路透新闻 20080131
-- China Construction Bank, China's second-largest lender, won approval to set up branches in Sydney and in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world's biggest bank, is applying to set up subsidiaries in Britain and Brazil.
-- China's big insurer PICC (Group) reported a 120 percent increase in 2007 net profits, paving the way for it to launch preparations for an eventual listing on the domestic market. The insurer had net profit of 2.2 billion yuan ($306 million) last year, boosting the group's total assets to 147.1 billion yuan as of end of 2007.
-- Great Wall Asset Management Corp, one of four firms tasked with cleaning up state-held bad assets, disposed of assets totalling 36.8 billion yuan in 2007, recovering 36 percent in cash. It also earned 155 million yuan in financial service income last year, a record for the firm since it began operations in 1999.
-- Weekly wholesale pork prices in China dropped last week for the first time since the middle of October, as more of the country's state pork reserves were released to the market, the Commerce Ministry said.
-- China should not ease its tight monetary policies despite interest rate cuts in the United States and the fallout of subprime loan crisis, wrote Yi Xianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank.
-- China Daily will publish the official English newspaper for Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as Village News.
-- Insurers have paid more than 100 million yuan ($14 million) in damages to people in central and eastern China where 55 have died because of the worst snowfall in almost half a century.
-- The State Intellectual Property Office said China plans to release its national intellectual property rights strategy this year after two and a half years of preparation.
-- The state auditor last year recovered up to 4.2 billion yuan in government funds that had been embezzled in 2006, and it punished more than 190 officials.
-- U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers said in a research report that China's economic growth may slow to 9.8 percent in 2008.
-- Reported earnings at major Chinese state-owned companies directly controlled by the central government rose 30.3 percent in 2007 from a year earlier to 996.85 billion yuan ($139 billion).
-- A weakening Chinese stock market in the fourth quarter of last year cooled venture capital investment in China in the quarter after a boom earlier in the year.
-- Surging prices of lead, aluminium and zinc have battered trading in the domestic spot market, with very few transactions on Wednesday.
-- The China Securities Regulatory Commission has approved a plan by Anhui Conch Cement to issue 200 million new local-currency A shares for technical upgrading.
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