China’s economic recovery picked up a surprising amount of steam in March, boosted by strong domestic consumption and unquenchable foreign demand for Chinese-made goods, the Wall Street Journal reported. The country’s official manufacturing purchasing managers index, a gauge of factory activity, hit a three-month high of 51.9 in March, topping February’s reading of 50.6 with the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction, according to data released Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics.
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Chinese lending to African governments dropped by nearly a third in 2019 -- and probably continued to fall last year -- as a rising threat of defaults stemmed a deluge of credit from the country in the past decade, Bloomberg News reported. A study by Johns Hopkins University’s China-Africa Research Initiative showed that Chinese financing to Africa fell below $9 billion for the first time in nearly a decade in 2019, with Beijing refraining or reducing the size of loans to major borrowers such as Angola and Ethiopia.
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Ireland’s High Court cleared the way on Friday for Norwegian Air to raise new capital and emerge from bankruptcy protection in Ireland and Norway in May by approving the airline’s restructuring scheme, Reuters reported. Norwegian’s survival plan, announced last year, puts a definitive end to its long-haul business, leaving a slimmed-down airline focusing on Nordic and European routes. “We can now go forward with the reconstruction in Norway and initiate a capital raise.” Chief Executive Jacob Schram said in a statement following the ruling.
Widely watched airfares in China are recovering to pre-pandemic levels as domestic tourists lead a patchy air travel recovery, scattering crumbs of hope to a shattered global travel sector, Reuters reported. With international markets like Europe still in partial lockdown, the global tourism industry’s attention is riveted on China’s new travel patterns as it brings COVID-19 under control and lifts curbs on movement. The Chinese domestic market quietly overtook the once-dominant U.S.
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China's small regional banks are fast approaching a surge of nonperforming debt that threatens to undermine the financial health of the vulnerable lenders, Nikkei Asia reported. As part of the country's coronavirus stimulus package, the government allowed small to midsized enterprises to defer principal and interest payments on loans. The extensions were applied to 6.6 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) as of the end of December, according to the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.
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As Hong Kong residents move overseas to escape China's political crackdown, real estate companies see new opportunities in areas such as assisting with visa applications and brokering property transactions, Nikkei Asia reported. Interest in leaving Hong Kong is the highest since the lead-up to the former British colony's 1997 return to China, said Andrew Lo, a local emigration consultant who has worked in the industry for over three decades. "This is the biggest emigration boom in Hong Kong's history," he said.
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It’s becoming clearer which parts of China’s corporate sector are most at risk of credit-market stress as Beijing pulls back liquidity: property firms, local government financing vehicles and energy producers, Bloomberg News reported. Developers account for a fifth of the $10 billion worth of delinquencies in China this year, while some concern is growing over local state-linked firms after one based in Chongqing missed payments on commercial bills. Coal companies in the country’s northeast are struggling to refinance in the wake of a shock default by a state-owned firm late last year.
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A Chinese court has ruled that HNA Group's corporate management was "highly mixed up" and more than 300 of its affiliates did not function as independent companies, Nikkei Asia reported. The People's High Court of Hainan Province in the civil case involving the once highflying conglomerate also decided to treat the group as a single entity in its bankruptcy proceedings going forward. The court disclosed late on Monday that it would pursue the restructuring procedures by consolidating the parent HNA Group with 320 of its affiliates.
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Chinese economic activity surged in the first two months of 2021 when compared with the same coronavirus-battered period last year, though the picture was less rosy when weighed against growth momentum in the final months of 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported. Economic data released Monday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed industrial production, consumption, investment and home sales in January and February all jumping by more than 30% from the same period a year earlier, when the Chinese economy was largely shut down to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus.
China is stepping up the bankruptcy process of heavily indebted companies as the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party tries to demonstrate its crisis management before the party congress in 2022, Nikkei Asia reported. Travel conglomerate HNA Group and five other major heavily indebted companies with ties with the government have liabilities totaling 1.8 trillion yuan ($277 billion). A high court in Hainan Province announced on Wednesday that more than 300 companies under the wing of HNA will go into a bankruptcy process called "chong zheng,"a type of corporate rehabilitation.
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