Home-grown auto prices down amid year-end sale

Home-grown auto prices down amid year-end sale

Prices of China’s domestically made automobiles retreated slightly in November as dealers cut rates to clear inventory.
Prices fell 1.64 percent from a month ago, and 2.22 percent year-on-year in general, data released by the price monitor body of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has shown.
In breakdown, price of passenger cars shed 3.07 percent from a year earlier, and that for sports cars decreased 2.9 percent. Multi-purpose vehicles was down near?1 percent.
Prices for imported automobiles rose 1.1 percent year-on-year, with that for passenger cars up near 5 percent while that for off-road vehicles down 3.66 percent.
Government subsidies and tax incentives have spurred brisk auto sales in China, with 12 million units sold in the first 11 months and more than 1.34 million units sold in November.
China is widely believed to overtake the United States to become the world’s biggest auto market at the end of this year with annual sales set to top 13 million units.

Coal mine owners exploring new opportunities

Coal mine owners exploring new opportunities

When the coal industry consolidation nears completion in North China’s Shanxi province, Wang Xiaoping, a small coal miner in Shaanxi province of Northwest China, is also seeking his fortune in other ways.
He was sitting at a recent investment seminar in Beijing, contemplating where to earn his living next.
Wang sold one of his two coal mines to a State-owned enterprise recently in the wake of the coal industry consolidation taking place in Shanxi.
The one he sold is a small mine in Shaanxi’s Fugu county with a production capacity of 300,000 tons. Wang is talking to possible buyers for his other mine, which has an annual output of 600,000 tons.
The Shanxi government plans to reduce the number of coal mines from about 1,500 to 1,000 before 2011, and then reduce that number to 800 by 2015. This will be achieved by closing mines with an annual output of less than 300,000 tons each.
Even though the Shaanxi government’s plans are not official, coal miners are ready for a stricter policy.
“A coal industry consolidation is actually under way in Shaanxi, as well, although no specific policy has been officially issued yet,” Wang said. “Lots of private coal mine bosses are searching for new fortunes.”
Wang said coal mine owners are looking at the property market and service industry for investments.
“Xi’an is the most attractive place for local coal mine bosses to pool money into the city’s property market,” he said.
The coal industry consolidation of Shanxi province has set an example for other coal-rich provinces following the government’s pledge to streamline the energy sector.
Other coal-abundant provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Henan, Shandong and Heilongjiang are following suit.
An official from Gansu province, who participated at the same investment seminar with Wang, but asked not to be identified, said some of the coal mine owners in Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces are merging their small coal mines to set up a large coal corporation.
With a new corporation with an annual output of over 3 million tons, they can survive and continue operations, he said.
The official from Gansu said self-consolidation is not allowed by city-level governments.
However, in small counties, such a merger is not strictly prohibited, because the local governments are in need of investors and their capital to develop local economies, he added.
Some owners of small coal mines have expressed interest in downstream businesses, namely the coal chemical processing sector, according to the official.
Coal miners who have to quit the business also have become the target of small companies in need of funds, government investment promotion bureaus and even overseas.
It is estimated that the Shanxi’s consolidation will mean billions of yuan in payouts to small mine operators.
On Capital, a Hong Kong-based capital management company, also took part in the same investment seminar as Wang in a bid to raise funds.
“We hope to attract the ‘idle money’ for our upcoming renminbi fund,” said Laurie Kan of On Capital.

More downloading websites going down

More downloading websites going down

After hundreds of websites offering free movie and music downloads were shut down, China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said over the weekend that the sites will have to solve the “copyright problem” if they want to reopen.
“In recent years, some websites publicly spread a large number of pirated films, TV dramas and other programs. Some of these programs contain lewd content. Such behaviors severely harmed young people’s health and copyright owners’ interests,” Xinhua News Agency quoted an unidentified official with SARFT as saying on Saturday.
The official said that regulating online audio and video services is a “long-term task”, and as long as these websites do not solve the problem of copyright, they will not be allowed to reopen.
SARFT officials said the closed websites did not have licenses issued by the administration. Statistics show that currently more than 530 BitTorrent (BT) websites have been closed, including the major download search engine BTChina.net.
Li Yongqiang of multi-media software firm Baofeng said the government’s crackdown would promote the common sense of normative operation among Chinese websites and was a step forward to solving problems such as piracy and online porn.
However, as many netizens expressed support for the activity, others pointed out that licensed websites should not blame everything on unlicensed sites. Netizen “Yanshan Tanke” said licensed sites should expand their resources and offer more convenient services with high connection speed and reasonable prices.
According to SARFT, the administration will continue the crackdown while further regulating licensing.
The shutdown of BT websites, however, has prompted an increasing number of people to buy pirated DVDs.
“When they buy DVDs from me, almost everyone talks about being worried that the free movie downloads would disappear,” a peddler surnamed Wang told China Daily near Fuchengmen subway station yesterday.

Tax policy change prompts brisk sales

Tax policy change prompts brisk sales

The central government’s decision to end a preferential tax policy in property trading from next year has triggered a property buying spree in the capital. [Mirror Evening News]

Thousands of landlords are selling their apartments to dodge a tax that will be levied on property transfers from next year.
The government announced on Wednesday it would continue most of its financial stimulus policies, started in January this year, at an executive meeting of the State Council. However, the housing transfer tax relief policy is still set to expire at the end of the year.
According to the current relief policy, apartments purchased within the last 2 years are exempt from the transfer tax, which is 5.5 percent of the total price, when sold. When the relief policy expires at the end of this month, transfers of properties bought within the last five years will be taxed.
This new regulation is having a dramatic impact on the current housing market.
According to statistics from bjfdc.gov.cn, the official website for the Beijing real estate trade administration, the housing transaction volume in December reached 1,800 units per day, compared to 1,000 in November.

“The end of the relief policy clearly aims to curb the quick speculation on the real estate market, a major force that has been pushing the housing price up,” Hu Jinghui, deputy general manager of 5i5j, a real estate agency, told METRO.
“We usually sell nine apartments every month, but that number doubled in the first 10 days of December alone,” a branch store manager surnamed Li from 5i5j said yesterday.
According to statistics from the company, about 40.7 percent of apartments in Beijing’s real estate market have been purchased in the last five years.
“The adjustment can definitely control speculators in the real estate market, but because the landlords will probably add the tax into their deals, housing prices in Beijing will continue to rise,” said Zhang Dawei, marketing director of the Midland real estate agency.
Not everyone is upset though. A woman surnamed Zhao has done well out of the rush for properties.
Zhao sold her 1994 70-sq m apartment near the West Third Ring Road in Beijing yesterday for 1.85 million yuan, or about $264,000.
She told METRO she had purchased the apartment at the end of 2007 when Beijing’s housing market growth was in a slowdown amid fear of a global financial crisis.
After learning that the housing transfer tax relief policy would end, Zhao quickly accepted an offer in cash.
If she had waited until next year, Zhao would have had to pay three-times more tax, or about 100,000 yuan.

ICBC gets approval to set up Hanoi branch

ICBC gets approval to set up Hanoi branch

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the nation’s biggest lender, said Friday it had gained approval from Vietnam to set up a branch office in its capital Hanoi.
The new subsidiary will expand ICBC’s presence in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region, and enhance its service in Asia, the bank said in a statement.
The expansion will also allow it to provide financing to the infrastructure construction in the fields of transportation, energy and telecommunications in Vietnam, the bank said.
By the end of September, ICBC has opened 155 overseas subsidiaries in 15 countries and regions.

Chinas new loans rise to 294.8b yuan in Nov

China’s new loans rise to 294.8b yuan in Nov

China’s new yuan-denominated lending in November rose to 294.8 billion yuan ($43.2 billion) from October’s 253 billion yuan, the People’s Bank of China or the central bank, said Friday.
The November figure brought new yuan-denominated loans in the first 11 months to 9.21 trillion yuan, 5.06 trillion yuan more than the corresponding period last year.

Buyers swamp car markets before rise

Buyers swamp car markets before rise

Wang Xin was all-smiles as she drove off in her first car, bought at the Yayuncun auto trade market in north Beijing yesterday.
“I feel pretty lucky to get my favorite car today and with such a big tax discount,” said the 26-year-old travel agent about her new wheels, an 80,000 yuan orange Suzuki Swift.
Wang was among many car buyers who rushed to snap up last-minute bargains, one day after the government decided to increase the vehicle purchase tax for low-emission cars from Jan 1 next year in its latest move to aid economic recovery.
The government will increase the purchase tax on cars with an engine capacity of, or less than 1.6 l, from the current 5 percent to 7.5 percent next year, a cabinet meeting decided on Wednesday. But the ongoing 50 percent discount in the purchase tax will remain.

Car industry analysts and sales managers said the new move would mean an extra 1,000 and 2,000 yuan to the cost of a car. This will not be a big difference compared with the total price, they said.
But anxious buyers were all over Beijing’s largest car market in Changping district yesterday.
A 20-year-old buyer surnamed Lu journeyed from nearby Hebei province to buy a Dongfeng Honda Civic yesterday.
“I once wanted to hold out for bigger discounts, but after the government announced the news yesterday, I decided to come to Beijing right away,” he told METRO as he paid off the 9,000-yuan purchase tax for his 120,000-yuan car.
Wang Shoujun, a sales manager at the car market, said his store, dealing in small-emission Mazda cars, sold two more vehicles yesterday morning compared to the morning before.
“Buyers were very eager and kept asking when their ordered cars will arrive. If the cars are delivered to the market after this month, they won’t enjoy the discounts,” he said.
Other salespersons said potential buyers were still dissatisfied by the discounts and were waiting for better deals on offer next year.
Automakers nationwide have virtually stopped manufacturing new cars after meeting their yearly quota last month.
“Overcapacity has forced car makers to stop providing new cars to the dealers, and I don’t expect any sharp increase in sales for the rest of the month,” said Guo Yong, head of the Beijing-based Yayuncun Auto Trade Market business center.

Civil aviation sector turns loss into profit in 09

Civil aviation sector turns loss into profit in ‘09

China’s civil aviation industry moved out of the red and began to report overall profits in 2009, according to Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).
Civil aviation firms reported total profits of 12.2 billion yuan ($1.79 billion), compared with 2008’s losses of 26 billion yuan, said Wang Changshun, deputy director of the CAAC, at a national civil aviation conference on Wednesday.
Profits of the country’s airline companies stood at 7.4 billion yuan in 2009, compared with losses of 31.8 billion yuan in 2008. Profits of airports nationwide were 3 billion yuan, 500 million yuan less than that in 2008.
Last year, 230 million journeys were made by air in China, representing an increase of 19.7 percent from 2008.

BT website reopens as rivals hit by crackdown

BT website reopens as rivals hit by crackdown

A leading BitTorrent (BT) website in China offering free movie and music downloads resumed service Thursday afternoon, a day after it went offline amid fears the authorities had closed it down in a crackdown on online piracy and pornography.
Operators put a notice on the website VeryCD, saying that Wednesday’s breakdown was caused by technical failures. With 5 million downloads each year, VeryCD is the largest BT download website in China. BT is a peer-to-peer file sharing agreement.
Users welcomed the website’s recovery. One named “toshiyalee” wrote that the one day suspension seemed like a year.
The latest crackdown came after November 24 when Tian Jin, deputy director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), vowed a wipeout of unlicensed video websites.

Huang Yimeng, co-founder of the website, told the Beijing News that his company was still applying for a license from the authorities, but declined to comment on the future of the company.
Hundreds of similar sites have already been shut down by the SARFT, including download search engine BTChina.net.
BTChina.net has been inaccessible since the weekend. A notice on its website said it had been closed because it did not have a license issued by the SARFT.
Web portal netease.com found that 95.7 percent of around 14,000 Internet users who responded to a poll were opposed to the closure of BT websites.
A commentator on it168.com wrote they had to turn to Internet downloads because tickets at Chinese cinemas were too expensive and many foreign movies were not screened in the mainland.
However, a director of voole.com, which offers paid videos online, said the closure of BTChina.net would encourage the development of copyrighted music and movie products.
Cao Yunxia, of the SARFT’s online video and audio program department, said the administration would continue the crackdown while further regulating licensing.
Since 2007, the administration has launched campaigns to clean up websites offering pirated or pornographic video programs.

Fast train drowning flight price

Fast train drowning flight price

Airlines slashed their airfare from Wuhan to Guangzhou to as low as 260 yuan ($38) to rival against the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed train, chaoyang.nen.com.cn reported Thursday.
The test run on Dec. 9 of the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed train went smoothly. It took less than three hours to travel from Guangzhou to Wuhan on the high-speed train, which reaches 394 km per hour, the highest speed in world railway history,
It took four years to build the Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway, which covers 1,068.6 km and has 9 stops.
The Wuhan-Guangzhou railway is the fastest and longest high-speed railway in China. The whole project cost 100 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) and is an important project in China¡¯s 11th five-year plan (2006-2010). Only German and Japan have the same kind.
A passenger who experienced the trial run said, ¡°I feel comfortable. Even the up-side-down bottle didn¡¯t fall.¡±
The Wuhan-Guangzhou railway is the world’s first 350-km per hour ballastless track and is slated to be in operation at the year end.