China’s largest conglomerate by revenue has invested more than $50bn in shadow banking products over the past three years, highlighting the proliferation of riskier financing channels in the world’s second-largest economy.
According to disclosures by Citic Group, an industrial and financial services conglomerate, its “maximum loss exposure” to wealth management products and other higher yielding investments reached Rmb322bn ($52bn) at the end of 2013, 36 times higher than its 2011 exposure of Rmb9bn.
Citic is selling almost all of its assets to Citic Pacific, its Hong Kong-listed arm, in a $36bn transaction that has been hailed as a landmark in China’s efforts to reform its state-owned companies.