China outbound investment to jump at least 20% in H2: think-tank

[SHANGHAI] China's rapidly increasing non-financial outbound direct investment (ODI) will jump at least 20 per cent in the second half of 2016 from a year earlier, a top government think-tank said in a research report published by a newspaper on Monday.

Buoyed by an abundance of foreign exchange reserves and decreasing opportunities at home due to a sharp slowdown in the world's second-largest economy, China's ODI surged 58.7 per cent year-on-year to US$88.86 billion in the first half.

China's foreign exchange reserves, the world's biggest, stand at around US$3.2 trillion.

"Some Chinese enterprises have accumulated a large quantity of capital and have now possessed the capability to re-allocate global resources," the State Information Centre, a unit of China's powerful economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), said in the research report.

"The lingering depression of the global economy has also facilitated outbound investment by our country's enterprises," it said in the report published in the official China Securities Journal.

The think-tank warned that rising global geopolitical risk and national protectionism were the main barriers for the expansion of the Chinese investment overseas.

It forecast that the growth of China's foreign direct investment (FDI) will slow to around 4 per cent year-on-year in the second half of this year from 5.1 per cent in the first half, due in part to the depreciation of the Chinese currency yuan .

REUTERS