters analysis of daily data from the National Equities Exchange and Quotations (NEEQ), which runs the New Third Board, shows that August volumes are set to surpass May’s record. Transactions worth 1.16 billion yuan ($188.63 million), as of Aug. 19, were nearly double July’s total, while the volume of shares traded has more than tripled month-on-month.

SMALL CAP CELEBRATION

Smaller private companies in China are the country’s biggest aggregate employers and generators of GDP, but they have difficulty getting bank loans and even more difficulty getting regulatory approval to list on major markets or issue bonds.

However, while dozens of local governments have created OTC markets to help match companies with investors, the lack of market makers and lack of a clear upgrade path to major exchanges has caused most firms and investors to steer clear.

But that may be about to change.

“The expectation is that the Third Board can be an entree onto the growth enterprise board for select small companies,” said Brian Ingram, chief investment manager at Russell Ping An Investment Management.

“If the board does serve that purpose, it’s likely to see pretty rapid growth, and the catalyst for that growth is the fact that regulators are allowing brokerage houses to serve as market makers.”

Brokerages hope it will boost in profits, something they need badly having struggled since 2010 as investors steadily switched out of Chinese stocks, among the world’s worst performers, in favor of housing and high-yielding wealth management products.

SMALL-CAP FEEDING FRENZY

Chinese investors enthusiastically trade small, volatile tickers listed on Shenzhen’s ChiNext growth board, so some predict a revitalized OTC board will attract similar speculative interest, further supporting liquidity.

However, sustained interest from both investors and companies depends on whether regulators formally commit to allowing companies on the New Third Board upgrade to ChiNext.

“We’re now considering listing on the New Third Board, but we are waiting for policy confirmation that we can upgrade to ChiNext,” said Cui Lijun, deputy general manager at robotics firm LEN in Shenzhen.

Similar experiments have disappointed in the past, such as the hard-currency-denominated “B-share” board. Speculators bought B-shares hoping they would ultimately be upgraded to yuan-denominated A-shares, but in the end only a few companies were allowed to transfer, leaving the rest stranded.

CALLS FOR CAUTION

The chequered history of OTC markets in China and abroad, especially with regards to disclosure standards, also has many calling for caution.

In the late 2000s, small Chinese companies began listing on American OTC boards, and some managed to upgrade to major exchanges such as NASDAQ. But many were subsequently found to be riddled with accounting irregularities, causing a swathe of delistings.

Given this history, it is unclear whether regulators want to expand the aggregate OTC market or consolidate it.

Out of all of China’s 26 OTC markets, the New Third Board is the only one that companies from anywhere in China can list on, and it will now be the only one where making markets will be allowed.

Some analysts said that this means the government may be elevating the Third Board, so it can then kill off the rest.

But Zhang Yunfeng, the head of Shanghai’s rival OTC market, said in an interview published in China’s Securities Times on Wednesday that he doesn’t feel threatened.

“I’m not optimistic about the market making institution … if there’s not enough base liquidity, market making will have a hard time enabling market performance.”

www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/21/us-china-markets-otc-idUSKBN0GL26920140821

Download PDF version.

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China’s rise enters a more challenging phase, where bold ambitions confront stubborn, often centuries-old obstacles

Leave a Comment / August 5, 2014

China First Capital 2014 Survey cover

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China’s economy and society have both reached levels of wealth and development that were unimaginable 30 years ago. What comes next? How can China continue to push forward, against some deep-seated problems, including how to generate globally-competitive innovation, how to sort out land ownership, how to attract and reward global investment flows? These issues are examined in detail in the new research study published by China First Capital.

The new report is titled ” China Survey 2014: The Rise Continues, New Directions & Challenges“. Copies may be downloaded by clicking here or from the research reports page of the company’s website.

China’s economy remains vibrant and fast-evolving. Many of the Fortune 500 successes stories of recent years – KFC, P&G, Coca-Cola – are finding it harder and harder to keep winning in the China market. As they lose share, other companies are gaining, both domestic and international. The report looks at this transformation through the vantage point of China First Capital’s rather long experience working in China,  alongside some talented CEOs in both domestic and global corporations, the incumbents and the disrupters both.

Investing successfully in China, either through the stock market or through M&A, also remains challenging. But, it’s worth the strain, the report asserts, since no other country can rival China today in terms of both the number and scale of money-making opportunities.

The new China First Capital report discusses these broad trends, and also examines the following in depth:

  •  is China’s investment community (PE and VC firms, stock market investors)  over-allocating now to mobile services and online shopping;
  •  an assessment of the serious challenge facing traditional shopping mall operators and retailers mainly because of competition from soon-to-IPO Alibaba’s online shopping giant;
  • a sober analysis of actual disappointing state of China’s high-tech industry;
  • how China triumphed over India, and won the battle as the world’s best and biggest Emerging Market,
  • why 3M may be the most successful American company in China, but flies so far beneath everyone’s radar

Some of the contents have already been published here on this blog and on Seeking Alpha.

The report’s core conclusion is that China has come a long way and in raw terms is certainly the most successful emerging economy of all time. But, it needs to become more innovative, generate more globally important technology breakthroughs, not just copycatting. There’s no absence of hype around about how China is poised to become a global technology powerhouse. The report, though,  cites China’s failure to serially produce an aircraft engine as a concrete, if not often talked-about, reminder of its technology frustrations and limitations.

 

 

Chinese PE Firms Too Tech-Focused: Report. AsianInvestor

Leave a Comment / December 5, 2014

AI

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Chinese PE firms too tech-focused: report

By Elva Muk | 28 July 2014

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Company valuations are being pushed up as PE firms chase the same targets, and market domination by big players like Alibaba is squeezing profit, says China First Capital.

Spurred by the success of the likes of Tencent and Alibaba, Chinese private equity and venture capital firms have become too focused on technology and e-commerce investments, argues a new report.

Nearly all publicly announced deals this year have been in the technology sector, says the China Private Equity 2014 report from China First Capital, a private capital markets advisory firm. They include online shopping sites and mobile travel, game and taxi-booking services.

Though China has restarted its initial public offering process after a hiatus of more than a year, US listing also provides an effective way for PE firms to exit their investments. Chinese internet and mobile companies Zhaopin, Cheetah Mobile, Sina Weibo and Qihoo 360 have already floated in the US market this year.

Though Tencent and Alibaba are shining examples of success, the investment outlook for newly established technology companies may not be as rosy, the report says. These firms do not enjoy a technological barrier to entry and rely “on the same prayer-for-low-profitability outcome: a purchase down the road by China’s two internet leviathans, Tencent or Alibaba”.

But China First Capital forecasts that the duo will soon lose their appetite for buying smaller Chinese internet firms.

Moreover, domination by the major players has squeezed the growth potential of newcomers. Alibaba commands close to 50% market share of the country’s online shopping in terms of transaction volume, while Tencent is similarly dominant in online gaming. Almost all the money goes to these two firms, the report notes.

Further, the investment landscape in China is less dynamic than some elsewhere. The US has a greater number of venture capital trade buyers for successful VC-backed companies, and less monopolistic internet and mobile industries and a richer early adaptor market to tap, the report notes.

In China over the past two years, PE firms have invested heavily in Chinese shopping sites that follow a model similar to Groupon. However, some projects have lost money because monetising the sites has proved difficult.

Another obstacle in China for private equity in building up investment is the high cost of acquiring clients. In most VC-backed companies in the US, the head of business development is responsible for generating growth at the cheapest cost.

This approach is uncommon in China. A typical method of acquiring customers in the mainland is to pay for a high-ranked listing on search engine Baidu, which handles over 60% of search requests in the country.

“The ‘pay to play’ rules of China’s internet [industry] lead to companies taking lots of expensive shortcuts, often burning a lot of PE and VC firms’ cash,” the report said.

Further, PE firms are chasing the same investment themes and companies, resulting in rising valuations. “It is an ongoing example of inadequate diversification by industry or stage,” it added.

China’s PE capital raised has grown five-fold to over $100 billion since 2005, while the number of firms has grown to 1,000.

– Haymarket Media Limited. All rights reserved.

http://www.asianinvestor.net/News/388932,chinese-pe-firms-too-tech-focused-report.aspx

PDF Version

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Neue Zurcher Zeitung Interview

Leave a Comment / December 5, 2014

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Monday’s “Neue Zurcher Zeitung” of Switzerland published an article based on the interview I gave last week while in London with the newspaper’s financial editor Christof Leisinger. For those whose German is up to the task, click here to read the article in full.

To get a flavor of what we discussed, here are some of the quotes, in English:

“China has the world’s second largest economy and capital market. GPD growth and corporate earnings are both growing far faster than in OECD countries. And yet, global institutional capital is in almost all cases seriously underweight China. How to explain this? Simple, there are just too few attractive and legal ways for international capital to invest in China.

“The Chinese companies quoted in the US and Hong Kong mainly come from two unrepresentative pools: large, slower-growing Chinese state-owned companies, and internet and mobile services “concept” stocks often with limited revenues and profits. The powerful engine of long-term economic growth in China, its millions of successful private sector entrepreneur-founded businesses serving domestic market, are almost all off-limits to non-Chinese investors. To invest, you need state approval to buy Renminbi and later permission to convert back into dollars, Euros or other freely-tradable currencies.

“China no longer especially needs or wants Western capital to finance its economic growth. The best way now to invest in China, to increase allocation there,  is probably through M&A, by putting money into US or European companies that are aggressively acquiring good Chinese private sector ones.”

“Overall, the country is doing an excellent job managing the transition from export-reliance to domestic consumption, a economic challenge Germany is still struggling with. The Chinese economy has undergone enormous structural change over the last five years, most of it positive, with more and more of economic activity coming from the private sector, rather than state-owned one, from producing and selling products to satisfy the needs of  China’s 1 billion consumers rather than those of Wal-Mart shoppers in the US.

“On the macro level I do not expect any big change anytime soon, no free convertibility for the Renminbi. But, more quietly and pragmatically, the Chinese government has solved a rather large problem related to this, by making it legal and simple now for every Chinese citizen to use Renminbi to buy up to $50,000 a year in dollars, to pay for travel, educating their children, or buy shares or other assets outside China. In other words, the capital account remains closed, but Chinese individually now have a lot of the benefits of free exchange between dollars and Renminbi. It’s one of the reasons the Champs d’Elysees and Bond Street are jammed with Chinese tourists.”

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