No slacking, Guangdong

Holiday? You should be so lucky. The Labor Day “golden week” in May has become a golden memory in China and the State Council says it will stay that way despite provincial plans to the contrary (although don’t forget you get a day off work to go grave sweeping the week after next). Apparently officials in Guangdong wanted to reinstate the five-day vacation in order to stimulate tourism – is this code for wanting to spend a few days with your feet up in Hainan? (Hey, the export crunch has been rough on those guys.) Anyway, the bottom line is the golden week holidays never served their original purpose of boosting consumption – they just altered temporal consumption patterns a bit. This is certainly not enough to reinvigorate Kingfisher, the European home improvement chain, which is scaling back its loss-making China business. Shrinking property sales hit Kingfisher hard last year and, while the recent uptick in the market is enough to make Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s Jiang Jianqing smile, it appears to be too little too late for Kingfisher’s B&Q brand. And too late also for property developer Neo-China, which is looking to clear some debt by settling convertible bonds at a discount. Kingfisher and Neo-China are essentially in the same boat: companies that overreached on the back of the property boom to the extent that a slow revival is not enough to bail them out.