Chapter 889: Chaotic Times, Chaotic State-Owned Enterprises

The "upper classes" sat together. The topics of discussion were naturally not trivial matters, but things closely related to the national economy.

For example, some people mentioned some policies recently proposed by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce. Previously, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce suddenly issued a policy, announcing that if state-owned enterprises want to advertise, the amount of advertising must be controlled within 2% of the pre-tax proportion of the enterprise's sales revenue. This ban is said to be to prevent state-owned enterprises from wasting state property by advertising indiscriminately.

In the past two years, the advertising superstar in China's consumer goods market is a state-owned pharmaceutical factory in Northeast China called Harbin Pharmaceutical Group. Before last year, it was still an unknown medium-sized pharmaceutical factory with a total asset of only 100 million yuan. The annual research and development expenses have never exceeded 2.5 million yuan.

But since last year, it has suddenly implemented an advertising bombardment strategy. Last year, it spent 700 million yuan, and the advertising budget for the first five months of this year has exceeded 600 million yuan, becoming China's largest advertiser in one fell swoop. Harbin Pharmaceutical's popularity and sales have also risen sharply. Under its demonstration effect, state-owned pharmaceutical factories and electrical appliance factories in various places have also launched advertising wars. The advertising revenue of CCTV and various media has risen sharply, and everyone is very happy.

As soon as the advertising quota order was issued, not only did the companies suddenly become a mess, but the media also complained. The Industry and Commerce Bureau had to make additional clauses, announcing that pharmaceutical, food, daily chemical and home appliance companies, which are the industries with the most advertising impulse, can increase the advertising ratio to 8%.

But even if it is 8%, it is not much money, and it still cannot meet the ambitions of pharmaceutical companies who want to obtain therapeutic effects through advertising, nor can it meet the requirements of other companies who want to quickly enter the market in this industry. . Soon, no one mentioned this limit order anymore.

Of course, there are policies more ridiculous than advertising limits. In order to prevent state-owned drugstores from competing with each other for business, some local drug regulatory departments have specially issued a policy stipulating that no second retail drugstores can be opened within the scope of the rice. Peking University professor asked again, how can the government guarantee that the above is a reasonable layout? It is to open three stores within the rice field. Whether it makes a profit or a loss, the self-owned drugstore operator will bear the consequences. Why should the government worry about it? \'' Although his question is very powerful, some people still raised a counter-question, saying that if those state-owned drugstores make a loss. Isn't it the government that has to clean up their asses?

These two questions have dragged the contradictions that have continued for more than 20 years to the system.

This regulatory thinking of the drug regulatory department seems ridiculous, but its internal logic But it is very clear, that is, to prevent the mutual slaughter between state-owned enterprises in the monopoly or semi-monopoly industry. For the regulator, both sides are flesh and blood. The result of competition is the loss of state-owned assets. The optimal state is of course friendship first and competition second.

The story of being born in the aviation industry is very typical. Since the 1990s, the enthusiasm for building airlines in various places has soared. More than 30 state-owned airlines of all sizes have emerged one after another, making China the country with the largest number of airlines in the world.

In order to grab customers, these companies have launched discount competitions. In 1998 alone, major airlines have made more than 5 billion yuan in profits. By the beginning of last year, the entire industry fell into losses. The Civil Aviation Administration of China finally couldn't stand it anymore. It issued a ban on discounts in February last year on the grounds that the practice of competitive discounts led to the loss of huge state-owned assets and must be stopped. Strictly order all companies not to give discounts anymore.

This order naturally caused an uproar in public opinion, and they accused the Civil Aviation Administration of China of putting the interests of the industry above consumers and interfering with market competition by administrative means. However, the effect of the ban on discounts was immediate. Only half a year later, the Civil Aviation Administration of China announced that the industry had turned losses into profits in the past six months, with a cumulative profit of 260 million yuan, a year-on-year reduction of nearly 500 million yuan. In other words, 700 million yuan of state-owned assets were saved by not offering discounts.

However, the ban on discounts could not change the competitive landscape that had already emerged in the aviation industry.

Not long after. In order to grab business, airlines turned open discounts into hidden discounts, and gradually returned to their original state. The Civil Aviation Administration of China repeatedly issued orders but could not stop the pace of business laws. In the first two months of this year, the industry reported a loss of more than 2 billion yuan.

While the civil war in state-owned airlines continued, some private business owners had quietly entered. Shanghai Spring International Travel is a private company engaged in tourism business. It has entered this industry since 1994. The chairman, who was a pilot, started to enter the charter business in 1997. Relying on his business resources of travel groups, he boldly chartered some small and medium-sized airlines' planes. Of course, his ticket prices were much lower than those of state-owned companies on the same routes.

In order to circumvent the policy of banning discounts, they deliberately blurred the prices and packaged the tourists' tour guide fees, accommodation fees, and air tickets together. Although the competent authorities were very annoyed, they could do nothing about him. Later, he admitted that in fact, their internal pricing was very low. For example, the air ticket price from Shanghai to Xiamen was lower than the train hard sleeper ticket price.

Compared with the conservative aviation industry, the anti-monopoly in the telecommunications industry has come to the forefront.

As the saying goes, ** brings efficiency, and monopoly produces benefits. In fact, from the beginning, people have questioned the phenomenon of excessive profits in the monopoly industry. The first target was the telecommunications company related to every household.

Last year, China Telecom achieved revenue of 229.5 billion yuan. Annual growth of twenty-five percent. Some experts have raised questions about the charging system of telecommunications. According to the telecommunications charging regulations at that time, consumers had to pay three minutes for making calls that lasted less than three minutes. Someone calculated that telecommunications companies overcharged more than 26 billion yuan each year.

Under the pressure of public opinion, the telecommunications department held a tariff hearing, which was specially filmed by CCTV. Under the aggressive questions of media reporters, telecommunications officials replied impatiently that they really did not have the energy to explain the details of the adjustment to everyone. "" These words are obviously very sad, and the atmosphere, including the media, is to criticize the bureaucracy of the telecommunications department. Unfortunately, they are very thick-skinned and do not care about this at all.

This March. One hundred and seven professors from Xijiang University jointly sent a letter to the government and the media, proposing to vote against another charging system of telecommunications companies, in which hourly charging starts when the other party answers the call.

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The initiator of the joint letter said that there were many calls that were put through but no one answered. They hung up on their own, but were charged by the telecommunications bureau. They provided a thick stack of phone bills. On a list of fifty long-distance call records, there were five calls shorter than thirty seconds. There is also a page of details. Twenty-three. The ultra-short and long words appeared ten times on the phone.

The attentive professors also conducted a special test. They made long-distance calls that rang many times but were not connected. As a result, they were charged on the long-distance call details printed by the telecommunications bureau.

…Strict calculations indicate that there were more than two million telephone users in Zhizhou at that time, calculated based on the number of people who did not answer the phone every day. The ring fee charged amounted to 1.2 million yuan, which is more than 10 million yuan a year.

Professors want an explanation for the unexplained overpayments.

The Hangjia Telecommunications Bureau finally made some progress and sent someone to have a dialogue with the professor representatives.

Face your teacher back then. The explanation given by the person in charge of the telecommunications bureau is that the ultra-short-term charges may be caused by a fax machine, recording phone, server, etc. on the other party's line, or the other party's hand may be slipping. The telephone network fell off after picking it up. There must be no problem with Hangzhou Telecom.

Of course, such a conversation ended unhappily. One professor ridiculed that among us there are computer experts and automatic control experts. There are also communication system experts. Why are the answers given by students not what we taught them?

The tariff adjustment and ringing news were very exciting for a while, but in the end they were ignored. In the end, telecom companies' price easing will be driven by market competition.

In order to support the declining railway transportation sector, the State Council approved the Ministry of Railways to establish China Railway Communications and Information Co., Ltd. and chartered it to carry out fixed-line communication services.

As soon as Tietong was established, the first thing that opened the door was that the initial installation fee for Xuannian phones was 600 yuan.

In the past few years, the initial telephone installation fee has been the most stable and lucrative part of the profits of telecommunications companies. After years of appeals from consumers, this fee has been reduced from 5,500 yuan to 1,250 yuan. But he refused to go down any more.

This time Tietong rushed in. The strategy naturally needs to be adjusted, and China Telecom responded quickly and announced the cancellation of the initial installation fee.

Tietong's plan to grab a big chunk of the monopoly came to nothing, but it unexpectedly benefited consumers across China. ""Monopoly industries will eventually retreat, and uncompetitive companies will eventually go bankrupt. Just like the domestic telecommunications industry, if there is no monopoly, private companies will definitely not be able to compete." Wang Xuyun said.

The main direction of Bijiu Club is to focus on the industry, including computer software and hardware, as well as some communication products. Therefore, Wang Xuyun is very familiar with the situation in this area, and especially complains a lot about the situation in the domestic telecommunications industry.

in past experiences. There have been many computer network failures caused by the telecommunications department. When encountering such problems, users always have to call the computer supplier. Ask what's going on?

"We have taken the blame for them." Wang Xuyun said with some helplessness. "In places where our fiber optic network cannot cover, most users still use dial-up Internet access. Therefore, when they encounter trouble, they call the telecommunications department to ask for a solution. When the incident happened, they would always blame us immediately, saying that it was a computer failure that caused the inability to access the Internet. In fact, 10% of the time it was their network that went wrong. "

Everyone nodded. In fact, the harm caused by breaking the base is great. It seems that the government has made money from it. However, this kind of money is not caused by the competitiveness of the industry, but at the expense of ordinary consumers. It is very sad that it is exchanged for the interests of the common people.

From housing, medical education, to communications and telecommunications, the common people are scolding them and saying they are too expensive. This means that insufficient supply has caused prices to be too high. This means that the demand is very strong. Why is there no capital coming in? It is because the government does not allow it.

Facing an uncertain future, ordinary people dare not spend money and capital does not dare to invest casually. So is it effective for the government to spend money on behalf of the ordinary people? It works, but only temporarily.

In this regard, Fan Wubing believes that the reason why China's economy was able to emerge from the shadow of the financial crisis in 1998 was mainly due to the housing reform triggering real estate investment. The other reason is that the expectation of joining... ratio triggered the expansion of external demand. .

But if we want to completely solve this problem, we have to break the industry regulation and allow private capital to enter the fields of medical care, education, communications, railways, culture, entertainment and even finance.

"In fact, looking back at China's economic growth since the reform and opening up, the driving force behind it is the institutional reform that breaks the industry monopoly, allowing people, money, materials and other production factors to flow fully in all departments, and finally achieve today's achievements." Fan Wubing said to everyone. "But since this year, the signs we have observed are not that the industry is becoming more and more open. Instead, the industry entry threshold is getting higher and higher. In many industries, it is not that the private sector advances and the state retreats, but that the state advances and the private sector retreats. For example, in some industries like steel, in order to pursue the so-called concentration, they do not hesitate to rely on administrative pressure on private capital and administrative methods of matchmaking to carry out corporate combinations. Major ministries and commissions are also happy to engage in so-called industrial combinations, intervening in the market in the name of industrial upgrading. The resource allocation efficiency of the economic system has actually declined."

Seeing that everyone listened very seriously. Fan Wubing said in a more serious tone, "Without opening up the industry access threshold, without accelerating the pace of market-oriented reforms, and without breaking the government's industry monopoly, the Chinese economy has no future! However, if these changes are made, too many people will be offended. It is better to burn money to stimulate the economy first. Anyway, we have a high savings rate now and have money to burn. Institutional reform is a long-term thing, and in this long term, we would have died long ago!"

Everyone burst into laughter and said that what Mr. Fan said certainly sounded reasonable, but his ability to exaggerate was also first-class, and his ability to confuse people was even higher. If he became a cult leader, it would be more difficult to deal with than the leader of the Circle Kung Fu. As for Japan's Asahara Sapporo, that was scum.

In fact, Fan Wubing believes that monopoly in economics is only a choice in property management, which is different from monopoly in politics. That is, using violent political means to eliminate competitors.

In the absence of administrative intervention, monopoly is just a choice of property management, not necessarily a good choice, nor a bad choice, but a legal choice. For example, Microsoft's monopoly is completely a market choice. In fact, no other company can compete with it.

Monopoly under administrative intervention, like the monopoly of domestic telecommunications or aviation industry, actually uses the cost of administrative input to supply consumers with high-priced and low-quality products or services, and this administrative cost is still borne by the taxpayers themselves. For the benefit of privilege, which is property rights, this is ideal.

In other words, although the current monopoly can allow state-owned enterprises to survive, it damages the interests of the whole people.