By Ankur Banerjee and Laura Matthews
SINGAPORE/NEW YORK (Reuters) – As market euphoria over China's biggest stimulus since the pandemic cools, foreign investors are now wondering whether the $114 billion stimulus package will provide the spark needed to reverse a stock market decline.
Chinese stocks have lagged major markets all year, despite a series of piecemeal measures authorities have implemented to revive the anemic economy and boost share prices.
This week's moves were sweeping. The package of rate cuts and, importantly for markets, an 800 billion yuan ($114 billion) facility to finance stock purchases showed Beijing's new urgency to cure deflation and the struggling property market in the world's second-largest economy.
Chinese stocks soared and the blue-chip CSI300 index recouped its losses for the year and was on track for its best weekly performance since 2022. The yuan rose to a 16-month high against the U.S. dollar.
On Thursday, Chinese leaders pledged to support the ailing economy through “vigorous” interest rate cuts and adjustments to fiscal and monetary policies, adding further fuel to the rebound.
Investors said the reaction showed how depressed sentiment was, but the measures did not address what most foreign investors want fixed: fiscal measures that directly stimulate consumer demand.
The package was primarily intended to “bring liquidity to the markets, but we're at a point where more liquidity alone is not going to generate the sustained recovery that long-term investors want to see,” said Phillip Wool, head of portfolio management at Rayliant Global Advisors.
“As long as demand remains as weak as it has been, no one will want to borrow, and measures like these will not have the desired impact,” Wool said.
Chinese stocks have faltered in recent years even as markets elsewhere hit record highs, prompting investors to pull back and stay away, and more than a quarter of global funds tracked by Copley Fund Research have no exposure to China at all. Nearly all funds maintained exposure to China in 2021.
While the CSI300 and Hong Kong's Hang Seng have both risen over the past two days, they are still 40% below their February 2021 highs. By comparison, Japan's Nikkei is up 24% and the S&P 500 is up 45% over the same period.
Gary Tan, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, believes this week's moves are unlikely to prompt him to change his underweight position in China.
“We believe it will take a fundamental change in China's deflationary outlook and in the Chinese property market for investors to pour new funds into China,” Tan said.
Vivian Lin Thurston, portfolio manager for William Blair's emerging markets growth strategy, is currently underweight China and has been largely unaffected by the new measures.
However, Thurston said his fund could potentially add value to certain stocks that show improving fundamentals and are less impacted by the economic backdrop.
CHEAP SHARES
The success of some of these measures, including those targeting capital markets, will depend on whether institutional investors feel comfortable investing in equities again.
China risks missing this year's economic growth target of around 5 percent because of a housing crisis and weak consumption, which analysts say can only be solved by fiscal policies that put money in consumers' pockets.
“Significant and effective fiscal stimulus is needed to effectively address these key economic challenges,” said William Blair's Thurston.
To be sure, some investors, such as Jonathan Pines, head of Asia ex-Japan at Federated Hermes, and Rayliant's Wool, are attracted by the valuations.
The Shanghai benchmark index trades at a price-to-earnings ratio, a commonly used valuation metric, of 12, while the Nikkei trades at 21 and the S&P 500 at 27.
In particular, Bob Zhang, managing partner at Beijing-based Pine Street Capital, likes stocks that focus on artificial intelligence processing power, semiconductors and software as a service, which he sees as cheap and benefiting from global technological advances.
Investors are also pointing to the fact that China is pulling out all the stops at the same time that the US Federal Reserve has started cutting rates.
“If the US continues to cut interest rates as expected, and China continues its policy easing, I think the market will form a positive feedback loop and continue to rise,” said Zhang of Pine Street Capital.
(1 dollar = 7.0165 Chinese yuan)
(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee and Rae Wee in Singapore, Summer Zhen in Hong Kong, Laura Matthews and Carolina Mandl in New York; editing by Vidya Ranganathan and Sam Holmes)