The Price of Faith: Chinese Buddhist Sites Plan IPOs

By CHENGCHENG JIANG / BEIJING

STR / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

Shaolin monks perform for visitors on Oct. 24, 2010. The temple makes millions every year from entrance fees and online sales of Shaolin items

In China today, there’s little that money can’t buy — even when it comes to faith. Many of the country’s most popular Buddhist sites are chock-full of cure-all tonics and overpriced incense. For the most part, people seem happy, or at least willing, to oblige. That changed this summer, though, when it emerged that China’s four most sacred Buddhist mountains were hatching plans to list on the Shanghai stock exchange.

In July, Mount Putuo Tourism Development Co. announced it would attempt to raise 7.5 billion yuan in a 2014 initial public offering. The company operates the tourist facilities at Putuo Shan, located on an island 20 miles (32 km) off Shanghai. Chinese state media quoted representatives of Wutai Shan in Shanxi province and Jiuhua Shan in Anhui province as saying they too had plans to raise funds on the capital markets. The fourth of China’s sacred mountains, Emei Shan in Sichuan province, completed a public listing in Shenzhen in 1997, under the incredibly auspicious ticker symbol “888.”

China’s billionaire explosion

By Matt Hodges

SHANGHAI – Cataloging Chinese billionaires gets harder by the year in this fast-changing country, where today’s financial

Russell Flannery says many of the new-generation Chinese tycoons boast diversified portfolios. Yong Kai / For China Daily

statement is increasingly made redundant by tomorrow’s initial public offering (IPO), said Shanghai-based Forbes Senior Editor Russell Flannery.

The World’s Billionaires list that Forbes published on March 10 – the eighth such list that Flannery has contributed to since he opened the company’s Shanghai bureau in 2003 – featured 115 people from the Chinese mainland, compared to 64 in the previous year.

The huge Chinese injection, as well as contributions from cities like Moscow, helped set a new precedent of 1,210 billionaires worldwide, with a total net worth of $4.5 trillion.

Part of this dramatic rise was due to China seeing more IPOs than any other country in the world in 2010, said Flannery.

He uses the example of the 12 new Chinese names on the list that got there by virtue of listing their companies on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange last year, one of China’s three bourses.

These 12 alone exceeded the total increase in new American billionaires (10) over the previous year. Nonetheless, US billionaires still outnumber their Chinese counterparts by more than 3:1 (413 versus 115).

The fact that Chinese companies are geared toward going global at such speed presents another problem: The list, which this year took Feb 14 (Valentine’s Day) as its cut-off date for compiling financial data, can be rendered inaccurate within as little as 24 hours.

Take Qiu Guanghe, chairman of Zhejiang Semir Garment, as a case in point.