China may be the spectacular growth story of our time, yet for all its might the country has an insular and undeveloped domestic equity market. Beijing invests trillions of state funds in international stocks, bonds, currencies, and hard assets. And Hong Kong, with its long ties to London, is a bona fide financial center. Yet mainland Chinese who want to be in equities are restricted to investing in domestic, yuan-denominated A shares on the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges, home to indexes that are prone to speculative mania.
“Mainlanders have only domestic-listed stocks, bank deposits, or real estate to pack their money in,” says Jun Zhu, an analyst who follows China for Minneapolis-based Leuthold Weeden Capital Management. “And cash is plenty. So you get inflated equity valuations, elevated housing prices—prices of everything, pretty much.” In 2007, when local markets were up sixfold in less than two years, the Chinese press was full of stories about retirees handing over their life savings to brokerage houses and students skipping meals to raise cash for hot initial public offerings. Shares whose prices closed on the lucky number eight were all the rage.
Now, mainlanders will finally get the chance to invest their restive yuan abroad. In August, Vice-Premier Li Keqiang announced that exchange-traded funds based on Hong Kong equities would be available on China’s mainland exchanges in Shenzhen and Shanghai. The decision is a significant step forward in Beijing’s long-term drive to build up Chinese equity markets, to encourage wider use of the yuan, and to bolster the country’s credentials as a global investing hub. “The new investment products should increase cross-border portfolio fund flows over time,” says Jing Ulrich, Hong Kong-based chairman of global markets for China at JPMorgan Chase (JPM). She says Beijing is getting ambitious about the internationalization of the yuan and expanding capital flows between the mainland and Hong Kong.
The most immediate beneficiary of the move will be Hong Kong’s bourse. Leuthold’s Zhu calculates that over the past 10 years the share prices of Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong and the U.S. have traded on average at a 56 percent discount (based on price-to-earnings multiples) compared with their A-share counterparts on the two mainland exchanges. That mainland investors are willing to pay a premium is a telltale sign of pent-up demand among domestic Chinese investors for international stocks listed in Hong Kong, she says. “Hong Kong is just a testing ground and a very important one,” says Zhu. “Once the door is cracked opened between the mainland and Hong Kong, mainland investors will gain access to the whole world—including London and the U.S.—eventually.”
The dilemma Beijing faces is how to balance the desire of mainlanders for more investment options with the country’s practice of micromanaging its currency vis-à-vis the dollar and other foreign currencies to promote exports. The yuan has strengthened 3.4 percent against the dollar this year, the best performance among 25 emerging-market currencies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
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Unleashing the Chinese Investor
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