One of the city's more ambitious efforts to develop a legal and transparent environment for the restructuring of state-owned companies has been the establishment of a property rights market, Shanghai Asset & Equity Exchange (SAEE).
Last year, SAEE claimed turnover of 10.27 billion yuan (about HK$9.55 billion), based on the sale of 612 enterprises.
That would make SAEE the most developed of the 15 provincial-level and more than 100 municipal-level property rights exchanges that have been established in the mainland since 1994.
Although about 50 per cent of the companies traded at the exchange have been state-owned, SAEE president Zhang Hailong said he expected the market to play an increasingly important role in state restructuring as the Shanghai municipal government moves to encourage outside firms to invest in the city, and Shanghai firms to purchase assets elsewhere in the mainland.
Trading at the exchange is limited to SAEE's 88 permanent first- and second-class members, most of which are large state-holding companies.
They are entitled to trade their own assets or serve as agents to introduce other firms to the market.