China has started a new round of checks on thousands of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending Web sites, a document obtained by Bloomberg News showed, as authorities continue their efforts to clean up the industry.
Regulators are trying to steadily resolve risks by guiding some firms to exit the business, an Aug. 13 document issued by the Chinese Internet Lending Financial Risk Management Working Leadership Group and cosigned by the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said.
The checks, which include self-review by peer-to-peer firms, as well as inspections by local financial regulators, must be completed by the end of the year, the document said.
“This is good for the industry because there’s been a lack of regulation,” Chen Shujin (陳姝瑾), a financial analyst at Huatai Securities Co (華泰證券) in Hong Kong, said by telephone. “The policy direction now gives more certainty to the P2P industry that the good ones will be able to survive.”
China’s clampdown on financial risk has weighed on P2P platforms for the past two years, but the pressure on the US$139 billion industry has intensified over the past few months.
The platforms, which facilitate loans from mostly individual investors to borrowers willing to pay high rates of interest, have about 50 million registered users, official figures showed.
At least 223 platforms failed last month — including platforms that have halted operations or come under police investigation —taking total failures to more than 4,500, according to Shanghai-based Yingcan Group (盈燦集團).
Outstanding loans dropped 26 percent to 956 billion yuan (US$139.3 billion) last month from 1.3 trillion yuan in June, Yingcan data showed.
Those complying with the rules are to be allowed to connect to a national product and information registration system, and some firms will then be permitted to apply for official business registration after a successful trial run, the documents said.
Peer-to-peer lending is to be subject to 108 queries, including whether platforms raised money from investors for their own use, rather than investing for other projects or lending to borrowers; offered implicit guarantees on product principal and return; provided illegal loans to controlling shareholders or affiliates; and if they distributed products by other financial institutions, they showed.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day