The Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Stang The Chinese government will push the reform of the Shenzhen stock exchange's growth enterprise market (GEM) board and launch a pilot registration system for listing candidates. The latest moves were aimed at deepening the reform, improving the fundamentals and enhancing the functions of the capital market. The announcement came after a meeting of the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reform Commission, chaired by Party Secretary Xi Jinping, on Monday. China will create a standardized, transparent and open capital market and push forward the fundamental reforms of issuance, listing, information disclosure, trading and delisting systems of the GEM board. In the past, it was very difficult to list and delist a company on the GEM board. After the reforms, the procedures to list and delist a company will be simplified. Earnings requirements for GEM companies will also be loosened as these new businesses usually have a long investment period.
Infrastructure construction has gathered pace across China as the government ramped up funding to spur investment in the sector. Company news Pinduoduo Inc, a Chinese e-commerce platform, said it would subscribe to the $200 million convertible bonds issued by the Hong Kong-listed Gome Retail Holdings Ltd. The convertible bonds will have a coupon rate of 5% per annum and a tenure of three years, with an option to extend by two years at the election of Pinduoduo, according to a statement by Gome. The CBs are convertible at HK$1. 215 (15. 67 US cents) per share, which works out to approximately 1. 28 billion GOME shares or approximately 5. 6% on a fully diluted basis. KFC announced on Monday a public test of chicken nuggets made with artificial meat, which consists mainly soybean, wheat and pea proteins, in China. Between April 28 and 30, customers can buy five nuggets for 1. 99 yuan at specified KFC restaurants in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Alibaba Cloud Computing Co Ltd said it would invest 200 billion yuan in the research and development of core technologies such as cloud operating system, servers, chips and networks within three years.
The CCP has been heavily promoting digital RMB and has recently announced major trials. This has aroused public attention. Experts believe that this is a new monetary measure implemented by the CCP to tighten control over the people and to prepare to return to a planned economy. On August 14, the Ministry of Commerce of the CCP expanded the scale of the digital RMB pilot project in 28 urban areas including Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanghai, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, and the midwest areas. The announcement mentioned that the digital RMB pilot project will first be promoted in Shenzhen, Chengdu, Suzhou, Xiong'an New Area of Hebei, and related departments of the Winter Olympics venues. The pilot project will then be expanded to other regions and eventually implemented nationwide. At the same time, state-run media also gave high-profile publicity to the fact that the four major state-owned banks – Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, and China Construction Bank – were testing the operation of the digital currency in major cities such as Shenzhen.
(ATF) – The People's Bank of China (PBOC) is to cut the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) for small and medium-sized banks by 100 basis points in its latest effort to bolster the real economy amid the coronavirus outbreak. The RRR cuts will be implemented in two phases, with the first round of 50 basis-points expected on April 15. The balance will be implemented in a second phase from May 15, the central bank said in an online statement over the weekend. The reduction in the cash that lenders must hold as reserves is expected to unleash around 400 billion yuan ($56. 3bn) of long-term capital into the market, the statement said. The cuts are expected to inject liquidity into around 4, 000 lenders including rural cooperatives, rural commercial banks and city commercial banks operating only within provincial administrative areas, adding sources of stable financing for the country's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). After the cuts, the RRR for the country's small- and medium-sized lenders will be slashed to 6%, a relatively low level compared with the ratio in other developing countries and past rates in China, the PBOC noted.
A set of new rules will be released by the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange soon. Software industry China's software companies saw their combined revenue down 6. 2% to 1. 41 trillion yuan (US$200. 09 billion) in the first quarter of this year from one year ago. The net profit of these firms fell 13. 1% to 166. 7 billion yuan. The country's software sector was hit by the Covid-19 outbreak as software companies' revenue, profits, exports and workers' salaries decreased significantly in the first three months of this year, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Technical services and tendering projects were suspended due to the epidemic. Household appliances Total retail sales of China's household appliances declined 35. 8% to 120. 4 billion yuan in the first quarter of this year from a year earlier, according to the China Electronic Information Industry Development Research Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Overnight Hysan Development priced a perpetual bond, ICBC Financial Leasing sold a keep-well supported bond, and Yangzhou Construction issued a 3-year bond. ALSO SEE: China sees US elections as Hobson's choice PBoC takes bite out of ICICI Bank This report appeared first on Asia Times Financial.
On November 3, Shanghai's Nasdaq-like STAR Market and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange announced the suspension about 36 hours before the scheduled start of trading in Hong Kong. The unprecedented actions shocked domestic and international investors. The now-accepted narrative is that Ma Yun, the driving force behind Ant, angered Chinese regulators in a speech in Shanghai. Another often-heard explanation was that China's stodgy state banks, threatened by the lightly-regulated Ant, retaliated. Others think regulators panicked when they realized that Ant had become a giant. In any event, Beijing, by ordering the suspensions at the last moment, has cast doubt on the soundness of China's equity markets and, more broadly, on the long-term viability of the country's private sector. What happened? There are reports that Chinese ruler Xi Jinping personally made the decision to suspend the Ant offering. China is not big enough for two big personalities. Xi is building a personality cult, and so is Ma Yun, better known as Jack Ma to the international financial and business communities.