China’s securities regulator has issued new draft regulations on initial public offerings (IPOs) in a step toward a resumption of share listings.
The new rules are meant to ensure that share prices more accurately reflect market demand, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its Web site on Friday.
China has in effect suspended share offerings to help prevent stock prices from falling lower amid a correction that began in late 2007 after the Shanghai Stock Exchange benchmark, the Composite Index, hit an all-time high of 6,124.04.
The Shanghai Composite Index fell 13.02 points, or 0.5 percent, to 2,597.6 on Friday, ending the week down 1.8 percent. But the benchmark has gained more than 40 percent this year, raising confidence that the market is resilient enough to absorb new share listings.
The regulator said it would seek opinions on the draft rules until June 5 and then revise them.
A number of big state-owned companies, including the Agricultural Bank of China (中國農業銀行), the country’s main rural lender, are awaiting IPOs.
Friday’s move may clear the way for them to go ahead.
The securities commission did not give details on how it would ensure that pricing of IPOs was more in line with market demand. IPOs generally are viewed as priced strategically low to ensure a stunning advance when they begin trading.
In one major change, it ends the practice of allowing institutional investors to participate in both the institutional and retail tranches of share offerings. The aim is to allow retail investors a bigger share of IPOs by preventing institutional investors from crowding them out.
The new rules also set a limit on how many shares an investor can seek in any given IPO. IPOs will resume once the rules are final.
“We will closely monitor market feedback and manage the pace and steadily carry out related work,” the statement said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts