[Green]

http://www.businessinsider.com/no-gr...down-23-2009-8

So Where's The Growth? Chinese State Enterprise Profits Down 23%

Latest data shows that profits for Chinese State Owned Enterprises (SOE's) has fallen 22.8% YoY in the first seven months of 2009. In contrast, the stock market has rocketed higher YTD on economic growth expectations.

The decline in profit moderated in July, but still seems very much at odds with optimism in regards to China's near-term growth. Profit also fell 2% in July from June, though the results of a single month might not be too dependable.

Margins appear to be clearly under pressure given profits fell by a higher percentage than revenue.

Alibaba: The SOEs' operating revenue was RMB 11.64 trillion in the first seven months of this year, down 4.7% year on year. The operating revenue of the centrally-controlled enterprises decreased 3.6% year on year to RMB 7.38 trillion, while that of locally-administered state enterprises was down 6.6% from a year earlier and reached RMB 4.26 trillion.

This could be further evidence that China is stimulating GDP growth at the expense of profits, by pushing unprofitable economic decisions to be made. It's worrisome since while uneconomic projects might make GDP data look good in the near term, such growth is illusory in the long term and actually destroys value. Measured in terms of profit, China's SOE economy is declining. Hopefully for Chinese stock market investors, the private sector will deliver on expectations and pick up the slack.

[Trüffelschwein]

Proposed ban by China of rare-earth metal exports would affect hybrid cars, CFLs

Aug 27 2009 10:32AM | Permalink


China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is proposing a total ban on exports of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum would be restricted to a total of 35,000 tonnes a year, which is far below global needs. Many of these are vital to energy-efficient technology: Neodymium is used in rare-earth magnets for high-efficiency motors: Chances are your new front-loading clothes washer uses rare-earth magnets in its motor. From the Telegram’s article: “No replacement has been found for neodymium that enhances the power of magnets at high heat and is crucial for hard-disk drives, wind turbines, and the electric motors of hybrid cars. Each Toyota Prius uses 25 pounds of rare earth elements. Cerium and lanthanum are used in catalytic converters for diesel engines.”
Terbium is used in the phosphors of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs.) It’s not an essential ingredient apparently, but used to tweak the CFL’s light to a more pleasant spectrum.
Some of these metals are currently produced only in China, so if China restricts or bans their exports it will affect energy-efficient products worldwide. According to the article, China’s intent is not to hold the rest of the world ransom – China needs these metals for its internal consumption.
Anybody remember the rush to discover uranium deposits in the 50s and 60s? Geiger counters are a running joke in cartoons of that era. We may be heading into a hunt new non-Chinese deposits of rare-earth metals.
The Telegram article also says China had put global competitors out of business in the early 1990s by flooding the market, leading to the closure of the biggest US rare earth mine at Mountain Pass in California - now being revived by Molycorp Minerals. From the Molycorp website: “Fortunately, the U.S. has one of the world’s largest and richest Rare Earth deposits at Molycorp Minerals’ facility in Mountain Pass, California. At Mountain Pass we are producing a variety of Green Elements and plans are in place to bring the facility back into full production. With appropriate federal assistance for research, development and capital costs, Molycorp Minerals is prepared to move forward to reestablish domestic manufacturing capacity on an expedited basis.”

[Target]

In Shanghai geht die neue Woche richtig schön los.

[Green]

na zumindest wissen die chinesen, was sie tun:

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv...57S0D420090829

China's CIC wealth fund muscles up as markets recover

BEIJING (Reuters) - China Investment Corp is investing as much overseas each month this year as it did in all of 2008, Lou Jiwei, the chairman of the $298 billion sovereign wealth fund, said on Saturday.

CIC is counting on handsome returns this year and might one day ask the government to hand it more of the country's record hoard of foreign reserves to manage, Lou, a former vice finance minister, said.

...

But Lou said 2009 was shaping up better.

"It will not be too bad this year. Both China and America are addressing bubbles by creating more bubbles and we're just taking advantage of that. So we can't lose," he said.

...

Lou said CIC was building a broad investment portfolio that includes products designed to generate both alpha and beta; to hedge against both inflation and deflation; and to provide guaranteed returns in the event of a new crisis.

"We have to be in everything because you never know what's going to happen in this world," he said...

[Swai]

China, Russia consider currency swap deal
September 1, 2009 - 8:18AM

China and Russia are mulling a possible currency swap deal, which if agreed would be the seventh such pact signed by Beijing, a Chinese commerce ministry official said on Monday.

China's central bank and other Chinese banks are in talks with their Russian counterparts, the director of the ministry's Europe department, Sun Yongfu, told Dow Jones Newswires on the sidelines of a press conference.

China is gradually liberalising its currency, which is not yet fully convertible, while trying to expand its role overseas.

Beijing has already signed currency swap deals worth 650 billion yuan ($112.79 billion) with Argentina, Belarus, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea.

Such arrangements ease liquidity trouble as they boost the amount of Chinese yuan that banks in the participating economies can draw on while servicing local companies that use the currency when trading.

An eventual deal with Russia would depend on the results of a trial program involving companies along the common border, the Chinese official said.

China has launched a pilot yuan trade payment program involving five cities in the country's eastern and southern commercial hubs and the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as Hong Kong and Macau.

http://business.smh.com.au/business/...0901-f5mg.html


Gruß,
Swai

[Green]

gedanken von prof. Pettis:

http://mpettis.com/2009/08/it%e2%80%...sive-stimulus/

...

But it won’t be easy, and I suspect that already the effect of rumors about slowing the fiscal expansion is strengthening the hands of those who want to stomp again on the gas pedal. For example the stock market was down 6.7% today, bringing its total decline since August 4 to 23.3%. Even my superstar PKU student Gao Ming, who has so far ridden this chaos pretty well, admitted to me today that it was not a good day for him.

Why did the market collapse? Forget about fundamentals. As I have argued many times before, China lacks the necessary tools that fundamental investors use (e.g. good macro data, good financial statements, a clear corporate governance framework, a stable regulatory environment, a market discount rate) and so no matter what people say, there are no fundamental investing here. There is only speculation, and the two things above all that drive the markets are those old speculator favorites, changes in underlying liquidity and government signaling.

...

My guess is that if the local stock markets do not soon recover their bounce (and they won’t without government help) and, even worse, if we start to see the awful sentiment seep into the real estate sector, Beijing will once again push forcefully for credit and fiscal expansion. In my opinion there is simply no way that domestic consumption – unless it is primed with government giveaways – can make up the slack quickly enough...



ebenfalls lesenswerte lageanalyse des chin. arbeitsmarktes::

Chinese factories face surprising labor shortage




http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...57U02B20090831

As hybrid cars gobble rare metals, shortage looms

...

Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. One promising U.S. source is a rare earths mine slated to reopen in California by 2012.

Among the rare earths that would be most affected in a shortage is neodymium, the key component of an alloy used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Focus, as well as in generators for wind turbines.

Close cousins terbium and dysprosium are added in smaller amounts to the alloy to preserve neodymium's magnetic properties at high temperatures. Yet another rare earth metal, lanthanum, is a major ingredient for hybrid car batteries.

Production of both hybrids cars and wind turbines is expected to climb sharply amid the clamor for cleaner transportation and energy alternatives that reduce dependence on fossil fuels blamed for global climate change.

Toyota has 70 percent of the U.S. market for vehicles powered by a combination of an internal-combustion engine and electric motor. The Prius is its No. 1 hybrid seller.

Jack Lifton, an independent commodities consultant and strategic metals expert, calls the Prius "the biggest user of rare earths of any object in the world."

Each electric Prius motor requires 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of neodymium, and each battery uses 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum. That number will nearly double under Toyota's plans to boost the car's fuel economy, he said.

Toyota plans to sell 100,000 Prius cars in the United States alone for 2009, and 180,000 next year. The company forecasts sales of 1 million units per year starting in 2010.

As China's industries begin to consume most of its own rare earth production, Toyota and other companies are seeking to secure reliable reserves for themselves.

Reuters reported last year that Japanese firms are showing strong interest in a Canadian rare earth site under development at Thor Lake in the Northwest Territories.

A Toyota spokeswoman in Los Angeles said the automaker would not comment on its resource development plans. But media accounts and industry blogs have reported recently that Toyota has looked at rare earth possibilities in Canada and Vietnam.

[Green]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=alJGGeYewoFU

Shortage of Rare Earths Used in Hybrids, TVs May Loom in China

Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- China said supplies of dysprosium and terbium, minerals needed to make hybrid cars and televisions, may be inadequate for its own needs, adding to concerns that the largest producer of rare earths may further cut exports.

China, accounting for more than 90 percent of global rare- earth output, “may not have enough supply” of the two minerals as demand increases, Wang Caifeng, deputy director-general of the raw materials department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said today.

Surging production of hybrid cars and music players such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius and Apple Inc.’s iPod have driven up demand for rare earths. China has cut export quotas to shore up prices and ensure domestic supplies, though there will be no ban on exports of the elements, Wang said today.

“The rest of the world has become a little concerned” about possible export bans from China, said Judith Chegwidden, managing director at London-based Roskill Information Services Ltd, an industry research group. “Dysprosium is increasingly used in permanent magnet motors in hybrid cars like Prius or wind turbines. Demand is growing fast.”

China has about half of the world’s reserves of rare earths, a range of more than 15 elements such as scandium and lanthanum. The government started to curb output and exports in 2006 as prices dropped, and Zhao Shuanglian, deputy chief of China’s Inner Mongolia province yesterday said the country may stockpile elements in a strategic reserve.

That could force companies to broaden their search for other suppliers.

...

“Demand is growing in areas of military defense, missiles, electronic information and green energy,” Wang said at a conference in Beijing. “Modern society can’t do without cell phones and televisions.”

China needs 70,000 tons of rare earths a year, she said. China cut 2009 output quotas of rare earths by 8.1 percent from a year ago to 119,500 tons, the Ministry of Industry of Information and Technology said May 18.

Waste

Terbium is a silvery-white metal used to make alloys and phosphors used in lamps and TV tubes. Other rare earths include neodymium, which is also used in mini hard drives in laptops and headphones in Apple’s iPod. Yttrium and europium are used to generate red on color TV and computer monitor screens.

China is also tightening control of mining for rare earths because it can lead to “serious pollution,” Wang said. To mine a ton of the material could lead to 2,000 tons of dirt and waste, she said.

The Asian country is also encouraging producers of minor metals to export processed products rather than raw materials to increase the value of shipments, said Liang Shuhe, deputy head of foreign trade at the Ministry of Commerce.

Minor metals include antimony, magnesium, zirconium, mercury and bismuth, according to the Minor Metals Trade Association. China’s Jinduicheng Molybdenum Co. is Asia’s largest producer of molybdenum, used to harden steel.

“The majority of China’s minor metals exports remain in the raw material form,” Liang said at the conference. “We encourage exports of high value-adding, high-end products instead of the raw materials.”


-> The Asian country is also encouraging producers of minor metals to export processed products rather than raw materials to increase the value of shipments

ich denke darauf wird es hinauslaufen: kein komplettes exportverbot, aber niedrige quoten, die die preise in die höhe treiben. ab einem gewissen preis wird es für die ausl. abnehmer wirtschaftlicher, die produkte, die diese elemente enthalten, direkt in china fertigen zu lassen.
auch eine clevere art des protektionismus.

[Green]

interessante gedanken:

[Full Yuan convertibility] could cause the $ to fall faster than its current decline rate. Before they would do this, however, they will continue to hedge that position. The ONLY way they can is in buying hard-assets (and producers thereof).

This looming renminbi “black swan”, as they label it, means the only sensible long term option is to be short the greenback and long commodities and commodity-linked companies.

It comes as no surprise to us that there are reports from China they are pressuring state-controlled organisations, like the China Investment Corporation (CIC) to rapidly build investment in non-Chinese enterprises, notably hedge-funds and commodities. This fits our view. Government procurement policies are more about strategy than purely industrial purposes.

The conclusion is that China recognises that the $ is going to tank and it wants to convert as much of its reserves into strategic assets as possible before the collapse really takes hold.

gesamter artikel hier: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009...bi-black-swan/



these: china will perspektivisch den renmimbi zur leitwährung aufbauen. eine grundvoraussetzung dafür wäre freie konvertierbarket (im gegensatz zur aktuell künstlich niedrig gehaltenen währung, die nur in bestimmten grenzen schwanken darf).

eine solcher "free flaoting" RMB würde allerdings den dollar crashen lassen.

china weiss das und sichert sich dagegen mit dollar assets (commcotities bzw. commocity producer) ab.


ist m.e. durchaus denkbar. haken: eine rasante starke aufwertung des RMB würde über nacht die wettbewerbsfähigkeit der chin. exportwirtschaft killen.
solange china nicht über eine zum grossteil binnennachfrage-gestützt volkswirtschaft ist (wie die usa), halte ich das für nicht durchführbar.

[Swai]

Verschwörungstheorie Nr. 4 / b:


Chinese sovereign wealth fund dumping dollars for strategic investments like gold

Reports suggest that China's main sovereign wealth fund and other state entities are under pressure to invest in strategic Western assets as the country tries to offload its dollars for firmer-based wealth including gold and oil.
Author: Lawrence Williams
Posted: Thursday , 03 Sep 2009

LONDON -

Several reports are coming out of China that there is pressure on state-controlled organisations - notably the country's main sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation (CIC) to rapidly build investment in non-Chinese enterprises. While the CIC itself, with apparent access to some $300 billion in funds - and the possibility of more from the government - may be concentrating on hedge funds and other investment entities, there is another sector for Chinese state-owned companies looking at major investment in commodities. Indeed with the funds available as China seems to be dumping its US dollars in favour of more concrete assets, virtually no minerals sector is safe from Chinese participation.

While CIC was set up only two years ago, funded with $200 billion in initial capital, a report to the U.S. Congress noted that according to top Chinese officials, it was created to improve the rate of return on China's $1.5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and to soak up some of the nation's excess financial liquidity. Depending on its performance with the initial allotment of $200 billion, the CIC might be allocated more of China's growing stock of foreign exchange reserves - and this has already proved to be the case.

Probably the most interesting of the recent reports of what is happening with Chinese sovereign wealth fund investment outside China has come from Paul Mylchreest's Thunder Road Report where an ex-U.S. intelligence service member is quoted. He reports that he has a friend who is in the Chinese Sovereign Wealth fund sector who says - hearsay I know and it wouldn't stand up in court - indicated that the wealth fund analysts were working all hours of the day and night trying to put investment deals together - particularly in the oil and precious metals sectors. The conclusion is that China recognises that the U.S. dollar is going to tank and it wants to convert as much of its trillions of dollars of holdings into strategic assets as possible before the collapse really takes hold.

The trouble is there is too much money available chasing too few assets - and too little time available - or such is the conclusion. As a result the Chinese government seems to be doing its utmost in trying to persuade the Chinese public to buy gold and silver by relaxing the restrictions - it's now easier to buy precious metals in China than in the U.S. - and by pushing gold and silver investment on state-owned television. If this continues the likelihood is that China will permanently overtake India as the world's biggest buyer of gold and silver, while the country's store of wealth will help shield it against further western economic collapse.

If this is indeed the case then it must be likely that the country is also building its own gold reserves - perhaps surreptitiously - through creative accounting by buying by a state entity, but not through the Central Bank itself where such sales would need to be reported. Positive for gold looking forward.

Returning to the Sovereign Wealth Funds angle though, CIC's chairman, Lou Jiwei, is reported by the WSJ as saying that investment in CIC's global portfolio for "one month this year equalled that of the whole of last year" and that given that the fund is expecting a positive return on its investments this year it may well ask the government for additional funding. Where it is going to place additional funding, who knows but there seems little doubt that China is using the western recession to buy up assets on the cheap and the funds available to do this are virtually unlimited by Western standards. But the Chinese won't buy up any old rubbish. They'll be looking for the crème de la crème.

Already CIC has bought 17% of Canada's last real remaining diversified miner - Teck Corporation - smartly buying when the latter was only just beginning to recover from last year's collapse and it has to be likely that more minerals-strategic investments are on the cards or being negotiated, either by CIC or other state organisations. Chinalco's ultimately thwarted move into Rio Tinto would have been another such instance and the Chinese investments and takeovers of Australian miners and promises of huge funding for minerals rich African countries are other examples.

Some reckon that China will be the world's second biggest economy, overtaking Japan, within the next couple of years and will overtake the U.S. by 2030. If it continues the way it is going and the U.S. continues the way it is going, this could happen much sooner. Communism, Chinese style, is winning the war of economic dominance and soon the world will no longer rely on the dollar as its reserve currency, but the renminbi!

In an interesting, but perhaps disturbing footnote to the Thunder Road Report mentioned above, Paul Mylchreest comments that in Latin America, where he has been living for 25 years, for the first time he can remember, locals are now preferring their own currency to U.S. dollars. He goes on to finish with this comment: "If a fellow with no education, a poor diet, and inadequate medical treatment living at 3,500 metres above sea level can figure out that the US dollar is undesirable as a store of wealth, how much longer do you think it can last as the world's reserve currency."

Your point to ponder for the day!

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/...8400&sn=Detail


Der Punkt mit dem gelockerten Regeln für Gold- und Silberkäufe sind zutreffend. Die Bevölkerung wird inzwischen angehalten, sich mit physischen Edelmetallen einzudecken.
Der Sinn sei mal dahingestellt...

Ansonsten sind das natürlich keine Neuigkeiten, China kauft bereits seit längerer Zeit Rohstoff-Produzenten auf, bzw. Beteiligungen.


Gruß,
Swai

[Swai]

Auch sehr interessant zum Thema Überkapazitäten:


Mall of misfortune
Last Updated: June 12. 2008 8:57PM UAE / June 12. 2008 4:57PM GMT




The people who work at the South China Mall, in the muggy, factory-filled city of Dongguan, have the honor of passing each day in the biggest shopping mall on the face of the planet. In theory, it’s a glorious place: a seven-million-square-foot retail-and-entertainment behemoth in the heart of China’s southern Pearl River Delta, the wealthiest region in a nation that boasts the world’s biggest population and its fastest-growing major economy. The mall is part of China’s new arsenal of superlatives: the world’s largest airport terminal, the highest train track, the golf resort with the most holes.

The employees of this giant mall could, if they wanted, spend their breaks driving bumper cars, browsing for house-wares, strolling along a Venetian canal, petting fake herons in an indoor rain forest, or gazing at an eighty-five-foot replica of the Arc de Triomphe – all, of course, without leaving the premises. They could also picnic next to the bell tower of St Mark’s Square in Venice, soak up the ambience of San Francisco, or take a ride on the mall’s indoor-outdoor roller coaster, a 553-meter flying railway known as Kuayue Shi Kong, or “Moving Through Time and Space”.

As it happens, it’s just those things – time and space – that give so much trouble to the workers here. They have too much of both. On a recent Friday afternoon, an amusement-park employee, slouched in a forsaken ticket booth, tried to kill time by making origami. Another worker slept, with perfect impunity, on a table. In front of the haunted house attraction, one attendant was doing hand-stands while two others looked blankly on.

There was nothing else to do, because the South China Mall, which opened with great fanfare in 2005, is not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins.

“They set out to be the biggest, and hoped that being the biggest would be the attracting factor,” says David Hand, a retail analyst at Jones Lang LaSalle in Beijing, who has followed the project. “It hasn’t delivered.”

The world has plenty of empty malls; there’s even an American website, deadmalls.com, where connoisseurs of desolation post photos and reminiscences of the once-great, now-gutted places where they spent the Saturday afternoons of their youth. What sets the South China Mall apart from the rest, besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires.

Three years ago, just before the South China Mall opened, it was featured on the front page of The New York Times as part of China’s “astonishing” new consumer culture. As the Times put it, with perhaps a trace of hyperbole, the “Chinese have started to embrace America’s ‘shop till you drop’ ethos and are in the middle of a buy-at-the-mall frenzy.” A spokesman for the mall’s developer Hu Guirong, an instant-noodle billionaire, told the Times that Hu’s team had spent two years traveling the world – France, Italy, Nevada – in search of ideas. They expected the mall to average more than 70,000 visitors a day. “We wanted to do something groundbreaking,” the spokesman said. “We wanted to leave our mark on history.”

[...]
Exactly why the South China Mall failed so badly is a matter of some dispute. Did the retailers hold back because there were no customers, or did the customers stay away because there were no retailers? Or did Hu Guirong doom the project by opening it before construction was finished – driving everybody away with the scaffolding and the dust?

Dick Groves, a retail consultant based in nearby Hong Kong, chalks it up to inexperience in the leasing business, mixed with an undisciplined financial system. “When it’s easy to get financing without having to convince someone of the project’s feasibility, and without having to show pre-leasing commitment, you can start to get into trouble,” he says.

[...]
Hand, the retail expert from Jones Lang LaSalle, maintains that Chinese developers are learning quickly and that the market has great potential. “The Chinese love shopping, they love brands, and they love international products, even though the average income is low,” he says. “New shoppers are born everyday. We won’t run out of them.”

[...]
About 500 new malls have been built in China over the last five years, estimates Kevin Jiang, a researcher at the Mall China Information Center. All of them are waiting for the arrival of this coming mega-middle class, as are the rest of China’s countless “visionary” development projects. [...]

The cowboy developers of China, like the bored employees of the South China Mall, are still waiting. Some day – and they hope it’s soon – this new middle class will finally show up to fill the empty spaces. The malls will overflow, the stuff will sell, and the country will take its rightful place among the world’s great consumer powers. But until then, Xia Qunyan remains sitting on a stool in front of her shop, shuffling her playing cards and wondering how to pass the time.

http://www.thenational.ae/article/20...206990272/1042


Muss man sich mal vorstellen: Das größte Kaufhaus der Welt, Platz für 1.500 Geschäfte...und drin sind gerade mal ein Dutzend.
Das dürfte eine der größten leeren Betonflächen der Welt sein...

Aber wie der Artikel so schön sagt: Wenn erst all die shopping-süchtigen Chinesen aus der neu entstehenden Mittelklasse anfangen in großem Stil zu konsumieren, dann geht es rasant aufwärts...na ja, sofern es eben genug von ihnen geben wird.


Gruß,
Swai