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Chinese stocks sold for a second day as regulators pledged to take further antitrust action against the country’s fintech sector in the wake of new rules aimed at reducing the monopoly power of its US giants. technology.
The high-tech ChiNext index in Shenzhen fell 1.3% and the Shanghai Star 50 index fell 1.1% after a senior official at the China Insurance and Banking Regulatory Commission said pledged to step up antitrust scrutiny of fintech companies.
The liquidation of Chinese tech stocks spread to Hong Kong, where Alibaba fell 6.8%, pulling it back more than 11% in the past two sessions and reducing the company’s market cap by $ 100 billion. business. Rivals Tencent and JD.com lost 3.5% and 5% respectively, while food delivery group Meituan lost 1.6%.
Antitrust’s focus on tech companies comes as they increasingly exert an influence on daily life in China, where a fifth of the country’s consumer goods are now sold on Alibaba.
Chinese regulators last week ended the initial $ 37 billion public offering of Ant Group, the payments and lending arm of Alibaba, after publishing new draft rules for online borrowing . Beijing last month released its first comprehensive personal data protection bill.
$ 100 billion
The amount Alibaba has lost of its market cap in the last two sessions
The latest comments from Liang Tao, vice chairman of CBIRC, reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, added to the downward pressure on equities this week from the Chinese market regulator.
On Tuesday, the State Administration for Market Regulation released new rules targeting behavior, including the use of exclusivity clauses to hamper competition, treating customers differently based on their spending data, and requiring them to buy bundles of products to access those they want.
“Looking at the proposed guidelines, we believe that if some of them were to be adopted and implemented, it could affect the development of the industry,” said Alicia Yap, Managing Director and Head of Internet Research pan -Asian at Citi.
Ms Yap said the rules could limit the targeted ads and product recommendations used by almost all e-commerce platforms, while the rules on “forced exclusivity” could hit Meituan, who has in the past forced restaurants not to appear on competing platforms.
But traders in Shanghai were skeptical that the new rules meant apocalyptic for China’s most successful businesses.
“It’s just a way of [Beijing] saying, [to] all the big companies: “You have to play the ball by our rules even though you are a giant like Ant Group – you all have to follow the instructions of the authorities,” said a trader from a Chinese brokerage firm.
Tech companies around the world have faced regulatory pressure this week. In Europe, Amazon has faced formal charges for allegedly violating antitrust rules in its treatment of merchants on its platform.
The positive data from a new Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and the German BioNTech also dealt a blow to technological stocks, which had benefited from the economy of work at home favored by the pandemic.
News of vaccine trials sent the high-tech Nasdaq down 1.4% on Wall Street on Tuesday, while the larger S&P 500 lost just 0.1%. In Asia, the Japanese Topix rose 1.3% on Wednesday, while the Australian S & P / ASX 200 rose 1.6%.
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