CIC moving into PE and hedge funds

It seems that China Investment Corporation (CIC) Chairman Lou Jiwei has overcome his wariness of exposing the sovereign wealth fund’s US$297 billion in assets to market risk. At the end of 2008, nearly 90% of the fund’s assets were held in cash under the national mattress, but today Lou admitted that CIC has adopted a more aggressive investment strategy targeting private-equity funds, hedge funds, and fund-of-funds. In fact, Lou said that CIC has invested far more than the US$500 million it was reported to have placed in June. Beijing has also overcome its wariness of auto parts imports. Two years after the WTO ruled that Chinese tariffs on foreign auto parts were discriminatory, China has reduced the tariff on such parts to 10%. However, analysts say that this is hardly a defeat for Beijing; most foreign automakers in China aren’t importing parts anyway, preferring to source locally. Finally, it looks like Apple has accepted a morsel of defeat from its negotiations with China Unicom to sell the iPhone in China. Despite desperately struggling to share revenues produced from the iPhone’s sold by Unicom, Apple finally knucked under and agreed to sell them wholesale to the telecom provider with no strings attached. This may, however, be a Pyhrric victory for Unicom. The iPhones will be specially modified to lack wireless connectivity, making them inferior not only to smart phones produced by competitors like HTC/Dopod, but also inferior to the hacked iPhones already for sale here, which have wireless. How peddling second-rate iPhones will help Unicom grab market share from China Mobile remains to be seen; Unicom plans to sell the phones at a discount, but they will have to be deeply discounted indeed to persuade Chinese consumers to switch.