Changing China

Supply Push?

This is almost certainly not what Chinese policy makers had in mind when they started encouraging exporters to explore the domestic market to help make up for a drop in Western demand: sex toy makers opening flagship stores in Beijing.

But as an article and a video by my colleagues Ben Blanchard and Kitty Bu explore, that is just one of the side-effects the global slowdown is having on the world’s most populous country.

With factory owners looking to tap the local market to soak up excess capacity now that the export market is less reliable, many are setting up their own local brand names and retail outlets.

In the case of many products, like clothing and electronics, that does not necessarily portend any significant change in habits or lifestyle.

But in other areas, companies’ efforts to build up demand for their goods in the home market will themselves increasingly serve to shape tastes and lifestyles.

It’s not just firms like Sweet Secrets, which says it holds the country’s first registered trademark for a sex toy company.

An array of products previously sent straight overseas has been popping up on shelves in many of Beijing’s markets over the past several months, exposing especially young shoppers to a new set of possibilities.

from The Great Debate:

Time for China to act on foreign listings

-- Wei Gu is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own --

China has talked about plans to allow foreign companies to float on its domestic stock markets for at least a decade, but that's all there has been: talk.

Now would be a good time to convert some of that talk into action. Beijing has been struggling with its own investment strategies: the state gets feeble returns on the U.S. Treasury bonds it owns, and its equity stakes in foreign financial firms are well under water.

So why not diversify by allowing 1.3 billion Chinese citizens have a go rather than a few bureaucrats working for China's sovereign fund? The many might even do better than the few. And it would give Chinese savers a chance to buy global blue chips at credit-crunch prices.

The idea of opening up China's equity markets to foreigners may seem fanciful, but it dovetails with another big national objective. China wants to build Shanghai into a global financial centre by 2020, but that requires a deeper and internationalised equity market. Only when that is in place will foreign money descend on Shanghai, together with an army of bankers, lawyers and accountants.

The market capitalisation of Shanghai is now the world's fourth largest, but it is dominated by state-owned firms with only a handful of foreign joint ventures and a few private companies.

The market is off-limits even to many of China's own best and biggest companies, such as the world's largest telecom operator China Mobile and China's top offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC.