Financial support guidelines with 26 specific measures were unveiled on Friday to support the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
The guidelines were jointly issued by the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.
It included 26 specific measures for five areas: promoting the Greater Bay Area’s cross-border trade and facilitating investment and financing, expanding the opening-up of the financial sector, promoting the connectivity of financial markets and financial infrastructure, boosting innovation of the Greater Bay Area’s financial services and preventing cross-border financial risks.
Promoting the development of the Greater Bay Area is a major strategic decision made by the Chinese government, and it is expected to have a significant and far-reaching impact on China’s reform and opening-up, said the PBoC.
The guidelines are expected to help further promote financial opening-up and innovation, deepen the mainland’s financial cooperation with Hong Kong and Macau, enhance the role of the Greater Bay Area in supporting and leading China’s economic development and opening-up, and provide strong financial support for building a dynamic and internationally competitive first-class bay area and a world-class city cluster, it said.
In February 2019, Chinese authorities unveiled the outline development plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, aiming to develop the region into a role model of high-quality development.
The Greater Bay Area consists of Hong Kong, Macau and nine cities in Guangdong – Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen and Zhaoqing.
Central bank bills
The PBoC issued 30 billion yuan (US$4.23 billion) of bills in Hong Kong on Thursday. The 20 billion yuan bills will mature in three months with an interest rate of 1.77%, while the remaining 10 billion yuan will mature in one year with a 1.78% rate.
The central bank said the issuance was well-received by investors in the offshore markets of many countries and regions in Europe, North America and Asia. The bid amount exceeded 80 billion yuan, 2.7 times the issuance size.
Since November 2018, the bank has established a normal mechanism of issuing central bank bills in Hong Kong. The move helps to enrich yuan-investment products with high credit ratings in Hong Kong, offer more yuan liquidity management tools, improve the yield curve of yuan bonds and advance the yuan’s internationalization, it added.
Fixed-asset investment
China’s fixed-asset investment declined 10.3% year on year to 13.68 trillion yuan in the first four months of 2020, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The fall narrowed by 5.8 percentage points compared with the decrease in the first three months.
Non-government fixed-asset investment fell 13.3% to 7.74 trillion yuan between January and April from the same period of last year. In the first quarter, it decreased by 18.8% year-on-year.
Company news
China Mobile Guangdong and Huawei jointly announced that the two sides have opened the world’s first enterprise private line service based on next generation optical transmission network (NG OTN) technology.
Huawei said the partnership marked the start of a comprehensive upgrade of Guangdong Mobile’s smart private network, which will fully meet the differentiated dedicated line connection needs of large, medium and small enterprises, accelerate the digital transformation of various vertical industries and lay a solid foundation for the development of Guangdong’s digital economy.
The Shenzhen stock exchange said it has delisted LeTV shares. LeTV, also known as Leshi Internet Information and Technology Corp, was listed in 2010 with its market cap exceeding 170 billion yuan. The company’s market value has declined gradually to 6.7 billion yuan.
The company recorded a total loss of 27.26 billion yuan between 2010 and 2019 but it raised about 10 billion yuan during the period. It had negative net assets attributable to shareholders of listed company audited in 2018. Its shares had been suspended from May 13, 2019. A total of 280,000 investors were affected.
The story was written by Xu Jiangshan and Nadeem Xu and first published at ATimesCN.com.