【英语财经】中国经济中的“僵尸企业” China state enterprises: Zombie economy

On a rainy afternoon at one of China’s largest shipyards, workers taking a break from welding cluster beneath the hulls of half-built vessels to keep dry.

Despite the collapse in freight rates that has ravaged the shipping industry, the yard at Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding is not short of business. A worker could ride his bicycle across the 1.1km yard entirely under the line of partial hulls.

This and other state-owned shipyards are being kept busy by China Ocean Shipping Group, better known as Cosco, the country’s largest shipper by carrying capacity, which ordered 11 huge container ships last year. Caixin, the financial magazine, reported that the three ships ordered from Waigaoqiao would be able to carry 20,000 20ft containers, making them the world’s largest.

Cosco’s non-government shareholders may wonder why the majority state-owned company needs 11 new vessels. Its directors acknowledged in the company’s half-year earnings statement that “overall demand in the shipping market weakened” in 2015, while “oversupply in shipping capacity continued”.

Scheduled to be delivered in 2018, the timing of the ship order is made all the more surprising given the fall-off in global trade, down 12 per cent last year in value terms, according to the International Monetary Fund. Most forecasts say that situation is unlikely to improve soon.

The good news for Cosco is that it will not have to spend much of its own money to meet the $15bn cost of the ships. A 2013 regulation by the finance ministry provides a subsidy to shipowners that demolish old vessels and replace them with new ones from state-owned builders like Waigaoqiao.

Cosco is a vivid example of the problems facing China’s inefficient and debt-ridden state-owned enterprises. Excluding one-off items, the company lost Rmb3.8bn ($580m) in the first nine months of 2015. Its net debt-to-equity ratio, at 206 per cent at the end of September, was more than triple the average of 66 per cent for Shanghai-listed companies, according to Wind Information, a Chinese financial database.

With China’s economy growing at its slowest in 25 years, economists say dealing with unwieldy state owned enterprises is the single most important step to restructuring the economy.

“SOE reform, debt, overcapacity and ‘zombie companies’ are all deeply connected issues,” says Jianguang Shen, chief Asia economist at Mizuho Securities Asia. “For private companies in overcapacity industries, after several years of losses there’s no way to continue. The owner will shut them down or sell them off, but at SOEs they can keep getting bank loans or government support.”

Lumbering giants

Beijing has been seeking to steer its economy away from an overdependence on heavy industry and construction. State-owned enterprises are, however, clustered in smokestack industries like steel, coal, shipbuilding and heavy machinery, all tied to the old growth model. These lumbering giants are ill-suited to meet demand in the emerging services sectors such as healthcare, technology, education and entertainment — the fastest-growing areas of the Chinese economy.

The Cosco subsidy is one of hundreds that benefit state-owned groups. Subsidies for listed companies totalled Rmb30bn in 2014, according to data collated by Wind from company filings. The actual figure is even higher: many subsidies flow to unlisted enterprises, while SOEs also enjoy non-cash benefits like low-interest bank loans and discounts on land, water and electricity.

Senior leaders have pledged an overhaul of the state sector. “We must summon our determination and set to work,” Premier Li Keqiang told top economic advisers in December. “For those ‘zombie enterprises’ with absolute overcapacity, we must ruthlessly bring down the knife.”

Following through on that threat Yin Weimin, China’s labour minister, said yesterday that he expects 1.3m coal workers and 500,000 steelworkers to lose their jobs as part of efforts to deal with overcapacity, without specifying when the axe will fall.

Last September a Communist party-approved masterplan for reform outlined initiatives aimed at imposing market discipline on state companies. They included stake sales and depoliticising the appointment of senior executives, who are selected by the party’s personnel agency rather than ordinary shareholders. The approach pursued most aggressively, however, has been consolidation — where the government orchestrates mergers of big SOEs.

In the past year, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which oversees non-financial SOEs, has approved the mergers of at least six very large enterprises. Among these is one to combine Cosco with China Shipping Group to create the world’s largest container line.

Communist party leaders believe larger SOEs will be more competitive globally. They have long viewed economies of scale as crucial for cultivating national champions. Size is considered more important now, with falling commodity prices hacking at profit margins on steel, coal, base metals and heavy machinery.

“[President] Xi Jinping probably believes that a large state-enterprise sector is good,” says Yukon Huang, former China country director at the World Bank and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He looks towards the west and sees that major companies are big and getting bigger. When China’s leaders look overseas at so-called ‘market’ economies, they don’t get the sense that big companies and big mergers are bad.”

Consolidation has been taking place for more than a decade. Since its creation in 2003 the number of companies under Sasac control has fallen from 189 to 103, largely due to mergers.

Reform in reverse

Large-scale reforms began in the late 1990s after bad loans to state-owned companies pushed China’s banking system to the brink of collapse. An aggressive round of reform saw employment in state-owned companies almost halve from 70m in 1997 to 37m in 2005.

With the worst-performing SOEs shut or privatised, profitability improved. The return on assets at SOEs has always lagged behind that of private firms but the gap narrowed markedly in the early 2000s.

That changed with the 2008 global financial crisis. The huge stimulus that China rolled out to offset the slowdown relied on state-owned companies acting in the national interest. Banks were ordered to increase lending to SOEs, which dutifully splurged on new factories and equipment regardless of commercial need. The downsizing of the state sector came to a halt.

The stimulus fuelled a construction boom for factories, housing and infrastructure. Demand for output from state factories soared temporarily and SOE profits grew.

But the sector overindulged and the comedown was hard. Banks and regulators tightened lending amid worries about the rise in company borrowing and increasing local government debt; the housing market cooled and infrastructure spending slowed. Companies stopped investing because of rising debt burdens and slack demand for output from newly built factories.

At state-owned Aluminium Corp of China, where total assets surged from Rmb82bn in 2006 to Rmb175bn six years later, net losses hit Rmb17bn in 2014, the most of any listed SOE. It is not alone. Some 42 per cent of all SOEs lost money in 2013, according to official data. Total profits for such groups fell in absolute terms last year for the first time since 2001. The gap in return on assets between SOEs and private firms is now the largest in two decades.

Policymakers have made “supply-side reform” the major theme of economic policy for 2016 but many analysts doubt that merging big companies into even larger ones can address the cause of overcapacity and weak profitability. Sooner or later, companies are likely to have to swallow the pill of factory closures and employee lay-offs.

“Creating even larger SOEs is likely to exacerbate their already daunting financial and organisational ills,” wrote Wendy Leutert, a visiting researcher at the Brookings Institution’s China Centre. “Merging centrally owned firms will increase their market share at the risk of long-term competitiveness and efficiency gains.”

For many western economists, the answer is clear: raise efficiency through privatisation. Yet China’s top leaders have resisted this approach.

Sasac has cautiously experimented with “mixed ownership,” a euphemism for selling minority stakes. Far from shrinking its role in the economy, however, the leadership believes the answer lies in strengthening the ruling party’s grip on state assets, while making SOEs more competitive.

At a politburo meeting on November 23, party leaders decided that the focus of the reform effort should be to “strengthen, optimise, and enlarge” state firms, while rejecting “privatisation”, according to a detailed account of the meeting circulated on social media.

Mega mergers are also seen as a way to eliminate “malicious competition” between rival state groups. The country’s two biggest manufacturers of railway equipment agreed to combine at the end of 2014. The new group will be expected to bid for the rail projects that are central to Mr Xi’s ambitious New Silk Road initiative, aimed at helping Chinese companies sell infrastructure in Asia and the Middle East.

Millions of jobs at risk

The greatest obstacle to shutting lossmaking SOEs is the prospect of mass lay-offs, which Beijing fears could lead to social unrest. Merging weaker SOEs into stronger ones is seen as a less disruptive way to deal with excess capacity than forcing lossmaking state firms into bankruptcy, leaving millions jobless.

“If a stronger enterprise can restructure a weaker one, they can find ways to redeploy workers. They’re not just going to fire everyone immediately,” says Ju Jinwen, an economist who researches SOEs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a think-tank that advises the government. “Dealing with overcapacity creates unemployment pressure. This has to be considered.”

Longmay Group, the biggest SOE in the rust-belt north-eastern province of Heilongjiang, made headlines when it announced plans in September to lay off 100,000 workers. The company’s statement, however, shows that many of the workers will be diverted to associated companies, a sign of the political pressure on SOEs to maintain jobs.

At the Waigaoqiao shipyard, a solderer named Li is happy to work at a company where lay-offs are rare, even in tough times.

“After the financial crisis, a lot of guys left for smaller (privately owned) yards where pay was better,” he says. “Now they’re closing down. These days they regret it but it’s not easy to get back in.”

Additional reporting by Ma Nan

一个下雨的午后，在中国一家大型造船厂，正在工间休息的焊接工人们三五成群，聚集在尚未造好的船体下方避雨。

尽管航运业普遍面临运价暴跌局面，但上海外高桥造船(Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding)的船坞里却并不缺生意。尚未造好的船体连成一排，工人可以一直在船体遮挡下骑自行车穿过总长1.1公里的船坞工地。

让这家造船厂以及其他国有造船厂保持忙碌的是中远集团(COSCO)，以运力计，它是中国最大的航运企业。去年，中远订购了11艘大型集装箱运货船。中国财经杂志《财新》报道称，该集团从上海外高桥造船订购的那3艘集装箱船均可装载2万TEU，为全球最大集装箱船。



政府以外的中远股东可能会问，为何这家多数股权由政府所有的公司需要11艘新船。中远在公司半年报中承认，2015年“航运市场需求总体疲软”，同时“运力过剩局面延续”。

这些货船定于2018年交付，在全球贸易滑坡的情况下，这一订单的时机显得更加令人意外。根据国际货币基金组织(IMF)的数据，去年，全球贸易额下滑12%。多数预测称，目前的情况不太可能很快改善。

对于中远而言，好消息是该公司不必花费太多自己的钱来支付这150亿美元的购船费用。中国财政部按照2013年的一项规定，为那些报废旧船、用外高桥造船这种国有造船企业的新船替代旧船的航运企业提供补贴。

中远是中国效率低下且债务负担沉重的国有企业所面临问题的生动写照。2015年头9个月，扣除非经常性损益，该公司亏损38亿元人民币(合5.80亿美元)。根据中国金融数据库万得(Wind Information)的数据，去年9月底，该公司的负债权益比率高达206%，是沪市上市公司平均水平（66%）的3倍多。

经济学家表示，在中国经济增速为25年最低之际，解决庞大的国有企业的问题是中国经济转型的最重要单一举措。

“国企改革、债务、产能过剩和‘僵尸企业’都是相互紧密联系的问题，”瑞穗证券亚洲(Mizuho Securities Asia)首席经济学家沈建光表示，“身处产能过剩行业的民营企业，亏损几年后就无法继续经营。企业所有者会把企业关掉或卖掉，但国有企业可以继续获得银行贷款或政府支持。

笨重的巨无霸

中国政府一直在寻求让中国经济摆脱对重工业和建筑业的过度依赖。然而，国有企业集中在一些污染严重的行业，例如钢铁、煤炭、造船和重型机械——所有这些行业都与旧的增长模式联系在一起。这些笨重的企业巨头不适合去满足新兴服务行业的需求，例如医疗、科技、教育和娱乐行业——这些都是中国经济中增长最快的行业。



中远获得的船只更新补贴是国有企业享有的数百种补贴之一。万得根据上市公司公告整理出来的数据显示，2014年，上市公司获得的补贴共计300亿元人民币。实际的数字更高：很多补贴流向未上市企业，国有企业还享有非现金福利，例如银行低息贷款、以及土地和水电价格折扣。

中国政府高层领导人已承诺改革国有企业。去年12月，中国国务院总理李克强主持召开经济工作专家座谈会时表示，要有勇气对“僵尸企业”、“绝对过剩产能”的企业狠下刀子。

中国人力资源和社会保障部部长尹蔚民最近表示，在化解过剩产能的过程中，预计将有130万煤炭系统职工和50万钢铁系统职工下岗，不过他没有说具体将从何时开始。



去年9月，由中国共产党批准的国企改革纲要性文件出台，列出了多项举措，旨在让国有企业符合市场化要求。其中包括股权出售和高管任命去政治化（目前国企高管是由中共组织部选任，而非由普通股东选出的）。然而，一直以来得到最积极执行的战略是整合——由政府安排大型国企合并。

过去一年，负责监管非金融国有企业的国有资产监督管理委员会批准了至少6家大型企业的合并。其中包括中远与中国海运(China Shipping Group)的合并，此举将缔造全球最大集装箱航运企业。

中共领导层认为，规模更大的国有企业在国际上将更有竞争力。长期以来，他们一直把规模经济效应视为培育国家冠军企业的关键。考虑到大宗商品价格下跌正在冲击钢铁、煤炭、贱金属和重型机械的利润率，眼下他们认为规模更重要了。

“（中国国家主席）习近平很可能相信，国企部门更庞大是件好事，”世界银行(World Bank)前中国业务局局长、卡内基国际和平基金会(Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)高级研究员黄育川表示，“放眼西方，他看到主要企业的规模都很大，而且还在变得更大。当中国领导人的眼光落到海外的所谓‘市场’经济体身上时，他们没觉得大企业和大规模并购是不好的。”



整合已持续了10多年。自从国资委2003年成立以来，由国资委控制的企业数量已从189家降至103家，这主要是因为并购。

改革开倒车

大规模的改革始于上世纪90年代末，当时国有企业不良贷款把中国银行业体系推向了崩溃边缘。一轮大刀阔斧的改革使得国有企业的职工人数几乎腰斩，从1997年的7000万人下降至2005年的3700万人。

业绩最差的国企关闭或私有化之后，国企部门盈利能力有所提升。国企的资产回报率一直落后于民营企业，但是在2000年代初，两者的差距曾明显缩小。



2008年全球金融危机后，情况出现了变化。中国为抵消全球经济放缓的影响而推出的大规模经济刺激，均依赖于代表国家利益的国企。银行业按指令向国有企业增加放贷，而后者则尽职地一掷千金，兴建新工厂和购买新设备，根本不考虑商业需要。国有部门的“瘦身”计划暂时搁置。

刺激政策助推了工厂、住宅及基础设施的建设热潮。对国有工厂产出的需求曾暂时飙升，国有企业利润有所增长。

但是国有部门膨胀得过于厉害了，一摔就摔得很重。在人们对企业借贷增加及地方政府债务上升日益担忧的情况下，银行和监管机构收紧了贷款；房地产市场开始冷却，基础设施建设支出放缓。由于债务负担不断加重、市场对新建工厂产出的需求不振，企业停止了投资。

国有企业中国铝业公司(Aluminium Corp of China)的资产总额从2006年的820亿元人名币飙升至6年后的1750亿元，2014年其净亏损达到170亿元，是国有上市公司中亏损最严重的。亏损的国企并非仅此一家。官方数据显示，2013年，约42%的国企出现亏损。去年国企自2001年以来首次出现总利润绝对值下滑的情况。如今，国企和民营企业在资产回报率上的差距已经达到二十年来的最高水平。



政策制定者已经将“供应侧”改革确定为2016年经济政策的重大主题，但是很多分析师怀疑，将大型企业合并成为“巨无霸”，并没有找对产能过剩和盈利能力薄弱的病根。早晚有一天，企业可能不得不吞下工厂倒闭和裁员的苦药。

“打造规模更大的国企很可能会加剧他们已然可怕的财务问题和组织痼疾，”布鲁金斯学会中国中心(Brookings Institution’s China Centre)的访问研究员温迪?洛伊特尔特(Wendy Leutert)写道，“央企合并是冒着牺牲长期竞争力和效率提升的风险，来扩大它们的市场份额。”

对于很多西方经济学家而言，答案是显而易见的：通过私有化提高效率。不过，中国顶层领导人反对这样做。

国资委已经谨慎地尝试了“混合所有制”（出售国企少数股份的委婉说法）。然而，领导层认为，国企改革的答案在于加强执政的中共对国有资产的控制（而绝非弱化其在经济中的角色），同时使国企更具有竞争力。

社交媒体上流传的会议详细记录显示，在去年11月23日召开的中共中央政治局会议上，中共领导人决定将改革努力的重点放在“做强做优做大”国企上，拒绝“私有化”。



强强联合也被认为是消除国企之间“恶性竞争”的方式。2014年底，中国最大的两家铁路设备制造商同意合并。新组成的企业有望竞标对习近平新丝绸之路计划至关重要的铁路项目。该计划旨在帮助中国企业在亚洲和中东承揽基础设施项目。

数百万就业岗位面临风险

关闭亏损国企的最大障碍是这可能导致大规模下岗，北京方面担心这会引发社会动荡。在解决产能过剩的问题上，把较弱的国企合并成为实力较强的企业，被视为比迫使亏损企业破产、造成数百万人下岗的破坏性更小。

“如果较强的企业可以改组较弱的企业，他们可以找到重新安置员工的办法。他们就不会马上让所有人下岗，”中国社会科学院(CASS)研究国企改革的研究员剧锦文称，“处理产能过剩会带来失业压力。这一点必须考虑在内。”中科院是为政府提供建议的智库。



去年9月，位于东北老工业基地的大型国企黑龙江龙煤集团(Longmay Group)宣布了裁员10万人的计划，这成了头条新闻。然而，该集团的声明称其中很多员工将被调往关联企业，这表明了要求国企保证就业的政治压力。

在外高桥造船厂，一名姓李的钎焊工很高兴能在一家即使在困难时期也很少裁员的企业上班。

“金融危机后，很多人跳槽去了工资更高的小型（私营）造船厂，”他称，“如今这些厂要倒闭了。现在他们很后悔，但是很难再回来了。”

Ma Nan补充报道

译者/何黎