CICC
China International Capital Corp’s research on the Belt and Road Initiative is comprehensive, rigorous and most importantly, honest.
Some 100 research analysts led by Liang Hong cover more than 40 industries and nearly 1,000 Chinese stocks listed both onshore and offshore.
Set up as a joint venture between China Construction Bank and Morgan Stanley, CICC has always believed that great work needs different viewpoints and collaboration. The securities house has established multiple connections with academic institutions such as the NUS Business School in Singapore and the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, as well as stock exchanges such as Astana Stock Exchange in Kazakhstan and Moscow Exchange in Russia.
Some of its research has been published in book form. In June 2018, CICC published a 255-page book covering everything about the Belt and Road from investment risks to a detailed analysis of a selected group of 24 BRI countries.
Six months later, it published a 287-page book on China’s state-owned enterprises, covering their reform and opening-up process. The latter was published in both English and Chinese.
CICC’s high-quality research takes a bottom-up approach. To investigate the willingness of Chinese corporations to participate in BRI, it conducted face-to-face interviews with senior management and collected responses to questionnaires from more than 100 companies.
The resulting report looked at host country market potential, political and business environment risk, as well as examining which geographic areas Chinese companies are interested in.
CICC also found that overseas expansion may not be profitable. Among the 103 companies that participated in the survey, 91.3% already have a presence overseas, but the revenues generated from abroad are relatively low: for 37 of them, overseas earnings were less than 10% of total revenues. That said, Chinese companies remain optimistic about the future; 61.6% of those interviewed said they expect to have more than 25% of their revenue generated overseas in the next five years.
Just before the second BRI forum, CICC published a special report called ‘BRI in numbers’. The firm found that the opportunities brought by BRI included increased foreign investment and exports volumes, as well as a blossoming in tourism.