【Compilation/Observer Network Wu Yakun】 In January last year, it was taken down by China last July, china was officially taken over in December, and the hambantota port in Sri Lanka, which was rented by the Chinese for 1 billion US dollars for 1 billion US dollars for 99 years, has changed in the past 100 days? What are the possibilities ahead?
A recent visit by a Bloomberg reporter may give some answers.
Hambantota Port, Sri Lanka
Rent to Chinese
Every year, about 60,000 ships vital to the global economy sail through the Port of Hambantota at the southern tip of Sri Lanka as they sail through the Indian Ocean, but few stop here to unload their cargo.
The 8-year-old Port of Hambantota has almost nothing — no bustling shipping containers, no cargo ships coming and going, not even a single weak fence that symbolically blocks the passage of giants. But it is such a lonely and despised port, but it has been favored by China's "Belt and Road" plan and has become an important layout in South Asia.
It is no wonder that the hambantota port is rarely noticed, because it was built by the Sri Lankan government with a lot of debt, and this debt has become larger and larger, and eventually grows into a weight that the Sri Lankan government cannot afford, let alone develop and utilize. In this way, Chinese promised to help repay the loan, and Sri Lanka leased it to Chinese 99.
The West is worried about this. They fear that China's $500 billion injection of the Belt and Road Initiative will make the hambantota port a strategic infrastructure for military use. After China Merchants took over the port, it has been trying to break the Western stereotype of China taking the port.
A new change
According to the financial report, China Merchants Group's revenue in 2017 reached 93 billion US dollars, about sri Lanka's gross domestic product (GDP) that year. The group wanted to use their past experience to make this must-pass place from China to Europe profitable.
Tissa Vikramasinghe, Chief Operating Officer of Hambantota Port
It turns out that China Merchants has indeed done just that. When I met the port's chief operating officer, Tissa Wickramasinghe last month, he told Bloomberg that the China Merchants takeover had nearly doubled the port's vessel calls.
"We very much want this port to work well," Vikramasinghe said, "and it doesn't matter to me whether it should have been built before or why it was built." ”
There is a long way to go
Still, Hambantota Port has a long way to go before it can alert its Indian Ocean rivals in Singapore, Malaysia and the Middle East. Even with more traffic than before, the port only has the capacity to handle one ship a day – a size that can't even be ranked on China Merchants Group's own throughput rankings, let alone on the list of the world's top 40 container terminals.
Comparison chart of cargo throughput of China Merchants ports (the cargo throughput scale of Hambantota Port can even be negligible)
In fact, the world's major shipping companies are transporting goods through Colombo, sri Lanka's capital, and there is no reason for the company to move its base from Colombo to the port of Hambantota, which is further south. According to Steve Felder, maersk Line's south Asia executive director at Maersk Line, the world's largest container carrier, the company is waiting for the Hambantota port to show its customers a "strong value appeal."
"It's too early to tell if Hambantota Port is our dish," Field says, "and the main attractions as a port are the accessibility of trunk traffic, the abundance of goods in the hinterland, cost, and efficiency." ”
Hambantota Port's overland trunk line network is under construction with the help of China
Seeing that the port has ruled out the possibility of becoming a military base, many people have higher expectations of the port, believing that If China fails to revitalize the port of Hambantota, it must be used as a tool to serve China's broader strategic interests to ensure China's discourse and position on key trade routes in the world and in international supply chains.
Rahul Kapoor, a shipping analyst at Bloomberg think tank in Singapore, said it would be difficult to build meaningful land and sea transportation around the port without investing billions of dollars.
"Hambantota Port is an excellent example of Chinese pursuit of maritime superiority," Kapoor said, "and for the foreseeable future, it will remain a strategy driven by commercial viability." ”
【Compilation/Observer Network Zhou Yuanfang】
China's A-share market has been rising steadily since it plunged from its highs in June 2015 and has been rising steadily since January 2016, bloomberg said in an April 18 article that China's stock market has largely returned to fundamentals in the past three years. This, together with the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect quotas will be increased in May this year; in June this year, a-shares will be officially included in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index; and the Shanghai-London Stock Connect will be opened before the end of this year, which constitutes a positive for mature investors on Wall Street.
The Observer Network compiles the article as follows:
Today, investors may have to rethink their views on the Chinese market, as Wall Street's traditional (value) investment strategies can be very lucrative in China.
After a frenzied boom of 2015 (the Shanghai Composite Index rose 5,178.19 points in June 2015) and the subsequent plunge, many have decided that China's stock market is a casino.
But the world's second-largest stock market with a total market capitalization of $7.6 trillion (according to the January 2018 A-share total market capitalization report, the total value of the A-share market reached a record high of 56.62 trillion yuan in 2017), has quietly become a mature market that pays attention to fundamental factors.
Data compiled by Bloomberg shows that Wall Street professional investors have been using value investing metrics for decades, with dividends, profits and yields, working very well over the past three years, with the stocks that perform best on these indicators outperforming the broader market by 46 percent in the CSI A-share market.
This is very different from what happened before the 2015 crash in China's stock market, and highlights that institutional funds are gradually gaining weight in the world's second-largest stock market.
This is also good news for foreign fund managers, as a-shares will be officially included in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index in June this year. This means that, at least in the long run, the stock picking skills honed by [Western investors] in long-term international trading can also yield huge returns in the Chinese market, which has been considered an immature speculative casino in the past.
Laura Wang, Morgan Stanley's Hong Kong-based strategist, said that "overall, investors in the Chinese market are maturing."
She uses metrics such as earnings, valuation and return on capital in her stock market. "Retail investors are starting to show trust in asset managers, and we're also seeing structural improvements in regulators," she said. ”
Recent stocks recommended by Morgan Stanley include Spring Airlines Co., Zhejiang Huace Film & TV Co. and Zhejiang Runtu Co., Ltd. (zhejiang runtu co.) wait. These companies also fit the bank's favorite themes of mass consumption and high-end manufacturing.
The People's Bank of China has just lowered the reserve requirement ratio of some banks, and as of 10:05 a.m. Beijing time on the 18th, the China CSI 300 Index rose by 0.4%, the first increase in five days.
According to Bloomberg statistics, in the past three years, the biggest impact on the performance of individual stocks (among the CSI 300 indexes) is dividends and dividends, followed by analysts' expected profits.
If an investor chooses the 60 stocks with the highest dividends in the CSI 300 as a portfolio (readjusted once a month), under this investment strategy, his three-year yield is about 28%. In contrast, the CSI 300 index fell by 18% in the same period.
Since mid-2015, dividend-paying companies have performed 76 percent better overall (than the broader market), up from just 46 percent seven years ago.
Since the 2015 slump, value investors have returned much higher, while the most favored momentum indicator for small and medium-sized retail investors (generally used to chase up and kill the fall) and the relative strength index (rsi, generally used to observe overbought and oversold) have performed poorly, and if investors choose the stocks with the highest return rate in 12 months as a portfolio, he will lose 8.5% since mid-2015.
This does not mean that China has become free of trend investors, or that China has become an oasis for value investors. Retail investors still make up a sizable share of China's day-to-day trading activities, and they are very active in switching between the hottest stocks, from IPO to the Hainan sector, and they don't care much about factors like stock valuations.
Another factor that distorts Chinese stock prices is the intervention of state funds, which Toshihiko Takamoto, a Fund Manager at Asset Management One, a Fund Company founded by Japan's Daiichi Life and Mizuho Financial Box, said was one of the reasons why some foreign institutions were reluctant to invest in China.
While Chinese government intervention is unlikely to disappear, the share of institutional investors appears to be increasing, with a greater focus on fundamentals.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (HKSCE) have recently agreed to quadruple the daily quotas for Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect. The new daily quota of Shanghai Stock Connect and Shenzhen Stock Connect will be expanded from RMB13 billion to RMB52 billion, while the new daily quota of Hong Kong Stock Connect will be expanded from RMB10.5 billion to RMB42 billion, effective 1 May 2018. The Shanghai-London Stock Connect is expected to open within this year. The pilot project of individual tax deferred pension insurance will be launched on May 1 to encourage long-term investment by domestic citizens.
Mark Tinker, AXA Framlington's head in Hong Kong, said: "They want to open up the market so that assets can be priced more rationally, which is also the role of Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect and Shanghai-London Stock Connect." This will allow international investors to enter and act as judges of the fundamentals of the asset, which has progressed well so far. ”