IT TAKES SOME deft reading between the lines to understand the unexpected decision by China Cinda Asset Management, a bad-debt manager controlled by the finance ministry, to drop its backing for the restructuring of Ant’s consumer finance business.
The only public reason that China Cinda has given for backing out late last week from its announced 6 billion yuan ($940 million) participation in a 22-billion-yuan funding round for the reformulated version of Ant’s consumer finance business is “further prudent commercial consideration and negotiation.”
As part of the ‘rectification‘ of Jack Ma’s Ant Group that commenced with regulators pulled the rug from under the group’s planned blockbuster $37 billion initial public offering in November 2020, Ant’s two consumer finance businesses, Huabei and Jiebei, were to be consolidated as Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance, in which Ant’s stake would be capped at 50% and regulatory oversight extended.
Authorities are pruning back the growth of China’s tech platforms for various policy reasons, from reining in financial risk to concerns about misuse of consumer data, overweening market power and a feeling that the platforms and their billionaire owners are just getting too big for their boots.
Yet authorities also have concerns about the four bad-debt managers straying from their core mission, especially now their cash flows are being squeezed and debt ratios rising. After all, there is still a potential real-estate sector meltdown to worry about. There is no appetite to repeat the bailout of China Huarong Asset Management, the largest of the four state-backed bad-debt managers established in the late 1990s to clean up the ugly parts of the large state-owned banks’ loan books.
The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) recently instructed the bad-debt managers to return to their core businesses of managing bad loans and distressed assets.
China Cinda already owns 15% of Chongqing Ant through its wholly-owned subsidiary Nanyang Commercial Bank. Expanding that to become the second-largest shareholder in China’s largest consumer finance company does not fit CBRIC’s mandate.
China Bystander 