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Chine investors surged into EU at height of debt crisis
A hostess walks past the euro sign at an exhibition about currencies in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012. China's Central Bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said Beijing has confidence in the euro and will keep buying the debt of European governments. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)©AP
As investors fled Europe in the worst days of its sovereign debt crisis, China-bad companies moved in the other direction and surged in, with cash flowing from China into some of the hardest-hit countries of the eurozone periphery.
The buying spree, analysts say, was nothing short of a transformation of the model of Chine outbound investment. It is expected to increa steadily over the next decade.
“We saw a massive spike in Chine investment in Europe, particularly [mergers and acquisitions] during the height of the debt crisis,” says Thilo Hanemann, an expert in Chines
e outbound investment and rearch director at Rhodium Group, a rearch consultancy.
“This was partly opportunistic buying becau asts were cheap and partly it was a structural cular shift in Chine outbound investment, from curing natural resources in developing countries to acquiring brands and technology in developed countries.”
The Financial Times this week investigates the modern trail of Chine investment, migration and ambition in Europe. A ries of reports from Beijing to Milan to Madrid to Lisbon to Athens reveal the scale of China’s expansion in Europe, the flow of investment and the strategies of Chine investors and migrants caught up in a national effort – a “going out” policy in place since 1999 – to find new markets and enhance China’s economic strength.
The incursion has not been all plain sailing. When a Chine state-owned consortium won the bid to build a road from Warsaw to the German border, the government in Beijing prented the deal as a model for Chine contractors in Europe.
But after cost over-runs and repeated breaches of local labour law, the Polish government cancelled the contract with Covec, the Chine consortium, in 2011 – less than two years into the project.
What befuddled the Chine company most were Polish environmental laws requiring tunnels for wildlife to be built beneath the road and a two-week work stoppage while ven rare species of frogs, toads and newts were moved out of the way.
The disaster has become business folklore in Beijing – a parable of the legal and cultural issues Chine investors face when trying to do business or buy companies in Europe. Still, the obstacles faced by Covec, as well as other pioneering companies, have not dented China’s confidence in European ventures even in times of turmoil.
Total annual Chine investment in Europe has dropped somewhat from the peak years of 2011 and 2012, but analysts across the continent e robust deals in the making and signs that investment will increa significantly this decade.
Official data on Chine outbound – and inbound – investment are notoriously unreliable becau the government does not measure most activity by Chine companies’ offshore subsidiaries and does not attempt to work out where investment ends up.
Independent entities such as Rhodium Group and the Heritage Foundation, a conrvative US-bad think-tank, have chronicled a recent shift in Chine money from resource-rich developing countries in Africa to partnerships in developed countries, including Europe.
Private Chine enterpris are playing an important role in the transition. State-owned Chine companies were the vanguard for China’s outward investment, with state-owned business accounting for 78 per cent of investment in Europe between 2008 and 2013, according to Deutsche Bank. At home, state behemoths dominate industries such as telecoms, transport, energy and finance.
But between 2011 and 2013, private companies’ share in Chine M&A activity in the continent ro to over 30 per cent – compared to 4 per cent in the previous three years,
Deutsche Bank rearch shows.
Investment tends to cluster in individual countries in any given year, according to data compiled by the Heritage Foundation. So far in 2014, Italy has been China’s biggest target in Europe with a surge of investment in the first half of the year. Clo to half of the $7bn in total Chine investment in Italy was made in 2014 alone. Portugal saw a jump in 2011 and in 2014. The UK has had two years of soaring Chine activity. Since the debt crisis, Spain has experienced steady increas.
Chine investment into Europe – while growing – still faces veral obstacles. “Relative to China’s $4tn in foreign exchange rerves, the volumes are still not that large becau Europe is not willing to ll China its top technologies and it doesn’t have very much el that China really wants,” said Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the conrvative US think-tank, the American Enterpri Institute, and compiler of an independent databa on Chine outbound investment. “In the future, we’re probably going to e a steady increa [in Chine investment to Europe] but no huge breakthroughs.”
