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July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Posters of the Chinese character for good luck adorn shops bolted shut in the northern city of Ordos, where cranes stand silently above half-finished developments and doors on workers’ dormitories creak in the wind.
Apartment sales have come to a virtual halt in the central district, real-estate agent Zhang Wei says. With the municipality’s revenue falling, the Inner Mongolian city that saw a surge in building during China’s record credit boom is now a showcase for the speculative financing Premier Li Keqiang is trying to curb.
“In the past few years there was a lot of coal so people came from all over the country,” says Gao Wei, 30, smoking in an office that deals in second-hand construction machinery and had no clients that day. “N
ow the economy has collapsed, they’ve all gone.”
Ordos’s implosion stands at one extreme of a national slowdown that a government report yesterday signaled may deepen this quarter, with industrial output gains last month matching the weakest since the 2009 global recession. The challenge for Li’s administration is to assure growth is resilient enough for the world’s second-largest economy to weather busts in local finance and industries ridden by overcapacity.
Most Efficient
“What has to drive growth now is greater productivity and more efficient investment with a financial system that channels money to the most efficient companies,” said David Loevinger, former U.S. Treasury Department senior coordinator for China affairs and now an emerging-markets analyst at TCW Group Inc. in Los Angeles.
China’s growth slowed for a second quarter to 7.5 percent in April-to-June, yesterday’s National Bureau of Statistics report showed. Factory production rose 8.9 percent in June from a year earlier, equal to the lowest since 2009 excluding January and February, when the Chinese New Year holiday distorts statistics.
The report boosted speculation that the government will act to defend its 7.5 percent growth goal for 2013. Nomura Holdings Inc. forecast China will lower banks’ reserve-requirement ratio four times by a total of 2 percentage points through June 2014. Bank of America Corp. said authorities will “introduce some fiscal expansionary policies on a limited scale.”
The government has already started to fine-tune policies and support growth, HSBC Holdings Plc said in a note yesterday. State Council announcements this month encouraging investment in public housing, energy saving, environmental protection and technology infrastructure will help counter the slowdown, HSBC said.
Forecasts Cut
Nomura yesterday cut its growth estimate for next year to 6.9 percent from 7.5 percent, while JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered its forecast to 7.2 percent.
Other growth risks come from slowing consumption and income gains. Consumption contributed 45.2 percent of GDP growth in the first half after accounting for 55.5 percent in the first quarter, according to the statistics bureau. Per capita disposable income of urban households rose 6.5 percent in the first half after adjusting for prices, compared with 9.7 percent in the first half of 2012, government data show.
“
We are all undergoing the temporary pains of restructuring,” Sheng Laiyun, a statistics bureau spokesman, said at a briefing yesterday in Beijing.
Cities’ Debt
Nine provincial capital cities last year had debt equivalent to more than 100 percent of a measure of annual revenue, and some cities were facing more difficulty repaying debt because of slower revenue from land sales, the National Audit Office said in a report last month.
Apple Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper,
reported today that Huaxi in eastern China, known as the nation’s richest village, is at risk of failing as most of its factories are empty. Sun Haiyan, Communist Party vice secretary for Huaxi, said in a phone interview that the report is unfounded and the village’s efforts to restructure its economy are going well.
Fueled by a boom in coal production, Ordos saw a building spree in recent years, with an expanded airport, a sports stadium and the new area of Kangbashi where high-rise apartments surround an artificial lake. Many local residents owned two to three homes each, said Bai Pusheng, a real estate agent.
Now the local government’s revenue is falling because the property crash has scuppered land sales, while residents no longer have compensation to buy property and make loans, according to real estate agent Zhang. About 70 percent of Dongsheng district’s real estate market was funded by private lending that has now stopped, he said.
Ordos’s January-May fiscal revenue dropped by 15.8 percent from a year earlier, according to official statistics.
Boom Halted
When the government sold land over the past few years, it always used the funds for infrastructure construction, Zhang said from the sales office of a new apartment complex with 1,000 units. “
Now they don’t have any money.” Meantime, the city’s coal rush has dried up amid sluggish domestic demand, with
prices dropping to an almost four-year low.
That hasn’t stopped efforts to keep the boom going. Authorities are planning construction for residents to see green spaces every 300 meters and a park every 500 meters, according to Guo Xiaojun, a publicity official from the Dongsheng government.
Financing Difficulty
Such projects may be getting harder to finance.
Some Ordos district governments had to borrow money from companies to pay municipal employees’ salaries, Economy & Nation Weekly, published by the official Xinhua News Agency, said in a July 5 report on its website. The Dongsheng government didn’t respond to a request for comment made through Guo on the magazine’s story.
Much of Ordos’s borrowing has been through local government financing vehicles, special-purpose companies set by authorities across China to fund infrastructure construction. The entities have amassed debt that the National Audit Office estimated was 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.7 trillion) at the end of 2010.
While state-owned policy bank China Development Bank “greatly supports” the projects of local government vehicle Erdos Dongsheng City Construction Development & Investment Group Co., other banks have become stricter and won’t lend for public-works projects such as roads and parks, said Dai Haishu, financial controller and senior accountant at the company.
Economic Impact
“Our projects should have no risk,” he said from his office overlooking unfinished concrete apartment blocks. “The economy has had an impact but we don’t have to repay all our money at once.”
A February 2012 bond prospectus for investors in Erdos Dongsheng forecast “fast growth” for the district and rapid gains in local government revenue. The company is continuing to borrow, and CDB loans have maturities of as long as 10 years, Dai said.
“
Ordos is a warning to other places in terms of how to guide the local economy and in what not to do,” said Yao Wei, China economist at Societe Generale SA in Hong Kong. “
The local governments are still not waking up to what they should do in this new environment.”
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China’s coal miners in crisis
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 02 April, 2014, 9:45am
UPDATED : Thursday, 03 April, 2014, 1:10am
Reuters in Ordos, Inner Mongolia
The urban district of Kangbashi in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, a city hard hit by price declines in the coal industry. Photo: Bloomberg
The Baofu highway, a road that serves the mines in China's coal-producing hub of Ordos,
was largely empty on a recent visit.
A few years ago, it was so clogged with trucks that the traffic jams were legendary, sometimes lasting several days.
Rows of once busy restaurants are closed and flanked by advertisements for discounted coal. At mines that are still operating, unsold coal is piled high and lacking its black sheen, having been exposed to the elements for months.
China's top-producing coal province of Inner Mongolia is in crisis.
Tumbling prices - caused by weaker demand due to slowing economic growth in China and a flood of cheaper imports - have forced many smaller miners out of business, while some major firms are slashing wages by up to 50 per cent to stem heavy losses.
The troubles faced by small miners in the region are likely to be replicated across the country’s coal industry, posing a risk for China’s financial health if there is a wave of bankruptcies. Photo: Reuters
Chinese coal prices are at six-year lows, and miners in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere are grappling with overcapacity, sluggish demand and shrinking bank credit.
The troubles faced by small miners in the region are likely to be replicated across China's coal industry, posing a risk for China's financial health if there is a wave of bankruptcies.
Weng Qingan, chief financial officer at China Coal Energy, the country's No 2 producer, said the outlook for miners across China was grim.
"If coal prices continue to slide, it will be hard for many companies to survive. The whole industry will undergo a major consolidation," he told a recent results briefing in Hong Kong.
Miners in the land-locked northern province are bearing the brunt of the slump, because they are far from coastal buyers.
Many are also a long way from railways and ports, forcing them to rely on expensive trucking for delivery.
In the Ordos mining district - which accounted for a fifth of the mainland's coal output at its peak in 2012 - about half of the 20 private mines visited last month were shut, rows of coal excavators and trucks locked away in their yards.
It is not clear how many mines have gone out of business, or shut down temporarily, but veteran coal traders said a further drop in prices could force more than 10 per cent of about 300 mines in Ordos to fold.
"The bigger ones can stomach the losses to maintain market share, but those without financial muscle have stopped production," said Li Ji, a coal analyst at Galaxy Futures, a brokerage in Beijing.
Weng said a third of the medium to large-scale miners in China were already incurring losses after a 16 per cent drop in prices last year.
Some employees at Inner Mongolia Mengtai Coal and Power have taken a 50 per cent pay cut since late last year, sources at the firm said.
After the 16 per cent drop last year, spot prices at the top Qinhuangdao port have shed a further 15 per cent since the start of the year to 525 yuan (HK$660) a tonne, lower than 2008 levels when prices were first published.
Li estimated that miners in Inner Mongolia could be losing at least 20-30 yuan for each tonne of coal they produce.
Inner Mongolia's coal output rose 0.7 per cent to 1.03 billion tonnes last year, accounting for about 30 per cent of China's total, driven by major producers who benefit from lower costs.
Besides traditional banks,
coal miners in Inner Mongolia and beyond have relied heavily on China's shadow banks - an unregulated sector made up of private lenders, trust companies and corporate bond issuers - to fund a recent expansion spree.
With banks acting as sales agents for the high-yield products shadow banks offer, major lenders risk severe losses if weak corporate borrowers default.
While the fire sale of luxury cars and homes was a common way for coal bosses to raise cash last year, the near year-long price slump has forced some shadow lenders to seize mines after owners defaulted on payments.
Still, industry turmoil may prove the catalyst for the consolidation the bloated sector badly needs, experts said.
