【英语财经】中国国企在欧洲大举收购引发担忧 State-owned Chinese groups’ acquisitions in Europe raise concern

China’s richest man says his country’s state-owned enterprises are short-termist and lack international management standards. Nevertheless, SoEs dominated a surge of Chinese investment into Europe last year, raising a series of questions over the suitability of China Inc as an owner of European corporate assets.

Self-made billionaire Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group and one of China’s biggest outward investors, criticised SoEs for being slow and lacking long-term overseas expansion strategies.

“The bosses of state-owned enterprises are unable to set long-term goals because their position will be replaced in two or three years,” Mr Wang told an audience at Oxford university last week. “Moreover, state-owned enterprises do not have international standards for their management systems, and have long cycles for their approval process,” he added.

He cited an example. When bidding for a real estate project in London, Mr Wang said, he was given one week to complete or the asset would go up for auction, resulting in a higher price.

“I made the quick decision to go for it, signed the agreement and paid the cash in three days,” he said. “In a similar situation, it would have been very difficult for a state-owned enterprise to make that swift decision.”

His warning comes as new data show SoEs accounted for 70 per cent of a record ￠20bn invested by Chinese companies in the EU last year, up from 62 per cent of ￠14bn invested in 2014, according to a report from the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics), a German think-tank, and the Rhodium Group, a New York-based consultancy.

Much of the 44 per cent jump in overall Chinese investment into Europe came from a few big ticket acquisitions by SoEs, including ChemChina’s ￠7.3bn takeover of Italian tyre group Pirelli and Shanghai Jin Jiang’s acquisition of Europe’s second-largest hotel group, Louvre Hotels, for a reported ￠1.3bn (see chart).

Concerns surrounding SoE outward acquisitions take several forms. One is simply that the financial performance of China’s top 106 SoEs, or those owned by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), deteriorated in the first 11 months of last year, with profits falling 10.4 per cent, the ministry of finance said, without specifying if it was referring to net or pre-tax profits.

A Chinese official, who declined to be identified, said that SASAC is now intensifying efforts to ensure that SoEs acquiring companies overseas engage only with “good projects” which make money. This stricture was making the organisation increasingly bureaucratic, with approvals to buy foreign assets and increase investments in them often taking several months.

Kjeld Erik Br?dsgaard, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School, said that SASAC’s urging for investments into lucrative projects was nothing new. “But now it seems that SASAC is under pressure to make sure that this is what is going to happen,” Prof Br?dsgaard said.

Aside from the issue of bureaucracy, analysts said that SoE purchases of European corporate assets also raised questions of fairness. SoEs are often highly indebted but nevertheless can use their government links to raise finance for overseas acquisitions on concessionary terms, analysts said.

For instance, ChemChina is a highly leveraged company with total debts of 9.5 times its annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (ebitda). But it is unlikely to face difficulty in funding the $44bn it needs to buy Syngenta, a Swiss agrichemical giant.

“China’s new policy-driven financing push has the potential to undermine EU integrity and geoeconomic interests in its neighbourhood,” wrote Thilo Hanemann and Mikko Huotari in the Merics-Rhodium joint report.

“It also challenges Europe’s longstanding goal of disciplining subsidies and state aid to ensure private capital is not being crowded out by state-related actors not operating on market principles,” Mr Hanemann and Mr Huotari added.

In addition, the asymmetry of bilateral market access is another European concern. “Chinese interest is growing particularly fast in sectors that remain restricted to foreign investors back in China, amplifying the political salience of unequal market access,” according to Mr Hanemann and Mr Huotari.

An increase in Chinese acquisitions of financial services firms last year was a particular concern because the sector remains largely off limits to European acquirers in China. Restrictions also limit the extent to which foreign companies can acquire assets in several other sectors, including automotive, agriculture and energy. All of these drew Chinese interest in Europe (see chart above).

中国首富王健林表示，中国国有企业是短期主义者，并且缺乏国际管理标准。然而，中国国有企业引领了去年中国对欧洲投资的飙升，这引发了一系列关于中国企业是否适合拥有欧洲企业资产的疑问。

白手起家的亿万富翁王健林是大连万达集团(Dalian Wanda Group)的董事长，也是中国最大的对外投资者之一。王健林批评中国国有企业行动迟缓，缺乏长远的海外扩张战略。

王健林上周在牛津大学(Oxford)发表演讲时表示：“国企老总无法制定长期目标，因为他们在两三年后就会被换掉。此外，国企管理体系缺乏国际标准，而且审批程序冗长。”

他举了一个例子。王健林表示，在试图拿到伦敦的一个房地产项目时，他只有一周时间来完成交易，否则资产将会挂牌拍卖，价格就会上升。

他说：“我迅速决定拿下它，签署协议并在3天内付了款。在类似的情况下，国有企业很难这么快做出决定。”

在王健林发表上述言论之际，由德国智库墨卡托中国研究中心(Mercator Institute for China Studies)和纽约咨询公司荣鼎咨询(Rhodium Group)联合发表的报告显示，去年中国公司在欧盟的投资达到创纪录的200亿欧元，其中，国有企业占到70%；2014年投资额140亿欧元，国企占62%。

中国企业对欧洲投资总额增长了44%，其中一部分增长来自国企的几笔巨资收购，包括中国化工(ChemChina)73亿欧元收购意大利轮胎企业倍耐力(Pirelli)，以及上海锦江国际酒店集团(Jin Jiang International Hotels)收购欧洲第二大酒店集团卢浮宫酒店(Louvre Hotels)——据报道收购价达13亿欧元。

围绕中国国企海外收购的担忧表现在几个方面。一个担忧是中国106家最大的国有企业（即国资委下属的那些企业）在去年前11个月的财务表现出现恶化，据财政部称，这些企业的利润下降10.4%，但没有说明是净利润还是税前利润。

一位拒绝透露身份的中国官员表示，国资委现在加大努力确保国企在海外只收购能赚钱的“好项目”。这种约束让国资委越发官僚化，收购外国资产和追加投资的审批往往需要数月时间。

哥本哈根商学院(Copenhagen Business School)教授凯尔?埃里克?布罗兹高(Kjeld Erik Br?dsgaard)表示，国资委敦促企业投资于有利可图的项目并不新鲜。他说：“但现在国资委似乎承受着确保投资盈利的压力。”

除了官僚问题以外，分析师表示，中国国企收购欧洲企业资产也令人质疑公平性问题。分析师称，中国国企往往负债累累，但依然能够利用政府关系，以优惠条款获得海外收购所需的资金。

例如，中国化工是一家高度杠杆化的公司，债务总额达到其年度息税折旧及摊销前利润(Ebitda)的9.5倍。但它在筹集收购瑞士农业化工集团先正达(Syngenta)所需的440亿美元资金方面却不太可能遇到困难。

韩其洛(Thilo Hanemann)和米科?霍塔里(Mikko Huotari)在荣鼎和墨卡托联合发表的报告中写道：“中国新的由政策驱动的融资举措有可能损害欧盟一体化及其在周边地区的地缘经济利益。”

两人还称：“它还挑战了欧洲的一个长期目标，即规范补贴和政府援助，以确保私人资本不会被不按市场规则运营的政府相关企业挤出。”

此外，双边市场准入的不对等是欧洲的另一个担忧。韩其洛和霍塔里表示：“在那些外国投资者依然在中国受限的领域，中国人的兴趣增长尤为迅速，这让市场准入不对等的政治特征更加突出。”

去年中国收购金融服务企业的案例增加尤其令人担忧，因为中国在很大程度上依然禁止欧洲企业收购其金融企业。外国企业在中国收购包括汽车、农业和能源在内的数个其他行业的资产也受到限制。欧洲的所有这些资产都吸引了中国人的兴趣。

译者/邹策