Corporate China’s debt mountain hits US$16 trillion, and rising

HONG KONG: Beijing may have averted a crisis in its stock markets with heavy-handed intervention, but the world’s biggest corporate debt pile – US$16.1 trillion (RM61.3 trillion) and rising – is a much greater threat to its slowing economy and will not be so easily managed.

Corporate China’s debts, at 160% of gross domestic product, are twice that of the United States, having sharply deteriorated in the past five years, a Thomson Reuters study of over 1,400 companies shows.

And the debt mountain is set to climb 77% to US$28.8 trillion over the next five years, credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s estimates.

Beijing’s policy interventions affecting corporate credit have so far been mostly designed to address a different goal – supporting economic growth, which is set to fall to a 25-year low this year. It has cut interest rates four times since November, reduced the level of reserves banks must hold and removed limits on how much of their deposits they can lend.

Though it wants more of that credit going to smaller companies and innovative areas of the economy, such measures are blunt instruments.

“When the credit taps are opened, risks rise that the money is going to ‘problematic’ companies or entities,” said Louis Kuijs, RBS chief economist for Greater China.

China’s banks made 1.28 trillion yuan (RM785 billion) in new loans in June, well up on May’s 900.8 billion yuan.

The effect of policy easing has been to reduce short-term interest costs, so lending for stock speculation has boomed, but there is little evidence loans are being used for profitable investment in the real economy, where long-term borrowing costs remain high, and banks are reluctant to take risks.

Manufacturers’ debts are increasingly dwarfing their profits. The Thomson Reuters study found that in 2010, materials companies’ debts were 2.8 times their core profit. At end-2014 they were 5.3 times. For energy companies, indebtedness has risen from 1.1 to 4.4 times core profit. For industrials, from 2.5 to 4.2.

Much of the new lending is going to China’s notoriously inefficient state-owned enterprises as part of the government’s fiscal stimulus.

S&P expects China’s companies to account for 40% of the world’s new corporate lending in the period through 2019. But quantity is not the only problem. Getting credit to the most efficient companies, where it has the most impact on the economy, would be easier if inefficient companies were allowed to fail, so markets can price debt effectively.

Policymakers have said they want market mechanisms to play a bigger role in credit pricing, but in practice have baulked at the consequences, effectively bailing out companies in trouble, as it did last year when state-backed Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy Science and Technology Co Ltd defaulted on a bond coupon payment.

Rapid debt growth, opacity of risk and pricing and very high debt to GDP are a hazardous combination, Standard & Poor’s says.

It took an unprecedented series of measures to arrest the plunge in China’s stock markets, which are worth just over US$8 trillion. Tackling corporate debt might make that seem like child’s play.

“Managing the debt market is probably more dangerous than the stock market because the scale of the debt market is bigger, and without any high-profile default, the moral hazard is a significant issue,” said David Cui, BofA Merrill Lynch analyst. – Reuters