Fang Xinghai responds to disputes in the primary market by vigorously supporting enterprises to file for overseas listings
On June 19, at the third plenary session of the 2024 Lujiazui Forum, Fang Xinghai, Vice Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, responded to many hot market issues.
Fang Xinghai stressed that private equity funds and private venture capital funds are very important forces in promoting technological innovation. According to statistics from the China Securities Investment Fund Association, in the first quarter of this year, PEVC funds invested in 4,438 projects with a total investment of 191.5 billion yuan. If the whole year is considered, the total investment will be close to 800 billion to 1 trillion yuan.
"With such an investment scale, it is hard to say that the primary market no longer exists. This is a bit exaggerated." Fang Xinghai responded to market controversy, saying that such a view may reflect that some management agencies are facing some difficulties in their business operations and that the new environment is more competitive.
Fang Xinghai emphasized that the CSRC’s attitude towards private equity funds and venture capital funds is to vigorously develop them, but to regulate their development.
In response to the bottlenecks currently encountered in the PEVC field, Fang Xinghai said that in the fundraising, investment, management and exit stages, the biggest difficulties generally reflected by everyone are in "raising" and "exiting". "Among "raising" and "exiting", if we analyze carefully, "exiting" may be the main reason. "Raising" is not a big problem in China, as China has a lot of savings."
Regarding the "withdrawal" link, Fang Xinghai said that he was in charge of the overseas listing filing work at the CSRC. "For overseas listings, the CSRC's attitude is to speed up the filing. Our speed is faster than before, but overseas listing filing is a new thing after all, and our speed is not fast enough. We need to continue to speed up the filing speed."
He cited some data. Since the release of the methods for supervising listing registration on March 31, 2023, Chinese companies have been very active in listing overseas. As of June 18, a total of 158 companies have registered for overseas listing. Among the 158 companies, 85 went to Hong Kong for listing and 73 went to the United States for listing.
"There are a lot of companies in the queue, which is a good thing. It means that a large number of Chinese companies are very active and working very hard. They are definitely not lying down. They all want to grow bigger and stronger. We should strongly support such things." Fang Xinghai said that in the process of filing, the CSRC will also emphasize increasing support for companies with large financing amounts and strong technological innovation to go public overseas, and the CSRC will file them as soon as possible. In addition, the CSRC supports mainland Chinese companies to go public in Hong Kong when they go public overseas.