Business news with words billion+commission+national. 26 news.

CHINA'S military enterprises are encouraged to conduct group listings and are expected to raise between 50 billion yuan (US$6.75 billion) and 60 billion yuan from public share sales by the end of 2010, a senior official said. The majority of these enterprises will complete their reform to turn into shareholding companies in five years, which paves the way to trade shares publicly, said Wu Fenglai, head of the Reform Department under China's Commission of Science Technology and Industry for National Defense. In his article published yesterday in the China Securities Journal, Wu noted that military enterprises, except wholly state-owned ones, welcome foreign investment. Depending on their influence in national security, the country's military enterprises are divided into wholly state-owned, state-controlled and state-invested. "Most of China's military enterprises are allowed to source funds from the capital market and foreign investors," said Wu. China issued a new

HARRAH'S Entertainment Inc has received final regulatory approval needed to complete the largest casino buyout ever, a year after Apollo Management LP and TPG Inc agreed to the US$17.1 billion purchase. The National Indian Gaming Commission approved the acquisition, removing the last regulatory hurdle to the purchase, Las Vegas-based Harrah's said in a statement. The transaction will be completed in early 2008, the company said. Harrah's, the world's largest casino company, received permission from Illinois, Nevada, Indiana and six other regulators in the states where it operates. The buyout firms agreed in December 2006 to acquire Harrah's for US$90 a share, attracted by its real-estate holdings and ability to generate cash, according to Bloomberg News. Indian approval was needed because Harrah's runs tribal casinos. Founded in 1937 in Reno, Nevada, Harrah's owns the Bally's, Caesars and Flamingo casinos in Las Vegas as part of its holdings, most of which are in the United

Harrah's Entertainment Inc. has tentatively cleared the last remaining regulatory hurdle to the largest casino buyout ever. Harrah's said Monday that the National Indian Gaming Commission has approved the company's $17.7 billion purchase by private equity buyers Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group, pending final commission review. The conditional approval means Harrah's can go forward with the deal, which is expected to close in early 2008. Harrah's and the buyers received the go-ahead for the deal last week from the Nevada Gaming Commission, capping a 10-week campaign to obtain approvals from state gambling regulators in eight states, including Iowa and Missouri. Indian Gaming Commission approval is needed because Harrah's operates several tribal casinos as well. Harrah's used to manage a casino north of Topeka before the Prairie Band Potawatomi tribe took over operations in July. Harrah's, which had nearly $10 billion in revenue last year, operates more than 50 casinos including Caesars Palace and the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas and Bally's in Atlantic City.

THE management of a second batch of power generating assets owned by State Grid Corp of China has been transferred to electricity producers, paving way for an eventual sale and making the firm a pure distributor as part of an industry reform. As of Sunday, the power-producing companies are responsible for safety operations and management of eight power plants in which State Grid owned a combined equity generating capacity of 6.47 gigawatts. The State Electricity Regulatory Commission said yesterday this marks the completion of the "main work" in the asset disposal. Other areas still to be done include deal signing, transaction and registration. State Grid, China's dominant power distributor, retained certain generating assets in 2002 during the breakup of the former State Power Corp into five national power producers and two grid operators. It had completed the sale of combined 10.8GW in the first phase of the sale in May to 31 companies, raising 18.7 billion yuan

CHINA may not subsidize oil refiners this year to compensate them for selling fuels at state-controlled prices, as it did in 2005 and 2006, a government official said. Refiners benefited from oil prices in the first nine months of 2007 that were lower than a year earlier, National Development and Reform Commission Vice-Chairman Zhang Xiaoqiang said in Beijing yesterday. Zhang said he was expressing his personal views. Bloomberg News reported China paid China Petroleum & Chemical Corp (Sinopec), 15 billion yuan (US$2 billion) in the past two years as compensation for losses caused by selling oil products at below-cost prices. The government increased fuel prices last month to encourage oil processors to bolster diesel and gasoline supplies. "On a full-year basis, refiners' losses in the fourth quarter can be absorbed allowing them to break even," Zhang said. The commission is China's main economic planning body. Shares in Sinopec, Asia's biggest refiner, fell 5.5

CHINA will collect more than 60 billion yuan (US$8.1 billion) in special funds from oil producers to offer subsidies to public service sectors and low-income families feeling the pinch of increasingly higher prices. In the first nine months, the country's oil producers have paid 41 billion yuan into the special fund, the National Development and Reform Commission said on its Website on Thursday. The special fund was launched to regulate profits earned by oil producers from soaring international crude prices. The country's domestic crude prices were roughly in line with global prices, unlike government-controlled prices for refined products, according to Xinhua news agency. The commission said it had provided subsidies totaling 42 billion yuan this year for taxi drivers, low-income families challenged by higher charges for LPG and farmers affected by increased diesel prices. In 2006, the special fund received 45 billion yuan from oil producers. The commission said 21 billion

CHINA has started building an 80,000-ton press forge in Deyang, in southwestern Sichuan Province, paving the way for making large planes, a longtime dream of the nation. The project, with an investment of 1.517 billion yuan (US$204.7 million), has won the approval of the National Development and Reform Commission and is expected to be the world's largest when it is finished in two and a half years, said Zeng Xiangdong, project director and vice general manager of China National Erzhong Group Co yesterday.

CHINA Guodian Corp plans to build a nuclear power plant in the country's southeast that will use Westinghouse technology, the major electricity generator has said. China Guodian plans several one-million-kilowatt reactors for the plant in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, according to a company statement. They will feature the US-based Westinghouse's AP1000 technology, the statement said. Westinghouse is owned by Japan's Toshiba Corp. A planning office for the new plant was set up on November 28, China Guodian said. China plans to spend 450 billion yuan (US$61 billion) on nuclear power plants during the 15 years through 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission has said.

CHINA has approved Sinopec Corp's US$5 billion joint venture oil refinery and petrochemical project with Kuwait Petroleum Corp in the southern Guangdong Province, a company newsletter said yesterday. The project will have annual ethylene capacity of one million tons, according to a brief statement carried by the online Sinopecnews. Ethylene is a basic petrochemical building block. The statement didn't specify the size of the refinery. Sinopec officials said earlier the plant would process 12 million tons of crude oil from Kuwait per year and expected it to come on stream in 2010. China's top industry planner, the National Development and Reform Commission, has approved the project, it added. Accordingly, Sinopec will stop an 800,000-ton-a-year ethylene expansion project in its Guangzhou unit, near the proposed Nansha plant. The existing 200,000-ton-a-year ethylene cracker at the Guangzhou unit will be closed when the new project starts, it said. Sinopec said earlier that the

CHINA insured 44.5 percent of sows nationwide by November 23 as a way to ease a pork shortage and curb the rising price of China's staple meat, according to the China Insurance Regulatory Commission. The commission said more than 21.24 million sows have been covered, with insurance fees totaling 21.6 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion). The top insurance regulator authorized five domestic insurers last August to undertake a pilot sow insurance scheme for pig breeders in response to the short supply of pork fueled by feedstuff price hikes and outbreaks of the blue-ear pig disease. The insurance covers losses from blue-ear disease and natural disasters such as floods, fires, typhoons and other epidemics. The price of pork, which almost doubled this year before starting to decline in mid-August, rebounded 54.9 percent in October, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics. Analysts say the higher pork and food prices pushed up the consumer price index, a main

THE Ministry of Railways is issuing bonds worth 45 billion yuan (US$6 billion), the largest single issue since China launched railway bonds in 1995, to bankroll 21 projects. The issuance, approved by the National Development and Reform Commission, will last until Tuesday. It includes seven-year bonds totaling nine billion yuan, 10-year bonds amounting to 26 billion yuan and 15-year bonds worth 10 billion yuan.

INDUSTRIAL and Commercial Bank of China today in Tianjin opened the country's first leasing firm wholly owned by a domestic bank. ICBC Financial Leasing Ltd, registered in Binhai District in Tianjin with a capital of two billion yuan (US$271 million), will offer aircraft and ship financing services, said Yang Kaisheng, director of the country's biggest lender. The bank signed cooperation agreements with China National Aviation Holding Company, COSCO Group, Hainan Airlines and a Canadian company at the opening ceremony. The commission has also given approval to Minsheng Bank, China Merchants Bank, Bank of Communications and China Construction Bank to enter the leasing business. The leasing business may help reduce strong demand for ships and planes as the country's economy continues to grow quickly. Over the past 10 years, China's demand for planes has doubled while about 90 percent of the financing for plane leases on the mainland are provided by foreign companies. The

AVERAGE housing prices in Shanghai rose 7.9 percent last month from a year earlier, outpacing September's growth rate by two percentage points. Prices of new homes in the city grew 8.3 percent in October and second-hand home prices rose by 8.9 percent, the National Development and Reform Commission said on its Website yesterday. Developers' investments in the city's real estate sector dropped 3.3 percent in the first 10 months of this year to 108.43 billion yuan (US$14.63 billion), Shanghai Statistics Bureau said yesterday. The fixed-asset investments totaled 354 billion yuan (US$47.58 billion) in the period, advancing 8.1 percent from a year earlier. The growth was driven by industry and city infrastructure, the bureau said. The country has issued a string of policies to cool down the real estate boom, such as tightening credit to developers, increasing supervision over land use and enforcing tax policies. However, these moves have not been as effective as the central

EXPORT growth slipped slightly last month against a faster expansion in imports due to the nation's economic control measures, China's Customs reported yesterday. Despite a slower pace in growth, the trade surplus still reached a record high of US$27.05 billion in October, adding pressure on the yuan to appreciate further, analysts said. The export rate last month increased 22.3 percent from a year earlier to US$107.7 billion. The growth speed decreased 0.5 percentage point compared with that of September. The import rate climbed 25.5 percent year on year to US$80.6 billion, accelerating 9.4 percentage points from a month ago. The trade value in October gained 23.6 percent to US$188.4 billion, with the surplus expanding 13.5 percent. "China's trade has shown a controlled growth since August after the government imposed export taxes on products to curb the surplus," said Wang Xiaoguang, an economist with the National Development and Reform Commission. From July 1,

CHINA may earn US$15 billion from selling carbon emission credits, a senior official with the nation's top planning agency said yesterday. The government has approved 885 Clean Development Mechanism projects by the end of October that will transfer a combined 1.5 billion tons of such credits to developed nations, Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, said yesterday in Beijing.

CHINA needs a budget of 450 billion yuan (US$60.36 billion) in the 13 years to 2020 for nuclear plants as the nation seeks alternatives to coal-generated electricity, according to a new industry plan. The development blueprint also calls for more self-sufficiency in nuclear-reactor design, equipment manufacturing and project construction and operations by introducing, absorbing and fine-tuning foreign technology. The plan, approved by the State Council, was released yesterday by the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top industry planner, on its Website. It iterated its earlier stated goal of having 40,000 megawatts of nuclear power in operation by 2020, or four percent of China's total power-generating capacity, and having 18,000MW under construction by that time. At present, nuclear power accounts for less than two percent of the total generating capacity of China. The NDRC said domestic equipment manufacturers should achieve annual capacity for nuclear

SHANGHAI stocks fell today on concerns the government will introduce more austarity measures to cool off the sizzling economy. The Shanghai Composite Index, which tracks both yuan-denominated A shares and hard-currency B shares, shed 0.12 percent, or 7.24 points, to 5,818.05. The Shenzhen Composite Index, which covers the smaller mainland stock market, was unchanged as it lost 0.01 percent, or 0.16 points, to 1,494.43. Turnover on the Shanghai market totaled 105 billion yuan (US$13.98 billion) and decliners outnumbered gainers by 546 to 323. China's Consumer Price Index, the main gauge of inflation, climbed 6.2 percent last month from a year earlier, just below the decade-high 6.5 percent increase reported in August, Zhu Zhixin, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters in Beijing. Meanwhile, central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said that the country will increase efforts to mop up excessive cash in the economy and may increase interest

SHANGHAI stocks flux acted in the morning session on concerns of more austere measures to cool off the sizzling economy. The Shanghai Composite Index, which tracks both yuan-denominated A shares and hard-currency B shares, inched up 0.51 percent, or 29.58 points, to 5,854.86 at 11:30am. The Shenzhen Composite Index, which covers the smaller mainland stock market, grew 0.82 percent, or 12.22 points, to 1,506.82. Turnover on the Shanghai market totaled 55.62 billion yuan (US$7.41 billion) and gainers outnumbered decliners by 535 to 337. China's Consumer Price Index, the main gauge of inflation, climbed 6.2 percent last month from a year earlier, just below the decade-high 6.5 percent increase reported in August, Zhu Zhixin, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters in Beijing. Meanwhile, central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said that the country will increase efforts to mop up excessive cash in the economy and may impose additional

CHINA has allocated 80 billion yuan (US$10.5 billion) within the next five years to prop up improvements and innovations of high-tech enterprises, the National Development and Reform Commission said. Under a memorandum of understanding signed by the China Development Bank and NDRC, the fund will be used in high-tech modernization, key projects and the development of small and medium-sized high-tech firms, the commission said in a statement posted on its Website. The project aims to formulate efficient finance channels for the high-tech industry at China Hi-Tech Fair being held in Shenzhen. "The government has noticed the problem and planned to reorganize the listing and other finance systems to support promising high-tech firms," Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice director of NDRC, said during a press conference last week. NDRC, CDB and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange are working together in order to promote teamwork between high-tech ventures and the capital market. They aim to

THE revenue of Shanghai's software industry is likely to jump 30 percent to hit 80 billion yuan (US$10.52 billion) this year, thanks to strong exports and core software product development, Shanghai Municipal Information Commission said yesterday. Local software firms can apply for product certification and tax deduction within one day at the commission's office starting from yesterday. In the past it took up to three months. Shanghai's software industry revenue reached 38.5 billion yuan in the first half. It is expected to grow 30 percent year on year to surpass 80 billion yuan in 2007, which is in line with the city's forecast of US$10 billion. In 2006, the local software industry earned 61.67 billion yuan in revenue, one-eighth of the national level. Exports were worth US$990 million, one-sixth of the country level, according to the commission. "Shanghai's firms have become competitive in core sectors such as operating system and midware. Previously, the sectors were dominated by foreign players," said Shi Xingde, the commission's senior official. China Standard Software Co, which provides self-developed operating system, has won deals from 23 government bureaus already this year. A total of 1,200 firms have software certification in Shanghai and more than 10 firms, such as The9 Ltd and Baosight Inc, are listed in domestic or overseas markets. The profit margin of the software industry has improved in the last four years - 13.67 percent in 2006 compared with 2.63 percent in 2002, according to the commission. To boost the development of the software industry, the commission decided to improve efficiency of the firms' certification and product registry in one location. Certified software firms also needn't pay income taxes for the first two years and are required to pay half of the tax in the following three years.