Energy & Resources

Why Tangsteel is moving away from its core business

Aug 30, 2013 (WiC 206)

It’s official – steel is China’s least profitable industry. In the first half of the year, the average profit margin at members of the China Iron and Steel Association was a wafer thin 0.13%, reports Xinhua. The sector suffered a Rmb699 ...

Major default has bank bosses worried about credit risk of state firms

Aug 30, 2013 (WiC 206)

When Lehman Brothers closed its doors in 2008 it earned a dubious accolade as the biggest corporate bankruptcy in American history. According to MarketWatch, it owed $613 billion, far exceeding the debts of the previous record-holder WorldCom, ...

Oil giant finds funding from insurers

Jul 19, 2013 (WiC 202)

Anyone with doubts about the importance of China National Petroleum Corp should look at the career paths of its former bosses. Earlier this year, Jiang Jiemin left his role as chairman of CNPC to become the head of the State-owned Assets ...

Shi Zhengrong’s failed push for solar domination has broader lessons

Jul 5, 2013 (WiC 200)

As far as symbolic steps go, it was quite a potent one. Shi Zhengrong’s family returned home one day and were surprised to find that their swimming pool had been filled in with concrete. Shi told them that he had ordered this because the pool ...

Is the reclaimed island of Caofeidian a symbol of Chinese financial excess?

Jun 28, 2013 (WiC 199)

In May 2007 former premier Wen Jiabao visited Caofeidian, an island 70 kilometres from Hebei province’s Tangshan City, for his annual Labour Day inspection tour. Only a few days earlier, Wen had been told that a huge oilfield had been ...

What’s good for power companies is bad for coal miners

Jun 21, 2013 (WiC 198)

When the daughter of coal baron Xing Libin got married on the island of Hainan last year, the media was agog at the extravagance. The bride’s dowry boasted six Ferraris and guests were entertained by a bevy of celebrities including Taiwanese ...

Controversial times for turbine firm Sinovel

Jun 7, 2013 (WiC 196)

Sinovel’s founding chairman Han Junliang is renowned for an ability to cultivate government connections. He once bought out all the first-class tickets on a long-haul flight to get some quality time with an official in charge of clean energy ...

Thousands of Chinese from Guangxi have gone to Ghana to mine gold

May 31, 2013 (WiC 195)

In Tuscany they call Prato “Little Wenzhou”, owing to the number of immigrants who have arrived from the city in Zhejiang province. As we pointed out in WiC79, sections of the local community feel overwhelmed by the influx of Wenzhounese. In ...

Shock as a Hong Kong exchange closes

May 24, 2013 (WiC 194)

Exchanges are like casinos, places where the house rarely loses. So it is odd that the headlines in Hong Kong this week were about an exchange that’s just gone bust. In a dramatic announcement last weekend the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange ...

As EU announces solar tariffs on Chinese exports, some Europeans cry foul

May 17, 2013 (WiC 193)

"I t takes two for a war, and I can declare here that the EU is not available for a trade war with China," insisted Markus Ederer, the European Union’s ambassador to China, earlier this year. The problem from the Chinese perspective is that ...