Scuttled listings and share prices hammered by official threats: Beijing has launched a withering and very public assault on some of China's ...
Ant Group, the financial arm of Alibaba, saw its $34 billion IPO sunk last year ahead of an anti-monopoly probe of the tech behemoth AFP/STRBEIJING: Scuttled listings and share prices hammered by official threats: Beijing has launched a withering and very public assault on some of China's biggest tech names.
Motivated by monopoly and data fears or national pride and the control reflexes of the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party, Beijing is wounding its own firms.At face value, the aim is to tidy up a once-freewheeling space where companies holding big amounts of sensitive user data blossomed in an enormous domestic market with little regulation.
While Beijing has encouraged firms to go global, a rush of tech firms listing abroad likely caught regulators' eye."At least in the view of Chinese regulators."As China's tech giants gain troves of personal data on every aspect of life - from transport habits to payments - there is growing unease in President Xi Jinping's government over who controls it.
"Before this, we saw government intervention in the Ant Group listing ... it's very difficult to say why the timing is as such, but they are all data-related," said Hong Hao of financial services firm Bocom International.Authorities have since expanded their antitrust crackdown beyond Alibaba, with top policymakers vowing to curb monopolies and"prevent the disorderly expansion of capital".
While such infractions had long been a feature of the industry, companies have since pledged to abide by anti-monopoly guidelines, including not to behave unfairly."Chinese Internet companies will officially bid farewell to their stage of barbaric growth," said former entrepreneur and Zhejiang University expert Fang Xingdong.
It did not provide details but in an early indication of action to come, Bloomberg News reported that regulators were planning to revise foreign listing rules to close a loophole used by tech giants to attract foreign capital.
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