Wednesday 8 March 2017

Beijing Cracks Down on Rumormongering Among Real Estate Agencies




(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 5 — Beijing has also started to crack down on rumormongering and other illegal activities among real estate agencies following Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform and Beijing Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development recently launched special ‘double random’ inspections targeting real estate agencies. Investigations were made of 30 realtors randomly selected from over 2,000, with a focus on price transparency and the authenticity of property listings.

Raids will be made in the next 20 days, and all offenses found will be punished in accordance with the laws and regulations, with zero tolerance. Beijing has been conducting special inspections at the municipal and district levels since October.

The municipal enforcement team has carried out inspections at least once a week. They have been focused on market disruptions caused by rumormongering, illegal financial businesses and non-transparent pricing practices.

China to Revitalize Real Economy in 2017, Introduce New Mechanisms for Real Estate Market




(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 12 – A recent meeting of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee on economic operations in 2017 called for more active efforts to revitalize the real economy and foster new economic growth drivers. For many experts, the decision of the meeting sends out a strong signal for robust efforts to boost industrial development.

In China, the last meeting of the Politburo each year focuses on economic operations for the following year and is of particular importance in that it sets the tone for the upcoming central economic working conference, which is considered to be the main indicator for the upcoming economic trends in the new year. The central financial working conference is held every five years, and the next one may take place later this year or early 2017, according to an informed source.

Real economy revitalization

“Manufacturing is the main battlefield for revitalizing the real economy. The existing manufacturing businesses are a critical factor, and innovation is the central task,” said Li Beiguang, deputy director of the planning department of the ministry of industry and information technology (MIIT), during an interview with the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Efforts will be made to promote emerging industries and, more importantly, to boost the progression of traditional industries through innovation.
China already takes on some of the challenges. According to the Intelligent Manufacturing Development Plan (2016-2020) issued by MIIT on Dec. 7, production will be digitalized in key traditional manufacturing industries by 2020, and the transition toward intelligent manufacturing will be completed in most key industries by 2025.

Upgrading the Chinese manufacturing sector is an issue closely linked with state-owned enterprises – the largest manufacturers in China. The central government has started mergers and business reorganizations of major SOEs this year in a bid to improve their competitiveness. Furthermore, the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) of the State Council is actively deliberating and developing implementation plans for SOE reforms in 2017, said SASAC vice chairman, Zhang Xiwu.

Keeping assets bubble in check

Although only less than 600 Chinese characters were used in declaring the outcome of Politburo discussions about economic operations in 2017, they convey a significant amount of information and messages, Xinhua reported. It made a special reference to the preservation of stability, saying that making progress while ensuring stability is an important principle for state affairs management in China, and is particularly relevant to economic operations next year. We should strive for breakthroughs in key areas, while maintaining social stability.

“Making progress while ensuring stability will remain the main theme. Fiscal and monetary policies will continue to focus on economic growth stabilization, which is described as the top priority for 2017,” Xu Hongcai, deputy chief economist at China Center for International Economic Exchanges, told Yicai Global.

Ensuring stability involves “keeping assets bubbles in check,” and guarding against financial risks. The term was first proposed during the Politburo meeting in July 2016; and the requirement was reiterated at the level of monetary policymaking during the October meeting. It stressed, “While ensuring reasonably accommodative liquidity, attention should be paid to curbing assets bubbles and preventing economic and financial risks.”The central government clearly intends to tighten its grip over financial risks.

Since the launch of the crackdown on financial risks in internet finance businesses last April, the overall level of risks associated with the internet finance has been curbed, and the upsurge in the frequency of risk incidents has been contained, said a PBOC official on Dec. 9. Currently, the focus of the crackdown is to clean up high-risk businesses and rectify issues discovered.

The real estate sector is considered to be the main battlefield for the fight against assets bubbles. Many local governments have introduced new regulations in property markets. As an indication of the future trends for the real estate industry, the politburo meeting asked efforts should be made to speed up the introduction of a long-term mechanism to ensure steady and healthy development of the real estate sector in line with the actual situation in China and the relevant laws of the market economy.

Conditions for stabilization of the Chinese economy have gradually improved, but particular attention needs to be paid to risks in the real estate and financial sectors to prevent them from building up or spreading further; and the risks should be gradually reduced through deepening structural reforms, said Wang Yiming, deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council.

Zhuhai Tightens Its Property Market, Suspends Housing Provident Fund Loans for Multiple House Owners



(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 13 – China’s Zhuhai city in China’s southeastern province of Guangdong has adopted a number of new rules and regulations for its property market. It is the latest example in a series of similar steps taken by various provinces across China, indicating Chinese authorities have stepped up their efforts to eliminate loopholes in the financial system.

Zhuhai city has unveiled its new property market regulation and control policy and tightened rules for housing provident fund loans. The new regulations stipulate that the minimum down payment ratio of a housing provident fund loan for a first-time buyer family buying a home for the first time should not be less than 30 percent.

The minimum down payment ratio of an individual housing provident fund loan for a family that has already bought one house and has settled its housing provident fund loans, but still has outstanding purchase loans should not be less than 40 percent. Zhuhai has suspended individual housing provident fund loans for families of workers with two or more houses.

The minimum down payment ratio of housing provident fund loans for families buying an ordinary house for the first time used to be no less than 20 percent; and the minimum down payment ratio of provident fund loans for families that own one occupied house was at least 30 percent.

Future Real Estate Policies Should Stabilize Increasing Property Prices, Experts Predict




(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 19 — Houses should be homes, not investments, the Chinese government said this weekend at the Central Economic Work Conference in Beijing. It plans to protect the real estate market from significant inflation.

The conference is an annual event held in December, which sets the country’s annual economic and financial agenda and defines policy trends for the year to come.

Measures the government plans to take include restricting loans to house buyers who see their purchase as only a financial tool; releasing more land holdings to the market in cities with rapidly increasing prices; accelerating the development of small and middle-sized cities and enhancing supervision of the housing market by regulating developers, salespeople and intermediaries, according to the conference report released by state-run news agency Xinhua.

Several real estate sales records were broken during the first 11 months of this year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The total floor space sold rose 24.3 percent from last year to almost 1.36 billion square meters, beating the 1.3 billion record set in 2013. Total sales revenue grew 37.5 percent to pass the CNY10 trillion (USD1.44 trillion) mark for the first time, reaching CNY10.25 trillion. Some Chinese cities saw rapid growth in house prices, with an increase of over 50 percent compared with the same time last year.

Sharply rising prices have attracted a lot of investors, who often use loans to fund speculative investments in the property market. To reduce financial risk and restrain asset bubbles, many local governments have released strict purchasing policies that restrict a household to owning no more than two properties. This legislation has led to families divorcing in order to purchase additional properties.

The authorities previously used short-term policies to regulate the market, resulting in fluctuations that matched economic trends. Future policies will be tailored to the city in which they take effect, Zhang Dawei, chief analyst from Centraline Property Agency, told Yicai Global.

Real Estate in Major Cities Cools, Stable Home Prices Trend in November’s Second Half, Data Shows




(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 19 — Latest data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) shows that the real estate markets of 15 first- and second-tier cities rapidly chilled in the second half of November, to show a stabilizing tendency in housing prices.

The NBS released information today on changes in the residential property sales prices of 70 large and medium cities in November, and of the first-tier cities and hot second-tier cities in the second half of the month. Compared with November’s first half, nine first-tier cities and hot second-tier cities saw a monthly decline in new commercial housing prices in the second half, with a drop of between 0.1 to 0.9 percentage points. Two cities flatlined, with the remaining four logging a growth rate of new commercial housing prices that fell to less than one percent per month.

The number of cities with a monthly increase in new commercial housing prices and second-hand housing prices fell in November in 70 big and mid-sized cities. Among these, the number with a monthly increase in new commercial housing prices decreased by seven, while those with a per-month increase in second-hand housing prices dropped by eight. More cities experienced a monthly decline. Contrasting with the previous month, the number of cities with a monthly decline in new commodity housing prices and second-hand housing prices was up by four and seven percentage points, respectively.

Tencent Cloud to Cut Storage for Ordinary Users to 10GB




(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 16 — Tencent Cloud, a leading public cloud computing service owned by internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., will substantially cut the storage for ordinary users to 10 gigabytes, citing sustainable growth of the platform.

Tencent Cloud offered one terabyte of free cloud storage to ordinary users in August 2013. Since then, there has been a rapid increase in the number of individual users and a number of service providers have stopped providing cloud storage services to ordinary consumers.

Ordinary users with an existing storage of over 10 gigabytes will still be able to download and view their files but the uploading of new data will be restricted, the company said last night.

In an industry-wide trend, Tencent Cloud follows Vdisk, Kuaipan.cn, Dbank.com, Sina Vdisk and Yunpan.360.cn, who have suspended storage services for ordinary users since April of this year.

China Mobile to Commercialize 5G Nationwide by 2020, CEO Says




(YicaiGlobal) Dec. 21 — China Mobile Ltd. [HKG:0941], the world’s biggest mobile phone carrier, plans to launch pre-commercial 5G services in 2018 and commercialize the fifth-generation wireless broadband technology across the nation by 2020, said CEO Li Yue.

5G is a completely new technology because it is developed for the Internet of Things, which connects people with other people, people with goods, and goods with other goods, Li said yesterday during a speech at China Mobile Global Partners Conference 2016.

China Mobile’s 4G users totaled 510 million, or 69 percent of the country’s 4G market, as of the end of November, Chairman Shang Bing said at the conference.

Shang said the ratio of mobile digital service revenue to traditional business revenue at China Mobile has grown from 1:1 last year to 1.5:1. Wireless data business makes up a larger part of the company’s total revenue than traditional SMS (Short Message Service) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) businesses, and has become the most important source of income.

China Mobile Vice President Sha Yuejia also said China Mobile has almost 400 million 2G and 3G users who will upgrade to 4G or 5G. About half of its 4G users will also trade up to a new phone, so it expects China’s mobile phone market volume to hit 540 million next year.