The year 2003 witnessed a host of large-scale merger and acquisition (M&A) cases in China involving state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which showed China's tough economic reform on SOEs has entered a new, decisive stage.

State assets of 117 SOEs totaling 22.7 billion yuan (US$2.7 billion) have been announced to be restructured through M&A in Changchun, the capital of northeast China's Jilin province.

Almost at the same time, 104 Beijing-based SOEs with good performances welcomed foreign funds and domestic capital to participate in their M&A process. During the April-September period, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) of the State Council approved 48 firms to sell their property rights involving 22.5 billion yuan (US$2.7 billion) of national assets.

"China welcomes foreign capital and Chinese private capital to pitch in SOEs' restructuring and regrouping," said Li Rongrong, the SASAC minister.

Foreign and domestic private capital have become the mainstay of the M&A of SOEs. Statistics showed overseas and domestic civil enterprises bought approximately 85 percent of property rights sold by major SOEs this year.

Last April, a listed domestic private company purchased 60 percent of shares of a large-scale steel SOE in Nanjing, which astonished many people. In the past five years, the volume of China's M&A business soared at an annual rate of 70 percent, figures showed.

The problem of the structural low efficiency of China's SOEs cannot be solved by management approaches, said Chen Qingtai, deputy director of the Development Research Center (DRC) under the State Council, noting that SOEs should more engage in the international M&A business to further vitalize the state-owned economy.

Chinese SOEs are attractive for foreign investors due to their good capacity, abundant human resources and market share, said Simon L. Tang, a lawyer with a US international law center.

SOEs have benefited a lot from the M&A process. From 1995 to 2002, the number of Chinese SOEs in the industrial sector was reduced from 77,600 to about 42,000 while total profit surged by 163.6 percent to 221 billion yuan, figures from the SASAC showed.

China will keep improving laws and regulations to facilitate mergers and acquisitions of SOEs in a bid to accelerate reform in the sector, said Zhang Delin, SASAC director of the policy and regulation bureau.

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