China's structured product offerings fall amid shadow banking curbs
Shadow banking crackdown on mainland bringsdrop in number of securities issued last month
Chinese structured product offerings dropped by the most in six months in June after the government put in place measures to curb the shadow-banking industry, restricting issuers' ability to sell the investments.
Premier Li Keqiang has sought to stem expansion of trust companies, wealth management products and other forms of shadow banking, which Barclays estimates was worth 38.8 trillion yuan (HK$48.7 trillion) as of the end of last year. The central bank introduced steps in May that included ordering lenders to curb interbank borrowing. The banking regulator tightened regulation of new trust products in April.
"The Chinese central bank's move to curb interbank borrowing may dry up liquidity and affect funding for wealth management products," said Francis Chan, who follows the financial sector in Asia for Bloomberg Industries. "Together with a clampdown on trust-related wealth management products, that may have caused sales of structured products to fall."
The data from Cnbenefit, based in the southwest city of Chengdu, includes structured notes offered through the qualified domestic individual investor programme, which allows Chinese investors to buy certain overseas securities. They also cover structured deposits and other wealth-management products that combine a fixed-income security with derivatives, Cnbenefit said.
The People's Bank of China's measures in May closed off routes for banks to offer wealth products with attractive yields, according to Xiaoning Meng, a portfolio manager at CSOP Asset Management.
"For banks to offer higher yields than deposit rates on the products, they have to go through non-loan channels," Hong Kong-based Meng said. "The central-bank move sealed off a lot of these channels and now, banks won't have a method to support the higher yields of the structured products."
DBS Group, Southeast Asia's biggest bank, offers a structured investment product in China that is linked to the three-month London interbank offered rate and pays an annualised return of between 2.5 per cent to 6.1 per cent, according to its website.
Chinese banks' outstanding wealth management products rose 44 per cent on the year to reach 10.2 trillion yuan by the end of 2013, according to a statement posted on the China Banking Association's website. There are 280,000 private banking clients with assets under management reaching 3.66 trillion yuan, the statement said.
Speculation has mounted that failures could spread among China's trust and wealth management securities after the eleventh-hour rescue in January of a 3 billion yuan product arranged by China Credit Trust. In March, Jilin Province Trust missed payments on a 973 million yuan product as Shanxi Liansheng Energy, the borrower drawing on the trust's funds, underwent a local government-led plan to restore profitability.
