经济新闻
上海发布国资基金新规,强调领投能力 2026-04-08
Shanghai has released a new set of guidelines to promote state-owned capital to become a long-term, patient, and strategic investor serving industrial development and assume the role of lead investor.
State-owned investment funds will be guided in enhancing their investment-leading and pricing capabilities and aligning their fundraising, investment, management, and exit processes with market norms, according to the Guiding Opinions on Further Promoting the High-Quality Development of Private Equity Investment Funds Under the Supervision of the Shanghai State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration issued by the local government on April 7.
The guidelines include 16 measures. Three of them -- encouraging state-owned capital to invest as lead investor, allowing management fees to be paid based on the subscribed scale, and setting the transfer price of funds based on the market -- are explicitly proposed in a provincial-level state-owned assets supervision document for the first time.
Chinese state-owned institutions made 5,444 direct investments in 4,989 enterprises worth a total of over CNY600 billion (USD87.2 billion) last year, according to data from financial platform CVSource. The number of investments and the investment amount increased 23 percent and 28 percent, respectively, from the previous year.
State-owned capital mostly played a role of co-investor in direct investment, as lead investors bear the main risks and responsibilities of valuation and pricing, industry insiders said, adding that it tends to let market-oriented institutions set the price first, using this as a guarantee of projects’ quality.
Strengthening the investment-leading capacity of state-owned capital is not only a strategic need but also an inevitable choice for the equity investment system with Chinese characteristics to mature, the insiders noted.
The guidelines emphasized the need to cultivate a management team with profound professional expertise and a global perspective, focus on enhancing the investment-leading and pricing capabilities of state-owned investment funds, improve their operational level, and optimize their risk control system.
State-owned investment funds serving as lead investors can leverage more social capital to invest in key industries and innovative projects in Shanghai, support the development of emerging industries, future industries, and technological innovation, determine the success or failure of corporate financing, and attract more enterprises to settle in Shanghai, Sun Jiatao, executive president of Haiwang Capital, the platform for managing funds under Shanghai Pudong Science and Technology Innovation Group, told Yicai.
More and more state-owned investment funds in Shanghai becoming lead investors can not only effectively attract market-oriented institutions and other entities to invest as co-investors, providing crucial support to enterprises, but also facilitate the activation of Shanghai’s industrial and innovation ecosystems, attract upstream and downstream enterprises, and assist the city in its development as world-class high-end industrial clusters, Sun pointed out.
For a long time, state-owned investors have paid management fees based on the actual paid-in capital or even the actual investment amount. The new guidelines stipulate that under certain conditions, state-owned capital can pay management fees based on its subscribed capital.
This eases the survival pressure of outstanding fund managers in the startup or seed stage and helps Shanghai’s state-owned capital gain more initiative in cooperation and competition with high-quality managers.
Problems such as lengthy investment procedures, obvious administrative decision-making, incomplete market-based incentive and restraint mechanisms, and overly short assessment cycles are unavoidable constraints for state-owned investment funds. Therefore, the guidelines proposed to optimize and enhance the efficiency of the investment decision-making mechanism.
Source: Yicai Global
