The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Photographer: Michael Nagle / Bloomberg
Photographer: Michael Nagle / Bloomberg
The New York Stock Exchange said it would remove three Chinese corporations from the list to comply with a U.S. executive order that imposes restrictions on companies identified as affiliated with the Chinese army.
China Mobile Ltd., China Telecom Corp Ltd. and China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. will be suspended from trading between 7 and 11 January, and procedures to remove them from the list have been initiated, according to a statement from the exchange. .
The three companies have separate listings in Hong Kong. They all generate all of their revenue in China and have no significant presence in the United States, except for their listings there.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order in November preventing American investments in Chinese military-owned or controlled companies in an attempt to put pressure on Beijing over what it considers to be abusive business practices. The order prohibited US investors from buying and selling shares in a list of Chinese companies designated by the Pentagon as having military ties.
Later, China’s Foreign Ministry accused the United States of “cruelly slandering” its civil-military integration policies and promised to protect the country’s companies. Chinese officials have also threatened to respond to previous Trump administration actions with their own black list of American companies.
The executive order resulted in the removal of a number of indices compiled by MSCI Inc., S&P Dow Jones Global Indexes and FTSE Russell.
Global exchanges, including NYSE and Nasdaq Inc., have courted Chinese companies over the past decade while trying to expand their IPO businesses, especially in the Internet sector. In response, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd. changed its rules in recent years to attract listings back, including allowing shares to be sold by companies with weighted voting rights – strengthening the power of the company’s founders at the expense of weaker protections for minority investors.
Companies, including e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.Com Inc., which already had listings in New York, conducted secondary listings in Hong Kong over the past two years as the US-China trade war intensified.
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