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China Inc.’s Investment Bank Dives Into Troubled Retail Market — Bloomberg

Leave a Comment / August 11, 2020

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China International Capital Corp., the investment bank ex-Premier Zhu Rongji set up two decades ago to help restructure the Chinese economy, is again taking on a role that fits with the government’s agenda.

CICC’s $2.5 billion acquisition of China Investment Securities Corp. will plunge the firm into the retail investor market, a segment it had long shunned because of thin margins and a traditional focus on institutional clients. The deal is part of Chief Executive Officer Bi Mingjian’s push to lessen dependence on volatile investment banking fees.

Yet the transaction also ties in with a key objective of the government, which will become CICC’s largest shareholder as a result of the purchase. Having used CICC to take some of the largest state companies public since the late 1990s, China is now looking for assistance in its quest to reform a retail-driven equities market that’s prone to speculative booms and busts.

In the wake of the latest such episode, a stock market meltdown last year, the government launched an unprecedented crackdown on the securities industry and arrested several high-ranking executives.

“CICC will once again play this civilizing and globalizing role, only with the more far-reaching aim of helping to professionalize the often-shambolic Chinese stock market,” said Peter Fuhrman, chairman of China First Capital, a Shenzhen-based advisory firm. “Its reputation is still unsullied in China, unlike other banks whose leaders have been marched out in handcuffs and whose market practices are widely blamed for the rampant speculative fever that often afflicts China’s domestic capital markets.”

Reforming Role

In announcing the takeover on Friday, CICC hinted at a reforming role by saying the two firms will “work together to improve the quality and efficiency of mass market services” through training and by upgrading technology systems at China Investment Securities’ 192 branches across the country that serve retail clients.

CICC is buying China Investment Securities from state-owned Central Huijin Investment Ltd. It will issue shares to Central Huijin, more than doubling the entity’s stake in CICC to 58.7 percent. CICC had to get a waiver from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for the transaction, so that Central Huijin’s controlling stake wouldn’t be classified as a reverse takeover.

An additional rationale for the deal is Huijin’s push to consolidate the securities industry by combining institutional and retail brokerage businesses, said Zhang Chunxin, an analyst at CMB International Capital Holdings Corp. She cautioned that “the reform process will be long and gradual.”

China Investment Securities ranked 17th among Chinese securities firms by revenue last year, while CICC was 23rd, according to official data. Bi’s overhaul has the support of the firm’s foreign shareholders, who had already been pushing CICC to diversify into areas such as asset and wealth management, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

Sherry Tan, spokeswoman at CICC, declined to comment.

Shareholder Backing

The combined stakes of CICC’s main foreign backers — private equity firms TPG Capital and KKR & Co., and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC Pte — will drop to 15.3 percent as a result of the takeover. However, the foreign firms may buy additional stakes from Central Huijin in future, people familiar with the matter said.

When former premier Zhu Rongji created CICC in 1995, China was launching a shakeup of its state-run industrial sector, leading to the closure of some 60,000 firms and loss of 40 million jobs. Since then, CICC has worked on some of the biggest listings of state enterprises, such as China Construction Bank Corp. and China Mobile Ltd. It was the top adviser on mergers involving Chinese companies in 2014, 2015 and so far this year.

Buying China Investment Securities is a departure from former CEO Levin Zhu’s strategy. The son of the former premier, who ran the firm until two years ago, had long resisted expanding into retail broking, fearing it would erode margins and its differentiation from other Chinese securities firms, according to people familiar with the matter.

Last year’s leverage-fueled equities rally and the subsequent implosion brought worldwide attention to the shortcomings of China’s markets. The government responded with an effort that included enlisting securities firms in supporting the stock market as well as jailing senior brokerage executives for alleged wrongdoing. CICC wasn’t among the firms that took part in the stock-market rescue, but China Investment Securities was.

Market Manias

China’s 114 million individual investors account for the bulk of equities trading. That makes them a hard-to-ignore segment, but also one that tends to be susceptible to market manias. Critics contend that the government’s efforts to restore market calm last year only served to hurt investor confidence further.

The Shanghai Composite Index remains 39 percent below its June 2015 peak. Xiao Gang, who was removed from his post as chairman of China’s securities regulator this year, in January acknowledged loopholes and ineptitude within the regulatory system.

Some analysts aren’t convinced the deal is in CICC’s best interest. The stock fell 2.1 percent on Monday after a trading halt was lifted.

The transaction makes the firm “more like a state-owned company, which could compromise CICC’s corporate governance, operational autonomy” and its ability to retain top talent, said Fred Hu, Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s former Greater China chairman.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-07/china-inc-s-investment-bank-dives-into-troubled-retail-market

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Why China PE will rise again — Interview in China Law & Practice Annual Review 2013

2 Comments / March 11, 2014

—CLP

 

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Peter Fuhrman, chairman of China First Capital, talks to David Tring about his company’s disciplined focus, what the IPO freeze means for PE investors and how a ruling from a court in China has removed a layer of safety for PE firms

What is China First Capital?

China First Capital is a China-focused international bank and advisory firm. I am its chairman and founder. Establishing, and now running, China First Capital is the fulfilment of a deeply-held ambition nurtured for over 30 years. I first came to China in 1981, as part of a first intake of American graduate students in China. I left China after school and then built a career in the US and Europe. But, throughout, I never lost sight of the goal to return to China and start a business that would contribute meaningfully and positively to the country’s revival and prosperity.

China First Capital is small by investment banking industry standards. Our transaction volume over the preceding twelve months was around $250 million. But, we aim to punch above our weight. China First Capital’s geographical reach and client mandates are across all regions of China, with exceptional proprietary deal flow. We have significant domain expertise in most major industries in China’s private and public sector, structuring transactions for a diversified group of companies and financial sponsors to help them grow and globalise. We seek to be a knowledge-driven company, committed to the long-term economic prosperity of Chinese business and society, backed by proprietary research (in both Chinese and English), that is generally unmatched by other boutique investment banks or advisory firms active in China.

What have been some of the legislative changes to the PE sector this year that are affecting you?

The recent policy and legislative changes are mainly no more than tweaks. There has been some sparring within China over which regulator would oversee private equity. But, overall, the PE industry in China is both lightly and effectively regulated. A key change, however, occurred through the legal system within China, when a court in Western China invalidated the put clause of a PE deal done within China, ruling that the PE firm involved had ignored China’s securities laws in crafting this escape mechanism for their investment.  While the court ruled on only a single example, the logic applied in this case seems to me, and many others, to be both persuasive and potentially broad-reaching. For PE firms that traditionally added this put clause to all contracts they signed to invest in Chinese companies, and came to rely on it as a way to compel the company to buy them out after a number of years if no IPO took place, there is now real doubt about whether a put clause is worth the paper it’s printed on. Simply put, for PE firms, it means their life-raft here in China has perhaps sprung a leak.

What are some of the hottest sectors in China that are attracting PE investors?

At the moment, with IPOs suspended within China and Chinese private companies decidedly unwelcome in the capital markets that once embraced them by the truckload – the US and Hong Kong – there are no hot sectors for PE investment in China now. The PE industry in China, once high-flying, is now decidedly grounded and covered in tarpaulin. What is perhaps most unfortunate about this is that what we are seeing mainly is a crisis within China’s PE industry, not within the ranks of China’s very dynamic private entrepreneurial economy. In other words, while financing has all but dried up, China’s private companies continue, in many cases, to excel and outperform those everywhere else in the world. The PE firms made a fundamental miscalculation by pouring money into too many deals where their only method of exit, of getting their money back with a profit, was through an IPO. By our count, there are now over 7,500 PE-invested deals in China all awaiting exit, at a time when few, if any exits are occurring. Since PE firms themselves have a finite life in almost all cases, this means over $100bn in capital is now stuck inside deals with no high-probability way to exit before the PE funds themselves reach their planned expiry. The PE industry has never seen anything quite like what is happening now in China.

What is a typical day like for you at China First Capital?

We are lucky to work for an outstanding group of companies, mainly all Chinese domestic. Indeed, I am the only non-Chinese thing about the business. I am in China doing absolutely what I love doing. There are no aspects of my working day that I find tedious or unpleasant. Even at my busiest, I am aware I am at most a few hours away from what the next in an endless series of totally delicious Chinese meals. That alone has a levitating effect on my spirit. But, the real source of pleasure and purpose is in befriending and working beside entrepreneurs who are infinitely more skilled, more driven and wiser to the ways of the world and more successful than I ever could hope to be.

We are quite busy now working for one of China’s largest SOEs. It’s something of a departure for us, since most of our work is with private sector companies. But, this is a fascinating transaction that provides me with a quite privileged insider’s view of the way a large state-owned business operates here in China, the additional layers of decision-making and the unique environment that places far greater onus on increasing revenues than profits.

What do you find are some of the major issues or concerns for foreign PE clients when doing deals in China?

All investors looking to make money in China, whether on the stock market or through private equity and venture capital,  must confront the same huge uncertainty – not that China itself will stop its remarkable economic transformation and stop growing at levels that leave the rest of the developed world behind in the dust. This growth I believe will continue for at least the next 20 years. The big unknown has to do with the actual situation inside the Chinese company you are buying into. Can the financial statements and Big Four audits be relied on? Are the actual profits what the company asserts them to be? How great is the risk that investors’ money will disappear down some unseen rat hole?

Some frightening stories have come to light in the last two years. How widespread is the problem of accounting fraud in China? Part of the problem really is just the law of big numbers. With a population almost triple that of the US and Western Europe combined, China has a lot of everything, including both remarkable businesses run by individuals who are the entrepreneurial equal of Henry Ford and Steve Jobs, and well as some shady operators.

What is your outlook for China’s PE sector in the coming 12 months?

I believe the current crisis will abate, and stock markets will once again welcome Chinese private sector companies to do IPOs. The IPOs will be far fewer in number than in 2010, but still the revival of IPO exits will also thaw the current deep-freeze that has shut down most PE activity across China. PE firms will again start to invest, and put a dent in the $30 billion or more in capital they have raised to invest in China but have left untouched. The PE industry in China, since its founding a little more than a decade ago, grew enormously large but never really matured. There are now too many PE firms. By some count, the number exceeds 1,000, including hundreds of Renminbi PE firms started and run by people with no real experience investing in private companies. Their future appears dire. At the same time, the global PE firms that bestride the industry, including Carlyle, Blackstone, TPG, KKR, have yet to fully establish they can operate as efficiently and profitably in China as they do in Europe and the US.

While the China PE industry struggles to recover from many self-inflicted wounds, China’s private sector companies will continue to find and exploit huge opportunities for growth and profit in China, as the nation’s one billion consumers grow ever-richer and ever more demanding.

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Smithfield Foods – Shuanghui International: The Biggest Chinese Acquisition That Isn’t

1 Comment / June 14, 2013


It is, if voluminous press reports are to be believed, the biggest story, the biggest deal, ever in China-US business history. I’m talking about the announced takeover of America’s largest pork company, Smithfield Foods, by a company called Shuanghui International. The deal, it is said in dozens of media reports, opens the China market to US pork and will transform China’s largest pork producer into a global giant selling Smithfield’s products alongside its own in China, while utilizing the American company’s more advanced methods for pork rearing and slaughtering.

One problem. A Chinese company isn’t buying Smithfield. A shell company based in Cayman Islands is. Instead of a story about “China buying up the world”, this turns out to be a story of a precarious leveraged buyout deal (“LBO”) cooked up by some large global private equity firms looking to borrow their way to a fortune.

The media, along with misstating the facts, are also missing the larger story here. The proposed Smithfield takeover is the latest iteration in the “take private” mania now seizing so many of the PE firms active in China. (See blog posts here, here, here and here.) With China’s own capital markets in crisis and PE investment there at a standstill, the PE firms have turned their attention, however illogically, to finding “undervalued assets” with a China angle on the US stock market. They then attempt an LBO, with the consent of existing management, and with the questionable premise the company will relist or be sold later in China or Hong Kong. The Smithfield deal is the biggest — and perhaps also the riskiest —  one so far.

This shell that is buying Smithfield has no legal or operational connection to Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development (from here on, “Shuanghui China”) , the Chinese pork producer, China’s largest, quoted on the Shenzhen stock exchange. The shell is about as Chinese as I am.

If the deal is completed, Shuanghui China will see no obvious benefit, only an enormous risk. Its Chinese assets are reportedly being used as collateral for the shell company to finance a very highly-leveraged acquisition. The abundant risks are being transferred to Shuanghui China while all the profits will stay inside this separately-owned offshore shell. No profits or assets of Smithfield will flow through to Shuanghui China. Do Shuanghui China’s Chinese minority shareholders know what’s going on here? Does the world’s business media?

Let’s go through this deal. I warn you. It’s a little convoluted. But, do take the time to follow what’s going on here. It’s fascinating, ingenious and maybe also a little nefarious.

First, the buyer of Smithfield is Shuanghui International, a Cayman holding company. It owns the majority of Shuanghui China, the Chinese-quoted pork company. Shuanghui International is owned by a group led by China-focused global PE firm CDH, with smaller stakes owned by Shuanghui China’s senior management,  Goldman Sachs, Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, Kerry Group, and another powerful PE firm focused on China, New Horizon Fund.

CDH, the largest single owner of Shuanghui International,  is definitively not Chinese. It invests capital from groups like Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund , CALPERS, the Rockefeller Foundation, one big Swiss (Partners Group) and one big Liechtenstein (LGT) money manager, along with the private foundation of one of guys who made billions from working at eBay. So too Goldman Sachs, of course, Temasek and New Horizon. They are large PE firms that source most of their capital from institutions, pension fund and endowments in the US, Europe, Southeast Asia and Middle East. (For partial list of CDH and New Horizon Fund Limited Partners click here. )

For the Smithfield acquisition, Shuanghui International (CDH and the others) seem to be putting up about $100mn in new equity. They will also borrow a staggering $4 billion from Bank of China’s international arm to buy out all of Smithfield’s current shareholders.  All the money is in dollars, not Renminbi.

If the deal goes through, Smithfield Foods and Shuanghui China will have a majority shareholder in common. But, nothing else. They are as related as, for example, Burger King and Neiman Marcus were when both were part-owned by buyout firm TPG. The profits and assets of one have no connection to the profits or assets of the other.

Shuanghui International, assuming it’s borrowed the money from Bank of China for three years,  will need to come up with about $1.5 billion in interest and principal payments a year if the deal closes. But, since Shuanghui International has no significant cash flow of its own (it’s an investment holding company), it’s hard to see where that money will come from. Smithfield can’t be much help. It already has a substantial amount of debt on its balance sheet. As part of the takeover plan, the Smithfield debt is being assumed by Morgan Stanley, Shuanghui International’s investment bankers. Morgan Stanley says it plans then to securitize the debt. A large chunk of Smithfield’s future free cash flow ($280mn last year) and cash ($139 mn as of the first quarter of 2013) will likely go to repay the $3 billion in Smithfield debts owed to Morgan Stanley.

A separate issue is whether, under any circumstances, more US pork will be allowed into China. The pork market is very heavily controlled and regulated. There is no likely scenario where US pork comes flooding into China. Yes, the media is right to say Chinese are getting richer and so want to eat more meat, most of all pork. But, mainly, the domestic market in China is reserved for Chinese hog-breeders. It’s an iron staple of China’s rural economy. These peasants are not going to be thrown under the bus so Smithfield’s new Cayman Islands owner can sell Shuanghui China lots of Armour bacon.

Total borrowing for this deal is around $7 billion, double Smithfield’s current market cap. Shuanghui International’s piece, the $4 billion borrowed from Bank of China, will go to current Smithfield shareholders to buy them out at a 31% premium.  Shuanghui International owns shares in Shuanghui China, and two of its board members are Shuanghui China top executives, but not much else. So where will the money come from to pay off the Bank of China loans? Good question.

Can Shuanghui International commandeer Shuanghui China’s profits to repay the debt? In theory, perhaps. But,  it’s highly unlikely such an arrangement would be approved by China’s securities regulator, the CSRC. It would not likely accept a plan where Shuanghui China’s profits would be exported to pay off debts owed by a completely independent non-Chinese company. Shuanghui International could sell its shares in Shuanghui China to pay back the debt. But, doing so would likely mean Shuanghui International loses majority control, as well as flooding the Shenzhen stock market with a lot of Shuanghui China’s thinly-traded shares.

Why, you ask, doesn’t Shuanghui China buy Smithfield? Such a deal would make more obvious commercial and financial sense. Shuanghui China’s market cap is triple Smithfield’s. Problem is, as a domestic Chinese company listed on China’s stock exchange, Shuanghui China would need to run the gauntlet of CSRC, Ministry of Commerce and SAFE approvals. That would possibly take years and run a risk of being turned down.  Shuanghui International, as a private Caymans company controlled by global PE firms,  requires no Chinese approvals to take over a US pork company.

The US media is fixated on whether the proposed deal will get the US government’s go ahead. But, as the new potential owner is not Chinese after all — neither its headquarters nor its ownership — then on what grounds could the US government object? The only thing Chinese-controlled about Shuanghui International is that the members of the Board of Directors were all likely born in China. The current deal may perhaps violate business logic but it doesn’t violate US national security.

So, how will things look if Shuanghui International’s LBO offer is successful?  Shuanghui China will still be a purely-Chinese pork producer with zero ownership in Smithfield, but with its assets perhaps pledged to secure the takeover debts of its majority shareholder. All the stuff about Shuanghui China getting access to Smithfield pork or pig-rearing and slaughtering technology, as well as a Smithfield-led upgrade of China’s pork industry,  is based on nothing solid. The pork and the technology will be owned by Shuanghui China’s non-Chinese majority shareholder. It can, if it chooses, sell pork or technology to Shuanghui China. But, Shuanghui China can achieve the same thing now. In fact, it is already a reasonably big buyer of Smithfield pork. Overall, China gets less than 1% of its pork from the US.

If the deal goes through, the conflicts of interest between Shuanghui International and Shuanghui China will be among the most fiendish I’ve ever seen. Shuanghui China’s senior managers, including chairman Wan Long, are going to own personally a piece of Smithfield, and so will have divided loyalties. They will likely continue to manage Shuanghui China and collect salaries there, while also having an ownership and perhaps a management role in Smithfield. How will they set prices between the two fully separate Shuanghuis? Who will watch all this? Isn’t this a case Shuanghui China’s insiders lining their own pockets while their employer gets nothing?

On its face, this Smithfield deal looks to be among the riskiest of all the  “take private” deals now underway. That is saying something since several of them involve Chinese companies suspected of accounting frauds, while the PE firms in at least two cases (China Transinfo and Le Gaga) doing the PE version of a Ponzi Scheme by seeking to use new LP money to bail out old, severely troubled deals they’ve done.

Let’s then look at the endgame, if the Smithfield deal goes through. Shuanghui International, as currently structured,  will not, cannot, be the long-term owner of Smithfield. The PE firms will need to exit. CDH, New Horizon, Goldman Sachs and Temasek have been an indirect shareholders of Shuanghui China for many years — seven in the case of CDH and Goldman.

According to what I’m told, Shuanghui International is planning to relist Smithfield in Hong Kong in “two to three years”. The other option on the table, for Shuanghui International to sell Smithfield (presumably at a mark-up) to Shuanghui China, would face enormous, probably insurmountable,  legal, financial and regulatory hurdles.

The IPO plan, as of now, looks crackpot. Hong Kong’s IPO market has basically been moribund for over a year. IPO valuations in Hong Kong are anyway far lower than the 20X p/e Shuanghui International is paying for Smithfield in the US. A separate tactical question for Shuanghui International and its investment bankers: why would you believe Hong Kong stock market investors in two to three years will pay more than US investors are now paying for a US company, with most of its assets, profits and revenues in the US?

But, even getting to IPO will require Shuanghui International to do something constructive about paying off the enormous $4 billion in debt it is taking on. How will that happen? Shuanghui International is saying Smithfield’s current American management will stay on. Why would one assume they can run it far more profitably in the future than they are running it now? If it all hinges on “encouraging” Shuanghui China to buy more Smithfield products, or pay big licensing fees, so Shuanghui International can earn larger profits, I do wonder how that will be perceived by both Shuanghui China’s minority investors, to say nothing of the CSRC. The CSRC has a deep institutional dislike of related party transactions.

Smithfield has lately been under pressure from some of its shareholders to improve its performance. That may have precipitated the discussions that led to the merger announcement with Shuanghui International. Smithfield’s CEO, C. Larry Pope, stands to earn somewhere between $17mn-$32mn if the deal goes through. He will stay on as CEO. His fiscal 2012 salary, including share and option awards, was $12.9mn.

Typical of such LBO deals, the equity holders (in this case, CDH, Goldman, Temasek, Kerry Group, Shuanghui China senior management, New Horizon) would stand to make a killing, if they can pay down the debt and then find a way to either sell or relist Smithfield at a mark-up. If that happens, profits will go to the Shuanghui insiders along with the partners in the PE firms, CALPERS, the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, Goldman Sachs shareholders and other LPs. Shuanghui China? Nothing, as far as I can tell. China’s pork business will look pretty much exactly as it does today.

In their zeal to proclaim a trend — that of Chinese buying US companies — the media seems to have been blinded to the actual mechanics of this deal. They also seem to have been hoodwinked by the artfully-written press release issued when the deal was announced. It mentions that Shuanghui International is the ” majority shareholder of Henan Shuanghui Investment & Development Co. (SZSE: 000895), which is China’s largest meat processing enterprise and China’s largest publicly traded meat products company as measured by market capitalization.” This then morphed into a story about “China’s biggest ever US takeover”, and much else besides about how China’s pork industry will now be upgraded through this deal, about dead pigs floating in the river in Shanghai, about Chinese companies’ targeting US and European brands.

China may indeed one day become a big buyer of US companies. But, that isn’t what’s happening here. Instead, the world’s leading English-language business media are suffering a collective hallucination.

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China PE value-added: Empty promises? AVCJ

Leave a Comment / December 5, 2014

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Author: Tim Burroughs

Asian Venture Capital Journal | 22 May 2013 | 15:47 secure

Tags: Gps | China | Operating partners | Buyout | Growth capital |Lunar capital management | Cdh investments management | Citic capital partners | Kohlberg kravis roberts & co. (kkr) | Jiuding Capital | Hony capital

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       –China value-add: Empty promises?

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Pulled by a desire to buy and build or pushed by a need to address restricted exit options, PE firms in China are placing greater emphasis on operational value-add. LPs must decide who’s all talk and who is action

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By the time Harvard Business School published its case study of Kunwu Jiuding Capital in December 2011, the investment model being celebrated was already fading.

Within four years of its launch, the private equity firm had amassed $1 billion in funds and 260 employees, having turned itself into a PE factory “where investment activities were carried out in a way similar to large-scale industrial production.” Jiuding’s approach focused on getting a company to IPO quickly and leveraging exit multiples available on domestic bourses; and then repeating the process several dozen times over. With IRRs running to 500% or more, an army of copycats emerged as renminbi fundraising jumped 60% year-on-year to $30.1 billion in 2012.

But the average price-to-earnings ratio for ChiNext-listed companies had slipped below 40 by the end of 2011, compared to 129 two years earlier; SME board ratios were also sliding. Already denied the multiples to which they were accustomed, nearly a year later these pre-IPO investors were denied any listings at all as China’s securities regulator froze approvals.

The Harvard Business School case study noted that concerns had been raised about the sustainability of the quick-fire approach, given that some of these GPs appeared to lack the skills and experience to operate in normalized conditions. “The short-term mentality creates volatility,” Vincent Huang, a partner at Pantheon, told AVCJ in October 2011. “A lot of these GPs don’t have real value to add and so they won’t be in the market for the long run.”

Subsequent events have elevated the debate into one of existential proportions for pre-IPO growth capital firms. Listings will return but it is unclear whether they will reach their previous heights: the markets may be more selective and the valuations more muted.

There is also a sense that GPs have been found out lacking a Plan B; renminbi fundraising dropped to $5.1 billion in the second half of 2012. The trend is reflected on the US dollar side as the slowdown in Hong Kong listings over the course of the year left funds with ever decreasing certainty over portfolio exits. If GPs – big or small – face holding a company for longer than expected, what are they going to do with it?

“We value control and we can take advantage of the M&A markets if we have it. We also like the IPO markets here but any investment where we aren’t a controlling shareholder, we can’t set down the timetable for exit,” says H. Chin Chou, CEO of Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia. “We ask ourselves, ‘Do we like holding this investment for five years because there is no IPO? At some point the IPO market will come back but until then you have to be very comfortable holding it.”

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Blackstone Leads Latest Chinese Privatization Bid — New York Times

Leave a Comment / December 14, 2014

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MAY 21, 2013, 7:07 AM

Blackstone Leads Latest Chinese Privatization Bid

By NEIL GOUGH

A fund run by the Blackstone Group is leading a $662.3 million bid for a technology outsourcing firm based in China, the latest example of a modest boom among buyout shops backing the privatization of Chinese companies listed in the United States.

A consortium backed by a private equity fund of Blackstone that includes the Chinese company’s management said on Monday that it would offer $7.50 a share to acquire Pactera Technology International, which is based in Beijing and listed on Nasdaq.

The offer, described as preliminary, represents a hefty 43 percent premium to Pactera’s most recent share price before the deal was announced. The news sent the company’s stock up 30.6 percent on Monday, to $6.87 — still more than 8 percent below the offer price, in a sign that some investors remain wary that a deal will be completed.

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Jiuding Capital: Local Boy Makes Good Atop China’s PE Industry

1 Comment / June 17, 2013

In China’s PE jungle, a mouse is king. Started just five years ago, Kunwu Jiuding Capital (昆吾九鼎投资管理有限公) has probably achieved the best results and best returns for investors in China’s private equity industry over the last three years. Indeed, few if any PE investors anywhere have out-performed Jiuding in recent years. (For a more recent analysis on challenges facing Jiuding, please click here. )

With only around $1 billion in assets, Jiuding is around 1%-2% the size of the leading global PE firms like Blackstone, KKR, Bain Capital and Carlyle. Yet, none of these firms matches Jiuding’s recent record at investing, exiting, and pocketing big returns in China. The firm is about as different from the likes of TPG, KKR and Carlyle as firms in the same industry can get. Jiuding isn’t staffed with Ivy League MBAs, operates out of modest offices, makes no claim to particular expertise in business operations, nor does it reward its partners with hundreds of millions in profits from carried interest.

Jiuding has mastered a form of PE investing devoid of glamour, prestige or deal-making genius. Rather than “Barbarians at the Gate“, think more “Accountants at the Cash Till“. Jiuding may want to savor its current status as “king of the China PE jungle”. The money-making formula Jiuding has used so effectively is getting tougher all the time.

The Jiuding investment method is blunt: it invests only in Chinese companies it believes will very soon thereafter get approved for domestic IPO. It’s not trying to guess which industries will flourish, or how Chinese consumers will spend their money in the future. It makes no bets on unproved technologies, or companies that may be growing fast, but are still years away from an IPO. Its investment technique is based on reproducing internally, as much as possible, the lengthy, opaque approval IPO process of China’s all-powerful securities regulator the CSRC.

Jiuding focuses more on guessing what the CSRC will do, rather than how a particular company will fare. This way, it hopes to capture a big valuation differential between its entry price and exit price after IPO. At its high point two years ago, there was a ten-fold gap between Jiuding’s entry and exit multiples. Jiuding bought in at a p/e of less than 10X, and could exit at over 80X. Though share prices and p/e multiples have fallen, the gap remains ample, still under 10X going in, and a likely 25X-30X going out.

Here’s the way it works: the CSRC IPO approval process can take anywhere from two to five years. Jiuding times its investment as close as legally permissible to the time when the company will file for IPO. It then gets to work doing everything it can to improve the likelihood of CSRC approval, attending meetings at the CSRC, lobbying backstage. When things go smoothly, Jiuding can enter and exit an investment in three years, including the mandatory one-year lockup after IPO.

The average hold time for other PE firms investing in China can be as long as six to eight years. These other firms are willing to invest earlier and then help the company transition, often over a two to three year period, to full tax and regulatory compliance. This is a prerequisite before filing for IPO. Change in China is perpetual, sudden, frenetic. The longer a PE firm holds an investment, the greater the risk some change in the rules, or the domestic market, or the exchange rate, or the competitive landscape will ruin a once-strong company.

These uncertainties, as well as the significant risk a Chinese company will not pass CSRC’s IPO approval process, are the two largest China PE investment risks that Jiuding tries to eliminate. For Jiuding, this means a hyper-technical focus on whether a company is paying all its taxes and whether its main customer is actually the founder’s brother-in-law. In other words, are there serious related party transactions? This is often the main reason the CSRC turns down an IPO application.

Other PEs, particularly the global giants,  take a different approach. They expend huge energy on the process of analyzing and predicting the future course of a company’s products, markets, competitive position. This involves a lot of brain power and also some guesswork. The results are mixed. A lot of deals never close, because the PE firm, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and lots of man-hours, can’t complete due diligence. Others will never reach the stage of even applying for IPO, let alone getting approval.

Jiuding seems perfectly-adapted to the Chinese investment terrain. When its process works, its bets pay off handsomely, often delivering returns of at least three times capital invested. Jiuding calls this a “PE factory method”. It tries to systematize as much of the investment process as possible. Jiuding has a huge staff of at least 250 people, ten times the size of other PEs in China. They are kept busy doing this work of collecting company data and then simulating the CSRC’s approval process. It invites its LPs, mainly wealthy Chinese bosses, to participate in deal screening and approval. If the majority of LPs doesn’t approve of a deal, it doesn’t get done. In the PE industry, this is often known as “letting the lunatics run the asylum”.

To be sure, Jiuding doesn’t always get it right. It does more deals each year than just about every other PE firm in China. Quite a few will flame out before IPO. But, Jiuding will usually get its original investment back, by forcing companies to buy back the shares. Meantime, its IPO hit rate is high, as far as I can tell. The company discloses information only sporadically, and its website lists only fourteen IPOs. Its actual tally is certainly far higher. Jiuding regards everything about its business — its portfolio of investments, its total capital, its staff size — as commercial secrets.

Jiuding differs in another important way from larger, better-known PE firms: it helps itself to less of its LPs’ money . Jiuding takes a lower management fee, usually a one-time 3% charge, rather than annual 1%-3%, and awards itself with a smaller carry on successful deals. Jiuding’s almost as efficient at raising money as it is investing it. It’s already raised at least ten different funds, including, recently, a dollar one.

With everything going so well, Jiuding, and its stripped-down approach to PE investing, looks unstoppable. But, there are some signs of serious problems ahead for Jiuding. Its main problems now aren’t raising money or even finding good companies. Partly, it’s a challenge familiar to most successful Chinese companies, including many Jiuding has invested in: copycats start springing up everywhere. In the last two years, hundreds of new Renminbi PE firms were founded. Many are trying to duplicate Jiuding’s formula. They also focus on companies ready to apply for IPO, and also try to anticipate the way the CSRC will rule on the application. Jiuding needs to fight harder now to win deals, and often does this by agreeing to invest at higher price than others. That will inevitably lower potential returns.

The second, larger problem is the CSRC’s IPO approval process itself. It is becoming slower, and also even more impenetrable and unpredictable, even to the savants at Jiuding. It’s harder now for Jiuding to get in and out of deals quickly, a key to its success. The backlog of Chinese companies with CSRC approval and waiting to IPO is now at around 500. In most cases, that means a wait of at least two years after the laborious CSRC process is complete. A lot can go wrong during that time. So, an investor like Jiuding will need to understand, before going in, more about a company and its longer-term prospects.

In China’s PE market, where good companies are plentiful and IPO exits are limited, Jiuding has prospered by focusing more on understanding the regulator than on understanding a company’s business model and industry. It never needed to bother much with monitoring the day-to-day dramas of running a company, or offering sage advice as a board member, or helping a company expand its partnerships and improve marketing. Yet, all this is becoming more and more necessary. These aren’t skills Jiuding has mastered. Who has? The same big global PE firms (including Carlyle, TPG, Blackstone, KKR, Bain Capital) that Jiuding has lately run circles around. Jiuding’s “PE factory” must adapt or die.

 

 

Taxed At Source: Renminbi Private Equity Firms Confront the Taxman

Leave a Comment / March 15, 2011

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The formula for success in private equity is simple the world over: make lots of money investing other people’s money, keep 20% of the profits and pay little or no taxes on your share of the take. This tax avoidance is perfectly legal. PE firms are usually incorporated as offshore holding companies in tax-free domains like the Cayman Islands.

Depending on their nationality, partners at PE firms may need to pay some tax on the profits distributed to them individually. But, some quick footwork can also keep the taxman at bay. For example, I know PE partners who are Chinese nationals, living in Hong Kong. They plan their lives to be sure not to be in either Hong Kong or China for more than 182 days a year, and so escape most individual taxes as well. Even when they pay, it’s usually at the capital gains rate, which is generally far lower than income tax.

The tax efficiency is fundamental to private equity, and most other forms of fiduciary investing. If the PE firm’s profits were assessed with income tax ahead of distributions to Limited Partners (“LPs”), it would significantly reduce the overall rate of return, to say nothing about potentially incurring double taxation when those LPs share of profits got dinged again by the tax man.

China, as everyone in the PE world knows, is very keen to foster growth of its own homegrown private equity firms. It has introduced a raft of new rules to allow PE firms to incorporate, invest Renminbi and exit via IPO in China. So far so good. The Chinese government is also pouring huge sums of its own cash into private equity, either directly through state-owned companies and agencies, or indirectly through the country’s pay-as-you-go social security fund. (See my recent blog post here.)

Exact figures are hard to come by. But, it’s a safe bet that at least Rmb100 billion (USD$15 billion) in capital was committed to domestic private equity firms last year. This year should see even larger number of new domestic PE firms established, and even larger quadrants of capital poured in.

It’s going to be a few years yet before the successful Chinese domestic PE firms start returning significant investment profits to their investors. When they do, their investors will likely be in for something of an unpleasant surprise: the PE firms’ profits, almost certainly, will be reduced by as much as 25% because of income tax.

In other words, along with building a large homegrown PE industry that can rival those of the US and Europe, China is also determined to assess those domestic PE firms with sizable income taxes. These two policy priorities may turn out to be wholly incompatible. PE firms, more than most, have a deep, structural aversion to paying income tax on their profits. For one thing, doing so will cut dramatically into the personal profits earned by PE partners, lowering significantly the after-tax returns for these professionals. If so, the good ones will be tempted to move to Hong Kong to keep more of their share of the profits they earn investing others’ money. If so, then China could get deprived of some experienced and talented PE partners its young industry can ill afford to lose.

It’s still early days for the PE industry in China. Renminbi PE firms really only got started two years ago. I’ve yet to hear any partners of domestic PE firms complain. But, my guess is that the complaining will begin just as soon as these PE firms begin to have successful exits and begin to write very large checks to the Chinese tax bureau. What then?

China’s tax code is nothing if not fluid. New tax rules are announced and implemented on a weekly basis. Sometimes taxes go down. Most often lately, they go up.  Compared to developed countries, changing the tax code in China is simpler, speedier. So, if the Chinese government discovers that taxing PE firms is causing problems, it can reverse the policy rather quickly.

The PE firms will likely argue that taxing their profits will end up hurting hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese whose pensions will be smaller because the PE firms’ gains are subject to tax. In industry, this is known as the “widows and orphans defense”. Chinese contribute a share of their paycheck to the state pension system, which then invests this amount on their behalf, including about 10% going to PE investment.

PE firms outside China are structured as offshore companies, with offices in places like London, New York and Hong Kong, but a tax presence in low- and no-tax domains. But, there’s currently no real way to do this in China, to raise, invest and earn Renminbi in an offshore entity. Changing that opens up an even larger can of worms, the current restrictions preventing most companies or individuals outside China from holding or investing Renminbi. This restriction plays a key part in China’s all-important Renminbi exchange rate policy, and management of the country’s nearly $2.8 trillion of foreign reserves.

The world’s major PE firms are excitedly now raising Renminbi funds. Several have already succeeded, including Carlyle and TPG. They want access to domestic investment opportunities as well as the high exit multiples on China’s stock market. When and if the income tax rules start to bite and the firm’s partners get a look at their diminished take, they may find the appeal of working and investing in China far less alluring.

 

 

 

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Carlyle Goes Native: Renminbi Investing Gets Big Boost in China

2 Comments / March 1, 2010

 

Qing Dynasty lacquer box from China First Capital blog post

My congratulations, both personal and professional, to Carlyle Group, which announced last week the launch of its first RMB fund, in partnership with China’s Fosun Group. I happen to know some of the people working at Carlyle in China, and I’m excited about the news, and how it will positively impact their careers. 

Carlyle is the first among the private equity industry’s global elite to take this giant public step forward in raising renminbi in partnership with leading Chinese private company. It marks an important milestone in the short but impressive history of private equity in China, and points the way forward for many of the private equity firms already established in China. 

The initial size of the new renminbi fund is $100mn. By Carlyle’s standards, this seems almost like a rounding error – representing a little more than 0.1% of Carlyle’s total assets of $90 billion.  But, don’t let the size fool you. For Carlyle, the new renminbi fund just might play an important role in the firm’s future, as well as China’s. 

The reason: Carlyle will now be able to use renminbi to invest more easily in domestic companies in China, then help take them public in China, on the Shanghai or Shenzhen stock markets. Up to now, Carlyle’s investments in China, like those of its global competitors, have been mainly in dollars, into companies that were structured for a public listing outside China. Carlyle has a lot to gain, since IPO valuations are at least twice as high in China as they are in Hong Kong or USA. 

That means an renminbi investment leading to a Chinese IPO can earn Carlyle a much higher return, likely over 300% higher, than deals they are now doing.  By the way, the deals they are now doing in China are anything but shabby, often earning upwards of five times return in under two years. Access to renminbi potentially will make returns of 10X more routine.  Carlyle has ambitious plans to keep raising renminbi, and push the total well above the current level of $100mn. 

As rosy as things look for Carlyle, the biggest beneficiary may well turn out to be the Chinese companies that land some of this Carlyle money. PE capital is not in short supply in China, including an increasing amount of renminbi. But, smart capital is always at a premium. Capital doesn’t get much smarter – or PE investing more disciplined — than Carlyle. They have the scale, people, track record and value-added approach to make a significant positive impact on the Chinese companies they invest in. 

This is the key point: the best opportunities in private equity are migrating towards those firms that have both renminbi and a highly professional approach to investing. That’s why the leading global PE firms will likely join Carlyle in raising renminbi funds. Blackstone is already hard at work on this, and rumors are that TPG and KKR are also in the hunt. 

Carlyle now joins a very select group of world-class PE firms with access to renminbi. The others are SAIF, CDH, Hony Capital, Legend Capital and New Horizon Fund. These firms are all focused primarily (in the case of SAIF) or exclusively on China. While they lack Carlyle’s scale or global reach, they more than make up for it by commanding the best deal flow in China. SAIF, CDH, Hony, Legend and New Horizon have all been around awhile, starting first as dollar-based investors, and then gradually building up pool of renminbi, including most recently funds from China’s national state pension system. 

Like Carlyle, they also have outstanding people, and very high standards. They are all great firms, and are a cut above the rest. Up to now, they have done more deals in China than Carlyle, and know best how to do renminbi deals. Carlyle and other big global PE firms will learn quickly.  As they raise renminbi, they will elevate the overall level of the PE industry in China, as well as increase the capital available for investment. 

The certain outcome: more of China’s strong private SMEs will get pre-IPO growth capital from firms with the know-how and capital to build great public companies.