Wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous Chinese New Year. This is a Dragon Year, which many consider the most auspicious in the duodecennial Chinese lunar cycle.

The vigorous dragon above is a “Kesi” embroidery from the Ming Dynasty, Wanli Emperor period.

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“Women”, in Mao Zedong’s memorable phrase, “hold up half the sky”. While not strictly the case in the business world, Chinese women do play a far more prominent role, both in starting and running big companies in China, than their sisters do elsewhere, particularly in the US and Europe.

According to a study last year by accounting firm Grant Thornton,  women hold 34% of the senior management positions in China, compared to an average of 20% elsewhere in the world. The percentages are also moving in opposite directions, with a greater proportion of top jobs in China going to women recently. Women held 31% of management jobs in China in 2009. Meantime, women are becoming less common in senior management in Europe and US, down from 24% over the same period.

And, no, it’s not just a case of women dominating “soft functions” like HR and accounting, as they often tend to do in the West. In China, 19% of women in management roles are serving as CEOs, compared to 8% elsewhere. A significant quotient of partners at private equity firms in China are women. The most talented and capable person in investment banking in China I know, Wang Yansong,  is female — even better, she works with me.

If there is a “glass ceiling” in China, it must be quite porous.

In my three-plus years in China, I’ve met far more successful big-time women entrepreneurs and bosses than I did in 25 years working in US and Europe. I’ve also been lucky enough to work with several, including one of China’s most well-known entrepreneurs, Mrs. He Yongzhi, the founder of the country’s largest spicy hotpot restaurant chain, 小天鹅, or “Little Cygnet”, with over 400 high-end restaurants across China.

Mrs. He started the business 30 years ago in a tiny alcove, with just five tables –no capital, no powerful backers and a competitor on every street corner. And yet, she has thrived. She invented the now-ubiquitous “yin-yang” twin-flavored stock pot commonly used not just in her own restaurant but in hotpot restaurants around the country.

Along with the restaurant chain, she also runs a food processing company, producing bottled hot sauces with her face on every label, and a large commercial real estate business, including five hotels in Chongqing, Sichuan and Tibet. Her daughter Weijia is a chip off the entrepreneurial block,  having started a high-end tea business called Nenlü.

Mrs. He’s  restaurant company has Sequoia Capital as an investor, and is planning an IPO next year that will likely make her into another of China’s self-made billionairesses. Already, half of the world’s self-made billionaires are from China. Over 10% of the richest businesspeople in China are women. That may not sound like much, but is light-years ahead of most every place in the world. In a typical working year, I will meet at least 10 women bosses who are well on the way to building an enormous fortune as founder and majority-owner of companies that may likely one day have an IPO in China.

Indeed, it’s one of the great joys of my working life, that I meet so many great “lady laoban”, as we call them, using the Chinese word for “boss”. I especially like meeting with women running metal-bashing businesses.  One of the more successful and elegant women bosses I know started and runs one of China’s largest private auto parts companies, making aluminum ventilation and heating systems for cars and large trucks.

At the factory, she wears a smock with the cotton elbow-protectors once in vogue among 19^th century English bookkeepers. Her husband works for her, as head of the security team. Her likely successor? Her one daughter, a recent new mom, who runs the company in tandem with her mother. Both mother and daughter are warm, lovely, attractive, fully at ease talking to truck mechanics and engineers, or walking the factory floor.

It may be a coincidence, but many of the women bosses I know do not have sons. Only daughters. Did they work harder in their professional lives to overcome the stigma (then large, now thankfully smaller) of having only girl children? It could be. But, such Western-style psychological theorizing seems misplaced. China has more great women entrepreneurs because 30 years ago, as China was ending its costly experiment with Maoist socialism, there were new huge areas of money-making opportunity open to all.  Gender mattered less than ambition, diligence, persuasiveness, business acumen and leadership skills. China after 1978 was a commercial “tabula rasa”. There were few established business rules and basically no role models (positive or negative) for anyone to follow.

China traditionally is a male-focused society, with deep-set roots in Confucian thinking that put husbands and sons well above the rank of wives and daughters. In many ways, this mindset still persists in China. And yet, paradoxically,  a society that puts men on a higher social plane can also provide women entrepreneurs with something of a level playing field in business.

In the last year, along with the two lady bosses already mentioned, I’ve met women who started and now run successful companies that make high-end LED screens, lease cars, provide an online B2B transaction platform, make and export embroidered blankets to Williams Sonoma. Never once have I heard a complaint about gender-discrimination or even a hint that the company has been victimized by negative perceptions about female bosses.

In the end, starting a company anywhere requires a tolerance of — if not full bear hug embrace of — risk. Women, so I’ve read, are programmed from birth to shun risk. It’s meant to be the reason there are comparatively few women combat soldiers and motorcycle riders, as well as successful entrepreneurs.

Gender theorists obviously never looked closely at China. Equally, Chinese women weren’t taught why they were destined by biology to underperform men in the workplace, to start fewer businesses, to climb high on fewer corporate ladders. Spared knowledge of these “facts”, they’re in full pursuit of their dreams and ambitions.

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No large Chinese company is more scrutinized, criticized, ostracized and demonized than Huawei, the Shenzhen-based manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. With revenues of $28 billion in 2010, and 110,000 employees, Huawei is the second-largest telecom equipment company in the world, along with being the largest and most prominent private technology company in China. It is also said to enjoy significant behind-the-curtain support from senior figures in the Chinese government and military.

Not much is known about the secretive company. But for all its size and prominence in the telecommunications industry, Huawei’s corporate finances and balance sheet may be a good deal weaker than commonly assumed. The problem comes from Huawei’s unbalanced balance sheet, and an over-reliance on loans from Chinese state-owned banks, rather than payments from customers, to finance its business. In 2011, instead of too much help from the Chinese government, Huawei seems to have suffered from a lack of it.

The bigger Huawei has grown, the more criticism it has attracted. Competitors outside China have loudly claimed the company was a front for the Chinese military, and that it owes its size in large part to an efficient process of stealing others’ technology and then selling its cut-price knock-off equipment within China and to telecom monopolies in the world’s poorer, most despotic countries.

Huawei has had a particularly hard time of it in the US, where it was sued in 2003 by Cisco for patent infringement. More recently, its plans to buy several US tech companies were blocked by the US government or obstruction by US politicians. Some of the same politicians also blocked Huawei’s sale of some larger telecom equipment in the US by asserting, without producing any real evidence,  Huawei equipment was used by the Chinese military for eavesdropping.

In part to counter all the criticism and alter its reputation as a technological lightweight, Huawei has been spending heavily in recent years to build large R&D centers around the world, hiring lots of PhDs, both Chinese and Western. The company is filing patents by the truckload, a total of over 50,000 at last count. In 2010, the company is said to have invested over $2 billion in R&D. According to the company, profits in 2010 were Rmb24 billion (US$3.7 billion) up from RMB18.27 billion in 2009.

But, the question still remains: is Huawei a solid high-tech company that is misunderstood and unfairly attacked by jealous competitors or attention-seeking politicians? Or, is it more of a bloated, backward and barely profitable machine-maker kept in business through hidden subsidies and support from various arms of the Chinese government?

I have no way to accurately judge, nor any particular interest in the company. I meet with Huawei people occasionally. Huawei is, after all, the largest and most prominent company in Shenzhen, where I now live. As a private company, Huawei releases limited financial information.

My sense is that Huawei’s main problem, at least at the moment, isn’t technical competence, but poor cash flow. This has been brought on by fast-declining profit margins, slow market growth, erratic payments from customers in less-advanced countries where Huawei derives a significant percentage of its sales. To top it off, once compliant Chinese banks have turned stingy in extending loans. Add it up, and Huawei may currently be in much less robust financial condition than previously. A paper tiger? Probabaly not. But, it does look like a very large company with a similarly large imbalance in its financial structure.

To sell its products, Huawei must usually be the cheapest supplier. But, its costs are rising fast and some of its largest markets of late, like equipment for 3G and other high-bandwidth mobile phone systems, are no longer growing quickly. Other product areas are basically stagnant, especially for traditional fixed-line telecom switches.

Though the company has made no public announcement about its financial condition, my conversations with Huawei people suggest the company had a relatively poor year in 2011, and has run into some serious cash-flow challenges. One example: Huawei’s private equity arm, which until recently was trumpeted by Huawei as a key source of future profits and access to new leading-edge technologies, has all but shriveled up and died. Funding has been basically cut off. The cash is needed apparently to keep other parts of the business above water.

In the past, Huawei could sustain its cash flow by tapping China’s state-owned banks for loans. This year, the flow of loans seems to have been curtailed. One reason:  the Chinese government has clamped down hard on all bank lending to stem rising inflation. That’s impacted most heavy borrowers in China, including, it seems, Huawei.

Chinese banks have cut back lending to Huawei, so Huawei apparently has cut back elsewhere in its business. If so, it suggests Huawei’s own cash reserves are scarce, particularly for a company its size. This is caused not only by low margins, but also because Huawei, as a private company, cannot raise money from the capital markets. Its only cushion is taking loans from Chinese banks. These loans, in turn, are dialed up or dialed down not based purely on Huawei’s creditworthiness, but also the overall credit stance of the Chinese government.

The simplest solution, a Huawei IPO, seems as a remote a possibility today as it ever was. The company does not seem ready to endure that level of public disclosure — of its murky financials, ownership, profit margins, management structure, reliance on orders and loans from Chinese government-backed entities.

Over the years, most of Huawei’s erstwhile competitors – including Northern Telecom, Alcatel, Fujitsu, Siemens, AT&T – have either gone out of business, or been dramatically slimmed down. Only Sweden’s Ericsson has sales larger than Huawei.

In the absence of reasonable profit margins and reliable cash flow from customer purchases, Huawei has used a ready flow of Chinese bank loans to finance its operations and investment. But, those low margins also make it a challenge to repay the ever larger bank debts. Ultimately, positive cash flow needs to come from customers, not bank loans.

Whatever the situation with Huawei’s books at the moment, I’m rather sure we will not be reading financial headlines anytime soon about a cash crisis at Huawei. It is a large business,  and well-connected politically. It is also reportedly a large supplier of equipment to the Chinese military.

The large banks in China are state-owned and are routinely used to advance economic, political and social goals.  These banks may have cut back on funding to Huawei this year, but if the company needs money to stave off more serious – and public — financial problems, it’s all but certain the flow of bank cash will be increased. If need be, Huawei could be put on heavy state loan intravenous support.

As Huawei has grown larger, the reliance on bank lending becomes ever more of a risk. It is, above all, a very stilted, unbalanced way for the company to manage its capital needs. A diet of too much debt and too little equity often leads to corporate malnourishment.

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Newspapers, as everyone knows by now, are a crummy business, being slowly but surely pounded to death by two major forces they can’t control. First, news is now available for free, instantly, online. So, no need to wait for – and pay for — tomorrow’s newspaper to find out what’s happened today. At the same time, Google and Craigslist have created a far more efficient, and generally far cheaper,  form of advertising online than traditional print advertising.

On the whole, it’s a very gloomy picture. But, there is one new newspaper business model that not only goes from strength to strength, it will likely continue to make big money for many years to come. It’s the free newspapers distributed on subway and metro systems. The first one appeared in Sweden in 1995. Shenzhen, where I live, this year got its first entrant, called “地铁早8点”( “8 O’clock” in English). These free newspapers seem inoculated from every pathogen that is killing off the big urban newspapers around the world like the New York Times, LA Times, Le Monde, South China Morning Post. 

Start with the fact they are free. That certainly makes it easier to find readers. Next, there’s guaranteed, efficient and low-cost distribution. In the case of 8 O’clock， the paper is handed out by reps or left in big piles weekday mornings at many of Shenzhen’s 137 subway stations. Based on my daily subway commute, I’d say the newspaper is now being read by well over 60% of the people on my morning rush-hour train. The newspaper is bulging with ads. By any standards, this is a both a business success and a repudiation of the notion that print newspapers are sledding towards extinction.

The key to success for 8 O’Clock is knowing who its readers are and what they want to read about. 8 O’Clock, like most free subway newspapers, attracts mainly under-40 office workers. They have very clear editorial tastes, and these differ in some key ways from the many newspapers that are now headed for the boneyard. For one thing, 8 O’clock doesn’t try to break major stories or even stay current on political or economic stories fighting for headlines elsewhere. Instead, it offers its readers a mix of brief articles about celebrities, sports stars, oddball “human interest” tales and the occasional local scandal. Around half of each page is pictures, either advertising copy or outsized art work accompanying the short articles.

8 O’Clock is owned by the biggest traditional newspaper publishing company in Shenzhen, called Shenzhen Press Group. It has ten other newspapers in Shenzhen, all using the conventional paid-circulation model. This offers some obvious traps for Shenzhen Press Group, most obviously in selling a product at newsstands with some strong similarities to the one it’s giving away for free in subway stations.  But, against that, Shenzhen Press Group is reaching people with 8 O’clock that most likely never buy paid-for newspapers. What’s more, Shenzhen Press Group already has an in-house advertising team and deep knowledge of the local market to sell ads efficiently in 8 O’Clock. A full-page color ad sells for around USD$25,000-$35,000, depending on the day of the week and placement. Readership is somewhere around 300,000 a day.

Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang and Guangzhou all have their own free subway newspapers. All seem to be thriving.  Other countries also have them, including US, UK, Germany.

China is the ideal place for free subway-distributed newspapers to thrive. Start with the fact, of course, its cities are huge and subway ridership dwarves that of most Western cities. But, as important, the newspaper industry in China is relatively new. Chinese aren’t imprinted in the way that so many Americans and Europeans are about what newspapers are for. The popular ones see themselves, unashamedly, as for-profit vehicles: an effective advertising medium. Not as a civic trust.

The editorial goal is to get enough people reading articles at the top of the page to deliver big audiences, efficiently, for the advertisers renting space at the bottom. For 8 O’clock, the advertisers are mainly large auto brands, hospitals, realtors and big chain stores all of whose businesses are thriving in China’s booming domestic economy. 

In cities like Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing, purchasing power, along with property prices, are reaching first world levels. There’s massive net migration into large cities in China, compared with stagnant, or declining populations in most big Western cities. The subway systems are themselves mainly new, with extensive networks – 14 lines in Beijing, 11 in Shanghai, five in Shenzhen, with two more on the way. As the systems grow, so too will the profits of the free subway newspapers like 8 O’clock.

A generation ago, there was basically only one newspaper of any importance and readership in China, the Communist Party’s People’s Daily (“人民日报”).  It’s still published, and has changed little down the years, a slim sheaf of turgid and often theoretical writing barely leavened by photos or ads. Meanwhile, thousands of newspapers and magazines have entered the market with a broad range of content.

All major media in China are still subject to censorship and, in theory, under the control of the Party’s propaganda department. But, 8 O’clock has ample scope to provide what Shenzhen’s subway commuters are after, at a price they can’t argue with.  A financially healthy newspaper serving a financially prospering city– 8 O’clock will keep waltzing compared to the wretched papers in the US and Europe.

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I get asked occasionally by private equity firm guys how CFC gets such stellar clients. At least in one case, the answer is carved fish, or more accurately my ability quickly to identify the two murky objects (similar to the ones above) carved into the bottom of a ceramic dish. It also helped that I could identify where the dish was made and when.

From that flowed a contract to represent as exclusive investment bankers China’s largest and most valuable private GPS equipment company in a USD$30mn fund-raising. It’s in every sense a dream client. They are the most technologically adept in the domestic industry, with a deep strategic partnership with Microsoft, along with highly-efficient and high-quality manufacturing base in South China, high growth and very strong prospects as GPS sales begin to boom in China.

Since we started our work about two months ago, several big-time PE firms have practically fallen over themselves to invest in the company. It looks likely to be one of the fastest, smoothest and most enjoyable deals I’ve worked on.

No fish, no deal. I’m convinced of this. If I hadn’t correctly identified the carved fish, as well as the fact the dish was made in a kiln in the town of Longquan in Zhejiang Province during the Song Dynasty, this company would not have become our client. The first time I met the company’s founder and owner, he got up in the middle of our meeting, left the room and came back a few minutes later with a fine looking pale wooden box. He untied the cord, opened the cover and allowed me to lift out the dish.

I’d never seen it before, but still it was about as familiar as the face of an old teacher. Double fish carved into a blue-tinted celadon dish. The dish’s heavy coated clear glaze reflected the office lights back into my eyes. The fish are as sketchily carved as the pair in the picture here (from a similar dish sold at Sothebys in New York earlier this year), more an expressionist rendering than a precisely incised sculpture.

It’s something of a wonder the fish can be discerned at all. The potter needed to carve fast, in wet slippery clay that was far from an ideal medium to sink a knife into. Next came all that transparent glaze and then the dish had to get quickly into a kiln rich in carbon gas. The amount of carbon, the thickness and composition of the glaze, the minerals dissolved in the clay – all or any of these could have contributed to the slightly blue-ish tint, a slight chromatic shift from the more familiar green celadons of the Song Dynasty.

All that I knew and shared with the company’s boss, along with remarking the dish was “真了不起”, or truly exceptional. It’s the finest celadon piece I’ve seen in China. Few remain. The best surviving examples of Song celadon are in museums and private collection outside China. I’m not lucky enough to own any. But, I’ve handled dozens of Song celadons over the years, at auction previews of Chinese ceramic sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London and New York. The GPS company boss had bought this one from an esteemed collector and dealer in Japan.

The boss and I are kindred spirits.  He and I both adore and collect Chinese antiques. His collection is of a quality and breadth that I never imagined existed still in China. Most antiques of any quality or value in China sadly were destroyed or lost during the turbulent 20^th century, particularly during the Cultural Revolution.

The GPS company boss began doing business in Japan ten years ago, and built his collection slowly by buying beautiful objects there, and bringing them home to China. Of course, the reason Chinese antiques ended up in Japan is also often sad to consider. They were often part of the plunder taken by Japanese soldiers during the fourteen brutal years from 1931 to 1945 when they invaded, occupied and ravaged parts of China.

Along with the celadon dish, the GPS boss has beautiful Liao, Song, Ming and Qing Dynasty porcelains, wood and stone carvings and a set of Song Dynasty paintings of Buddhist Luohan. In the last few months, I’ve spent about 20 hours at the GPS company’s headquarters. At least three-quarters of that time, including a visit this past week, was spent with the boss, in his private office, handling and admiring his antiques, and drinking fine green tea grown on a small personal plantation he owns on Huangshan.

I’ve barely talked business with him. When I tried this past week to discuss which PE firms have offered him money, he showed scant interest. If I have questions about the company, I talk to the CFO. Early on, the boss gifted me a pretty Chinese calligraphy scroll. I reciprocated with an old piece of British Wedgwood, decorated in an ersatz Chinese style.

Deal-sourcing is both the most crucial, as well as the most haphazard aspect of investment banking work. Each of CFC’s clients has come via a different route, a different process – some are introduced, others we go out and find or come to us by word-of-mouth.  Unlike other investment banking guys, I don’t play golf. I don’t belong to any clubs. I don’t advertise.

Chinese antiques, particularly Song ceramics,  are among the few strong interests I have outside of my work.  The same goes for the GPS company boss. His 800-year old dish and my appreciation of it forged a common language and purpose between us, pairing us like the two carved fish. The likely result: his high-tech manufacturing company will now get the capital to double in size and likely IPO within four years, while my company will earn a fee and build its expertise in China’s fast-growing automobile industry.  

Two truisms about China should carry the disclaimer “except in Xinjiang”. China is a densely-populated country, except in Xinjiang. China is short on natural resources, except in Xinjiang. Representing over 15% of the China’s land mass, but with a population of just 30 million, or 0.2% of the total, Xinjiang stretches 1,000 miles across northwestern China, engulfing not only much of the Gobi Desert, but some of China’s most arable farmland as well. Mainly an arid plateau, Xinjiang is in places as green and fertile as Southern England.

Underneath much of that land, we are beginning to learn, lies some of the world’s largest and richest natural resource deposits, including huge quantities of minerals China is otherwise desperately short of, including high-calorie and clean-burning coal, copper, iron ore, petroleum.  How, when and at what cost China exploits Xinjiang’s natural resources will be among the deciding issues for China’s economy over the next thirty years. Already, some remarkable progress is being made, based on two past visits. I return to Xinjiang tomorrow for five days of client meetings.

Because of its vast size and small population, Xinjiang hasn’t yet had its mineral resources fully probed and mapped. But, every year, the size of its proven resource base expands. Knowing there’s wealth under the ground, and finding a cost-effective way to dig out the minerals and get them to market are, of course,  very different things. Until recently, Xinjiang’s transport infrastructure – roads and railways – was far from adequate to provide a cost-efficient route to market for all the mineral wealth.

That bottleneck is being tackled, with new expressways opening every year, and plans underway to expand dramatically the rail network. But, transport can’t alter the fact Xinjiang is still very remote from the populated core of China’s fast-growing industrial and consumer economy. Example:  it can still be cheaper to ship a ton of iron ore from Australia to Shanghai than from areas in Xinjiang.

Xinjiang’s key resource, and the one with the largest potential market, is high-grade clean-burning coal. Xinjiang is loaded with the stuff, with over 2 trillion tons of proven reserves. Let that figure sink in. It’s the equivalent of over 650 years of current coal consumption in coal-dependent China . The Chinese planners’ goal is for Xinjiang to supply about 25% of China’s coal demand within ten years.

Xinjiang’s coal is generally both cleaner (low sulphur content) and cheaper to mine than the coal China now mainly relies on, much of which comes from a belt of deep coal running through Inner Mongolia, Shanxi and Shandong Provinces. Large coal seams in Xinjiang can be surface mined. Production costs of under Rmb150 a ton are common. The current coal price in China is over four times higher for the dirtier, lower-energy stuff.

For all its advantages, Xinjiang coal is not going to become a primary source of energy in China. The Chinese government, rightly, understands that the cost, complexity and long distances involved make shipping vast quantities of Xinjiang coal to Eastern China unworkable. Moving coal east would monopolize Xinjiang’s rail and road network, causing serious distortions in the overall economy.

Instead, the Xinjiang government is doing something both smart and innovative. It is encouraging companies to use Xinjiang’s abundant coal as a feedstock to produce lower cost supplies of industrial products and chemicals now produced using petroleum. All kinds of things become cost-efficient to manufacture when you have access to large supplies of low-cost energy from coal. Shipping finished or intermediate goods is obviously a better use of Xinjiang’s limited transport infrastructure.

I’ve seen and met the bosses of several of these large coal-based private sector projects in Xinjiang. The scale and projected profitability of these projects is awesome. In one case, a private company is using a coal mine it developed to power its $500mn factory to produce the plastic PVC. The coal reserve was provided for free, in return for the company’s agreement to invest and build the large chemical factory next to it. The cost of producing PVC at this plant should be less than one-third that of PVC made using petroleum. China’s PVC market, as well as imports, are both staggeringly large. The new plant will not only lower the cost of PVC in China but reduce China’s demand for petroleum and its byproducts.

Another company, one of the largest private companies in China,  is using its Xinjiang coal reserve, again supplied for free in return for investment in new factories, to power a large chemical plant to produce glycerine and other chemical intermediates. This company is already a large producer of these chemicals at its factories in Shandong. There, they run on petroleum. In the new Xinjiang facility, coal will be used instead, lowering overall manufacturing costs by at least 20% – 30% based on an oil price of around $50. At current oil prices, the cost savings, and margins, become far richer.

The key, of course, is that the companies get the coal reserve for free, or close to it. True, they need to build the coal mine first, but generally, that isn’t a large expense, since it can all be surface-mined.  This means that the cost of energy in these very energy-intensive projects is much lower than it would be for plants using petroleum or, to be fair, any operator elsewhere who would need to purchase the coal reserve as well as build the capital-intensive downstream facilities.

The Xinjiang projects should lock-in a significant cost advantage over a significant period of time. As investments, they also should provide consistently high returns over the long-term. While the capital investment is large, I’m confident the projects are attractive on risk/return basis, and that in a few years time, these private sector “coal-for-petroleum” projects will begin to go public, and become large and successful public companies.

The Xinjiang government keeps close tabs on this process of providing free coal reserves for use as a feedstock.  Since in most cases, these projects are looking to enter large markets now dominated by petroleum and its byproducts, there is ample room for more such deals to be done in Xinjiang.

Deals are getting larger. This summer, China’s largest coal producer, Shenhua Group, announced it would invest Rmb 52 billion ($8 billion) on a coal-to-oil project in Xinjiang. The company plans to mine 70 million tons of coal a year and turn it into three million tons of fuel oil.

Remote and sparsely-populated as it now is, Xinjiang is going to play a decisive role in China’s industrial and energy future, just as the development of America’s West has helped drive economic growth for over 100 years, and created some of America’s largest fortunes.  My prediction:  China’s West will produce more coal and mineral billionaires over the next 100 years than America’s has over the past hundred.

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Anyone seeking to succeed in investment banking in China should live by one rule alone: it’s not who you know, but how well you know them. In China, more than any other country where I’ve worked, the professional is also the personal. Comradeship, if not friendship, is always a necessary precondition to doing business together. If you haven’t shared a meal – and more importantly, shared a few hundred laughs – you will never share a business deal. Competence, experience, education and reputation all matter, of course. But, they all play supporting roles.

The stereotypical hard-charging pompous Wall Street investment banker wouldn’t stand much of a chance here. A “Master of the Universe” would need to master a set of different, unfamiliar skills. Personal warmth, ready humor and a relaxed and somewhat deferential attitude will go a lot farther than spreadsheet modeling, an Ivy League MBA and financial dodges to increase earnings-per-share.

I’ve been around a fair bit in my +25 year business career, doing business is over 40 countries and managing companies in the US, Europe and Asia. Everywhere, it helps to be likeable, attentive, courteous. We all prefer working with people we like.  But, since moving to China and opening a business, I’ve learned things work differently here. Making money and making friends are interchangeable in China. You can’t do the first without doing the second.

Investment banking is so personal in China because most private Chinese companies, from the biggest on down, are effectively one-man-shows, with a boss whose authority and wisdom are seldom challenged. Usually, there is  no “management team” in the sense this term is applied in the US and Europe. A Chinese boss is the master of all he (or often she, as women entrepreneurs are common here) surveys.

A substantial percentage of my time is spent getting to know, and winning the friendship, of Chinese bosses. This alone makes me a lucky guy. Without fail, the bosses I meet are smart, gifted, able, hospitable, warm. We don’t select for these qualities. They are prerequisites for success as a private business in China.

Bosses are also usually guarded about meeting new people. It comes with the territory. Anyone with a successful business in China is going to be in very large demand from a very large “catchment pool”, including just about everyone in the extended circle of the boss’s friends, relatives, employees, suppliers, political contacts. Everyone is selling or seeking something. Precious few will succeed. Being a boss in China requires enormous stamina, to deal with all those making a claim on your time, and a gift for saying “No” in ways that don’t offend.

For investment bankers, successful deal generation in China will usually follow an elliptical path. The biggest mistake is to start pitching your company, or a transaction, the moment you meet a prospective client. You need first to win the boss’s trust and friendship, then you can discuss how to work together. In my working life in China, it’s axiomatic that in a first meeting with a company boss, one or the other of us will say, “我们先做朋友”,  or “let’s become friends be first”. It’s not some throwaway line. It’s an operating manual.

The Chinese use a specific word to define the engagement between an investment banker and client. It speaks volumes about the way new business is won here. It’s “合作” or cooperation. You don’t work for a Chinese company, you cooperate with it. There’s got to be a real personal bond in place, a tangible sense of shared purpose and shared destiny.

I could probably teach a class in the cross-cultural differences of investment banking in China and the US. I’ve not only been active in both places, I’ve been on both sides of the table. Before starting CFC, I was CEO of an American company that retained one of the most renowned investment banks in the US to handle an M&A deal for us. At that company, we had a deep senior management team, including two supremely capable founders. We dealt individually and collectively with the investment bank, which had a similarly-sized team assigned to the project.

The relationships were professional, cordial. But, the investment bankers never made any real effort to become my friend, nor did I want them to. Rarely, if ever, did discussions veer away from how to create the conditions to get the best price. The bankers were explicitly pursuing their fee, and we were pursuing our strategic goal.

The deal went pretty smoothly, following a tightly-scripted and typical M&A process. The investment bank’s materials and research were first-rate, and they had no difficulty getting directly to decision-makers at some of the largest software companies in the world. They performed with the intricate precision and harmony of the Julliard Quartet.

I can count the number of times I sat down with the bankers for a nice meal where business was not discussed. Or the number of times when the meeting room rang with peals of friendly laughter. Zero. Both would be unthinkable in China.

Here, a deal is more than just a deal. Price is not the only, or even the main objective. Instead, as an investment banker, you must knit souls together, their lives, fortunes, careers, goals and temperaments. There is no spreadsheet, no due diligence list, no B-school case study, no insider jargon to consult.

Be likeable and be righteous. But. above all, do not be transparently or subliminally motivated mainly by personal greed. A successful Chinese boss will smell that coming from miles away, and recoil. You’ll rarely get past “ 您好” , the polite form of “hello”.

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True of false? The basis of China’s global economic competitiveness is cheap labor? False. It’s cheap factory land.

No doubt,  until a few years ago, China’s low labor costs were a vital part of its economic growth story. That is no longer the case. Labor costs have risen sharply in the last five years. There are now many countries with a decided labor cost advantage over China. And yet China remains the “factory of the world”. For one thing, its workers have higher productivity than those earning lower wages in countries like Vietnam, India or Indonesia.

But, there is a more fundamental, and most often overlooked, reason for China’s global economic competitiveness. Factories, and other productive assets like mines or logistics centers, are built on land that is either free of close to it. The result is that in China land costs usually represent an inconsequential component of overall manufacturing and operating costs. This, in turn, gives China an inbuilt edge and, when added to the productivity of its workers, an insurmountable cost advantage over the rest of the world.

There is no good international data on the percentage of a company’s fixed costs that come from purchase or rental of land. But, it is certainly the case that in China, this percentage will be far lower than in any developed – and many developing – countries. This isn’t because land is cheap in China. It isn’t. The market price, in most areas, is often on par with land costs in the US. But, good businesses in China don’t pay market price. Often they pay nothing at all.

This has two useful aspects for the favored Chinese business. First, it means the cost of expanding operations is limited primarily to the cost of new capital equipment and factory construction. Second, the business given a plot of land is thus endowed with a valuable asset it can use as collateral to secure more funding from banks. Even better, if the business runs into trouble or later goes bust, the owner will be able to sell the land at market price and pocket a huge personal gain.

It can’t be overstated just how important this is to a business owner’s calculation of risk, and so the success of Chinese entrepreneurial companies. Owners know that if all goes bad, they still hold land acquired for little or nothing for that is worth millions of dollars.

All land in China belongs to the Chinese government. Every year, a fraction of it is released on a long-term lease (usually forty years or longer) for development into commercial or residential land. While there is no official central policy to make land available at low prices to successful businesses, in practice, this is the way the system works. Land is sold at deeply-discounted prices, or given outright, to businesses that are seeking to expand, often by building a new factory or office building.

Land in China, it goes without saying, is in very high demand. It’s a crowded country, and only 15% of the land is flat or fertile enough to be suitable for cultivation. This “good land” is also where most new factories get built.

There isn’t enough new land released every year to meet the enormous demand. This is true both for residential land, a key reason why housing prices are so high, and commercial land. For most businessmen, it’s impossible to get new land, at any price. A privileged group, however, not only gets land to expand, but gets it at artificially low prices. In China, land prices are elastic. Different levels of government have ways to transfer land to companies at prices equal to 5%-15% of its current market value.

Officially, the land allocation system in China is meant to work in a more market-oriented way, with new land for development being auctioned publicly, and selling prices controlled and verified by higher levels of government. In other words, the system is meant to discourage, if not prohibit, land being given to insiders at low prices. In practice, these rules are often more observed in the breach. Local governments have ways to control the outcome of land auctions and so guarantee that favored businesses get the land they want at attractive prices.

These below-market sales deprive the local government of revenue it might otherwise earn from a land deal done at closer to market prices. But, there is some economic logic at work. The sweetest of sweetheart land deals are generally offered to successful companies whose growth is being stifled by insufficient factory space. The new land, and the new factories that will be built there, will increase local employment and, down the road, tax revenues.

Note, the deeply-discounted land prices are available mainly to companies that are already successful, and straining at the leash to maintain growth and profits. Both private and state-owned companies are eligible. It’s a rare example of even-handed treatment by officials of state-owned and private companies.

Is corruption also a factor? Are cheap land deals really not all that cheap when various under-the-table payments are factored in? My personal experience, though limited, suggests such payoffs, if they happen,  are not compulsory.

I’ve played a walk-on part in several below-market land deals. My role is to meet with local officials, usually the mayor or party secretary,  to urge them to provide my client with the land needed for expansion. All local government officials in China are also motivated by, and rewarded for, having local companies go public. I stick to that point in my discussions with the local officials – my client needs land to grow and so reach the scale where the business can IPO.

In each case, the deal has gone forward, and clients have gotten the land they were seeking, at a price 5-15% of its then-market value. My client wins the trifecta: the business grows larger, unit costs remain low because of scale economies and the cheap land, and the balance sheet is strengthened by a valuable asset purchased on the cheap.

In all respects, this system of commercial land acquisition is unique to China. It is also a key component in the country’s economic policy, though it never has been proclaimed as such. The government at all levels is keen to keep GDP growing smartly. This process of rewarding good companies with cheap land for growth plays a key part in this, everywhere across China. China’s government (at national, provincial and local levels) is not hurting for cash, unlike for example America’s. Tax revenues are growing by upwards of 30% a year. So, maximizing the value of land released for development is not a fiscal priority.

Who loses? There are likely incidences where peasants are thrown off land with little or no compensation to make way for new commercial district. But, that way of doing things is becoming less common in China.

Mainly, of course, the losers are the international competitors of Chinese companies getting cheap land to expand. It’s hard enough to stay in business these days when facing competition from China. It verges on hopeless when the Chinese companies can build output and lower unit prices because of land they get for free or close to it.

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Among major cities in China, Chengdu takes the prize as most pleasant, livable,  comfortably affluent, relaxed and charming. I arrived back here today. I’m reminded immediately there’s much to like about Chengdu, and one thing to love: the food.

Chengdu is famed for its “小吃”, (“xiaochi”) literally “small eats”. To translate 小吃 as “snack”, as most dictionaries do, doesn’t even remotely begin to do it justice. A 小吃  is a often one-bowl wonder of intense, jarring flavors. They not only take the place of a full meal with rice, they make the Chinese staple seem almost superfluous, a waste of precious space in the stomach.

There are about a dozen小吃 that can stop me in mid-stride, any time of day. These include several varieties of cold noodles, including the bean jelly ones called 凉粉, literally “cold powder”，as well as dandan noodles served dazzlingly hot, in both senses of the word.

My favorite 小吃 , by a wide margin, is 抄手 , literally, “to fold one’s arms”. It’s an odd name, since the last thing I’d ever do when I see a bowl of抄手 in Chengdu is fold my arms. They are always thrust outward, in anticipation.  抄手 is a bowl of wontons steeped in a fire-engine red soupy sauce, optimally with enough Sichuan pepper corn to numb the tongue all the way down the gullet. This frees up the nose to do the real work of decoding all the subtle flavors.

Offiically, Chengdu has a per capital income of around $5,200, about half Shanghai’s. But, I’d prefer living and working in Chengdu any day. So would many Chinese I know. The economy is doing well, despite some geographic disadvantages. Chengdu is the most westerly of China’s large cities, and so isolated from the most developed regions of China. It’s over 1,000 miles to Shanghai, Beijing, and almost as far to Shenzhen.

Chengdu is doing well economically – though you don’t always have a sense this ranks as high on the list of civic priorities as drinking tea and playing mahjong. The electronics and telecom industries are both doing well. Quite a few companies have received PE investment.

The one industry, however, that is still relatively undeveloped is the food business. This is odd. By logic, Chengdu should be a center of China’s food processing and restaurant industry. Not only is it a great food town, situated in a very region valley producing some of China’s best fruits and vegetables, but it is also capital of Sichuan Province.

Sichuan food is almost certainly the most popular “non native” cuisine across China. Within a mile of where I live in Shenzhen, there are probably over 50 Sichuan restaurants. It’s the same in Beijing, Shanghai and most other major cities.

There’s an innate association in Chinese minds between Sichuan and good food. In this, Sichuan reminds me a lot like Italy. Italian food is prized across all of the Western world, and as a result, some of the Western world’s biggest and most successful food companies are based in Italy. Among the larger ones are Barilla, Bertolli, Buitoni, Parmalat, Ferrero. These, and thousands of smaller ones making wine, cheese, salami, all benefit from the widespread popularity of Italian food, and the high market value of associating a food brand with Italy.

Chengdu and Sichuan should be no different. It should be the capital of China’s food processing industry. But, as far as I can tell, there are as of yet no great food companies or food brands based there.  If you shop around in Chengdu, the food products being marketed as “authentic Sichuan food ” are mainly an assortment of beef jerky, along with sweet and savory biscuits made from beans and peanuts.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these products, but there isn’t a big brand national brand among them. The mass market is going unserved.

Let’s look at two of the biggest food product categories where Sichuan brands should predominate: chili sauce and instant noodles. Each of these product areas have sales of billions of dollars a year in China. Yet, the leading brands come from outside Sichuan. In the case of instant noodles, the leaders are mainly Taiwanese and Japanese.

In chili sauce, the biggest brands all seem to come from Guizhou province. This, particularly, should cause a collective loss of face across Sichuan. Their spicy food  “owns” the palettes of hundreds of millions of people and yet the main brands of chili sauce in supermarkets come from the poorer province to its south.

The companies selling bottled pre-made Sichuan sauces (for popular dishes like Gongbao Jiding, Mapo Toufu and Yuxing Rousi) mainly come from Taiwan, Shanghai, even Hong Kong. It’s as if the most popular brands of spaghetti sauce were made in Brazil. Chinese food companies all over are eating Sichuan’s lunch.

This situation is unnatural and, I’d hope, unsustainable. Sichuan companies should by rights eventually dominate the market for many food products in China, much as Italian food companies are among the largest in Europe.

Some lucky PE investors should someday make a lot of money backing Sichuan food companies. Me and my company would love to play our part in this. Ambitious food entrepreneurs in Chengdu, call us anytime — 0755 33222093. If ever there were a billion-dollar unfilled market opportunity in China, this would be it.

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Most investors, over time, will underperform the stock market as a whole. This is as true for people investing their own money in shares, as it is for mutual fund managers, hedge funds, PE and VC firms. So, any investor with a big sustainable “unfair” advantage should seize it.

Right now, in private equity industry in China, certain private equity firms have this unfair advantage. They get the most cash, the most good deals and the most certain exit through a domestic IPO in China. These PE firms are one part of a tripartite alliance, the likes of which the investment world has never seen.  The other two are China’s National Social Security Fund, soon to be the largest source of investible capital in the world, and the CSRC, China’s securities regulator, which has all the say in approving all domestic IPOs.

The PE firms get funding through one, and profits through the other. The deck is heavily stacked in their favor. For the hundreds of other PE firms active in China, including the global giants  TPG, KKR, Carlyle, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs,  making money investing in China is riskier, harder and slower.

Among the PE firms that are members of this new elite in China are CDH, SAIF, New Horizon,  Hony Capital. To many investment professionals outside China, these names will be unfamiliar. Yet, they operate in an environment, and achieve outcomes,  that ought to be the envy of  other investors.

The firms mainly got their start about ten years ago. They were present at the creation of the Chinese PE industry. They raised their initial capital, in most cases, from prestigious American investors, like Stanford and Princeton endowments. The firms’ investment focus has shifted somewhat over time – from technology deals to more traditional industries, from investing only dollars to now using also Renminbi. They did well almost from the beginning. This early success set in motion policies and preferences that have led more recently to their position today.

The two key developments took place within the last 18 months. First, in October 2009, China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange launched the ChiNext （创业板）board for private companies to go public. It’s been a resounding success, with over 230 companies now listed, having raised over $5 billion from the public. Chinext’s total aggregate market cap is now over $100 billion.

The Chinext p/e multiples, from the start, have been well above levels in the US and Hong Kong. Currently, the average is 42X trailing year’s earnings. The high valuations make it a very profitable place for PE firms to exit from their investments. But, the CSRC acts as a strict gatekeeper, controlling both the number and quality of Chinese companies allowed to IPO on Chinext. Most Chinese firms who apply for Chinext listing are turned down.

The CSRC has a clear preference for companies that have received PE finance from one of the top PE firms in China, since this means, in effect, the company has already passed through a more rigorous due diligence process than the CSRC can attempt. The CSRC’s logic is impeccable: if a good PE firm was willing to put its own capital at risk when the company was private, that business should be a safer investment for public shareholders than a Chinese company without a top PE investor.

Who comes top of the CSRC’s list of favored PE firms? The firms listed above. This means that the companies invested in by these PE firms have a better chance of being chosen by the CSRC to go public on Chinext. In turn,  because of Chinext’s high valuations,  this all but guarantees these PE firms achieve better annual investment returns than others.

When the NSSF announced it was going to begin investing up to 10% of the national pension system’s capital in alternative investments, particularly PE, only a few firms were able to pass through its rigorous selection criteria. It chose firms with strong performance and high standards. Leading the list when the NSSF started handing out money last year: CDH, SAIF, New Horizon, Hony Capital.

The favored PE firms now have access to enormous capital from the state pension fund, along with what seems to be preferential access for its deals to China’s IPO market. In the future, any gains these favored PE firms have from investments using NSSF funds will flow back into higher pensions for millions of Chinese retirees. Will the CSRC consider this, when it deliberates which Chinese companies should be approved for IPO? It seems a fair assumption.

China’s pay-as-you-go pension system only got started recently. So, most of the profits from the PE deals won’t get distributed to pensioners for many years. In the meantime, the gains will be recycled back into more PE investing in domestic companies that then get preferential access to China’s capital markets. It’s a process as elegant as it is practical: Chinese investors bid up the shares at IPO, locking in high profits for a PE firms investing NSSF money. The major part of the PE’s profits is then returned to the NSSF to finance higher pension payments in the future to those same Chinese investors.

All the other PE firms outside this loop, including the global giants, will claim the system is rigged against them, that it’s harder and harder for them to compete with the favored PE firms, and to get approval for their portfolio companies to IPO in China. They probably have a point. But, in the end, this system in China will result in more private Chinese companies getting growth capital, leading to more jobs, more successful IPOs, and more comfortable retirements for China’s many millions. Those are outcomes most Chinese, as well as many others, including me, can endorse unreservedly.

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