Investors spent 830.63 billion yuan (US$113.32 billion) in the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets as of last Friday, nearly four times more investments than for the whole of last year.

Their spending was fueled by a frenzy for investments in initial public offerings as well as purchases of subsequent share offerings and corporate bonds.

By the end of this year a total of more than 841.49 billion yuan is estimated to have been spent in the stock markets. The amount is equivalent to the total collected by the two markets in the first 14 years since their set up in late 1990.

IPO funds

More than half of the amount was gotten through 120 IPOs launched this year. They raked in about US$61 billion to rank first in the world.

The IPO funds collected over the year outpaced the money floated on the New York Stock Exchange by US$10 billion.

A bigger number of large IPOs are expected next year from numerous centrally administered state-owned enterprises. In addition, domestic companies that had listed in Hong Kong were encouraged by officials to also go public in the mainland market.

Of the 43 Hong Kong-listed SOEs, 13 had not offered mainland shares. They included such domestic giants as China Telecom and Dongfeng Motor Group.

This year, additional share offerings of listed companies grew two-fold. A total of 311.9 billion yuan was raised through 133 private placements and 24 subsequent offerings as of last Friday. Another 242 companies also planned to issue additional shares.

This year's bond offerings have seen the issue of two types of new bonds -corporate bonds and bonds with attached warrants. They each raised 20 billion yuan.

(Xinhua News Agency December 27, 2007)