More Chinese state-owned companies might be spun off as private entities to help improve economic growth, but Beijing will keep control of major industries, a Chinese State Council official said yesterday.
Regulators are working on plans to overhaul ownership following the Chinese Communist Party’s pledge last month to increase competition in state-dominated industries, said Huang Shuhe (黃淑和), vice chairman of the council’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which controls the biggest government companies.
Economists say that Beijing must curb the dominance of state companies that control swathes of the economy, from banking to oil and steel production, or risk seeing China’s growth rate plunge.
The development blueprint issued last month pledges to open more industries to competition, although it said state ownership will remain the core of the Chinese economy.
Huang gave no details of which companies or industries might be affected.
The 117 companies that are controlled by the State Council, or Cabinet, range from areas regarded by many countries as strategic, such as oil or telecommunications, to a travel agency and a food processor.
They include oil giant PetroChina Ltd (中國石油天然氣), phone carrier China Mobile Ltd (中國移動) and four of the world’s biggest banks.
“State-owned industries that don’t require state ownership can allow more ‘social capital,’” Huang said at a news conference, using the party’s euphemism for private investment. “State ownership could be reduced or entirely withdrawn.”
Huang said that would apply only to some companies, adding that those deemed “vital to national security” — a segment that the government previously said includes a wide range of companies — would remain entirely state-owned.
Growth in the world’s second-largest economy fell in the second quarter of this year to a two-decade low of 7.5 percent.
It rebounded to 7.8 percent in the following quarter, but analysts say that was due to higher government spending and growth might fade this quarter or early next year.
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