Asian Equity Culture Slowly Takes Shape
Markets Have Come
A Long Way in 30 Years
Despite Occasional Crises
Thirty years ago, China didn't have any listed companies. Now, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China is about to have the one of the largest initial public offerings in history, raising about $20 billion. And ICBC, the largest Chinese state-owned bank, will list not in New York, but in Hong Kong and Shanghai. New York is no longer the only go-to place to raise huge pots of money.
The ICBC issue "speaks to the sheer size and scale of the local capital markets in Asia that they can raise that amount of money" in such a short period of time, says Tim Dattels, a partner at TPG-Newbridge.
Asian companies and capital markets have come a long way in the 30 years since Dow Jones launched an Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal. Today the region has never looked more prosperous and its prospects are strong. Asia has never before produced a greater share of the world's very wealthy, and Japan no longer dominates lists of Asia's richest people, as the rise of China and India have broadened the base.
Uneven Progress
In line with the gains, Asia's stock markets have seen dramatic growth. Yet the progress of a true equity culture remains uneven.
Through the years, regional markets have been buffeted by their own cross currents as well as those generated outside Asia. In 1987, for example, Asia was hit by the contagion of Black Monday in the U.S. But the Japanese stock market recovered far more quickly than its counterparts in the West, beginning the ascent that two years later put Industrial Bank of Japan and Nomura Securities into the ranks of the world's most valuable companies. By the end of 1989, Japan had easily eclipsed the U.S. in market capitalization. At about the same time, the Chinese equity market was born in a typically chaotic start, with Shenzhen and Shanghai competing for the honor of hosting the first listings.
Then, nearly 10 years after Black Monday, the region spawned its own financial crisis, which began with the devaluation of the Thai baht in July 1997 and spread quickly through Southeast Asia to South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Today, the markets are still capable of great volatility -- just consider the giant swings in the Indian stock market over the past year. But the crises of nearly a decade ago, when the region seemed to have almost run out of money, appear almost unreal now, given the bulging coffers of the region's central banks -- led by China, with more than $900 billion.
While Asia has embraced stock market investment with enthusiasm, the philosophy underlying equity markets hasn't been adopted with equal fervor. The core idea of capitalism is that free markets are best at allocating capital efficiently. As capital flows to those who can utilize it most effectively, economies grow and prosper. The inevitable corollary of this, though, is for there to be winners, there have to be losers.
Yet that is something most governments in the region aren't comfortable with. Asian governments have been slow to appreciate the virtues of capital markets, preferring a system where banks do the bulk of financing -- and banks can be more easily told how to allocate money.
For capitalism to work, there must also be widespread acceptance of the fact that some people will have a greater share of wealth than others. "In the U.S. or Europe, you are not always singled out as special, either positively or negatively, if you are wealthy," says Jim Hildebrandt, a managing director in Asia for Boston-based private equity firm Bain Capital. "People have mixed emotions on how to treat the super wealthy in China and Japan."
Ironically, at the same time as Asia's stock markets are developing, that ambivalence about Western style capitalism is on the rise, particularly in places like Japan and Korea. The backlash in Japan has been particularly strong this year, following the arrests of Takafumi Horie and Yoshiaki Murakami on charges of violating Japanese securities laws. Activist investors, private-equity firms, hedge funds and greenmailers are seen by some as simply playing money games.
By contrast, Hong Kong has always been the home of freewheeling capitalism in Asia. This is a city where many people peg their kids' allowances to the level of the Hang Seng Stock Index to teach them early to understand the markets. Yet even in Hong Kong, the equity culture hasn't resulted in anything like a deep respect for corporate governance. Instead, in the territory and throughout Southeast Asia, listing has always been widely seen as a way to get rich quick.
Many of the listed companies in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong were built by overseas-Chinese. The units getting listed tended to be part of conglomerates that pursue a variety of operations. They are big, but not necessarily strong, even though (or perhaps because) many of them have their own group banks to help subsidize other group companies. A conglomerate structure made sense when markets were relatively closed; governments bestowed licenses and monopoly power. Today, though, with competition far more intense, conglomerates are yesterday's story.
Still, the families that control these listed companies often continue to treat them as their personal fiefdoms, even if they control only a minority of the shares. Frequently, even their boards are kept in the dark about major corporate developments. Assets move back and forth between companies in the fiefdoms.
Such practices are common in the region. Still, it is possible that they won't survive the transition from the first generation to the second, from the founding entrepreneur to the children with Harvard M.B.A. degrees.
In any case, it would be churlish to ignore the many signs of progress across the region. Even China's young markets have already come a long way.
Early on, China's idea of listing was the antithesis of what stock markets are supposed to be about. The idea was to attract foreign capital to bail out the weakest, not the strongest state-owned enterprises. So the first generation of companies to list were China's worst, not its best. They were chosen by a complicated quota system reflecting the priorities of provincial governments and orchestrated by Chinese regulators.
The reasoning had its own logic. If China were to list its premier companies first, why would anyone ever invest in the second best? But the policy seriously cut interest in early China-listed stocks, despite the country's economic boom. Analysts at some local securities firms privately described Chengdu Cable, one of the first Chinese companies to list in Hong Kong, as one of country's worst cable makers. And Maanshan Iron & Steel listed well before Shanghai Baosteel, China's showcase steelmaker.
Listings were simply all about raising money, not about changing the way these companies were run, despite the fact that the hospitals and nurseries were hived off in "restructurings" that were supposed to make these entities appear more like normal Western companies.
The Fine Print
Today, Chinese companies have come a long way. Disclosure has improved a lot, as avid readers of Chinese offer memos can attest. In a section on risks in the Bank of China prospectus, for example, are juicy tidbits with titles such as "The Heilongjiang Incident," describing the embezzlement and fraud that are a recurring story with Chinese banks.
To be sure, there is plenty of room for improvement. Enforcement remains iffy; the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission lacks real authority. Use of proceeds from the listings, for example, has a long history of problems as companies take the money raised and use it for far different purposes than promised in their offer documents. Investors attempting to sue companies using inflated numbers when reporting their results have been stymied by bizarre rulings from indifferent courts.
The market that's probably grown the most rapidly in recent years is India. The listing requirements are easy to satisfy, so young companies can sell shares and attract growth capital. Moreover, until recently, interest rates in India were stiflingly high, making the stock market the natural resort of ambitious entrepreneurs. Indeed, listing has been so simple and attractive that foreign private equity firms are often confined to taking minority slivers in public companies that don't need their money.
And despite the disputes between Western investors and regulators in Korea, or the arrests in Japan, there are signs of progress in those two markets as well.
In Japan, hostile mergers and acquisitions have suddenly become part of the landscape as in the bid Oji Paper launched this year for Hokuetsu Paper, another Japanese paper maker. Suddenly such tactics are no longer the monopoly weapon of barbarians from the West. Moreover, governments are liberalizing rules, allowing stock rather than cash to be the currency in such takeover battles. When that happens, the entrepreneurs who established and then listed their companies begin to treasure their minority shareholders. Increasing their market capitalization enables them to become more wealthy and powerful. Of course, that can lead to the temptation to artificially keep share prices high. But such abuse is inevitable when shareholder democracy is young.
In Korea, there are also hopeful signs, despite the backlash against foreign capital. Lawyer Kim Joo Young, a passionate advocate for both political and shareholder democracy, encourages labor unions to become shareholders to better safeguard their own interests. So, for example, when workers feared layoffs after Lone Star, an American investment fund, bought Korea Exchange Bank, Mr. Kim encouraged the union to acquire shares to influence policy at the level of the board of directors.
"Corporate governance goes with political democracy," Mr. Kim says. "One shareholder, one vote, accountability and transparency are things you need both in finance and in government. The two progress together."
There are also signs of greater appreciation of the benefits of a healthy stock market in China. As the population ages there's a smaller base of workers to support an expanding number of elderly. So officials have started to devote time to the pension system as an alternative to the iron rice bowl. But that, too, calls for a stock market that channels capital to companies with the best rather than the worst prospects. y
亚洲股市文化隐约成形
30年前，中国还没有上市公司。而现在，中国工商银行(Industrial & Commercial Bank of China)的首次公开募股(IPO)却炒得热火朝天，正有望凭藉200多亿美元的融资额成为全球有史以来最大的一笔IPO。
工商银行这一次并没有选择在纽约上市，而是将上市地选在了香港和上海。由此也可以看出，对于大规模IPO交易而言，纽约已不再是唯一选择。
TPG-Newbridge的合伙人提姆?达特尔斯(Tim Dattels)表示，工商银行的募股活动已充分证明，亚洲本地市场的规模足以保证他们在短期内募集到如此庞大的资金。
在道琼斯公司(Dow Jones)推出《亚洲华尔街日报》的30年中，亚洲的企业和资本市场都发生了翻天覆地的变化。如今，亚洲地区正呈现出前所未有的繁荣景象，亚洲的前景也从未像今天这样美好。亚洲对全球财富的占有额达到了历史最高水平，随着中国和印度的崛起，日本也不再是亚洲最富人群的聚集地。
发展并非一帆风顺
伴随着亚洲股市的上扬，亚洲市场呈现出突飞猛进的增长。不过提到真正的股市文化，亚洲的发展仍然是磕磕绊绊。
这些年来亚洲市场曾受到本地以及亚洲以外资金的多次冲击。1987年，美国的黑色星期一蔓延到亚洲，给亚洲市场带来不小的打击。不过日本股市很快复苏，甚至走在了美国的前面，2年后，日本兴业银行(Industrial Bank of Japan)和野村证券公司(Nomura Securities)傲然跻身于全球最具价值的企业之列。与此同时，中国股市也在一片混乱声中诞生，上海和深圳证交所开始为谁将成为中国首只股票的上市地争得不可开交。
然后，在黑色星期一爆发后的第十个年头，亚洲又遭遇了自己的金融危机，1997年7月，泰铢暴跌，危机很快蔓延到从东南亚到韩国再到台湾和香港的广大地区。
时至今日，亚洲市场仍然暗藏着动荡因素──看看过去一年来印度股市的大起大落便可想而知。不过鉴于以中国央行为首的亚洲各国央行已经掌握了大量外汇储备，10年前的危机似乎不会重演。
虽然亚洲已经热情接纳了股市投资方式，但人们恐怕还没有拿出同样的热情去接纳股市哲学。资本主义的核心思想就是自由市场是有效分配资本的最佳途径。随着资本逐渐流向那些使用效率最高的人，经济开始增长，社会开始繁荣。但有赢家必有输家，这也是市场发展中不可避免的结果。
然而亚洲多数政府却没有准备好面对这一事实。亚洲政府一直不愿承认资本市场的优点，他们更欣赏由银行承担大部分融资任务的金融体系──银行在分配资金方面更听指挥。
要想让资本主义真正发挥作用，人们就必须广泛接受这样的事实：某一部分人一定会比其他人富有。“在美国或者欧洲，当你很有钱的时候，你并不会被另眼相看，不管是被高看还是被贬低，”波士顿私人资本运营公司Bain Capital的董事总经理吉姆?希尔德布兰德(Jim Hildebrandt)说。“而在中国和日本，人们对于如何对待极其富有的人却有着非常复杂的想法。”
极具讽刺意味的是，在亚洲股市发展的同时，人们对待西方资本主义模式的矛盾心理却与日俱增，特别是在日本和韩国。在堀江贵文(Takafumi Horie)和村上世彰(Yoshiaki Murakami)因被控违反日本证券法而遭逮捕后，日本今年对西方资本主义模式的反感尤其强烈。很多人认为股东维权分子、私人股权投资公司、对冲基金和反收购分子都只不过是在玩着金钱游戏。
与之相反，香港一向是自由资本主义的乐土。在这里，很多人将恒生指数的点位作为给孩子们零花钱的参照，让孩子从小就开始了解市场。然而即便在香港，股市文化也并未发展到足以让人们重视公司治理的程度。事实上，在香港乃至整个东南亚地区，企业上市一直被广泛视为快速致富的途径。
东南亚和香港的很多上市公司由海外华人组建。拥有多种业务的企业集团将部分子公司上市，这在亚洲非常普遍。它们规模庞大，但却未必强大，即使（也许是因为）很多企业集团都通过下属的银行来为集团内企业提供财务支持。当市场相对封闭时，集团架构可以起到很大的作用；政府向它们发放牌照，赋予它们垄断地位。但今天，随着竞争日趋激烈起来，企业集团已很难续写昨日的神话。
不过，控制这些上市公司的家族经常还是将企业视为他们的私人领地，即使他们只控制少数股份。甚至是公司董事会也常常对公司的一些重大事项一无所知。这些企业集团的资产可以在集团下属企业间自由转移。
这种做法在亚洲很常见。不过，在企业掌门人从第一代向第二代──从创立这些企业的父辈到在哈佛商学院等名校拿到MBA学位的子女──过渡的过程中，这种现象可能不会再存续下来。
不管怎样，忽视亚洲出现的许多进步迹象是不恰当的。即使是尚属稚嫩的中国市场也已有了长足的发展。
刚开始的时候，中国对上市的理解与股市应有的功能完全相悖。中国当时希望通过股市吸引外部资金，来解救那些状况最差的国有企业，而不是用这些资金去促进优势企业的进一步发展。因此，中国最早一批上市企业也是中国最糟糕的企业。上市实行复杂的指标审批制，而指标的分配在很大程度上反应了各省在全国的优先座次，拿到指标的企业最后还要经中央主管部门审批才能上市。
这种思路自有它的道理。设想一下，如果中国先将优质企业上市，那么谁还会向次优的企业投资呢？但这一政策严重损害了人们对早期上市公司的兴趣。中国一些证券公司的分析师私下里将最早一批在香港上市的大陆企业之一成都电缆(Chengdu Cable)列为中国最糟糕的电缆生产商。而马鞍山钢铁(Maanshan Iron & Steel)更是早于宝钢股份(Shanghai Baosteel)之前很久就上市了。
当时，中国企业上市完全是为了圈钱，而不是为完善企业的经营，虽然当时中国为了让上市企业看上去更像西方企业而进行了大规模“改制”，企业兴办的医院和托儿所等机构大多被剥离出来。
今天，中国上市公司已经有了很大进步。信息披露大为改善，这一点从公众对招股说明书如饥似渴的阅读中就可见一斑。比如在中国银行(Bank of China)招股书的风险提示栏目下面，公众可以见到“黑龙江事件”等惹人注意的内容。这次事件是中国银行发生的多起盗用公款和欺诈事件之一。
当然，这方面还有很大改善空间。中国在执法方面仍存在很大问题，中国证监会(Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission)也缺乏真正的权威。上市所融资金在使用上一直存在很大问题，很多上市公司拿到钱后会将它们用于与招股书所承诺的完全不同的目的。起诉上市公司公布虚假业绩的投资者在法院那里却很难讨到明确的说法。
近年来发展最迅速的市场或许要数印度了。印度的上市门槛很低，因此，一些创建时间不长的公司也可以发售股票筹集发展资金。而且，印度的利率一直高得吓人，这也让股市成为雄心勃勃的企业家们很自然的一个选择。由于公开上市简单易行，外国股权投资公司在那些不太需要其资金的上市公司那里只能持有很少的股权。
在韩国，西方投资者和国内监管部门之间存在争议，日本也发生过拘捕事件，不过这两个市场也都表现出了变化的迹象。
今年，王子纸业(Oji Paper)计划收购北越制纸(Hokuetsu Paper)一案使敌意收购突然出现在日本人的视野里。一夜之间，敌意收购已不再是西方野蛮人独有的武器。而且，日本政府也放宽了有关规定，允许在这类收购战中使用股票作为收购方的出资，不再限制只可以用现金。
此事发生后，创建企业并将公司上市的企业家们开始重视少数股股东。市值的增加让他们变得更富有也更强大。当然，这也会鼓励他们人为维持高股价，但在股东民主尚处于初期的时候，这种不规范做法也在所难免。
虽然韩国对外资一向抱有成见，但现在也出现了一些转变的迹象。积极倡导政治和股东民主的律师Kim Joo Young鼓励工会成为股东，以更好地捍卫自己的利益。比如，韩国外换银行(Korea Exchange Bank)员工曾担心美国投资基金Lone Star收购该行会引发资方大量裁员，Kim Joo Young就鼓励工会通过购买股份进入董事会，以期影响公司的决策。
Kim Joo Young说，公司治理就像民主政治，一人一票、责任心和透明度是政府和金融市场都应具备的素质。这两者是同步发展的。
事实也表明，中国人对一个健康的股市所能带来的经济利益也越来越看重。随着老龄化的加剧和老龄人口的日益增加，藉以支撑老年人退休福利的在职人员群体在日渐收缩。中国政府因此创建了退休基金，以取代计划经济时期包办式的养老方式。而这同样也要求通过股市将退休基金投向优质企业以实现其保值增值。
Henny Sender
