Covid-19 Business Watch: The week in review

Rather than capital, I feel like Chinese regulators never sleep. Over the past nine months, Ant Group's IPO got pulled, Community Group Buying players were fined for price dumping, and Alibaba and Meituan were fined for anti-monopoly violations. Just like Oprah dishes out cars, every tech giant seems to be getting a summons.

The big news last Friday was the Chinese government’s decision to turn online education stocks into non-profits, banning them from raising capital and going public. The sell-off across the ADRs was huge!

Tencent, which influences the JSE via the Naspers stable, collapsed this week after Chinese competition authorities ordered it to stop a practice of exclusive music licensing rights, also levying a small fine, which follows similar action against other tech firms. And the value destruction in Naspers has been staggering, equalled only by the speed of the recovery this week. So why are the regulators getting involved?

It’s the trillion-rand question for local fund managers right now ... which actually puts our local unrest and vaccine issues into perspective.

Michael Avery is joined by Warwick Lucas Chief Investment Officer at Galileo Asset Managers; Raymond Parsons, professor in the School of Business and Governance at Northwest University; and Michael Power, Strategist at Investec Asset Management.

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