On October 20, 2023, the CSRC issued a decision to amend Article 50 of the Guidelines for Publicly Offered Infrastructure Securities Investment Funds (Trial) (the "Revision"). Based on the Guidelines for Publicly Offered Infrastructure Securities Investment Funds (Trial) (the "REITs guidelines") released by the CSRC on August 6, 2020, the Revision expands the asset types in the publicly offered REITs pilot to consumer infrastructure. This expansion includes a broad range of underlying assets in the REITs guidelines, such as warehousing and logistics, toll roads, airports, ports, and other transportation facilities, municipal facilities like water, electricity, and heating, consumer infrastructure like department stores, shopping centers, and farmers' markets, and other infrastructure aligned with national strategies, development plans, industry policies, and investment regulations, including pollution control, information networks, industrial parks, affordable rental housing, and clean energy.
The Revision broadens the scope of underlying assets for publicly offered REITs, further positioning publicly offered REITs as innovative tools and important vehicles for the high-quality development of the real economy in financial services. Within a week of the Revision's release, the CSRC and the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges accepted four consumer infrastructure publicly offered REITs projects (China Fortune Land Development Shopping Center, Harvest Wumart Consumer, China Resources Commercial Assets, and CICC SCPG Consumer Infrastructure Public REITs). With the acceptance of the first batch of consumer infrastructure publicly offered REITs, the market size for publicly offered REITs is expected to continue expanding, attracting more domestic and foreign investment.
While continuing to strengthen supervision of the financial industry and improve the quality and efficiency of market access, the Implementation Measures further enhance the opening up of China's financial sector to the outside world. This is conducive to attracting high-quality foreign resources to participate in the disposal of non-performing assets in China, drawing on foreign management experiences, and improving the efficiency of China’s non-performing asset disposal. As of now, Hong Kong New World Development Group has established Hainan Xinchuangjian Asset Management Co., Ltd. in Hainan Province, becoming the first foreign-controlled local asset management company.