The State Council is involved with the valuation of all state businesses in China.

Mr Brown said Sallmanns was the first company to discuss a valuation in this way and was ''breaking new ground''.

Producing the report had entailed valuing about 4,000 different items of machinery and 300 blocks of buildings on a site that took up 700,000 square metres purely for its production facility.

Mr Brown said Sallmanns had been valuing large sites in China for years but this was the first it had conducted of a mainland company for the purpose of a listing in Hongkong.

Guangzhou Shipyard is the first of nine companies intending to list here. The others include a brewery, a mine, steelworks, three machine-tool producers, a fabric manufacturer and a chemical products company.

The firms were involved in different types of manufacturing but were all on the largest scale, he said.

Mr Brown said the values involved were ''much larger than you generally get for buildings in Hongkong''.

He said many enterprises were so large they involved the development of housing and even schools in the vicinity.

The Guangzhou Shipyard was actually one of the smaller sites of the nine.

He said that Sallmanns had been doing valuations in China for years but recently had been doing more and more.

It had reached the extent where the company had set up a subsidiary to meet the requirements of China business, he said.

It had an integrated team to deal with both the surveying and engineering aspects of any large facility.

Chinese companies wanted land and machinery dealt with together, he said.

In addition to valuing companies for listing purposes, the company also does valuations for joint ventures, merger and acquisition cases, resumption cases, and financing, accounting and liquidation cases.

Previous listings clients have included Playmates, Chevalier, Carlsberg Brewery, Joyce Boutique Holdings and Guangdong Investment, among a list of 29 companies.

Resumptions included the long-running Shun Fung Ironworks case, joint venture, acquisition and merger cases in China, the Xian Paper Making Machinery Works and Shanghai Automobile Propeller Shaft Plant.

The firm also has an extensive list of financing, accounting and liquidation clients.

One large-scale project had been for a placement for China International Trust and Investment Corp (CITIC), which was injecting two large power stations in China into its operations.

''At very short notice we had to go and value them for inclusion in the circular,'' Mr Brown said.

The total value of machinery and equipment had been $5.67 billion, and the buildings and structures about $2.5 billion, he said.

Mr Brown said listing was now getting off the ground in China, whereas previously the focus had been on joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions.

Because of the way things were proceeding in mainland China, Hongkong-listed companies owned entities in China and were required under the Companies Ordinance to have valuations reports for them in order to satisfy the listing committee of the stock exchange.

The next stage was that now mainland Chinese companies themselves were listing in Hongkong and required the same work to be done.