Chapter 942 The Eve of Capital Plundering《Seeking Monthly Tickets》

After the capital formed a blood relationship, those multinational companies successively obtained the qualifications to enter the Chinese refined oil market. BP Group was allowed to jointly build 500 gas stations with PetroChina and Sinopec in Guangdong Province and Zhejiang Province respectively, and ExxonMobil and Shell were allowed to jointly build 500 gas stations with Sinopec in Guangdong Province and Jiangsu Province respectively. After that, BP signed an agreement with PetroChina to set up 800 joint venture gas stations in Fujian, and Sinopec also signed an agreement with ExxonMobil to set up 600 gas stations in Fujian.

It was through this series of very strong, planned and efficient strategic adjustments that the two state-owned oil companies were completely renewed. In the future, as global energy prices continued to rise, they successively became "China's most profitable companies."

This eye-catching big change in the petrochemical field vividly reflects the two logics of change in the monopoly field. The first is "monopolizing in the name of the state and making profits as a market", forming an "internal competition pattern" between state-owned enterprises in the resource industry, and private enterprises! $The first is to be completely excluded from the game; the second is to accelerate capitalization operations and combine with oligarchic transnational capital under the premise of monopoly.

Such "Chinese stories" continue to happen in all monopoly industries controlled by state-owned capital. As the saying goes, autocracy brings efficiency and monopoly produces benefits.

Fan Heng's idea is obviously contrary to this policy. He hopes that the two major oil companies will be reborn, rather than just relying on the monopoly of the terminal market, wearing a high-efficiency and high-efficiency painting, continuing to exploit ordinary people, and achieving superficial economic prosperity by increasing social tolerance.

To change, it is necessary to change in essence, and not to change from one monopoly to another, causing a false prosperity at the expense of the interests of the people.

However, to achieve this goal, it is inevitable to touch the interests of many people, and the difficulty is quite great.

In recent times, just before and after China joined, predicting China's future and direction has become the hottest topic in the global economic circle. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan mentioned for the first time in a white paper that China has become the world's factory. In products such as color TVs, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, microwave ovens, and motorcycles, Chinese manufacturing has ranked first in the world market share.

Economists further believe that Chinese companies will start a journey to conquer the world like Japan in the 1980s. In this regard, the China Threat Theory has also quietly emerged.

Of course, voices that are completely different from the above views have also emerged.

Some scholars predict that with the increasing opening of the market and the influx of multinational capital, the state-owned economic system that has long been shaky will be vulnerable, and those old and inactive state-owned enterprises will soon be driven out of the market, which will affect the macro-stability and sustainable development of the Chinese economy.

A Chinese-American lawyer also published a book called "China is about to collapse", saying that China's economic prosperity is false, and under the strong impact after joining, China's current political and economic system can only last for five years at most. Investment bank Salomon Smith Barney predicts that China will lose 40 million jobs in the first five years of joining, and severe employment pressure will sooner or later crush the country.

A similar argument also believes that China's economic growth model characterized by high input and low output and a development model based on cheap labor and huge energy consumption are entering a dead end, and China's high growth that has been maintained for nearly two decades will be unsustainable.

Of course, Fan Wubing himself is very clear that the facts in a few years will prove that all the above predictions are not self-fulfilling. The growth of China's economy and enterprises is still moving forward in a tortuous way according to its own logic, and has nothing to do with those overly optimistic or pessimistic conjectures.

In fact, since the death of John King Fairbank in 1991,

there has been no second observer in the mainstream Western world who has an objective and sober understanding of China. The Financial Times of the United Kingdom said that after the 1990s, a sign of China's economic vitality is that almost every few years, Chinese and foreign economists have to change their ideas and adopt new language or concepts to describe and analyze new economic phenomena in China. The fate of China's economy is slowly transformed in the transformation of these frameworks and concepts, and the common language of international game rules is increasingly speculative and gradually connected.

For China, many Westerners' predictions about China are just fantasies. The impact on China is a long and linguistic process. In China, which is undergoing gradual changes, "there has never been a change that is generated overnight."

In fact, the "state retreat and private advancement" policy that began in 1998 was a major strategic decision to deal with this change. The entry, exit and reorganization of state-owned capital groups were all formulated according to the market opening timetable.

For another interest group, multinational corporations, China's accession also means a major strategic adjustment.

First, there has been a subtle change in the industry choices of multinational corporations, and they have begun to move from competitive fields to monopoly or quasi-monopoly fields.

Generally speaking, when multinational corporations enter developing countries, they often choose resource-rich fields that are closely related to the government and have large capital investments, such as energy, finance, and telecommunications. However, their strategies in China are completely different.

In the early and middle stages of reform and opening up, the vast majority of multinational companies entering China were in the field of fully competitive markets. The most successful ones were Coca-Cola, which produces beverages, Procter & Gamble, which produces shampoo, and Japanese companies in the home appliance industry.

Many European and American economists are puzzled by this. The general explanation is that multinational corporations imagined the Chinese market from the perspective of population size at the beginning, while domestic enterprises were vulnerable; secondly, these foreigners did not even know how to establish relationships with government officials in the planned system, nor did they know how to gain benefits by influencing central policies.

However, more than ten years later, this situation has changed fundamentally. Multinational corporations that are competing with Chinese emerging companies in the consumer goods field are likely to be wiped out if local companies have not made fatal mistakes. Therefore, they began to turn to resource-based industries and obtained priority investment and cooperation rights.

The most convincing case is the strategic transformation of General Electric. This large company entered China in 1992, but its development has not been smooth. The light bulbs it produces cannot compete with rural enterprises. Recently, they have shifted their investment focus from civilian products to basic engineering with higher technical content. General Electric's industrial lighting, medical equipment, gas turbines, fans, hydropower generation equipment, aircraft engines, power transmission of industrial groups and other project investments have all received good returns in China. Most of these fields are private! $It was a forbidden zone for China, but now it is gradually opening up.

Second, the financial investment of multinational companies has greatly increased. Before this, they were worried about the independence of the HSBC system in China and it was difficult for them to find opportunities to enter. For example, in 1998, Soros's Quantum Fund's attack on the Hong Kong network proved to be a failed experiment.

After China joined, the opening of the financial market was put on the timetable. Major multinational financial institutions have significantly accelerated their business layout in China. HSBC, Citi, AIA, Standard Chartered and other banks have successively moved their regional headquarters from Singapore or Hong Kong to Shanghai.

Financial investment companies that had been secretly deployed before have also begun to surface. As early as six years ago, Morgan Stanley established China International Capital Corporation with China Construction Bank and others, and held more than one-third of the shares.

In the past few years, almost all the capital restructuring of large state-owned monopoly enterprises has been related to CICC. It has raised nearly 20 billion US dollars in the international capital market for China Telecom, China Petroleum, China Unicom and China Mobile, and issued 5 billion yuan of corporate bonds for State Power Corporation and China Three Gorges Project Development Corporation. These businesses have won CICC the honor of ranking first in the new share issuance business in the Asia-Pacific region in the past year.

While Morgan Stanley shared the huge profits of Chinese companies' financing at home and abroad, it was also envied and jealous by countless peers. At that time, there were no rigid and restrictive legal regulations on access to China's capital market. The substantive threshold was the policy approval red line. Like most joint ventures in those days, it was just more sensitive and cautious about the opening of the capital market.

Third, the trend of multinational companies becoming more and more exclusive is becoming more and more obvious. In many of the past, foreign-funded factories had to have a joint venture partner in China. For example, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola's canning plants in various places had to cooperate with state-owned grain and oil companies! $, and Procter & Gamble's partners were stipulated to be local state-owned daily chemical factories.

Now that this restriction has been gradually lifted, some multinational companies that have already established joint ventures think that they have a stable foothold, so they use various means to force out Chinese investors.

Recently, Japan's Panasonic confirmed to the media that all 50 Panasonic joint ventures they have established in China will seek to become wholly-owned, and the American Motorola company that produces mobile phones has also made such a decision. They believe that wholly-owned is a natural choice for Chinese companies after joining the WTO.

Motorola's largest joint venture in China is Zhejiang's Oriental Communications. The United States proposed to the Chinese chairman that either China should sell its shares or the United States should withdraw from the joint venture. Oriental Communications chose the second option, so Motorola immediately withdrew and stopped all technical support.

Another company that is more determined to take the wholly-owned action and is not hesitant to fight with China is Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi has established 15 joint venture packaging plants in China. Pepsi also tried to force out the Chinese partner in Chengdu, Sichuan. When the negotiations were not successful, the United States announced a substantial increase in the price of concentrates and did not approve Sichuan Pepsi to produce more brands of beverages.

The United States' tough stance caused collective resistance and boycott by Chinese packaging plants.

Similar things are essentially transnational companies taking advantage of China's accession and the vacuum in Chinese laws and management to accelerate their predatory expansion.

"Have you and Dad considered too many issues? Some things cannot be controlled by a few people." Shen Ying disagreed with Fan Wubing's worries.

Fan Wubing scratched his head and said, "I know I am a little worried, but I always feel uncomfortable when I see some things. As for those who are in a position like Dad, they naturally have to make plans and do their work better to live up to everyone's trust. If he was just trying to get by, why would he bother so much? It's easy for us to build dozens of retirement villas for them anywhere, right?"

"But what can you do?" Shen Ying asked back.

It is not easy for ordinary people to understand the inside story of domestic enterprises currently cooperating with foreign capital on a large scale, but figures like Fan Wubing and Shen Ying naturally know it well. The most important point is that once introduced After foreign investment, the salary of the entire management can keep up with the international situation. Those with an annual salary of over one million can only be considered as a drizzle, and those with an annual salary of over 10 million can only be regarded as an average level. In this way, everyone is naturally highly motivated and have the courage to use it. Using their own relationships and contacts to promote the privatization process, the factory director and manager suddenly became the chairman of the board. This part of the shares came easily.

As for how many real state-owned enterprises will be left, it is difficult to say. At least now is the best time for foreign capital to intervene in monopolistic industries, especially those industries that were not open to the outside world in the past, are even more popular.

But there is also something weird here, that is, some industries are open to foreign investment, but they are unwilling to open to domestic private capital. This can’t help but make people feel a little weird, but if you think about it carefully, it is not difficult to find out. The key points.

It is said that politics and economic history influence each other. After private enterprises enter some key industries, a new situation is likely to occur, in which they begin to exert influence on political activities through their economic control. This is the government unacceptable.

As for foreign joint ventures, there are no worries in this regard, because they are foreigners after all. They have no right to vote or be elected, and they have no chance to interfere in domestic political activities, because even if foreign capital controls a considerable part of the equity of state-owned enterprises, it is only It just collects some dividends, and the impact on the political situation can be said to be minimal, so there is no political risk issue. This is what everyone is most assured of.

"Anyway, dad has intervened in the reform of the two major oil companies this time, and has also gained some initiative. This is good." Fan Wubing said to Shen Ying, "As for the rest, we can only take one step." Take a look."

Shen Ying nodded, helped Fan Wubing pack his bags, and then asked, "Actually, Russia is quite fun. I've always wanted to visit it. This time President Putin invited us there, can we take a few days to relax?" What about relaxing?"

"Of course it's okay to relax, but I think Putin's invitation to us this time may not be just to express his gratitude." Fan Wubing always felt that Putin had some plans for inviting him to visit Russia this time.

However, this is not a big deal. After all, the current economic situation in Russia is not good, and he is a well-known expert in saving the country!